“Ha ha ha. Of course, part of it was plain old disgust with the school─it’s a crying shame I never painted their crying faces, those bums.”
Logic can’t explain how I knew instinctively that she was Kowako Towai. I’d only been at the school for a year, so I didn’t know what she looked like, and I’d never seen a photo of her─but something about the way she was standing there left no room for doubt.
Even without that, I would probably have been able to deduce she was an artist from her paint-splattered clothes and the handkerchief wrapped around her head.
She looked like she’d walked straight from her studio into the auditorium, totally indifferent to her appearance─and while that made it hard to tell how old she was, she looked quite a bit younger than I’d imagined.
Her face was so covered in paint that I couldn’t say for sure, but judging from the way Mr. Bare-Legs perked up when he saw her, she was probably a beauty underneath it all.
“…Are you Ms. Towai?”
Unlike me, Sakiguchi─who’d been tracking her whereabouts with the help of the child genius─probably recognized her face, but he asked nonetheless.
“Indeed I am,” she replied with a puckish air. “I’m Kowako Towai. Former teacher, current artist, and kidnapper of the hour.”
“…”
The sudden appearance of the artist, who sounded totally unabashed, seemed to have caught Sakiguchi off guard as well.
I’d been certain he was the one who had asked her to come, since he’d been investigating her whereabouts, but apparently not─we now had the unexpected opportunity to confirm our solution, but if Sakiguchi hadn’t invited her, why was she here?
The criminal always returns to the scene of the crime.
You hear that a lot, but would someone really come back after seven years? And just when we were in the middle of investigating the crime? That would be quite the coincidence.
“Sure would. Anyway, they really hate me around here, so the truth is, I didn’t want to come─but I heard some kids had the nerve to commandeer my art room even though it was supposed to be locked up. That you?”
She was grinning the whole time.
There was a certain, how can I put it, pressure behind that smile.
But nonetheless, the leader answered boldly, “Yes, that’s us. We are the Pretty Boy Detective Club.”
“Funny name.”
She walked toward us as she continued. “So, did you solve the other mystery?”
She looked at me like she was testing me.
The other mystery?
Oh right, I’d forgotten.
That was where all of this had started─the art room.
The thirty-three paintings we found in the crawl space of what Ms. Towai had called “my art room.”
The paintings copied sans their human subjects.
Our search for the meaning behind those paintings had kicked everything off.
“Unlike when we painted over this huge canvas, I did those all by myself. What do you think my motivation was?”
Hell of a way to beat around the bush.
It was easy to see how people might dislike her.
Talking to children this way the first time she met them would probably disqualify her from being a teacher as far as most people were concerned─but for a master speaking to her apprentices, even if they were children, taking an unsparing attitude right from the start might be just the thing.
I couldn’t play the good apprentice, though.
Because I’d forgotten all about the other mystery─and it wasn’t like solving the mystery of the huge painting in the auditorium automatically led to solving the mystery of the art room.
They were completely separate.
Even after you’ve sorted the mixed-up puzzle pieces into two piles, you’re still more or less at square one.
But I sensed Ms. Towai wasn’t so lenient as to let me get away with saying I didn’t know─so I just stood there, completely stymied.
“Our resident artist will answer that question,” the leader interjected, clapping the child genius on the back. “Speak up, Sosaku.”
It wasn’t just me; Sakiguchi, the delinquent, and Mr. Bare-Legs all looked startled too─none of us had expected that from the guy who always spoke for the child genius.
Even the child genius himself was probably caught off guard─but while his expression didn’t flicker, he did resolve to speak.
“It’s not that you didn’t paint the people.”
In a bold break with customary practice, he was speaking for the second time in the course of a single case.
“It’s that you painted the gods.”