The sun was about to set, and the sky was starting to turn purple.
When I opened the door to Café☆ Blue Moon, where I was supposed to meet Yuta Gamon, it was already past five.
It was my first time in the place. The interior design seemed very adult. Not the kind of place a high schooler would choose. Between the decorations and the faint smell of tar, it was less like a café and more like a café bar.
I came up with several hypotheses about the connection between Yuta Gamon and this place, but I decided it was a waste to spend valuable brain memory on something like that and gave up halfway.
There were three other people in the room, besides the owner.
A man and two women.
The man was Yuta Gamon. He was sitting in a corner seat, and had his hands wrapped around his knees for some reason.
One of the girls was Miyuu Aikawa. I’d met her earlier. She was the one who’d told me about Yuta Gamon.
When our eyes met, she looked surprised, then stood up and gave me a little bow. I nodded to her.
As for the other girl...
I didn’t know her, and yet...
“Poor Sarai-kyun! ♪ Poor Sarai-kun! ♪”
P-Poor Sarai-kun?!
For some reason this woman sympathizing with me was sitting next to Yuta Gamon, so I figured she was with him, but...
Now she was dancing around the shop. Looking at her, I lost all confidence in my analysis. That’s how hard it was to read her actions.
I wasn’t sure if she was part of Kirikiri Basara, or maybe she was just an employee here at Blue Moon. That would only make sense if the place included a service where the employees danced for the customers, though.
...It was immediately clear, however, that this wasn’t that type of place.
If she was taking pity on me, that meant she knew my dad was dead. But that didn’t tell me who she was.
As for Yuta Gamon, he was glaring at me angrily.
“What is it? I’m sorry I’m late, but I’d already been scheduled to work, and I told you that over the phone.”
“...”
Gamon said nothing. Instead he just pouted and looked away. He was acting just like a child, but—
“You look pale. Something bad happened because I was late, didn’t it? But I wasn’t the direct cause of whatever it was, so you can’t bring yourself to blame me. Is that it? Did the police question you or something?”
Gamon’s whole body twitched.
“H-How...”
“It’s obvious.”
Holding your knees, psychologically speaking, means you’re trying to protect yourself. At least, that’s what one theory says. It’s the same thing pill bugs do.
In other words, despite the fact that Gamon was waiting at the place he’d specified, he was so afraid he felt the need to protect himself. And Gamon’s biggest fear was that he’d be arrested for Isayuki Hashigami’s murder. The only reason he’d agreed to meet me here, knowing that he might run into the police, was that he wanted proof of his innocence — in other words, a clue to the real killer.
Which meant he’d made a bad call. On his way here, or perhaps while he was waiting, someone from the police had made contact with him.
“That detective knew me. It wasn’t a coincidence. He was here because he was after me. But for some reason, he didn’t arrest me. Either he let me go, or he’s hoping I’ll lead him to something.”
“...”
Evidently he hadn’t been asked to go the station.
It was quite possible.
Just like I’d decided Gamon wasn’t the killer, the police — or perhaps only part of the investigative team — might have reached the same conclusion.
It was still strange that they didn’t even question him, though.
“Um, what’s this about a detective?” Aikawa seemed confused.
“Huh? Um... No, we’re just talking about how there’s so many police officers around Kichijoji lately.”
From the terrible excuse he was giving her, it didn’t look like Gamon had told her about his witnessing my father’s murder.
“A-Anyway, tell me about the CODE riddle that was hidden on the ceiling.”
He probably wanted to change the subject, because he turned to me.
That’s right. That was why I came here today.
“Hey, if there’s four of you here, can you at least order something? Gamota never orders anything but water!” The bartender, a very heavily muscled man, was twisting his body back and forth as he spoke. It was pretty disgusting.
“F-Forget it! The mystery! Tell me already!” Gamon sounded irritated.
“Fine. I’ll get started.”
Me, Aikawa, and the girl who’d started dancing — she said her name was Narusawa — each ordered something. Then I put a piece of paper on the table. Gamon and the rest all looked at it.
It was a photo of all the holes in the ceiling of my father’s study. Gamon had taken it yesterday.
Just like he’d said, there was a message from my dad there.
I’d succeeded in decoding it last night. It would’ve been incredibly difficult to solve this mystery from scratch. But once you knew that it was rows of letters, it wasn’t that hard at all. This was my father’s dying message.
I’d only waited to tell Gamon this morning because I’d forgotten.
“Boards with all these holes like the ones on the ceiling are called pegboards. You’ve seen them used on the walls in music rooms, I’m sure.”
“They block sound, right?”
I shook my head in answer to Aikawa’s question. “They don’t block sound. They absorb it. They reduce the rate at which sound emitted in the rooms is reflected, and allow a sound-absorbing material behind the pegboard to absorb it.”
“Huh? Then those holes don’t exist to shut out sound from the outside?”
“They might work to do that a little, but that’s not their real purpose.”
“Wait, isn’t it actually really rare to use something like this in a house?” Gamon’s eyebrows furrowed as he spoke.
“Yeah. My dad wasn’t a musician or anything. There was no sense in using a pegboard in the study. By the way, this pegboard was put in when he did a sudden remodeling of the study a year ago. He didn’t remodel anything else in the house. When I asked him why at the time, he dodged the question.”
Thinking back, that was probably when my dad went from denying the Occult to saying it existed.
“Then Dr. Hashigami put that pegboard in to hide a message from the start? Isn’t that kind of crazy?” Gamon asked.
I was about to tell him that only idiots and amateurs jumped to conclusions like that — but I stopped. I didn’t expect any kind of intellectual discourse from a high school student running an aggregator blog.
“There were about forty thousand holes on the ceiling...”
“What?! You counted them all?” Gamon’s eyes went wide.
It was kind of amazing how he could get surprised at every little thing.
“I would never do something so inefficient as count them all individually. All you need to do is count the number of rows, and the number of holes in a row. It took less than fifteen minutes.”
Gamon didn’t seem satisfied with my answer. He was still glaring at me.
“Right, right. Sorry. So what was the message hidden in the holes?”
“Just like you said, they were encoded letters.”
“CODE! ☆ CODE! ☆ DYING? DINING? KITCHEN! ☆” Narusawa seemed unable to keep up with the conversation, so she was interrupting at irregular intervals. The word “inappropriate” probably didn’t exist in this large-breasted woman’s dictionary.
I decided to ignore this mysterious creature.
“Well, basically, the whole ceiling was covered in letters.”
“Letters on the ceiling?! That’s really surprising!” Gamon wanted to look good for Aikawa, so he kept interrupting, too. “Did you hear that, Myu-Pom? It was my idea that they were letters! Even Zonko told me I was smart!”
“Wow, you’re amazing, Gamo!”
“Who’s Zonko?” I asked. Was he talking about some other girl?
“Right, right. Zonko is this radio.” Gamon showed me the bag he had slung over his shoulder. Inside was a very old-looking radio.
“What are you talking about?”
“Oh, this thing talks all the time.”
“Gamo, are you talking about that again...?” Aikawa seemed bothered.