Monogatari Series - Volume 26 - Chapter 1.11

011

Saying that it wasn’t necessarily the case that he left his keys behind10 sounded like a bad pun, but please ignore it—sometimes I’m the one that’s out of his mind.

Originally, I was selfish, had few friends, tended to be at odds with others, and was not very good at working with others, which was why I couldn’t come up with such an obvious idea, but the fact that I had overlooked the possibility that the crime scene was a joint effort between the couple was an embarrassing blind spot.

I’d paired up as buddies with a vampire, a corpse doll, a god, and the darkness in my heart, though… However, although the term “collaboration” may sound appropriate, it was still a misnomer.

The mother who committed abuse. The father who committed murder.

Because the process was so disjointed, the scene of the crime looked so inexplicable—if the husband came home while Associate Professor Iesumi was away, and then stabbed his wife’s handmade work in the back.

With the motive of “because she was his daughter”.

Was his wife’s behavior, which was also the cause of their separation, too unpleasant to watch—or did the husband also think it was “his child” and stab the doll for that reason?

The extreme possibility was that he felt sorry for her because she was locked in a cage, so took pity on her and put an end to her… Did he stab her in the back because he couldn’t kill her while looking that “henohenomoheji” face in the eyes?

There could be infinite variations on the motive.

No, no no, this was still just an assumption. The wings of my imagination were flapping too much. It wasn’t right to be so insistently suspicious of the husband who I’d never met, the husband whose name I didn’t even know. The freedom of my inner heart should be used for little girls, tween girls, and young girls, not for suspecting someone of trespassing or murder.

“Although, it would be his own home, so it wouldn’t be trespassing. And it was a doll, so it wouldn’t be murder,”

said Ougi-kun.

“But, even if you don’t have proof, that doesn’t mean you don’t have a basis for that reasoning, right? When it comes to the uneven results of that doll, as you said yourself, Araragi-senpai. The difference between that balloon-art-like form and the roughly scribbled ‘henohenomoheji‘ face… You could think of it as the professor being better at sewing than she was at drawing, but you could also see it as each task being assigned to a different person, right?”

“……”

Group work—division of labor.

Handmade.

“If so, then I wonder what the circumstances of that were. I don’t mean to be presumptuous, but Araragi-senpai, shouldn’t you start the investigation all over again? With this, it might even change the nuance behind the professor’s disappearance.”

“……”

I didn’t think it would change anything.

If there was something to think about divided into parts, then we should also split up her disappearance into parts… Ougi-kun seemed to be pushing me towards the idea that the husband was involved in the professor’s disappearance, but even in the unlikely event that that was the case, that was a job for the police to investigate.

In the first place, I didn’t even have any investigatory power.

If it was an oddity phenomenon—if the “replacement child” phenomenon was involved, then as someone who’s had some experience with the matter, I would not be reluctant to interject a few words of caution, but if not, then playing detective without discretion would be an illegal act.

Just as Ononoki-chan had admonished me, I should remember to rely on the police.

Or so I said, but an hour later, I was parked in the parking lot of Associate Professor Iesumi’s apartment building, not near Naoetsu High’s gymnasium, the venue of the girlsbas senior-junior social.

Without waiting for Kanbaru and Higasa-chan to return from their shopping trip, I left a message with Ougi-kun, turned the steering wheel as far as it could go, made a U-turn, and revisited the Iesumi residence.

It’s because I nonchalantly act with such ingratitude that it’s been hard to make friends even in university, but I’d have to wait until next time to get pampered by high school girls.

This was urgent.

No, I wasn’t pretending to be a great detective who was caught up in intellectual curiosity and impulsively embarked on a guessing game… In fact, I was the exact opposite, the type of person who avoided murder scenes, even to the point of taking detours. I sounded like I was trying to be understanding, but I honestly didn’t understand why Tsukihi would go hiking with her friends after hearing a rumor that a dead body was buried there.

What the hell was she doing?

Even if it wasn’t a murder or a crime, the reason I dared to revisit the apartment—where not only the act of child abuse but also the feud between husband and wife had appeared—was not out of intellectual curiosity but, dare I say it, the shield, as Ougi-chan… Ougi-kun had said.

In other words, self-protection.

It was something I’d remembered as I was speaking with Ougi-kun about the threefold locked room. Or rather, it was something I realized. Not the lock to the cage, which could easily be opened, nor the lock to the front door, where the husband might own a key—but the lock to the nursery, the second door.

As for that lock, it would not be surprising if the husband (who used to live in the house) knew where the key was, which means it wasn’t necessarily a locked room… When I thought as much, I realized something.

I’d magnificently broken through it—a battering ram.

Ononoki-chan had kicked down the door, but wasn’t that kind of yikes?

It had to be yikes.

Since I was entrusted with the key, I’d been confident that I wasn’t trespassing this time, unlike the case with Benikujaku-chan, even though we hadn’t been told we could destroy the room—the sight of the doll in the cage with its back stabbed must have confused me more than I thought, as I completely forgot to clean up the mess.

Neither the act of abusing a doll nor the act of murdering a doll was a crime, but the vandalism of the interior doors of another person’s home certainly was.

Ononoki-chan…!

That girl had no hesitation in her destruction, or, being Yotsugi, it was like she had no other ideas11… With such a docile expression (or rather, no expression at all), she sure was good at destroying things without batting an eyelid… Speaking of which, in Benikujaku-chan’s case, she’d also broken the window to the apartment without compunction.

She would probably answer proudly and without shame that she was a tool with that sort of function, but it always ended up being me that had to clean up afterwards.

It’s like how, even though it’s the heroes who defeat the demon king, it’s the ordinary people who have to rebuild the world after it was destroyed in battle—no, this was not a story with that sort of lesson. This was simply a matter of a lack of discipline. After all, the original owner of that Ononoki-chan was that violent onmyouji… Not to mention, the current owner, Tsukihi, was not the type of person who lived for tidiness, to say the least.

Whatever it was, I hadn’t thought about it enough.

It was quite the awful nursery, so the destroyed door fit right in, but even in a room that looked like the remnants of affection, that didn’t mean that the door should also become remnants.

It may not be a problem or an incident at the moment, but if the disappearance of Associate Professor Iesumi continued for a long time, then someone, some party, would enter that room at some point—the management company, or even the police.

Although her whereabouts were unknown, it only meant that she did not show up at work and could not be contacted, not that she had been reported missing—the people that would likely file a missing person report, her family and parents, were probably all living in Switzerland. At the moment, the authorities did not seem to be taking any action, but even that had its limits.

If the rent wasn’t paid on time, the apartment would have to be vacated at some point—and if that nursery was seen, that would cause a huge scandal. No doubt, it would be linked to her disappearance, and how would the destroyed door be seen then…?

Maybe, as a coward, I was being overly cautious—if the judiciary was going to arrest her for that level of destruction, Ononoki-chan would have been arrested a long time ago (she had once smashed the front door of the Araragi house to bits, as well as my sister).

I could assume that the person usually in charge of cleaning up after Ononoki-chan was the influential administrator of the specialists, Gaen Izuko-san—she was good at that sort of subterfuge, that “onee-san that knew everything”.

Subterfuge against sabotage.

However, as my relations were currently cut off with that onee-san, I couldn’t rely on that possibility anymore… Now that I’d realized, I had to do something about it myself.

If I hadn’t realized it, I could have just let it go… Even though I was supposed to be having a change of pace having fun with high school girls, switching to going and covering up a crime was quite the rollercoaster.

If the rent is withdrawn from her bank account, even if she’s not there, then the payments wouldn’t be delayed right away (though it depended on her bank balance), but it was better to take action as soon as I could—you could say it was fortunate that I kept the key in my pocket instead of getting rid of it… Although, if I had just thrown it away, I wouldn’t have even been able to consider performing a cover-up, and may have just given up. Actual crimes were probably exposed as a result of such unimportant lapses of memory…

Life just didn’t go smoothly, did it.

But I was glad that I realized when Ononoki-chan was away… A former vampire under surveillance, acting arbitrarily of my own accord, could get me killed yet again. Even though I was trying to clean up after Ononoki-chan’s behavior, I wouldn’t accept if Ononoki-chan were to clean me up, instead.

And so, after going to a home center and picking up carpentry tools meant for repairs along the way, I revisited the Iesumi residence.