And so, by solving the mystery, a band of rogues who had commandeered an unused classroom came to properly inherit the facilities from their former occupant, thus officially turning the art room at Yubiwa Academy into the headquarters of the Pretty Boy Detective Club─and I should probably end this tale right there, but I’m sorry to say there are still one or two more lilies I need to gild.
My approach is the polar opposite of Ms. Towai’s, who expressed respect for artists by not painting them, but I must say that wanting to gild lilies is painterly in its own way, and by the strained logic that most people would consider a golden lily an evolutionary advance, I’d like to tack on seven more pages.
First, let me address the last mystery in need of solving.
We had managed to come up with solutions to the mystery of the thirty-three paintings in the crawl space and the giant painting in the auditorium which were, if not precisely true, at least beautiful. But the question remained of how Ms. Towai, who had painted all those paintings and generously confirmed our theories, had appeared in the auditorium with such impeccable timing.
Why did the legendary teacher who disappeared seven years ago return to the school at precisely that moment?
I couldn’t possibly set down my pen without addressing that mystery─there’s no way she was simply waiting in the wings for her cue.
She’d played it off by saying, “I heard some kids had the nerve to commandeer my art room,” but if that was true, who’d she hear it from?
Sakiguchi and the child genius had more or less pinned down her whereabouts in the course of their long evening’s investigation, but they hadn’t yet had a chance to contact her. I suppose they’d planned to take the helicopter there once we’d solved the mystery or something─so it was probably a good thing for everyone that she showed up when she did.
But then, who’d tattled on us?
I don’t know.
I don’t know, but I do know someone who was aware that the Pretty Boy Detective Club was searching for a former teacher and current artist by the name of Kowako Towai─because I had told him so at the bus stop.
What I can say about the guy who so conspicuously left his contacts on the bench is that meetings are his business, he knows a lot of people, and he has close ties with the Twenties, a criminal organization that will “transport” anything and anyone anywhere their clients want.
Which means that drawing on his personal network─his contacts, so to speak─to find a missing person and (assuming she was still alive) transport her to and from a certain middle school auditorium should have been a piece of cake.
But…he didn’t have any reason to do so, and even if he did, it wasn’t hard to imagine how the petty guy with the lolicon would react to hearing that his younger rival had beaten him at his own game, so maybe it’s best to leave this particular mystery unsolved.
Maybe that would be the beautiful thing to do.
As it happens, Sakiguchi’s ultimately pointless search for Ms. Towai apparently led him to an otherwise uninhabited island, so small it wasn’t even on the map─where I hear she’s still living a self-sufficient life devoted to her art.
No wonder no one could find her.
Happily, our case hadn’t taken us to this place whose neighbors apparently refer to it as a modern-day Panorama Island, but Ms. Towai invited us to visit her there any time we liked. Ha ha ha, like that’s ever gonna happen.
And one last bonus:
A few days later, the child genius finished his mural.
It covered the whole ceiling, rivaling Ms. Towai’s giant painting in scale. And thanks to the combined efforts of the Pretty Boy Detective Club, we finished well ahead of schedule.
Who knows, maybe the child genius was also inspired by his encounter with Kowako Towai.
If only a person with Yubiwa’s artistic sensitivity had been working at the school seven years ago─Ms. Towai had said that, but I suppose he won’t be able to devote himself to art forever.
As heir to the Yubiwa Foundation, he’s already involved in its management, and eventually he’ll have to shoulder the job in earnest─so the day will inevitably come when he has to give up his art.
Maybe that’s why he took part with such uncharacteristic enthusiasm in this case, speaking more than once, even.
Maybe that’s why he’s a member of the Pretty Boy Detective Club─because he, more than anyone, longs to be a boy and not a man.
I was afraid to take the contacts out myself, so I had him help me again, and I took the opportunity to ask him a question.
“Hey, child genius, what motivated you to paint the ceiling?”
Naturally, he didn’t answer.
Fine by me, I’m used to it.
Later, while I was passing up paints to him, the scale was so massive I couldn’t even tell what he was painting, let alone why.
No one would tell me, either.
“Dear, dear, is this really the same Ms. Dojima who so recently demonstrated such masterful powers of deduction?” Sakiguchi teased, after which I lost my appetite for asking any more questions.
Come on, you know better than anyone how little that had to do with my own abilities.
Apparently, he didn’t like that I’d leaned on his sworn enemy for help, regardless of the fact that I had the leader’s blessing. Whatever, there’s no harm in being resented by a guy with a lolicon.
But as the monumental mural neared completion, the whole picture gradually came into focus.
Over (under?) a background of pure black sprawled all eighty-eight of them.
The huge bear and lion stood out, so at first I thought he had painted a safari scene, but no─there was a goat with the bottom half of a fish, and a chameleon.
There was a picture of someone’s hair, and another of a water jar.
A scorpion and a serpent.
A maiden and a god.
He had painted the eighty-eight constellations.
A picture of the heavens that even a planetarium could never manage.
I stood there staring up at the completed painting with my mouth hanging open.
“Ha ha ha! I’m delighted to see it pleases you, young Dojima! Your happiness is a fitting reward for Sosaku, since he painted it for you!” Sotoin said, laughing joyfully─he painted it for me?
I looked around for the child genius, thinking I must’ve misheard; his work complete, I found him sitting on the sofa with Mr. Bare-Legs and Sakiguchi, sipping a cup of the delinquent’s tea.
“Now that we’ve got this colossal painting on the ceiling, even gloomy old Dojima might look up now and then,” the delinquent said brusquely, not exactly speaking for the child genius as he set my tea on the table.
“…”
In response, I looked up at the ceiling again─yes.
I’d stopped looking at the night sky when I lost sight of the phantom star I’d spent ten years chasing─I’d lost the desire to look up.
That’s why I joined the Pretty Boy Detective Club.
So I could look at the sky again one day.
“You did all this…for me?” I said in disbelief to no one in particular.
“What are you talking about, Doji? You did it with us,” Mr. Bare-Legs said from his upside-down position on the sofa─apparently working together on the mural had done away with the last of his anger.
He was right.
Just like Ms. Towai had made the students her accomplices in the mass kidnapping, I’d played an admirable supporting role in recreating the starry sky on the ceiling of the art room.
“And we did it with the permission of the former owner. I’m so glad we were able to bring the mural to fruition without any cause for further hesitation,” Sakiguchi chimed in, in his beautiful voice.
Well, technically speaking, Ms. Towai had only been using a room that belonged to the school, so it wasn’t quite accurate to call her the former owner─but when I realized that was one reason Sakiguchi had worked so hard to track down Ms. Towai, I felt genuinely bad about meeting with his sworn enemy behind his back (even if that’s not how I thought of it at the time) and calling him “the guy with the lolicon” over and over. I think I’ll give him my elementary school uniform to make it up to him─assuming he’s satisfied with mine, that is.
“Ha ha ha! Young Dojima, until the day you once again look up at the real night sky, I invite you to enjoy these beautiful stars to your heart’s content! And I will accept the pleasure of joining you! Alright then, lads, once you’ve finished your tea, it’s time to prepare for a party! Let us make merry in honor of completing this great work of art!”
With that, the leader nudged me toward the sofa─we talk about things being beautiful beyond description, beyond depiction.
And yet I wished someone would paint a picture of that moment, all of us looking up at the same scene, when I felt for the first time like I’d truly become one of them.