The Wavering of Haruhi Suzumiya Page 13

  Haruhi raised her hand at Koizumi’s declaration.

  “Now wait just a minute. So that means Shamisen was with us until three, whereupon he went missing. The killer had to leave the shack no later than four thirty. It took half an hour for the snow to cover the tracks, so that narrows it down to four. That means that the killer took Shamisen—and killed Keiichi—sometime between three and four.”

  That sounded right, I said.

  “The hell it does!” Haruhi said. “Something’s wrong. The only ones who left the room at four were Tsuruya, Yutaka, and me. But I was with Tsuruya the whole time, so that means she’s not the killer. Yutaka’s suspicious, but if it took at least half an hour for the snow to cover the tracks, he couldn’t have done it either.”

  Good point, I said.

  “It’s no point at all! It means everyone here has an alibi! We were all here during that hour.”

  Eight of us played the board game starting at three—Haruhi, Asahina, Nagato, Koizumi, my little sister, Tsuruya, Yutaka Tamaru, and me. Since the break at three until the beginning of free activity time at four, not a single one of us had left the common area—except for the cat.

  “Could it have been Arakawa or Mori?” Haruhi wondered.

  The two servants were immediately brought in for interrogation. Haruhi sounded like a police detective as she questioned them.

  “Well then, Mr. Arakawa, let’s hear your alibi, starting from three o’clock.”

  Arakawa the butler gave a polite bow.

  “I’ve been in the kitchen since two o’clock, cleaning up after lunch and preparing for tonight’s dinner and tomorrow’s breakfast.”

  “Do you have anyone who will vouch for that?”

  “If I may,” said Mori, her smile as pure as her maid uniform, “I was with Mr. Arakawa the entire time, helping him prepare. He didn’t leave my sight until I went to wake up Mr. Keiichi.”

  “Likewise,” said Arakawa. “At the very least, I can state with confidence that Miss Mori did not leave the kitchen between three and four o’clock.”

  “Which means you’re testimony for each other.”

  Haruhi nodded thoughtfully.

  “But that means you could have conspired to commit the crime together—or that one of you is covering for the other. Am I wrong?”

  Haruhi’s shining eyes turned to Koizumi, seeking an explanation.

  “That is not the case. This mystery is predicated on a single perpetrator, and neither Arakawa nor Mori will give false testimony. I’ll just come right out and say it—neither of these two is the killer,” said Koizumi.

  “Well, then who is it?” said Haruhi happily. “Everyone’s alibi is perfect, which means none of us could have killed Keiichi!”

  Koizumi seemed slightly pleased. Haruhi seemed to have hit upon the point he wanted her to hit. With a smile, he replied:

  “That is precisely what I want you to think about and solve. There’d be no game otherwise.”

  “The first thing we need to think about is why the killer needed Shamisen.”

  Having appointed herself chair of the investigation, Haruhi poked at the nose of the calico cat my sister held.

  “Otherwise, what’s the point? What was the killer doing that they needed a cat for?”

  If the stupid cat would just talk, he could’ve provided crucial testimony—he was a witness, after all.

  “What I think is that the killer needed Shamisen to be there for some reason,” said Haruhi.

  Even I knew that much. The question was, what was that reason?

  “Kitty, kitty cat… hmm…” Asahina muttered charmingly under her breath, her hand touching her chin as she mulled it over. “Cat. Calico cat. Calico. Hmm… kitty… kitty food…”

  She didn’t seem to be getting anywhere, though.

  Tsuruya always seemed to have pretty sharp eyes; she stuck out her tongue and rolled her eyes back as she thought. I guessed that was just how she looked when she was thinking hard. She silently folded her arms, maintaining her funny expression.

  Speaking of silence, there was Nagato. Although at the moment, it was probably best for her to stay silent. I’d bet with a fair amount of confidence that Nagato had seen through whatever trick Koizumi was playing. Maybe I’d get her to tell us who the culprit was once everyone else had given up, I thought.

  “Shamisen’s alibi is the key. If only he hadn’t shown himself the whole time… a locked room trick? A locked room using snow to impose a time limit… hmm?”

  Muttering to herself, Haruhi suddenly looked up. She regarded Koizumi’s smile, then Yutaka’s calm expression, then Shamisen’s sleepy face.

  “Time limit… alibi… oh, I see!”

  Haruhi suddenly turned to me.

  “Kyon, what do you think of when you hear the word ‘alibi’?”

  “Cop shows,” I answered immediately, then regretted it. “Uh… made-for-TV suspense movies,” I tried again, then regretted it even more. Time continued to pass as I tried to think of what to say next.

  “He’s a decoy!” Haruhi answered her own question. “Of course he’s a decoy! Shamisen’s being used to trick us!”

  Trick us how? I asked.

  “Just think about it. Here—when does Shamisen’s alibi get vague?”

  From three to four thirty. I was the last one to see him before he teleported to the scene of the murder.

  “Forget about that time period. Think about what happened earlier.”

  Before three? Hadn’t we just been wandering around the villa then? No—wait.

  “Koizumi, when was it that you carried the cat back to the common area?”

  I thought I noticed Koizumi’s handsome smile turn slightly more angular.

  “Just a bit past two thirty,” he said.

  “And where did you bring him from?”

  “The kitchen.” Koizumi smiled at Mori. “Isn’t that right?”

  “Yes.”

  Mori looked to Shamisen with a smile.

  “Just as I was tidying up, the cat came in and started sashaying around at my feet. I gave in and let him have some table scraps, but he only seemed to become more persistent. So when Mr. Koizumi passed through, he took the cat with him.”

  I remembered Koizumi saying something about making plans for tomorrow and leaving his seat.

  “And that was at two thirty?”

  In response to my question, the plainly dressed maid gave me a smile so elegant I almost flinched away.

  “Yes… yes, it was. I didn’t check the time, so I can’t be perfectly accurate, but I think it was around that time.”

  “And when did Shamisen start hanging around you?”

  “At two o’clock, when I returned from the shack, he was grooming himself in the kitchen.”

  So that much matched up. Our calico cat had roamed around the villa after escaping my younger sister’s clutches, had begged for food from Mori, then around two thirty had been carried by Koizumi back into the common room, where he’d commenced napping on the cushion in front of the heater.

  “So he has an alibi from two to three.”

  There was an explanation for his movements for that hour. But what had Shamisen seen between then and when he went to the shack? I wondered.

  “That’s where the trick is.”

  Haruhi narrowed her eyes and stroked her throat. Then, as if something had jumped out at her—

  “All we know for sure is that one hour. The rest is still vague, especially where he went and what he did after three. The cat’s alibi, and when he fell into the hands of the killer…”

  Haruhi frowned, deep in thought; I went ahead and frowned too. My sister looked up at me with a puzzled expression, while Yutaka only smiled and said nothing. He probably knew the truth, being the prime suspect.

  “Shall I give you a hint?”

  “No, wait.”

  I cut off Koizumi and thought.

  It was around two o’clock when Keiichi had gone to the shack.

  The cat
was last seen at three, and nobody had seen him again until we found him with Keiichi’s corpse at four thirty.

  If the killer had exited the shack through the window, it had to be with enough time for the falling snow to cover his or her tracks, so the murder had happened between three and four.

  But between three and four, all of us—including Yutaka—were in the open common area, and none of us left. Only at four did Yutaka, Haruhi, and Tsuruya leave.

  All right. I nodded, satisfied.

  “I give up. Give me a hint.”

  Koizumi shrugged.

  “I would have thought that the first to notice would be either you or your sister,” was all he said before clamming up again.

  “Huh?”

  What kind of hint was that? I couldn’t imagine that my sister was sharper than Tsuruya or Haruhi.

  “Oh, I see!” Haruhi shouted.

  Tsuruya’s bright voice rang out immediately after Haruhi’s.

  “That’s it, Haru-meow! The cat’s alibi is the same as the killer’s!” she said, the realization all over her face. “Yes, yes! That’s it! That’s why the cat had to be here! Not just anywhere, here! Not in the shack, but in the room with everyone else!”

  I didn’t have the slightest idea what she was saying. Asahina and I were dumbstruck, but Haruhi seemed to understand, and her voice rose accordingly.

  “Right! Nice one, Tsuruya! For that hour, the cat had to be in a place where everyone could see it, because otherwise, the killer’s own alibi would be blown!”

  “Bingo!”

  Tsuruya snapped her fingers.

  “Shami didn’t go missing at three, but at two thirty! He has two hours without an alibi, not just an hour and a half!”

  “Which pushes the time of the murder forward half an hour, from between two thirty to four… no, sometime in the half hour between two thirty and three—basically, the true crime happened at two thirty. Right?”

  “Right!”

  I told them to hold up. The two energetic girls sounded like they were closing in on the truth, but what about the rest of us? I had no clue what they were going on about.

  “You’re so slow, Kyon. Who would be confused by the fact that Shamisen went missing from three to four thirty, then was found at the crime scene?”

  Uh, us, right?

  “Okay, and who stands to gain from that?”

  Nobody? I asked.

  “It’s not nobody! The killer took Shamisen off and locked him in the room. The fact that they did that meant they needed to do that. What part of that did they need?”

  Haruhi’s eyes bored into me accusingly, as though she were the true killer, glaring at a detective.

  “Uh,” I said. “The fact that Shamisen was there means that… the killer took him there, so the moment when Shamisen disappeared is the time of the murder, so…”

  “That’s right.”

  What’s right? I wanted to know.

  “What do you mean, ‘what’? That’s what everybody would think. That’s the trick! The killer needs us to be thinking about the time when Shamisen doesn’t have an alibi.”

  “Everybody has an alibi from three to four,” said Tsuruya. “But what about starting at two o’clock? We were told not to leave the room, and we didn’t, right?”

  “That’s because the killer needed to preserve their alibi between two and three,” said Haruhi. “So they had to make it seem like Shamisen was still here. Why? Because Shamisen going missing from three to four thirty would actually establish their own alibi. Shamisen couldn’t be both here and at the scene of the crime at the same time. If the cat is here, we assume that the killer hasn’t yet taken him to the shack. But you were the last person to see Shamisen, and that was around three o’clock. Making us think that the killer had to have taken Shamisen to the shack sometime after three is obviously the trick!”

  “Which means there’s only one person who could possibly be the killer! It’s the person whose alibi around two thirty is shaky, and the person who was closest to the cat at three!”

  Tsuruya giggled happily.

  “Kyon, don’t you see? Think about it this way. We just need to find the person who had the opportunity to kill Keiichi between two o’clock, when he shut himself in the shack, and four, when we broke in. Turns out it’s impossible for everybody except one person! Except that if we narrow it down to three o’clock, that person also has an alibi. So what we’ve gotten wrong is the time of the murder!”

  Not to be beaten, Haruhi grinned.

  “Right, right! Keiichi was killed before three, and that’s when Shamisen was taken to the shack.”

  “Now wait just a second,” I said. “How do you explain that I saw Shamisen at three? And what about Asahina seeing him sleeping a bit before three? Don’t tell me he split himself.”

  “You still don’t get it?”

  Haruhi’s smile was full of pride.

  “Let me explain what the killer did. Neither Mori nor Arakawa is the killer, and we don’t have to doubt their testimony. Since the game master gave them the stamp of approval, we’ll ignore them.”

  Apparently the only ones who hadn’t figured it out were me, Asahina, and my sister.

  Haruhi looked us over, then started explaining victoriously.

  “The killer left the common area sometime between two and three and took Shamisen out of the kitchen. He or she then took Shamisen to the shack where Keiichi was. It doesn’t matter whether it was locked or not—either way, the killer entered the room and stabbed Keiichi. Then he or she locked the room from inside, left Shamisen there, exited the room via the window, moved around to the path, then returned to the house—empty-handed, of course.”

  “Hang on,” I said. “What about the fact that I saw Shamisen at three? He was sleeping on the cushion in front of the heater.”

  “That wasn’t Shamisen!”

  Haruhi glanced at Tsuruya, and after having confirmed that Tsuruya’s expression indicated agreement, she continued.

  “It’s the logical conclusion. There’s only one killer, and the only time that killer could have acted alone was during a few minutes around two thirty, while moving easily between the main house and the shack was impossible for everybody else, no matter what time it was. Regardless of his or her alibi, that person is the killer. And what do we need to destroy that alibi? Don’t you see? You just need to show that Shamisen went missing around two thirty. Which means the only explanation for the Shamisen you saw was that it was a fake.”

  Tsuruya butted in.

  “So lemme just ask you, Kyon. The Shamisen you saw between two thirty and three—was that the real Shamisen?”

  When she put it that way, I didn’t have an answer. I only saw the cat from behind—both when it was picked up and when it was sleeping on the cushion. That was all I saw.

  But a fake? What kind of fake? Was she saying that Shamisen had been secretly cloned somewhere along the line? I asked.

  “Who knows?” answered Haruhi calmly. “I told you, it’s the logical conclusion. The cat you saw on that cushion between two thirty and three was not Shamisen. It couldn’t have been Shamisen. I don’t know if it was a clone, or a doll, or just a look-alike. All I know is that it wasn’t your calico.”

  “Hey, Haru-meow, I think everybody’s figured it out, so let’s just say the name of the killer, ’kay? We’re not gonna get anywhere otherwise,” said Tsuruya excitedly, at which Haruhi nodded.

  “Good point. If we wait for Kyon, he’ll be thinking about it all winter break at this rate. Together, then?”

  “Gotcha. The killer is—”

  The two girls smiled together at a certain individual, then with double-barreled synchronization, shouted out the name of the killer.

  “—Koizumi!”

  Koizumi raised both hands, like a suspect run down by two famous bounty hunters holding Winchester rifles.

  “Right you are,” he said, his bitter smile looking a bit defeated. “I was the killer. I had hoped you would
take a bit more time to think it through, but Suzumiya and Tsuruya were too sharp.”

  Haruhi’s mouth bent into a smile.

  “Why didn’t you give us free time starting at three, instead of four? It would’ve taken more time to pin down the culprit, I think.”

  “That would have indeed made ascertaining the killer more difficult,” Koizumi explained. “If any one of you had left for more than five minutes starting at three o’clock—that’s the amount of time it takes to get from the house to the shack and back—and had been alone for that time, that would’ve made it impossible to exclude you from the list of suspects. In other words, there would be no way for you to plausibly deny being the killer, so I decided it would be better to remove everybody from being a suspect. The game would have been too difficult otherwise.”

  That made sense, but I wondered if he hadn’t just thought of it.

  “Where did you hide the body double for Shamisen?”

  “In my room. I had Arakawa bring it there before the game began. That doesn’t make him an accessory—from the perspective of the story, I brought it in myself.”

  With an expression like a day laborer reaching the end of his shift, Koizumi continued.

  “After the murder, before returning here, I went and got the double out of my room. The rest, you’ve figured out.”

  So that was the cat Koizumi had carried in a bit after two thirty. Still—

  “So where’s the cat?” I asked again. “Where’d the fake go? It still hasn’t shown up, not since I spotted it last. Don’t tell me you were able to make it disappear again.”

  The defeated Koizumi looked to Haruhi, whereupon our gallant brigade chief marched over to the heater in the corner of the room.

  “Kyon, think back carefully now. Koizumi was next to the calico cat you saw sleeping on the cushion, right? You took the board game from him and then came back to the table, and we were all paying attention to you. Koizumi took the chance to stick the sleeping cat into his rucksack. So—”

  Standing by the wall, Haruhi picked up the rucksack that was sitting next to the heater vent.

  “—that’s where it still is.”

  She tipped over the bag, and sure enough, a big ball of fur came tumbling out.