I saw through to what had really happened.
Although I did make one mistaken assumption.
I’d hoped that by layering Fudatsuki’s invisi-vision contacts over my own too-good eyesight, I’d double Mayumi the Seer’s ability to see through stuff, but in the event, it didn’t work like simple addition.
Fudatsuki had said the contacts were nowhere near as good as my own eyesight, but they still improved the wearer’s vision enough to render an invisibility suit visible─which is why I thought that if the contact lenses were a “5” and my vision was a “10,” adding them together would give me a “15.” And maybe if I looked at the giant painting with that boosted vision, I’d see something new.
But 5 plus 10 didn’t equal 15─and come to think of it, even with normal glasses that correct your eyesight, putting on two or three pairs at the same time doesn’t give you double or triple the benefit.
In this case, the level 5 contacts attenuated my level 10 vision, so I ended up looking at The Auditorium in the Auditorium with level 5 vision─which was actually a good thing.
My “too-good eyesight” became “just right eyesight.”
My own plan had misfired.
But Fudatsuki’s was right on the mark.
“The painting─wasn’t switched out at all,” I muttered.
Yes.
That was the truth.
“Whaddaya mean it wasn’t switched out, Dojima?”
The delinquent gave me a suspicious look.
“We jumped to conclusions,” I replied─because yes, that too had been a mistaken assumption.
Of course, it was only natural to assume the painting had been switched out since it was completely different from the original─unlike my silly notion about layering on contacts.
“Gimme a break. If it wasn’t switched out, are you saying the students really were kidnapped from the painting?”
“No, that’s not it either.”
I searched for a clever way to explain it, but no matter how hard I tried, with my paltry vocabulary I could only tell it like it was.
Though that might actually have been the sincerest attitude I could take toward art, not some string of flowery phrases.
“They’ve been wholly painted over.”
“Wholly…cow!”
Mr. Bare-Legs’ mouth dropped open.
Yesss! The shocking truth had softened his anger over my escape, if only a little!
I pressed on, anxious not to let this opportunity go. I was hoping to achieve forgiveness by attrition, which was more a selfish attitude than a sincere one.
“In other words, she altered it from a painting of the whole student body at an assembly to a painting of an empty auditorium─without ever taking the enormous canvas off the wall.”
Once you got it, it was obvious.
It was the only possible answer.
If the old canvas couldn’t be taken out and a new one couldn’t be brought in, there was no other practical solution.
But at the same time, it was a startling breakthrough in our thinking.
If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I never would have believed it either─that is, if I hadn’t looked at the painting with my “attenuated” vision and therefore seen only halfway through it, to the “base layer” where the entire student body was lined up in neat little rows, I wouldn’t have thought it possible.
I didn’t see through to the pure white of the canvas, nor to the empty wall behind it.
Precisely because I only saw through the topmost layer of paint─I was able to see the image underneath that had been painted over.
My eyes can see clear through canvas, but I can’t control the penetration in a way that would let me see through only that one thin layer of paint─if I could fine-tune my eyesight like that, I wouldn’t need protective glasses.
Since he left these contacts behind when he got on the bus, I’m certain Fudatsuki had seen the truth─though not literally.
What is essential is invisible to the eye.
For once, that did appear to be the case.
“Ohh… Now I get it,” the delinquent said. “Then, that confirms that the culprit must’ve been Kowako Towai. Only the artist herself would ever do something as sacrilegious as painting over a finished picture.”
I agreed.
When the child genius wanted to tell us that one of the thirty-three paintings was The Gleaners, he drew on a picture he’d taken with his phone instead of doing it directly on the canvas─because an artist doesn’t paint over another artist’s painting.
Ironically, the boldness of the crime pointed straight to the criminal─of course we still had no proof, and it was just a generalization, but I had a hard time imagining that someone capable of painting such a high-quality picture would treat another artist’s work with such a lack of respect.
She would never have painted over it.
Unless it was her own.
“Painted over, you say… Yes, if that’s the case, it does solve the problems of how she got it in and out of the ‘locked room’ of the auditorium, how she painted the new picture, and how she disposed of the old one─but, Ms. Dojima,” Sakiguchi said, proceeding with the utmost caution.
He seemed to understand that this was the only possible explanation, but still wanted to clear up each and every one of his lingering doubts.
“Look how enormous this painting is. Painting over it would be no mean feat─it must have taken a significant amount of time.”
“True, and the original painting took a whole month to complete. It would have been impossible for her to spend that much time working in a public space like the auditorium without being discovered.”
“In which case…”
“But she didn’t have to repaint the whole thing. The basic composition is the same, so all she had to do was paint over the rows of students, which would have reduced her workload by a lot.”
“I’ll grant you that─but it’s still a huge amount of work for one person to do alone.”
“What if she wasn’t alone?”
From there on out, I was speculating.
Far from staying within the realm of logical deduction, I never even entered it. The original painting had been painted over─that was a fact I had seen with my own eyes, but as for what happened seven years ago, all I could do was rely on my imagination.
All I could do was imagine the most beautiful scenario possible.
“That was the motivation for the kidnapping, so to speak. To carry out this large-scale crime with a large group of people.”
“Carrying out the crime with a large group of people was the motivation…? I don’t follow you, Ms. Dojima. When you say a large group, who do you mean? Ms. Towai’s fellow artists?”
“No, the students of Yubiwa Academy.”
It was the only thing that made sense.
Of course, I couldn’t rule out the possibility that her fellow artists had helped, but this was the only plausible explanation.
That she, Kowako Towai.
Had recruited the students she’d taught art to.
The students who lamented the loss of art class as much as─or maybe even more than─she did, and they’d committed the crime together.
“But Doji, Ms. Towai was a problem teacher, right?”
“Thank you for listening so attentively. That is an excellent question. And those are excellent legs.”
I paused in solving the mystery to butter up Mr. Bare-Legs.
I was desperate to get back on his good side.
That was pretty much the same as apologizing, wasn’t it?
“But it was only ever the administration who saw her as a ‘problem teacher’─from what we’ve heard, she never abandoned her classes or ignored her students or anything like that.”
Sure, holding overseas drawing competitions and modeling nude for middle school students was unquestionably beyond the pale─but even if she’d done lots of things that were problematic for a teacher, as an artist she’d always provided a sterling example for her students. Though maybe that was exactly why she’d been labeled a problem teacher.
And in that case…
Some of the students had to have been on her side.
I hoped so, anyway.
“In the end, the mass kidnapping of seven years ago was Ms. Towai’s final class─even if all the students in the school didn’t attend, I think she taught the ones who did everything she could by painting alongside them.”
The techniques of a painter, of course, but also what it means to be an artist.
Fudatsuki, who greatly values the planting of seeds, would probably say she was simply motivated by a playful heart─but in any case, Ms. Towai had planted seeds in the hearts of the children.
Seven years had passed since then.
The students who were in their first year of middle school at the time were about twenty years old now─what sorts of adults had they become?
Ms. Towai’s goal had been nothing so narrow-minded as revenge for her firing─no, she’d had her eyes on the future.
I looked at the child genius.
He’d probably known the truth from the start.
Even without my eyesight or Fudatsuki’s contacts, someone with the right expertise could probably tell if a picture had been painted over─so, conversely, the fact that no one outside the group who had participated in the act seven years ago had ever guessed the truth meant they had no eye for art.
“I think the reason Ms. Towai disappeared seven years ago wasn’t that she wanted to turn her back on the world, it was that she wanted to take sole responsibility for the crime. She wanted to make sure there was no way the students who had worked alongside her would be punished.”
Maybe I was giving the problem teacher a little too much credit, but at the same time, it all made sense.
And who knows, maybe some school employees did guess the truth. There had to be at least a few who got where she was coming from─but they probably would’ve kept quiet, and even if not, with so many students involved in the crime, they would’ve had no choice but to cover it up.
The crime probably wasn’t all that calculated─though on second thought, that kind of thorough planning might actually be second nature to an artist.
“Beautiful,” Sotoin murmured.
That was all.
But even though it wasn’t as if he’d said it to praise me, for some reason I felt suddenly bashful, and added, “W-Well, anyway, I’m not sure how much of it is true.”
“All of it,” a voice declared.
I turned around.
Kowako Towai was standing in the doorway of the auditorium.