Shota Akiyama, just like Reina Myoko, had saved up more than 100 million yen.
There were a few things we could confirm based on this fact: Shota and Reina had likely worked together to amass such a large amount of money. And they both made efforts to prevent anyone from realizing they had that much money.
And if this murder was connected to the source of that money, Shota probably had an idea who the killer might be.
I was abuzz with ideas, but there was something I had to take care of first.
I had to hear what Otoha Tamachi knew about Reina.
When I arrived at the entrance to the hotel, I realized a car was parked in the lot.
Maybe Otoha had arrived. My wristwatch read 1:20 A.M.
I looked up at the car. It was a red BMW.
✦ ✦ ✦
I went back to the lobby and returned the tablet to Dr. Higano. He and Noi-tan began to update each other on what they’d missed while apart.
Not even a second later, the automatic entrance to the hotel slid open.
“Sorry to make you wait!” Otoha strolled towards us, her voice slow and easygoing.
Not having seen her for such a long time, I was first struck by the fact that she was more beautiful than I’d remembered. She was dressed stylishly in an elegant summer coat, a blue shirt, and a long skirt with a floral pattern. She had on pink flower-shaped earrings. Unlike me, she looked like a real “princess,” beautiful enough to make me feel self-conscious.
Junseiwa Academy had an ability to shield its students from social trends, and while there Otoha had been another unremarkable, unpolished adolescent girl. She must’ve discovered makeup and fashion after she graduated. Had she really become this beautiful?
I tried to recall my impression of her at that time, but nothing came to me. We hadn’t been all that close, and it wasn’t nice of me to say, but she hadn’t seemed like anything other than one of Reina’s hangers-on. I racked my brain, but all I could remember was chatting about shampoos with her when we happened to be alone in her dorm bathroom once.
“So Otoha, sorry to get right to the questions, but what can you tell me about that red BWM?”
Otoha tilted her head inquisitively. “What about it? My dad bought it for me.”
That made sense. I was surprised the cars were the same, but there was no way the BMW Otoha had arrived in could’ve been Reina’s still-missing BMW. I remembered the plate number, and of course it was different from the one we’d written down as Reina’s.
Otoha took off her summer coat and leisurely sat down opposite Dr. Higano and me. She smiled bashfully at Dr. Higano in his white coat.
It was a tender smile, and gave her the warm air of a sunbeam. She was probably liked by everyone she met.
As one might imagine, Junseiwa Academy had been full of women just like her. Most of these women weren’t competitive, didn’t have a mean bone in their bodies, and, indeed, required this sense of harmony to live.
The classrooms had almost seemed to give off the pleasant aroma of warm milk.
As one of the hoi polloi, I always felt somewhat isolated from the rarified, enclosed environment. Then after Nadeshiko was murdered, the isolation was certainly no longer the product of my self-consciousness. I was actually ostracized from the group.
They never explicitly rejected me. Whenever my sister’s death came up, the other girls in the academy cried with me and were incredibly sympathetic, almost too kind. They were nice people, so I was thankful.
But they all considered me a foreigner of sorts. No one considered me part of their group, and none of them ever once thought of themselves as being on the same side as the victim. They were completely ignorant of their privilege. They deigned to look upon me with kindness.
And that’s probably why alarm bells were going off in my head at that moment, despite the fact that Otoha seemed so sweet.
Dr. Higano introduced himself as a detective helping with the case, took out his cube puzzle, and looked straight at Otoha. “It seems you’ve been looking into Reina’s case,” he said.
“Yes. But all I was able to find is that she—” Otoha suddenly became choked up and put her hands to the corners of her eyes. She took out a handkerchief and wiped away her tears.
“You’ll have to excuse me. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, Reina,” she choked out.
She cried quietly. I watched her, a little confused. When she had settled down I asked, “What exactly do you mean by ‘I’m sorry’? Did something happen between you and Reina?”
She sniffed. “I had always wanted to apologize to her. But I wasn’t able to in the end. I distanced myself from her during college after…something happened.”
“You mean…You cut off ties with her?”
“Yes. And it wasn’t just me. Everyone who was close with Reina during high school distanced themselves from her.”
“You mean all the Bumblebees?”
Her eyes and the tip of her nose had reddened. She nodded.
“You guys were inseparable. How could that happen?”
She hesitated. Quietly, she said, “She…She cheated.”
I frowned. I didn’t know what she meant.
“I met a guy shortly after starting college,” she explained. “Reina stole him from me. It’s a little embarrassing, but I was just a teenager at the time and I was obsessed with being in a relationship, so it was really difficult to handle the betrayal. It felt like the Bumblebees had to choose between me or Reina, and they took my side and decided to separate themselves from Reina, like I did.”
It seemed a little strange for a group as tight as the Bumblebees to have broken up because of romantic troubles, but this was not an uncommon adolescent occurrence.
However, there was something that didn’t sit right with me. “Reina doesn’t strike me as someone who would lose her head over a guy…”
“Reina was involved with a lot of guys,” Otoha said. “Do you remember Sawazaki-sensei?”
I couldn’t remember him from the name alone. Otoha reminded me that he had been the chemistry teacher, and after she provided some nearly-obsessive details about him, I eventually recalled him vaguely.
“Didn’t he have to leave for some disciplinary reason?” I asked.
Sawazaki-sensei had always kept some distance between himself and students, so his dismissal, a pretty serious punishment, hadn’t created much noise, but I did remember students spreading rumors about him.
“Yes,” she confirmed. “That was Sawazaki-sensei. He had an affair with Reina while she was in high school.”
“No way!”
Sawazaki-sensei was your average, married, middle-age man. There was absolutely nothing cool about him. I had trouble imagining any interaction between the two of them other than an ordinary student-teacher relationship.
“It wasn’t just Sawazaki-sensei. She was dating guys from other schools while she was seeing him. And before that she was seeing a couple of older guys as well.”
The almost holy ideal of Reina that I had held was being dramatically rewritten.