Chapter 26: A Crow's Wet Feathers (Part 2)
"Uwaaa, you've got a huge bruise here, Ii-chan."
With my pant leg rolled up, Kunagisa patted the bruise on my ankle. This blue-haired goon probably didn't realize how much that patting hurt. Hikari-san had brought me anti-swelling medication, so I stuck it on. It felt as if all the warmth had drained from my body.
This was comfort?
"Akane-chan was sooo tough. Not that she ever looked like much of a pushover," Kunagisa said. "Didn't you know, Ii-chan?"
"Why would I? Who could've known one of the Seven Fools would turn out to be so freaking tough? This isn't a video game or something."
She was a complete force to be reckoned with. I hadn't expected her to be so overwhelmingly tough, and I certainly hadn't expected her to have a handgun prepared. I had had a number of brushes with death by now, but this was by far the most dangerous.
"If Teruko-san hadn't come to my rescue, things would've gotten really bad."
"You have to be careful. That body doesn't belong to you alone, you know."
"Says you, woman."
Since the showdown, we had entered a phase of treating the wounded, dictated by common sense as the primary concern. At the time, I hadn't thought anything of it, but after a while, the damage from that initial leg sweep became much more apparent, so I was now undergoing treatment in Kunagisa's room.
"You hit your back as well, didn't you? Did it hurt?" Hikari-san said. "Please take care. Akane-san was in the karate club in high school, you know?"
"I think I've heard that before…"
"She even participated in the national tournament."
Man, teach me that stuff.
"Yeah, but apparently she only won five matches."
"You only need five matches to win the national tournament."
As for Akane-san's wounds, first, there was her broken right arm. Then there was that first kick, which had apparently broken four ribs. Even in that early phase of the showdown, she had suffered a major wound, yet she was still able to jump around like that. It was no small feat.
Meanwhile, Teruko-san was undergoing treatment with Akari-san. The skin around her throat had been scratched off from when Akane-san was strangling her, and there had been some bleeding, but she had suffered no other notable wounds. At the time of that gunshot, I had thought the bullet had hit her square in the back, but in fact, it hadn't hit her at all. I thought she had fallen into my arms from the force of being shot, but it was actually the result of her dodging the bullet. Perhaps it was her reaction to the sound of the gun being cocked. She was like one of Charlie's Angels.
Not to mention that, afterward, she was playing dead.
"Actually, that's not quite right," Hikari-san said. "I'm sure she was just shielding you."
"Shielding me?" Indeed, depending on how you looked at it, that wasn't an impossibility. "So you're saying she was risking her life for me?"
"No, her life wasn't, particularly in danger. Teruko's apron is bulletproof."
"Bulletproof?"
She wasn't an angel, she was a battle maid. What the hell had happened to reality?
"Yes. Spectra is sewn into her clothes. Unlike Kevlar, Spectra can withstand any number of shots without weakening. And it's light so you don't get sweaty. Teruko is nigh-invincible at short range, but she takes caution with long-range defense. See how long the skirt is on this apron dress? That's because it works like an aikido hakama."
It sounded like a terrible joke, but it was hard to tell based on Hikari-san's expression. Maybe it was better to just let it go. "But why is Teruko-san so strong? Are you that strong, too?" I asked.
"No, Teruko is our mistress's resident bodyguard, in a sense. Our roles are fundamentally different. Up to now, you've never seen all three of us doing the same job, have you?"
Come to think of it, it did seem as if Hikari-san and Akari-san were always the ones at work. As a former participant in the ER3 program, maybe it was unforgivable that I hadn't noticed until now. Yeah, it sounded pretty bad.
"But I'm sure glad she rescued you. I'm sure you've noticed by now that she can be awfully cold. Saving you is one thing, but staking her own life to shield you… It almost doesn't make sense."
"Yeah, about that. Why did she do it?"
"Well, she's a whimsical girl."
Just like everyone else here.
But it wasn't completely beyond my comprehension. I still didn't know for sure how Teruko-san felt, but insofar as she was still a mystery to me, I was no doubt just as much a mystery to her.
Surely, she just wanted to ask about me.
"That's just a bunch of nonsense, though…"
Come to think of it, she had seemed abnormally strong when she grabbed my arm that afternoon, but I never would have imagined that that was some kind of foreshadowing.
"It seems like your back and hips are okay. You didn't hit your head, did you? Well then, that's a wrap up," Kunagisa said, and, sticking close to me, began to massage my shoulders. This was Heaven.
"Now then, shall we head back to the dining room?"
This was Hell.
Right. The noninjured guests had all been left waiting anxiously for Kunagisa and me in the dining room. Unbelievably. Terrifyingly.
"Tomo, you go on alone. These injuries are way worse than I thought. I don't think I can go."
"Whatever. But y'know, Ii-chan, this is your chance to look good in front of Akari-chan. If you're smooth, you might get something out of it."
"Oh my, do you have Akari on the mind? She loves smart people, you know."
Kunagisa and Hikari-san were happily double-teaming me with suggestions. What were they, middle school students?
"Tomo, you know how much I hate stuff like that. You don't need me to explain it, right? Just think something up yourself."
"Ii-chan, didn't you do this kind of thing abroad? Performances or presentations or what have you?"
"Well, yeah, but they were Hell every time. They would always bitch at me, you know, like 'Quit talking around the subject' or 'You're being too vague' or 'Nobody's interested in your problems.' Ah, I know, I know. I should just do it, right? Just do it."
"Don't weasel out of this," Kunagisa's smirk said. "Come on, you'll get in trouble. You have to be more cheerful about this. I know that's probably impossible for you, but anyway, let's get going. Tie my hair up first."
"Huh? You don't like it that way?"
"It feels like my head is being pulled on. One or two tails is better after all."
"Mmm, and here I liked it."
"Tomo-san, would you like me to do it?" Hikari-san asked.
"Uh-uh," Kunagisa shook her head.
"Putting my hair up is Ii-chan's job."
Yes. I redid her hair, and…
…and our preparations were complete.
"Well, let's go."
Slowly the gates of Hell opened. I was feeling quite heavy-footed, and it wasn't just because of my injuries.
"What a buncha nonsense," I muttered as I arrived in the dining room. Everyone besides Akane-san, whose wounds were severe, was gathered together.
That, of course, included Shinya-san.
As if he had already given up, as if a burden had been taken off his shoulders, he had a calm air about him as he watched us walk through the door. Maki-san sneered at me, making me think I was about to be harassed again, but she remained silent.
Lined up on the table was the remade food Yayoi-san had prepared while I was being treated. Possibly because Yayoi-san had calmed down, this time the food was remarkably fancier.
Akari-san, still feeling awkward, avoided eye contact. Teruko-san had bandages wrapped around her neck.
Rei-san watched over the scene in complete silence.
And then there was Akagami Iria-san. She was looking at me with challenging eyes.
"Well then, shall we have you begin?" Iria-san said to me as I took my seat. "What is all this?"
"Allow me to explain. Sonoyama Akane-san of the ER3's Seven Fools is the killer, and Ibuki Kanami-san's caretaker, Sakaki Shinya-san over there, is her accomplice."
Silence.
"And?"
"That's it."
"Give us thirty minutes," she insisted. "The first thing I want you to explain is what Sonoyama-san was doing in Yayoi's room."
"That's easy. Yayoi-san flew out of the dining room, right? Thus, Yayoi-san was the next person to be somewhere by herself, so Akane-san used it as an opportunity to kill her."
"The idea had been to have Akane-san's plan backfire, but instead things had backfired on me and Teruko-san had saved me. And ultimately, I'd had to rely on Akane-san's kindness."
That hatchet she had brandished at me surely would've lopped my head off.
"I'm very grateful to Teruko-san."
"No, I don't mean that. You know what I mean. Wasn't Sonoyama-san killed? In that sealed storage room?
"As you saw, she's alive." I shrugged. "Assuming she doesn't have a twin, I think we can all agree that it was Akane-san."
"So what about that headless body in the storage room?"
"Well, Akane-san is alive, so that wasn't her body. That's just logical thinking."
"It was someone else's corpse?"
"If you see a headless body, beware of switching. It's a cardinal rule of detective novels, right? I'm sure your darling detective would say the same thing."
Iria-san tilted her head at me as if to show that this was beyond her comprehension. "Um, just wait a second. I'm thinking."
She wanted a moment to contemplate things alone. I was a bit impressed by her spirit. "Umm…"
"Well, in the meantime, might I ask something?" Shinya-san raised his hand. "I've got a question for you there."
"I don't mind," I nodded. I thought for sure I'd be asked when I realized the truth behind the incidents or how I figured out the killer or something like that, but Shinya-san's question was totally different from my expectations.
"Is that wound on your foot okay?"
"Yes. It's made a bruise, though."
"Really? So it's not broken. That woman…" he snorted. "Or maybe she couldn't break it, though that's not like her… Or is it?"
I wasn't sure what all his whispering meant.
Finally, "Nah, it's no good," Iria-san said capitulating. "I don't get it at all. There was really a switch?"
"There was. Kunagisa's computers were destroyed, right? The third incident. Nobody could have done that. Literally, precisely nobody. Everybody served as everybody else's witness, so alibis and accomplices weren't even a matter of concern. We were all watching one another the whole time. Nobody could have done it. Nobody who was there, anyway. Therefore, the only person who could've done it would have been someone who wasn't there with us. That's just logical thinking."
"I gathered that much," Iria-san said. "You don't need to keep emphasizing that it's logical. You're kind of a smart aleck, aren't you? So whose headless body was that in the storage room? Everybody was here together. There wasn't a single person who could have been switched with Sonoyama-san's body. Isn't that strange to you?"
"Well, it is strange, but…" I decided to give her an easy-to-understand analogy. "Do you know this quiz? Or actually, it's more like a trick or a form of fraud, but anyway…"
I pulled out the alibi chart and turned it over to the back. There I drew a big rectangle, then drew nine lines through it. In other words, a ten-box chart.
"What is that?" Iria-san asked. "Something to do with this?"
"Please pretend these are telephone booths. Ten telephone booths. Now let's put eleven people in them."
"Phone booths?"
"Oh, I mean, they're just boxes. They could be rooms."
"Ten rooms."
"Yup," I nodded.
Incidentally, this was a magic trick I had picked up from a book I read while in elementary school.
"Okay, so let's say A-kun tries to enter the first box, but a second person enters it before him." I wrote an X in the first box. "Now for the third person." I wrote an X in the next box. "The fourth person." I wrote yet another X in the next box. "The fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth people. The ninth person, and the tenth person. So now we've got ten people inboxes. But there's still one box leftover. So let's stick that first guy, A-kun, in there." I drew an X in the final box. "And so we've fit eleven people in ten boxes. Do you get it?"
"That's stupid," Iria-san said. "The first person never entered the box, so it was off by one person."
"Yes, that's correct. It's a rudimentary trick that anyone can figure out with a little thought. But if done with the right timing and skill, nobody notices."
"Yes, they do."
"They don't. We didn't notice."
"I don't have any idea what you're talking about. And this is all off-topic. I'm asking whose body that was in the storage room. Everybody was gathered here. No matter how you look at it, that makes us one person short. Or are you saying there was a thirteenth person on this island?
"Not possible. There were twelve people on this island. Let's assume that's a given."
"Well then, who was it?"
"As of now, there are eleven people alive on this island. Akagami Iria-san, Chiga Akari-san, Hikari-san, and Teruko-san, Handa Rei-san, Himena Maki-san, Sashirono Yayoi-san, Kunagisa Tomo, Sakaki Shinya-san and Sonoyama Akane-san. Then, finally, there's me. So the answer should be clear."
I allowed a brief pause.
"It was Ibuki Kanami-san."
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