4

First, we went to the manager's office, near the dorm's entrance. Mr. Tanaka, the man in charge of the dorms at Teito University, was a tall, slim man with a gentle and friendly personality. His speech was laid back and his dress was casual, but his unkempt hair was streaked with gray, so it was unclear just how old he was.

“You've been put through the wringer, haven't you?”

As soon as Mr. Tanaka saw us, he blurted out words of deep fatigue. The police must have just finished with him. 

“Um, did Yoshida really commit suicide?”

Yuto asked bluntly. Mr. Tanaka looked down with a pained expression and lowered his voice, prefacing his story with a “You didn't hear this from me...” 

“Yeah... Sad, but it looks that way. Yoshida's fingerprints were on the tape, and the circumstances seem clear enough: suicide by burning charcoal. They haven't found a note yet, but it sounds like there was evidence that she was going through it.” 

“What do you mean?” 

“They talked to her editor and saw the manuscript left on her computer, and it sounds like her latest work was going to be a long story written in first person, about the narrator dealing with the death of her lover. It was a heartfelt story, with detailed depictions of the loss of something important and the pain of not being able to forget your memories, and there were multiple instances where it looked like the narrator was thinking of ending it all. The police seem to be interpreting it as a sign of her own mental state.” 

“Like Osamu Dazai writing No Longer Human before committing suicide...” Nozomu said to himself. 

“But people can write depressing stories without being mentally unwell, you know?” Ohashi said, not mincing her words. “That kind of short-sighted, judgy viewpoint is really rude!” 

“That's true... It's not like I think she was doing that bad,” Mr. Tanaka nodded. “But that doesn't mean I think a crime was committed.” 

“Who was in the dorm around noon today? Did anyone from outside the school come to visit?” 

When he heard my question, Mr. Tanaka frowned and said “You're asking the same kind of questions as the cops.”

“I was here in this room the whole time, but no one came by. I checked the records, and most of the students went out right after breakfast. The only ones left by twelve were you four, Yoshida, and...”

Mr. Tanaka rattled off a few names. There were all other dorm residents I remembered seeing in the park during the solar eclipse. 

“I'm sure some of 'em had classes, but I guess a lot of people wanted to go out and watch the eclipse. Nobody came back until evening. I watched the eclipse from in here, you know? I was on a video call with a friend.” 

“I see, thank you,” I said, bowing. “Also, I want to ask a few questions about the scene. Was the skylight unlocked before Yoshida arrived? And, if you know, was the tent bag originally open?” 

“Hmm, 'fraid I can't tell you either of those. I rarely open that skylight, so I don't remember how it was left, and I haven't been in that storeroom in a while, so the tent bag... Maybe one of the dorm residents took it out and was careless puttin' it back.” 

In other words, we still didn't know whether they were related to the incident or not.

We thanked him again and left the manager's office. At any rate, we had learned who was in the dorm at the time of Yoshida's death, which was a good find.

“Keisuke, you didn't tell me you were a detective.” 

Yuto nudged me in the side, half teasing and half genuinely impressed.

We then decided to visit the four dorm residents who had been in the dorm that day, one by one. They all looked skeptical, probably genuinely didn't know anything, and told us they hadn't seen Yoshida at all. The only time anyone passed near the meeting room in the corner of the dorm was when they were going to the bath, so it wasn't unusual that there were no eyewitness accounts during the day.

“I guess there's no point asking around.” 

After the third person looked at us as though we were just selfish upperclassmen treating a person's death as a curiosity, Yuto finally voiced his complaints.

Even Nozomu spoke negatively, saying “If there was any useful information to be gleaned from a witness, the police would have obtained it by now.”

“Well... since we've come this far, let's at least ask the last person.”

Half out of spite, I dragged the three of them along with me. The fourth person was a second year boy named Yu Shimizu. He showed his face when we knocked, but recoiled as though startled when he saw us all standing shoulder to shoulder. 

“What's going on here?”

“Hey, we're not here to bully you or anything,” Yuto said jokingly. “We were just wondering if you knew anything about the late Yoshida.” 

“Shimizu, you were in the dorm around noon today, right? Did you see or hear anything?” 

“Um, I was just playing games in my room, so I don't know anything...”

Yuto gave me a look that said “I told you so” when he heard the same answer as the last three times we'd asked. 

“Yeah, that was all I wanted to ask. Thank you.” 

Just as we were about to leave, Shimizu spoke up. “Oh, but!”

“I actually saw Yoshida in the yard of the dorm yesterday evening. I couldn't believe there was a real celebrity there, so I watched her from the shadows, and she took out a lighter and burned what looked like some papers she had in her hand. She watched them smoking and burning with this intense look in her eyes, like she'd gone mad. I felt like I'd seen something I shouldn't have, so I ran away. I don't know what she was really doing, but when I heard that Yoshida committed suicide today, I thought it kind of made sense. She was definitely being weighed down by something.”

Returning to the cafeteria, we struggled to make sense of this new evidence we'd suddenly found. Yoshida, burning paper out in the yard at dusk. Her mad stare. All I could think was how picturesque a scene it was.

“She was going to light the charcoal grill the next day, so she was practicing...”

Yuto immediately rejected his own thought. It was true that you needed kindling to light a charcoal grill, but burning paper with a lighter wasn't the sort of thing you needed to practice, and it didn't explain why she was staring so intensely at the fire. 

“Perhaps Yoshida was burning a manuscript she'd written?” Now it was Nozomu's turn to offer an interpretation. “She wasn't satisfied with the story she'd written, so she burned it to break away from it. It's not unreasonable to think she'd get emotional watching her own work disappear.” 

“I see. It's like when a potter smashes a piece of pottery that doesn't meet their artistic standards.” 

Yuto seemed satisfied with his own analogy and nodded his head up and down.

“Furthermore, her suicide may have been caused by her inability to write a work that satisfied her. For an author, that's a feeling we couldn't understand, like the pain of childbirth.” 

“That might be it! The depressing novel she was in the middle of writing wasn't just a representation of her pain, it was its cause.” 

Ohashi was quick to agree. But I just couldn't do the same. 

“She only burned a few sheets of paper. Isn't that too little for a manuscript? Besides, they found her manuscript on her computer.” 

Nozomu had to nod at that. But when he asked if I had any better ideas, I didn't, and a long, heavy silence covered us. In the end, wasn't trying to deduce the reason why another person committed suicide nothing but a shameless act of arrogance? Wasn't it impossible?

But in the first place – the question that had started all this – had Yoshida really taken her own life?

The reason I felt the urge to investigate on my own was because I still had doubts that she had committed suicide. Not only for emotional reasons, but also because of the tent pipes I'd seen. I didn't want to get stuck on my own ideas, but I still wondered if it was possible that someone could have used those pipes to escape the locked room. I couldn't shake that thought.

I thought back to the scene I'd witnessed in that storeroom. It wasn't just that the tent bag was open and the two pipes were sticking out. That's right. It was also the way the ropes extending from the pipes were arranged with the corpse.

“Listen everyone,” I began, gathering my thoughts as I prepared a speech. “There was something strange about the scene. I already mentioned the two pipes sticking out of the tent bag. One of the ropes on the ends of the pipes was under her torso, while the other was laid across her stomach.” 

“...Couldn't you have just made a mistake? Maybe it blended in with the color of her clothes,” Nozomu said, furrowing his brow. 

“No, I'm certain.” After all, I'd stared at Yoshida's corpse so hard it was burned into my eyes. “The problem is that the two pipes couldn't have been in the same position. If she'd fallen onto the ropes while they were already down, they'd both have been beneath her body, and if she'd knocked them out of the bag after falling down, they'd have both been on top of her. But neither of those were the case. Isn't that proof that someone moved the tent pipes after Yoshida collapsed?”

The three of them listened to my theory with skeptical expressions. 

“So... you're saying someone who was in the room with her propped up one of the poles and climbed it to escape through the skylight,” Yuto said, looking down in thought. “But if they were in a room full of carbon monoxide, they wouldn't have been safe.” 

“There's any number of ways around that,” said Nozomu, leaning forward. “Maybe the culprit was wearing a gas mask, or maybe they killed Yoshida somewhere else and moved her body and the grill to the storeroom afterwards.”

I slapped my knee when I heard his idea. I hadn't even thought of the latter option, but it was worth considering. The showers in each dorm room would be perfect candidates for a true crime scene, and it would be easy to plant fingerprints on the charcoal grill and the duct tape. All the culprit would need to do would be to sneak past the witnesses and escape via the window.

But how on Earth could they pull off something like that in broad daylight? With the sun illuminating their every move...

At that moment, I felt a tingling in the corner of my mind.

The sun... That's right.

Today was a partial solar eclipse, which occurs once every several decades.

There was no way that wasn't related to the case.

In an instant, my brain began racing as though powered by a jet engine. Everything I'd seen and heard today ran through my mind. The tent pipes protruding from the bag, the sun being covered up, Yoshida burning the papers... What truth did those pieces form?

Think.

Like a great detective from a manga.

After a few minutes of silent reflection, I drew my conclusion. It was hard to believe at first, but at the same time, I thought it was the only possibility.

“What's wrong, Keisuke? You've been acting strange for a while now.”

At the prompting of Yuto, who was peering into my face, I forced my mouth open. My eyes were fixed on a girl. 

“So, Yoshida was murdered after all. And you're the culprit, right... Ohashi?”

 

 

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