Perhaps the doctor had remembered it broken up like that. And when he was on the verge of passing out and trying to say the man’s name, he happened to spot a first aid kit, and it came out as a more regular English phrase instead.
Had Tsuruya figured out what he meant on the spot? Yeah, there was no way she didn’t know this comedian’s card joke. Yet she’d pretended otherwise, written the whole thing up as a Challenge, and sent it our way. With the first two episodes thrown in for good measure.
How generous of her. I was almost touched. What had driven Tsuruya to do this? Should we just accept it all in the spirit of fun?
Something was bugging me. Something unsettling that I couldn’t quite put a finger on.
Haruhi seemed thoroughly satisfied with a job well done.
“We don’t need to consider the motive, right?”
“I’d say motives are an issue of the inner workings of the human heart and impossible to uncover through deduction alone. We can, of course, speculate… For example, perhaps the card comedian was also in the running for Shouko’s hand, and this is the result of a broken heart, a common enough reason for assault cases like this. Or perhaps the doctor was secretly an agent for a criminal syndicate, and the card joker was trying to purge that influence from his relative’s life. We can imagine all sorts of things. And for precisely that reason, attempting to pick a motive is inherently futile. Nor did Tsuruya expect that of us.”
“Good point. It’s been hundreds of years, but we still don’t know what motivated Akechi Mitsuhide to take out Oda Nobunaga at Honno-ji. Wondering what someone was thinking at the time does us no good. I mean, people mostly act on impulse. And all of us come up with reasons for our actions after the fact. I’m a proponent of the theory that the whole Honno-ji event was just a fit of madness. Mitsuhide just happened to be in a traitory mood that day! Normally, he’d never have done it, but he happened to realize he was in a position to pull it off and acted before he could stop to think.”
While Haruhi and Koizumi were debating motives, I remembered something. Before Tsuruya’s e-mail arrived, Koizumi, T, and Nagato had been having a debate about the concept of fairness in a mystery.
On that basis, could we say Tsuruya’s problem was fair?
“It certainly isn’t the most generous problem, but if you work out that it’s set abroad, you’ve got a good chance at solving it.”
“Knowing there was a narrative trick involved helped a lot,” Haruhi added.
“The trap Tsuruya hid in Episode Three made it seem like they were speaking Japanese, when actually, they were speaking English. A deception applied to both the setting and the language used. But we were expecting it. Between Episode One’s age trick and Episode Two’s gender trick, we were all assuming there would be something like that here. In other words, the first two episodes were the biggest hints to solving Episode Three.”
So they weren’t just any random old stories, then. And we’d gotten to know Tsuruya herself better. How she was just as entertaining as a kid and would likely still be like this ten years from now—a weirdly comforting thought.
Still…
…this feeling swirling inside me… It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Tsuruya or anything. I just had a vague suspicion that we were still being fooled somewhere. It was like her smirking face was floating in the air just above me. And I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from, which only made the itch worse. I was just sure we were missing something.
“I hate to sound picky, but I have one more question.”
At this, Koizumi put the marker down, turning toward me. “Which is?”
“Did this actually happen?”
“Oh!” he said, eyes widening. “What makes you say that?”
“The timing’s a bit too perfect. On several levels.”
Tsuruya being overseas on family business and at a party for the launch of a new project, sure. But did cases involving people with extremely specific name gimmicks actually happen?
“Perhaps because one did, she decided it was worth informing us about it. And…” Koizumi gave Haruhi a glance that only I could see. “Things that appear extremely unlikely do seem to occur on occasion. And it’s an established fact that there is a substantial discrepancy between our ideas of what is probable and the actual odds of them occurring. The birthday paradox and the Monty Hall problem are perfect examples.”
I’ll have to look those up later.
“So that means her actual name is Shouko Notobe?” Haruhi said, scowling at the computer screen and pointlessly swirling the mouse around. “Tsuruya’s answer e-mail’s a bit late, huh?”
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing.
So far, she’d sent those out right as we finished, but with Ep3, she was taking her sweet time.
“Think of the time difference. I dunno where she is, exactly, but it’s probably the middle of the night. She might have dozed off!”
Still…
“Perhaps Tsuruya believes it will take us longer to reach the answer. In which case, we should be patting ourselves on the back.”
Or maybe we hadn’t hit 100 percent yet? What if we let ourselves get stuck at 70 percent?
“Don’t be stupid, Kyon,” Haruhi scoffed. “Even Tsuruya can’t monitor the clubroom in real time. How would she know what we know?”
Her timing so far had been downright uncanny, but…now that you mention it, that’s a fair point. Tsuruya might be a bundle of energy you could easily label hyper, but she wasn’t clairvoyant and couldn’t possibly know just how far our deductions had taken us. Still, she’d sent those first two answer e-mails with such perfect timing that it sure seemed like she knew the moment we’d solved them. I mean, logically speaking, I knew she couldn’t possibly have known that, but…
Crap, I was stuck in a thought loop.
I shook my head, trying to free myself, and spotted something extremely unusual.
“……………”
Nagato had her eyes fixed on me. An unusually piercing gaze.
What? Why was she trying to bore a hole in me with her eyes?
But then she looked away, her eyes locking on something else.
I turned my head, following her look.
She was looking at T. All she could see from her position was the back of T’s blond head.
Nagato swiveled her emotionless face back to me once more.
“?”
All I had were question marks.
What was she trying to tell me?
I stared at Nagato’s wordless anomaly for a full five seconds.
“…………”
And Nagato did something genuinely astonishing.
She rose to her feet like there were strings attached, dragged her folding chair over to the main table, sat down again, and…
“…………”
…stared directly at T’s face.
I was not the only person gaping. Haruhi, Koizumi, and Asahina all looked like they were touring the Louvre and the Winged Victory of Samothrace had suddenly started dancing.
T looked up from her forest of furigana and said, “Is there something on my face, Nagato?”
She sounded confused. Like Nagato’s glare was physically repelling her, she leaned way back and held a hand up to hide her face, palm facing us.
Having observed this action, Nagato looked at me again.