Think of a ship in a bottle.
The only way a ship bigger than the mouth of the bottle could get in there is for someone to stick the pieces of the ship in one by one, then assemble them with a pair of tweezers─just like Ms. Towai must have done when she painted The Auditorium in the Auditorium.
She must’ve brought the materials in separately, then stretched the canvas right there in the auditorium before beginning work on her enormous painting─but she couldn’t have used the same method for the switch-up.
Because whatever artistic message she may have been sending, her actions did have a criminal aspect to them, so she couldn’t have afforded any witnesses.
Both lugging in an unstretched canvas and painting the second painting inside the auditorium would have been out of the question─someone from the school definitely would have caught her in the act.
I mean, the painting was so huge that when she was first hired, she’d had to take over the auditorium for a whole month to finish it─if she wanted to switch it out, her only option would have been to paint the replacement somewhere else and bring it in once it was done. But the completed painting was far, far too big to fit through the auditorium door, which meant she couldn’t have brought it in after it was finished.
It was impossible.
An impossible crime.
A locked-room mystery, albeit an unorthodox one─I could see how the officials at Yubiwa Academy would’ve been reluctant to report it to the police.
“Okay, but come on. It’s not like she actually kidnapped the entire student body from inside the picture,” the delinquent said.
But maybe the school officials did consider it a possibility.
That might be why this painting still hung in its original spot seven years later─otherwise, I can’t imagine why the school would leave up a painting by some problem teacher.
They were leaving a place for the kidnapped students to return to─or even if they weren’t quite that sentimental, I bet they just felt it was too creepy to get rid of.
Which was reasonable.
I mean, it even creeped me out.
I shivered at the thought that I’d been absentmindedly looking up at it for more than a year and a half, ever since I first set foot in the auditorium during my entrance ceremony─though of course I wasn’t about to swallow some absurd story about students being kidnapped from a picture.
However.
One person had swallowed it wholesale.
“Beautiful!”
Sotoin clapped boisterously, then reached out to shake Sakiguchi’s hand.
“Excellent work, Nagahiro! You had good reason for grandstanding! That beautiful hidden ball trick you just performed is further proof that I was not mistaken in appointing you vice president! It was so dazzling, in fact, that I can’t help but think you’re after my position as president!”
“Ha…ha ha, what are you saying, Mr. President? To think that I would have designs on your position… I-It’s unimaginable. Quite out of the question.”
Why was he so shaken?
All the same, Sotoin’s praise did appear to finally relax him.
The leader seemed to view the discovery of a new mystery as cause for celebration─he was a “detective,” of a sort anyway, so you’d think his greatest joy would lie in solving mysteries, but apparently nothing could beat having more of them to solve, so long as they were beautiful.
If you asked me, though, the situation seemed to be getting more puzzling by the minute─because if the canvases we’d found really were painted by this problem teacher Kowako Towai, then all of our theories had missed the mark.
The delinquent’s idea may have been the best we had at the moment, but there was no guarantee he was right.
Neither was there anything in Ms. Towai’s story to back up the theory presented by the child genius (or more accurately, by his spokesman Sotoin) that there were at least another thirty-three paintings (Sakiguchi’s silence on the subject spoke to his thorough discretion toward those with power and influence).
“The easiest way to sort this all out would’ve been to just ask Ms. Towai, but if she’s gone missing, guess there’s not much we can do. Missing, like the people in the paintings… Kinda sounds like it means something, but I’m not sure what…”
Mr. Bare-Legs seemed as lost as I was─as a jock, art was outside his field of expertise (nudes aside), so once things got this tangled up, I guess he felt helpless.
I hardly need mention the delinquent’s reaction.
The leader, however, seemed suddenly energized.
“As detectives, it would not be fitting for us to ask the artist to explain her own actions! In my opinion, the confession of a criminal does not constitute evidence!” he proclaimed with great enthusiasm.
Never mind that what he said made no sense whatsoever.
Although I suppose it was preferable to pinning your entire investigation on eliciting a confession─which detectives in mystery novels do as a matter of course. But if you really think about it, that’s a pretty scary thing to do.
Anyway, the leader being who he is, he generously conceded, “I would of course be happy to speak with Madame Towai if we were merely confirming the accuracy of our own solution. Nagahiro, knowing you, I have no doubt that even if you haven’t yet located Madame Towai, you are already investigating her whereabouts. How soon can you find her?”
“It’s difficult to say… I am indeed in the midst of an inquiry into the matter, but it’s rather like trying to catch a cloud─at present I don’t even know if she is still alive.”
She wasn’t just missing, she was MIA.
A bona fide seven-year disappearance.
Even if she were still alive, that was long enough to have her declared officially dead by filing a missing persons report─and no matter how much support Sakiguchi enjoyed as president of the student council, searching for a missing person off campus couldn’t be all that easy.
And then.
The silent child genius raised his hand.
Not that he said anything, mind you─he just held up his hand, but even I could guess what he meant.
He was volunteering to help with the investigation.
And nothing could help an investigation along like the cooperation of Yubiwa─and the Yubiwa Foundation.
The battle of competing theories was falling apart, but it didn’t seem to matter anymore─all of us just wanted to find Ms. Towai as soon as possible.
“With Sosaku’s help, I believe we can find her by morning.”
With his anxiety dispelled and a glimmer of hope in sight, Sakiguchi had regained his confidence, and his voice was back to its beautiful self.
“I see,” the leader replied. “In that case, we’ll all meet here early tomorrow morning.”
Apparently he couldn’t even wait till school let out the next day─at times like this he was an elementary school kid through and through.
But he wasn’t done.
“Everyone, please redouble your efforts to discover the truth by then. That’s your homework.”
I got more homework from this detective club than I did from my classes.
If you want to make a jigsaw puzzle more difficult, it turns out increasing the number of pieces isn’t the way to do it. No matter how many pieces there are─five hundred, a thousand, ten thousand─the basic task stays the same, and in the end it’s only a question of time. Astronauts (yes, the very same profession I aspired to until recently) improve their concentration and perseverance by doing all-white jigsaw puzzles, but even that is only a matter of time in the end.
No, the simplest method for making a puzzle harder, so simple that anyone could do it if they wanted, is to mix in the pieces from another puzzle.
In other words, to do multiple puzzles at once.
This has broken quite a few spirits from what I hear, because the problem is no longer one of time─when two things that appear similar but are actually completely different are mixed together, it really wears a person down.
Sotoin may not have intended to present us with a puzzle like that, but the fact was, he had.
On the one hand was the disappearance of the human subjects from thirty-three canvases, and on the other was the kidnapping of the entire student body from the huge painting in the auditorium. The two mysteries appeared similar, but at root they were entirely different kinds of problems.
Their superficial likeness was what made them so maddening.
Coming up with appropriate─which is to say, appropriately beautiful─solutions to both problems in the space of one night was way beyond me. After all, I couldn’t even claim full ownership of the theory I’d presented earlier in the day.
In which case.
Maybe I ought to call on the wisdom of a certain individual once again.