Figuring it would be better to bring them along than to return empty-handed, I called down to the denizens of the world below and began handing them the canvases one by one─I passed them through the hole in the ceiling to the delinquent, who had a foot on the ladder, and he passed them to Sakiguchi.
There were just over thirty canvases in all, so it was quite a job, but I preferred doing it all at once to going back into that tiny space over and over.
I also thought that if we spent some time getting them down, then the child genius─who seemed utterly exhausted from the full exertion of his abilities─would be able to rest a little longer, which was an uncharacteristically thoughtful gesture coming from someone with a personality as lousy as mine.
I was starting to feel less like I was on an adventure or searching for lost treasure and more like I was giving the crawl space a much-needed spring cleaning, but I tried to put a positive spin on it by thinking that at least we’d discovered the door before the child genius had finished his mural.
Each canvas had a different painting on it, though clearly none of them were new─they’d been stored in just about the worst imaginable conditions, and every time I moved one, the paint flaked off or cracked. But I could tell they were mostly landscapes and still lifes.
I figured they must’ve been student projects from back when the art room was actually an art room, rather than the headquarters of a detective organization─thirty or so was just the right number for a class, and maybe when the room was shuttered, someone couldn’t bear to throw the paintings away so they put them up in the crawl space?
That was about as far as my powers of deduction got me, but when I finally finished handing all the canvases down and climbed down the ladder myself, I found the others had reached a different conclusion.
They’d laid out the thirty-odd paintings on the rug, and without waiting for the return of the hardy explorer (me) or offering so much as a word of gratitude, they’d begun to inspect them─and despite my attempt to give him some rest, even the child genius had stood up from the sofa to take part, so I guess my good intentions were in vain.
So much for trying new things.
From now on, I’m doubling down on only thinking about myself.
In any case, now that the paintings had been laid out in the light, I realized I’d better secretly retract my as-yet-unvoiced theory about them being student projects.
My overly good eyesight had actually made it harder to tell, but now that I was out of that narrow space and back in the earthly realm with my glasses on, looking from the right distance with the right eyesight, it was clear they weren’t the work of middle school students.
Even I, possessed of no eye for beauty at all when it comes to art, could see that whoever painted them had considerable skill.
If they had been painted by middle school students, then they must be from some golden age when every kid in the class was as gifted as the child genius─which seemed highly unlikely. If there had been such an age, I can’t imagine Yubiwa Academy would’ve gotten rid of art class.
Suddenly, Mr. Bare-Legs’ theory about a hidden treasure was seeming much more plausible. Could this be some sort of valuable art collection?
If so, who had the right to the paintings? Did I hold all rights as the one who found them, or would they be split between the six of us because I’d been investigating on behalf of the Pretty Boy Detective Club? If we did share, it would be only fair to divide the spoils 5:1:1:1:1:1, considering my outsized role in their discovery…
“Lemme guess, you’re thinking up some petty scheme,” the delinquent said, cutting into my thoughts with his razor-sharp insight.
How did he know?
Well, even if this were a “treasure,” the horrible storage conditions must have lowered the value by at least half, and who would hide valuable paintings in the crawl space above a middle school art room anyway?
Apparently, though, I was the only one thinking about the value of the paintings, or to take it a step further, asset valuation─everyone else’s attention was fixed elsewhere.
“Hey, Dojima. Don’t these paintings look familiar?” the delinquent asked.
“Huh? Familiar?”
I took another look at the rows of paintings, which strictly speaking added up to three times ten plus three equals thirty-three─familiar? How could a pile of paintings that had been stashed away in the crawl space until a few minutes ago possibly look familiar…?
The truth was, not a single one rang a bell.
I canvassed my memory for any hint of familiarity, but came up empty─what I did find, however, was that there was something…uncanny about the canvases.
I’m not quite sure how to explain it other than by saying they struck me as vaguely strange─but not all thirty-three of them.
Some were uncanny, and some weren’t.
“I’d say about half of them feel kind of…unnatural,” I muttered.
“Half? I’d say a third. Ten, maybe,” the delinquent answered.
“I’m getting it from fully eighty percent of them.”
“Twenty-two of ’em for me.”
The councilman and track star added their impressions─was there a reason Mr. Bare-Legs’ count was so precise? I knew I couldn’t expect a comment from the silent genius, so now it was just a question of what our leader was thinking.
“Hm? I don’t sense anything particularly odd about them. I simply feel that each and every one is truly beautiful!”
“…”
It struck me as highly questionable that the leader of a detective organization would utterly fail to sense the weirdness that even a newbie like me was picking up on─not to mention the wild indiscriminacy of summing up this pile of old, ragged, crumbling paintings as “truly beautiful.”
Was this boy really Manabu the Aesthete?
What if he was just a frisky elementary student who called everything under the sun “beautiful”? A secret shiver of anxiety ran through me.
But setting that aside, and despite the variation in actual numbers, four out of six of us definitely sensed something odd about this mysterious collection of paintings─even if I couldn’t explain where, exactly, that feeling came from.
“Hmm. They’re not just familiar, it’s more like déjà vu,” the vice president mused. “Not so much a sense that something is wrong than that something is missing, perhaps.”
If a gloomy type like me said something so roundabout and suggestive, everyone would almost certainly be annoyed, but when the guy with the beautiful voice said it, it sounded perfect. Annoyingly perfect.
Déjà vu. A sense that something’s missing.
My meager mental dictionary couldn’t really distinguish a sense of familiarity from déjà vu, but a sense of something missing sounded right, and I felt like we were getting closer to the truth─there was definitely something lacking from these paintings.
Lacking.
It wasn’t painterly passion or technique or anything like that, but something more concrete─
At that moment, a gunshot rang out behind me.