To my great relief, the delinquent and Mr. Bare-Legs walked me home. If I wanted to be treated like a girl I wouldn’t dress like a boy, but the sun was setting early these days, so I decided to take them up on their offer─though being boxed in between the two of them felt more like an arrest than a rest for my overanxious mind.
“I doubt anything untoward will happen, but in light of recent events, there’s no harm in taking a few precautions,” Sakiguchi had declared. I’d been pulled into trouble of all sorts and sizes since joining the Pretty Boy Detective Club (most of which originated with the club’s own members), so I wasn’t exactly sure which “recent events” he was referring to, but if it had to do with my route home, my guess was he was referring to the case involving Kamikazari Middle School.
“Though things’re probably so screwed up over there that they don’t have time to mess with our school,” the delinquent countered, before nevertheless delivering me to my doorstep─which I was grateful for in terms of my personal safety, but since my parents seem to be keeping a closer eye on me lately, the situation was a bit delicate.
How did they feel, I wonder?
Was it easier for them to sleep at night when their daughter had been dreaming her life away chasing a nonexistent star, or now that she dressed like a guy and spent her time with a bunch of colorful pretty boys?─I had a feeling it was six of one, half a dozen of the other.
“Actually, we came along more for your peace of mind than for actual protection. No matter how vigilant you are, if someone wants to kidnap you, they’re gonna kidnap you,” Mr. Bare-Legs said with an incongruously innocent smile─I guess people who’ve been kidnapped three times really do have a different perspective.
“Maybe that’s why Nagahiro wanted you to have a cell phone.”
Huh, interesting.
I’d been certain the sly councilman was trying to keep me on a short leash, but sure enough, kiddy cell phones can function as personal alarms, too.
The sole way in which this thing outdid the latest smartphone technology was that if you pulled on the strap, a really loud alarm went off.
“Hmm… Do you really think Sakiguchi took all that into consideration?”
“Yup. A little overprotective, if you ask me, but worthy of a guy with a lolicon. Naturally he’s an expert on kid’s cell phones.”
“Worthy” isn’t exactly the word I’d use, but…
I had mixed feelings about being treated not just like a girl but a little girl, but oh well, I might as well accept that overprotectiveness as a positive thing.
Wait a second, though─kidnapping?
Speaking of kidnapping.
“Hey, you guys,” I said as I was about to shut the front door. “Sotoin said it was like the people imprisoned in the locked rooms of those thirty-three canvases had made a dramatic escape, but don’t you think it’s more like they were kidnapped?”
“Huh?”
The delinquent looked at me dubiously.
But Mr. Bare-Legs, with his abundant experience of being kidnapped, seemed to understand my point straight away.
“Yeah, you could be right. It’s not so much that they were shut up in those pictures and escaped─it’s more like they were being protected by the pictures, but got abducted… That sounds right to me.”
“What’s the difference?”
The delinquent still didn’t seem to get it.
Figures, since he’s never been kidnapped!
I mean, since the bossman would be more likely to kidnap someone than be kidnapped, maybe he had a hard time grasping the niceties.
“What do you think I am, some kind of monster…?” The delinquent glared at me. “Whatever. You better give this some serious thought tonight. The leader told us this was homework.”
Funny how you don’t know the difference between escaping and being abducted, but you can see right through my laziness.
“Ah hah! I think you like me!” I crowed.
“I’m gonna kill you.”
So hard to find that sweet spot of familiarity.
Note to self: never forget that when you leave the art room, these guys aren’t your friends.
I may be gloomy, but I tend to get carried away, and one day that’s going to get me in trouble.
“Seriously though, Dojima, you can’t expect us to treat you like a guest forever. I’ve said this a million times, but you gotta start seeing yourself as a member. What are you, one of those trending celebrities who makes a guest appearance as a voice actor in the movie version of a hit anime?”
I was flattered that he would compare a person like me to a trending celebrity, but boy oh boy, the satire was scathing tonight.
“Give it a rest, Michiru. That kind of talk might come back to bite us when they decide to turn our exploits into a movie.”
For once, Mr. Bare-Legs took a scolding tone─which was in itself a fine thing, but man are his ambitions over the top.
Give up on the movie version already.
On the other hand, the delinquent had a point.
And if a delinquent was giving me a lecture, I knew I was in trouble.
I promised the two of them that I’d come up with a theory to present by the end of the school day tomorrow, and shut the door with a sigh of relief.
A theory.
It was time for what we detectives call some deduction.
This was going to be rough.
It’s a bit late to admit this now, but I’m not much for reading detective novels─actually, books aren’t really my thing in general. Yes, I’m one of those people responsible for reducing the number of readers on trains.
I said a quick hello to my family, then went to my room and took off my boy’s clothes─the uniform itself was comfortable enough for a girl to wear, but I still wasn’t used to having my chest bound like that.
I was dying to take it off the instant I got home.
The outfit I was wearing was one I’d altered in imitation of the clothing the child genius had tailored for me─though of course I’m no costume artist, and as a total novice I had only managed a faint echo of what he’d achieved.
Look and learn.
All art begins with imitation.
Our current view was that the thirty-three canvases we’d discovered weren’t practice exercises─and yet it was equally clear that the mysterious artist hadn’t intended to produce counterfeits.
Which left us with…
I mulled over the problem as I did a quick costume change from boy to girl. Throwing on something to lounge around in didn’t require much mulling over, so I had plenty of leeway to focus my thoughts elsewhere.
Deduction while dressing.
The only idea I could come up with was that the paintings were meant as some kind of critique.
Satire in the delinquent’s vein, if you will.
A message.
By intentionally altering universally acclaimed masterpieces, the artist was trying to put across some idea… Given that their quality was so high I couldn’t even imagine how the artist had managed to paint them in the first place, maybe it had been a little harsh to call it a debasement, but still, it was unquestionably desecration. After all, each of those original paintings was somebody’s baby.
If I started with the hypothesis that these pictures were intended as some kind of gauntlet thrown down to the great painters of yesteryear, I felt like I could scaffold some deductions onto that by the end of the day tomorrow─but I decided to stop thinking about it for the time being.
My deductions might do for a jury-rigged hypothesis based on limited information, but mere deductions weren’t going to cut it here.
Maybe they would fly if I belonged to an ordinary detective club, but I didn’t. I was a member of the Pretty Boy Detective Club.
My deductions had to be beautiful.
“Be pretty, be a boy, be a detective, is it?” I muttered to myself.
Those were the rules of the club.
And then there was the fourth rule, the one I needed to permanently etch into my mind in huge block letters─
As if on cue, just as I finished changing, a sound rang out from the pocket of my uniform where it sat on the hanger.
My kiddy phone was ringing.
What the heck? Don’t tell me the leader was summoning me again, just when I’d finally returned to the refuge of home and was lazing around in my pajamas! Apologies to Sotoin, who was kind enough to treat me like every other member of the club despite the fact that I was not only the newbie, but a grumpy girl and not even a pretty boy at all─but I was genuinely fed up.
For a second, I waffled over whether I should pretend I hadn’t heard it, but I knew that wouldn’t fly.
I steeled myself and pressed ANSWER.
But my mental preparations turned out to be unnecessary.
To put it another way, the attack came from a completely unexpected direction, an ambush for which I was thoroughly unprepared─because even though only the members of the Pretty Boy Detective Club were supposed to know my phone number, the person on the other end of the line wasn’t one of us.
“Hello, Ms. Dojima? It’s me.”
That voice.
The voice of the very person the overprotective Sakiguchi was trying to protect me from by giving me this kiddy phone.
“It’s Lai Fudatsuki. You probably don’t remember me.”
Don’t remember you? How could I forget?