Nevermore
By: Hikari-chan (Chitsuki)
Disclaimer: If you recognize it, it still belongs to Gosho Aoyama. Anything that is Edgar Allan Poe's work is (eventually) referenced in the text and belongs, of course, to Mr. Poe (although I think it's public domain now). I make no profit from this.
Musings: I feel like a broken record, but thanks for all your kind reviews~ :) I'm glad to hear your thoughts, really! We're moving into the investigation. If anyone's a detail-fiend and wants to beat Conan to solving the case, you might want to take notes. I tried my best to get everything right, but I feel there's probably an inevitable plot hole somewhere. Ah well~
-o-o-o-o-o-
Chapter 4
-o-o-o-o-o-
Breakfast found Ayumi, Genta, and Mitsuhiko huddled around the back corner of the dining room with Conan practically dictating what questions had to be asked. Mitsuhiko had his laptop open while Ayumi and Genta were scribbling away in their notebooks.
"You guys need to separate the classes first. Maybe one of you can do Class 3-A and 3-B, one of you can do Class 3-C, and the last can do Class 3-D and 3-E," Conan instructed. "We'll need specific times, where they were, what they were doing, who they were with, and if there's anyone they saw – teachers or staff or guests they recognize."
"Like confirming alibis?" Ayumi asked.
"Yes. If there are classmates who spent the whole day together, we can group them up," Conan continued.
"It should be pretty easy," Mitsuhiko commented. "I think a lot of us spent the whole day snowboarding or skiing or skating together."
"Mitsuhiko, if you're putting this all down electronically, I saw Ryusaki-bucho and Enomoto-san near the moguls around 4:00PM yesterday," Conan added.
Mitsuhiko nodded as he clicked away on his keyboard. "Genta-kun and I were with a bunch of the snowboarders."
"Write down the list of their names," Conan told him. "You'll have to talk to anyone who left your group for longer than maybe half an hour. They could have come across something."
"Ai-chan and I can vouch for a bunch of people who came skating too," Ayumi added. "Li-sensei was with us from 10:00 in the morning until about 2:00 in the afternoon. Then, Chino-sensei joined us around 4:00 until dinner time."
"Yamaguchi-sensei was with us almost the whole day too," Genta supplied. "He went on break and gave us free time to practice after 3:00."
"Which one of you is interviewing Class 3-C?" Conan asked.
The three teens looked at each other. "I can," Ayumi finally volunteered.
"Okay. For that class, you need to ask additional questions," Conan said. "We need more details on the times, as exact as they can remember. When did the scavenger hunt start? When were they supposed to meet up? Where was the meeting point? When did they last see Ishihara-san and Hino-san, and were they together?"
Ayumi nodded as she scribbled down the details in her notebook.
"I can take Class 3-D and 3-E," Mitsuhiko looked up from his laptop. "Since they were on free time, it's probably more work to catalogue where everyone was. It'll be easier to do with a computer."
"And Kojima-kun is bad with details," Ai added as she walked up to their table with a tray full of breakfast foods.
They all smiled as Genta scratched his head sheepishly. Ai passed around the food and took a seat before they all dug in. There were going to need the energy for what was going to be a long day of work ahead of them.
-o-o-o-o-o-
The re-formed Shounen Tanteidan split up after breakfast was over. Since the weather was still bad, guests were advised to spend their day indoors using the facilities, which was going to make tracking down everyone they had to interview much easier. Teitan Junior High School's teachers followed this advice as well, telling their students they could use this as free time before the students scattered into groups.
Mitsuhiko had gotten a list of the guests from a reluctant Ryusaki-bucho and carved out the group of students at the resort, using the business centre's printer to give both Ayumi and Genta a list. The remaining guests were on the list he gave to Conan and Ai. Then, the trio was off to ask questions.
The first thing Conan did was inquire with the teachers regarding the two missing girls. There was no news from the police so far about finding anything and neither girl had shown up. Choshi-sensei was getting visibly agitated.
"They could have taken shelter in downtown Otaru," Chino-sensei suggested. "Maybe they got stranded when the snowstorm got too bad and the police just hadn't seen them yet."
Choshi-sensei had no response other than nodding his agreement, but Conan privately thought that was rather optimistic. Or suspicious. If they took the position that Ishihara and Hino were stranded in the city, then no one would look for them on the resort. If the murder and disappearances were related, that would inadvertently give the culprit more time to plan his next move. Plus, the girls weren't answering their cell phones. Conan didn't know when the cell phone reception went down, but it was probably safe to assume the girls' friends would start calling soon after Ishihara and Hino missed showing up at the meeting point.
"Say, Choshi-sensei, would you mind telling me what your class did yesterday?" Conan asked.
"Huh? Oh, well, we left at around 10:00 to take the shuttle bus down to Otaru. It's just under half an hour to get there," Choshi-sensei explained. "Then we had a lesson, we had lunch, and the students were given a scavenger hunt to find certain landmarks around town."
Conan took his notebook out and started taking down the notes. "Was the whole class there during the lesson?"
Choshi-sensei looked surprised. "Of course."
"What time did it end?"
"Um, around 1:00? We were served lunch by 1:15 or so."
"When did the scavenger hunt start? And when were you supposed to meet up?"
"It started at 2:00, and they had three hours before they had to meet at the shuttle bus stop," Choshi-sensei answered. "We waited for about half an hour for the girls to show up, but they didn't and the snow was coming down hard by then."
Conan tapped his chin with the pen, looking at the rough timeline he had drawn in the notebook. "So the girls would have disappeared between 2:00 and 5:00 yesterday afternoon," he concluded. "This is bad."
"It-It is?" Choshi-sensei whispered.
"If they've been abducted and we still haven't heard anything? Yes. The chances of people surviving a kidnapping are the highest in the first 24 hours," Conan stated. "After that, the chances diminish significantly."
Now all five teachers were staring at him.
"It's cute that you're trying to play detective, Edogawa-kun," Saiki-sensei finally said, obviously trying to break the awkward silence.
Conan stared at her, eyes sharp behind the glasses. "I'm not playing," he bit out. "Igarashi-sensei, can you tell me as soon as you hear something back from the emergency services? If we don't hear back from them, we can narrow down the search area."
"We can?" Igarashi looked surprised.
"Of course," Conan replied with a smirk. "It was snowing too hard for any abductors to get far out of town yesterday. If Ishihara-san and Hino-san aren't found in Otaru, the only place they could be, is right here on this resort."
-o-o-o-o-o-
By mid-afternoon, Conan had made a round of the whole complex for anything unusual and hadn't seen any place where two teenage girls could be conveniently hidden. Anxiety was gnawing at the corner of his mind. It had been a whole 24 hours since the girls' disappearance. While the lack of cell phone reception could be a huge contributing factor to lack of contact from the kidnappers, it still wasn't the comfort he wanted. He thought about barging into every guest room but the bulk of the guests were actually their classmates, and he doubted the remaining guests would agree to let him search their rooms with no proof. He had managed to rope Ryusaki-bucho into showing him all the empty rooms, much to the manager's obvious disgruntlement, but that had turned up nothing.
He made his way back to his room, thinking he would tackle the puzzle of the mysterious notes. He found, however, that it was already occupied. Ai was sitting at the desk in the corner of his room, flipping through his Edgar Allan Poe book.
"Hey," he greeted her, shutting the door behind him.
She looked up at him. "I finished talking to the staff," she told him. "Cross-referencing it with the staff registry, almost everyone alibied out for the time of the murder."
"But?" he prompted.
"No one saw Li-sensei or Yamaguchi-sensei until their 10 o'clock lessons with our class," she told him. "If the murder was committed closer to 8:00, that's plenty of time to cover up any clues, send an email, and show up like nothing happened."
"And they would have had no problem getting into the room either since the instructors were all friends, and that list Mitsuhiko pulled from the resort computer didn't show anyone unusual having an access keycard," Conan continued her train of thought. "Any problems Chiba-sensei was having with the other staff?"
"Not that anyone knows of," Ai answered. "By all accounts, he was friendly and laidback, seldom had issues with people. Yamaguchi-sensei mentioned that he was almost too laidback, like he wouldn't even get mad at people who booked lessons and didn't show up for them."
"Hmm..."
"Did you find out anything about Ishihara-san and Hino-san's disappearances?" Ai asked him.
Conan sighed and sat down heavily on his bed. He told her what he had found out about the activities of Class 3-C the day before, then added, "Except for Choshi-sensei, our teachers claimed to be on the resort all-day yesterday, but Chino-sensei said she spent most of her day alone until she went skating. Igarashi-sensei, Sugimoto-sensei, and Saiki-sensei all interacted with some students throughout the day, so we just need to wait for that to be confirmed. I also realized that Ryusaki-bucho doesn't have an alibi for either the time of the murder or the time of the disappearances. He spent both slots alone in his office."
Ai pursed her lips. "He has access to every room on this resort so it would be easy for him to get in and out."
"Speaking of that, how did you get in here?" Conan asked, curious.
Ai held up a keycard. "Kojima-kun gave me his room key when I saw him earlier. I've been picking up where you left off with the reading."
"Uplifting reading, isn't it?" Conan commented sarcastically.
"Actually, I found the quote."
"What?" Conan shot up from the bed and hurried over to the desk, where she had the book open.
"Right here," Ai pointed to the page, "from 'The Cask of Amontillado'."
Conan grabbed the book and quickly skimmed the story. Ai waited quietly and patiently while he finished reading it. When he finally looked up at her, his expression was one between horror and confusion.
"It's a revenge story," he stated.
"Yes. The narrator murders his victim, Fortunato, by sealing him into an underground...cave, I guess you can call it, because he was insulted and vowed revenge," Ai summarized.
Conan frowned. "You said Chiba-sensei was very laidback though," he pointed out. "Didn't have enemies or grudges held against him."
Ai crossed her arms and tilted her head thoughtfully. "Yamaguchi-sensei also said that he was too laidback. Maybe that caused friction between the manager and him. Could he be losing money on lessons he didn't follow up on?"
"The resort is inclusive, so I don't think that's it." Conan looked back down at the story. "And we still haven't explained the error in citation."
"Maybe it's the victim or culprit's romanized initials," Ai suggested.
"Chiba Ren doesn't romanize into CX though," Conan replied. "And there's no X in Japanese."
A loud knock on the door interrupted their musings, followed by Genta's voice yelling, "Haibara!"
Conan went to open the door, and their three friends stumbled into the room, looking worn out, but kind of proud. "How did it go?" Conan asked once they had all collapse between the beds and the floor.
"We've covered the whole grade," Mitsuhiko announced proudly.
As suspected, almost everyone in Class 3-A and 3-B had spent the day on the slopes or in the skating rink, and Genta didn't have anyone who spent more than half an hour alone anywhere. Mitsuhiko had all of Class 3-D and 3-E accounted for as well, with some students spending time on the slopes and others using the indoor facilities. Between Genta and Mitsuhiko's interviews with the 4 classes, Igarashi-sensei, Sugimoto-sensei, and Saiki-sensei's movements through the day were tracked and mostly covered.
Ayumi's account of Class 3-C's day was in-line with what Choshi-sensei had told Conan earlier. She had additional information from some of Ishihara and Hino's friends though, who were with them up until about 2:30. After that, Ishihara and Hino had separated from them, saying they had something to do, and left. By 4:30, they had tried texting and subsequently calling Ishihara and Hino to see what they had been up to, but there was no response, and by 6:00, when they made it back to the resort, cell phone reception had been lost by the storm.
"So Ishihara-san and Hino-san's time of disappearance is probably between 2:30 and 4:30 yesterday," Ai summarized.
"That's enough time for the same culprit to murder Chiba-sensei, go into town, abduct them, and bring them back to the resort before anyone noticed they were missing," Conan thought aloud. "So we still don't know if they're on the resort, and we still don't know if this is one case or two."
"We have narrowed down the list though," Ai pointed out. "From those we've already interviewed, the only people that didn't alibi out are Ryusaki-bucho, Li-sensei, Yamaguchi-sensei, Chino-sensei, and Choshi-sensei."
"Wait, you guys think our teachers have something to do with this?" Mitsuhiko asked, obviously shocked.
"No, I just want to leave the possibility open until we have proof they're not involved," Conan assured him. "We still have all the other guests to interview, so I'm sure our pool of suspect isn't going to be 40% our junior high school teachers."
A moment of silence followed where each of them pondered what that meant. It was interrupted by the loud rumbling of Genta's stomach. Everyone turned to look at him. Then, Ayumi giggled and the tension was broken, everyone breaking into smiles and laughter.
"I guess that means it's dinner time," Mitsuhiko grinned, snapping his laptop shut and leaving it on Genta's bed.
Ai stood up and walked over to hand Genta's keycard back to him.
"Say, Haibara," Genta started, "what were you and Conan doing earlier in here, alone?" He was looking between them with a suspicious expression on his face.
"Genta-kun!" Ayumi blushed, but she looked at Ai and Conan curiously too.
Conan rolled his eyes and held up the massive, 800-page book he was still holding in his hands. "Discussing the English language and death," he answered, his voice drier than the desert.
-o-o-o-o-o-
The dining hall was buzzing when the Shounen Tanteidan showed up. A girl with short brown hair came running up to them, a worried expression on her face.
"Ayumi-chan!" she exclaimed.
"Sakura-chan," Ayumi greeted her. "Are you okay?"
The girl – Sakura – shook her head and asked frantically, "Have you seen Kotori-chan and Megumi-chan?"
"No, not since briefly at breakfast," Ayumi answered slowly.
"I haven't seen them since about 3:00 in the afternoon," Sakura replied, fidgeting with her fingers now. "We agreed to meet for dinner but when I knocked a little earlier, they weren't there, and they're not here either."
Ayumi turned to Conan, biting her lip. "Conan-kun," she whispered.
"Slow down," Conan instructed. "Mitsuhiko, go back and get your laptop."
Mitsuhiko nodded and with Genta, they hurried back the way they came.
"Now, from the beginning, what happened?"
Sakura took a breath and started. "Um, a bunch of us from 3-D were going over the history homework in the library. Around 3:00, Kotori-chan wanted to take a shower, so Megumi-chan went with her, and they said they'll meet us for dinner. We knocked on their door about half an hour ago, but no answer, so we thought maybe they meant they'll meet us in the dining room. They weren't here either. We thought that was weird until someone from 3-C said that they were missing 2 girls too."
Mitsuhiko and Genta came back then. The group quickly found an empty table and Mitsuhiko reviewed his notes from Class 3-D. "Fujimoto Kotori-san and Hamasaki Megumi-san," Mitsuhiko muttered. "Ah, here it is. I talked to them shortly after lunch in the library. They spent the day yesterday checking out the library and skating with their friends, didn't see anything suspicious."
"What do you mean?" Sakura asked.
"We're looking into the other missing girls too," Conan explained. "Who else knows about Fujimoto-san and Hamasaki-san being missing for the last 3 hours?"
"Um, just a few of us from 3-D and the girls who told us about their missing friends in 3-C," Sakura answered.
"It'll spread around by the end of the night," Ai pointed out. "The rumour mill won't sit quietly."
"It might be a good thing," Conan mused. "Sakura-san, tell the girls to be more careful. Maybe travel in larger groups. We're going to look into it; Fujimoto-san and Hamasaki-san have to be around the resort somewhere."
Sakura nodded and scurried off. It was a moment before Ayumi began in a shaky voice, "What do we do now, Conan-kun?"
"We need to do a search of the resort again," Conan decided. "There's now 4 girls missing and they're all on the resort somewhere."
"You're sure now that the first two girls aren't in Otaru?" Ai asked.
"Two kidnapping cases with almost the same M.O.? The chances are pretty high it's the same culprit," Conan explained. "In any case, I hope the culprit has some complex plan other than random kidnapping."
"Why would you want there to be more to the kidnappings?" Genta blurted out.
"Because that would mean our culprit has a reason to keep our missing classmates alive, some kind of reason we haven't figured out yet," Conan clarified.
"The most the average human can survive without water is about 3 days," Ai added. "If the culprit has no reason to keep them alive, then even if they're not already dead, they might have been left somewhere without food or water."
"Which would mean we only have just over 30 hours to find them before they die from dehydration," Conan finished solemnly.
-o-o-o-o-o-
The room he was standing in was dark. The moonlight shone silver through some high windows, casting shadows. Conan let his eyes adjust to the darkness. Soon, he could make out the furniture, and he sighed, recognizing the room as one he hadn't seen in 8 years, but that he would never forget.
It was the underground FBI office that they had gathered in just before the takedown of the Organization. The first and last time he was physically here, he had just found out that Ran had been kidnapped. Resigning himself to the inevitability of the dream, he opened the door and made his way upstairs, expecting to see the faces of FBI agents, both those who survived the raid, and those who didn't. Standing around though, were his junior high school classmates.
Four girls ran out from the crowd of students, each with pleading looks on their face.
"Edogawa-kun," the girl he remembered was Hino-san addressed him. "Save us."
"I..." he stuttered. "Where are you? Where are you being kept?"
He knew it didn't make sense to ask that. He was standing there in the body of a seven-year-old, asking apparitions of his fifteen-year-old self's classmates a question they probably didn't even know the answer to.
The second girl approached him, holding out her hand as though she was reaching for him. "Help! Help!"
"I will!" he said. "Tell me where!"
The sound of a gunshot came from nowhere and Conan's white shirt was suddenly splattered by red, sticky liquid. The apparition of Hino-san dropped abruptly to the floor, eyes wide and staring at him. Blood pooled onto the floor at his feet, and he took a step back, gasping for breath.
"No," he whispered. "How do I save you?!"
He knew he was screaming now. He bent down to feel for a pulse, and that was when he found a shadow looming over him, blocking out the silver light of the moon. Conan held his breath as he turned slowly around, coming face to face with the cold, calculating eyes of a man with long blonde hair. The man grinned maniacally at him, but the gun he held in his hand wasn't pointed at Conan; it was pointed to the girls behind him.
"One down, three to go," he hissed.
"No, no, no!"
-o-o-o-o-o-
"Please, no!"
Conan sat up in bed, eyes wide and sweat running down his body, his breath coming out in gasps. Through the window, he could see that the snow had started up again sometime in the night, and the storm was continuing to keep anyone from coming up to the resort, or leaving it. Conan put a heavy hand on his forehead, closing his eyes and trying to get his breathing under control.
They had done a thorough search of the resort complex the night before, pairing up with the teachers. Conan deliberately grouped himself and Ai with Chino-sensei, Choshi-sensei, and Igarashi-sensei in order to observe the former two teachers' behavior, but nothing they did indicated that they knew more than they should. If one of them was truly the culprit, they were damn good actors.
He looked over at Genta's bed to find his roommate facing away from him, but lying perfectly still. Genta must be exhausted, Conan thought to himself. They had started the search as soon as they realized Fujimoto and Hamasaki had been missing, more or less skipping dinner, and the search had continued long into the night. They had even gone outside to make sure they weren't being kept in the chapel or the equipment building. It had been the wee hours of the morning by the time they had decided they all needed to rest before the search effort was continued.
Conan glanced at the clock. Despite his nightmare, it was already late morning. He got up and headed to the bathroom, getting ready for the day.
-o-o-o-o-o-
The Shounen Tanteidan gathered in the dining room in time for lunch. Their classmates were split between those who were solemnly silent at the news that there were four missing girls from their group, and filled with nervous energy.
Conan automatically kissed Ai on the cheek when she sat down next to him, but he looked far away, pushing his food back and forth on his plate. He looked up when Ayumi called his name and asked if he was okay.
"Yea," he responded dully, forcing a reassuring smile. He chanced a glance at Ai, who was looking at him worriedly. "I just had a bad dream," he admitted to his friends.
"So you didn't sleep well," Ai stated. "Makes you wish you could sleep without dreaming, doesn't it?"
Conan frowned. Sleep without dreaming... Sleep without dreaming... Dream within a dream... Sleeping pills...
He reached into his pocket and pulled out the two black cards he had taken to carrying around and reread the first one. That's right; there was no scene of crime found with the first card. He had two cards, and only one crime scene.
"Did you figure something out?" Ai asked, recognizing the look on his face.
He looked up at her. "What if these are prospective?" he asked. "We've been assuming that the second note goes with Chiba-sensei's body because it was found with Chiba-sensei's body. But what if the first note goes with the first body?"
Ai shifted closer and reread the first card too. "Dreams," she whispered.
"Yes. You can only dream if you're sleeping, and Chiba-sensei was found facing a mirror, almost like there were two of him," Conan continued. "A sleeping person facing a sleeping person; a dream within a dream."
"And the mistakes in punctuation and citation?" Ai asked.
Conan frowned. "Not sure about the punctuation, but the citation could be, as you said before, a romanized name."
"C for Chiba," Ai muttered. "And L?"
"There's no L in Japanese," Conan pointed out. "Romanized Japanese would replace all L's with R's."
Ai took the second card from where it had been tucked beneath the first one, looking at it. "If you're right, what does this one mean?"
"'The Cask of Amontillado'," Conan mused. "Someone being killed for revenge, maybe locked somewhere and left to die."
"I don't think there's anywhere we've seen in the complex where no one would check with 4 missing girls," Ai said skeptically. "Someone would more likely die if they were left outside."
Conan stared at her. Somewhere someone could be locked up outside and left to die... Conan shot up from the table and sprinted out of the dining room. The elevator was too busy with all the guests coming in for lunch, so he took the stairs, almost breaking the door when he impatiently opened it to his room. He threw on his winter jacket and boots and grabbed his snowboard from where it was resting next to his luggage and raced back down the stairs, almost crashing into Igarashi-sensei, who was standing in the lobby with Ayumi, Genta, Mitsuhiko, and about a dozen more students who must have seen him tore out of the dining room like a bat out of hell and wondered what happened.
He ignored them, quickly making his way around the small crowd and out the doors on the side facing the slopes, tossing the snowboard onto the thick snow and jumping on to click his boots into place. The snow was whipping madly around him, the view of the slopes in front of him a blur.
"Edogawa-kun!" Igarashi yelled above the sound of the wind. Conan looked behind him. He could make out Igarashi-sensei holding the door open despite the cold. "Where are you going? The ski lifts aren't working and you're on flat ground!"
Conan ignored this and stepped onto the engine button instead. The snowboard whirled to life, air rushing in as the engine warmed up. Suddenly, Conan felt more weight on the board. He glanced behind him to see that Ai, in her own winter jacket and gloves, was standing with him on the snowboard. He realized that he didn't see her in the lobby just now; she must have figured out what he was doing and gone to get her own winter gear.
"What are you doing?" he raised his voice to be heard above the loud whirls of the snowboard's engine and the wind of the storm.
"You don't think I'm letting you go out there in this storm on your own, are you?" she retorted.
"It would be safer if you stay here," he argued.
Her gloved hands gripped the edge of his jacket and her eyes bored into his. "Don't you believe in me?" she asked, reminding him of the conversation they had two nights ago.
His heart raced and he knew it wasn't just the adrenaline flowing through his veins. Conan knew he trusted Ai in a lot of ways, but he didn't know if he could believe in her the same way she had claimed to believe in him. He had always been the savior rather than the one being rescued, however this really wasn't the time to debate that issue with Ai.
The slight change in the humming sound of the snowboard's engine alerted him that it was just seconds away from being ready to go, so Conan merely faced forward again and shouted over his shoulder at her. "Then you might want to hold on a little tighter!"
She had just enough time to wrap her arms around his waist and hold on for her life before the snowboard shot off into the storm, the wind whipping in their faces. Conan guided the snowboard expertly along the bottom of the slopes until he reached the moguls. Turning the board, they raced up the slopes towards the patch of trees he could see in the distance. As they got closer, he could make out the shape of the hut he had found earlier. He turned the snowboard a full 90 degrees to stop it.
The snow around the path leading up to the shack was at a lower level than the rest of the immediate area. There was snow around the bottom of the doorframe but most of it was uncovered.
"Someone's been here fairly recently," Ai pointed out.
"Just like I thought," Conan agreed solemnly.
"You don't think the girls are being kept here, do you?" she asked him.
He took a deep breath. "We'll find out in a second." He reached for the door and pushed it open, bracing himself.
-o-o-o-o-o-
End Chapter 4.
Word Count: 4,784
Cumulative Word Count: 20,046
Chitsu's Curiosity Corner: I swear I didn't do that on purpose. It's just the next scene didn't fit into the chapter word count. As always, would love to hear what you think! Cheers~