"Honestly, you little rascal. It's very rude to be so grabby. You'll have your own when you grow up." Ran hurriedly pulled Yimi away.
"Mmph?"
Held in Ran's arms, Yimi stretched out her naughty little paw again. Under Conan's envious gaze, she pressed Ran's chest.
Her verdict: "Very fake."
"?"
For a moment, Ran felt oddly wounded. She was normally very gentle with children, but she found herself wondering whether she should flick this newest member of the family on the forehead to establish some big-sister authority.
Fortunately, Ran was still quite confident in herself. After thinking about it for a moment, she realized Yimi's "fake" was referring to the doctor in front of them.
Ran's gaze involuntarily drifted downward. The white coat made it hard to tell the doctor's figure. So this pretty doctor had that kind of problem...
No, even if that was true, there was no need to say it out loud!
"I'm Asai Narumi, the doctor here. If you're feeling unwell, you can come see me," Narumi introduced herself with a smile.
Ran hurriedly joined in. "We're tourists from Beika Town. My name is Mouri Ran, and these are my little brother and sister, Yimi and Conan."
Poor Narumi. He had already resorted to changing the subject like this.
"Ran, we're leaving." Kogoro, who had just finished asking around, looked noticeably deflated.
"Dad, did you find the client?"
"No. Someone just told me that this Aso Keiji died many years ago." Kogoro took the letter out of his pocket and looked at it again, but the single short sentence showed no sign of being a code.
Someone influential on the island had told him that Aso Keiji had once been a famous pianist here. On the night of a full moon twelve years ago, after finishing a performance, he locked his family inside their house, stabbed his wife and daughter to death, then set the place on fire and killed himself.
Conan reminded Kogoro, "But the request fee has already been paid to you, Uncle. I think someone else must need your help."
"That's true. Maybe we'll learn something if we ask the mayor. Excuse me, do you know where the Civic Hall is?" Kogoro looked at Dr. Narumi.
Narumi pointed in one direction. "For the Civic Hall, go that way. At this hour, you should be able to run into the three people campaigning to become the next mayor. There's a memorial service for the former mayor there tonight."
"A memorial service, huh..."
Mouri Kogoro led them away. Only after all four had disappeared from sight did Narumi lower his head and stare thoughtfully at his own chest.
* * *
"Yimi, you can't do that again, understand?" Ran looked sternly at the kitty, who was amusing herself by marching with exaggerated straight-legged steps.
"Do what?" Yimi immediately switched back to her usual way of walking.
"Just casually exposing other people's secrets... Dad, don't listen. This is girl talk. It has nothing to do with you."
Kogoro quickened his pace by a few steps and muttered, "What kind of 'girl talk' can two brats ten years apart even have?"
Conan kept quiet, though he thought the much more important thing to correct was Yimi casually pressing strangers' chests in the middle of the street.
Yimi was puzzled. "But aren't detectives supposed to, investigate the truth?"
"Why are you starting to play detective too?"
Ran shook her head. "Listen carefully, Yimi. Everyone has secrets that belong to them. Of course detectives have to investigate cases, but people hate having their privacy exposed. Even if you accidentally find something out, you shouldn't just say it."
Through Yimi's hat, she gently rubbed her ears. "Yimi has secrets she needs to hide too, right? It would feel awful if someone exposed them and then looked at you strangely."
"Mmph." Yimi nodded, only half understanding.
Ran kept lecturing. "Shinichi used to love showing off his deductions too. He'd size up complete strangers, then grab the hands of people passing by without caring how they felt. That's the thing I hated most about him. Now that I think about it, he must have been practicing to become Kaitou Kid!"
Conan hurriedly protested, "Ran-onee-san, Shinichi-niichan can't possibly be Kaitou Kid!"
He needed to find time to call Ran and clear this up. It was all that rotten brat's fault!
Besides... he didn't think he had ever ignored other people's feelings, had he?
When they reached the Civic Hall and explained why they were there, they received nothing resembling a normal welcome. They did not even get to see the mayor.
With the next mayoral election underway, a famous detective suddenly showing up probably made the mayor suspect that one of the other candidates had sent him to dig up dirt. Even though the mayor's secretary had reported their arrival, Mouri Kogoro was still kept waiting for a long time, until the sky had already grown dark.
Naturally, Yimi had no patience for sitting around. The sea was directly behind the Civic Hall, so she simply slipped out the back door to go fishing.
How could she possibly catch anything? She didn't even have a fishhook.
Conan, who had gone with Yimi, habitually clasped both hands behind his head and wore a dry little smile. He had personally watched Yimi pick up a stick, wind a piece of string around it, tie on a crab that someone had apparently stepped on and killed on the beach, and fling the whole thing into the water.
"I caught one!"
Yimi suddenly whipped the rod back. Conan saw a small sea fish with its mouth caught between the dead crab's claws, its tail thrashing wildly.
"?" How could a fish possibly have swum through exactly where she had cast?
Yimi took the fish off. Kisaki Eri and Kogoro had been feeding her well lately, so for the moment she had no particular desire to eat a live fish raw. She could bring it back and have Ran make soup with it.
Yimi looked down at her own clothes, then grabbed Conan. Under his confused gaze, she stuffed the fish into his pocket.
"What are you doing?!"
Conan tore off his jacket in horror, hurriedly shook the wriggling fish out of his pocket, and released it back into the sea.
"Your pocket is bigger than mine." Unhappy, Yimi stomped on his shoe. "Now you owe me another fish."
"It's not a mouse. Even if you really caught it, you have nowhere to keep it." Conan put his jacket back on.
Ran had told him to play with Yimi, but he really wasn't very good at dealing with this child. Even after being told not to leave Ran's sight, she had still dragged him all the way out here.
After observing her for the past few days... no, even from the first day they met, Conan could tell that Yimi was definitely not an adult who had been turned into a child.
Of course, he was extremely curious about her past and whether she had anything to do with the Black Organization. But every attempt to probe into her past was always vaguely brushed aside. Maybe she simply did not want to remember unpleasant things.
When he saw Yimi getting ready to cast again, Conan quickly stopped her. "The memorial service should have started by now. Let's hurry back and find Uncle and the others."
"Okay." Yimi nodded and opened the Civic Hall's back door.
Behind the door was a spacious room. A very clean piano stood in the center—the same piano Aso Keiji had played before supposedly going mad.
The Moonlight Sonata. Not only was it connected to Aso Keiji himself, but people said that on the day the former mayor died, someone had heard this piece playing at the scene as well. By the time anyone arrived, the former mayor had already collapsed dead across the piano.
Of course, Conan knew none of that. He and Yimi had simply passed through this room's back door on their way to play by the sea.
"Uncle, what are you doing?"
Even without knowing any of that, Conan could still be suspicious of the unfamiliar man who had appeared here at some point and was now crouched beneath the piano doing something.
Crouching under a piano could be explained by saying he had dropped something. But when Yimi opened the door, Conan had clearly seen the man startle and hurriedly crawl out from underneath. That was already the behavior of someone with a guilty conscience.
"Where did you two kids come from? Don't you know you're not allowed to wander in here?" The long-faced man with a handlebar mustache recovered and angrily scolded them.
"A-le-le, we're not allowed in here? But I clearly saw that the door wasn't locked." Conan pitched his voice higher and pretended to be an innocent, curious child.
"Meow?" Yimi looked at him in confusion.
"Listen. This piano is cursed. Back then..."
The long-faced man explaining it to them was named Kawashima. He was the wealthiest man on Tsukikage Island and one of the three mayoral candidates, with fairly strong support.
"Cursed?"
The moment Conan, a firm believer in science, heard such a superstitious word, he naturally had to see what exactly made this piano worthy of being called cursed. Under Kawashima's stunned gaze, he reached out and played a short string of notes.
"There's nothing strange about this piano."
The only strange thing was how well maintained it seemed. Weren't people supposed to avoid this piano like the plague?
"Stop! Don't touch that!" Kawashima hurriedly scooped Conan away.
But while Conan was examining the top of the piano, Yimi's sharper nose followed a pungent smell. Just like Kawashima a moment earlier, she crawled beneath the piano and pawed at something overhead.
Plop—
A transparent packet of white powder fell onto the floor.
"..."
"Congratulations, Host, on unlocking the achievement [Drug-Busting Cat]. Reward: portal energy +5%. Reward: lottery draws +1."
Conan's face twitched twice. He immediately pretended to be a responsible older brother and pulled Yimi out from under the piano. "Honestly, don't mess with other people's things. Hurry and apologize to Uncle."
No matter how naturally he acted, Kawashima could not simply let them go and pretend that children would not recognize what they had found. Yimi did not even need to instinctively ask what her new achievement meant.
"You little brats! You're asking to die!" In his panic, Kawashima no longer cared whether he could catch two children at once.
Children were only young and inexperienced. They were not blind or mute. The moment these two told an adult, evidence of his crimes would be dug up.
He had only come over because a detective had arrived and, feeling nervous, used going to the bathroom as an excuse to check this place. He had never expected two damn brats to discover it...
There were already plenty of legends about this piano's curse. If two more children died, maybe no one would even notice!
"Run!" Conan quickly shoved Yimi away from Kawashima's reach, then kicked Kawashima in the shin.
The room was far too empty. There was nothing he could use to slow the man down.
The feeble kick did no real damage. Worse, by moving closer on purpose, Conan got himself grabbed by Kawashima.
Judging from the corridor layout he had seen on the way in, their voices probably could not reach the main hall. If there had been only one child here, that child would have been doomed. But over such a short distance, at least one of them should be able to run out and alert the adults!
Yet just as Conan prayed that Kawashima was not carrying a weapon, the hand gripping his collar suddenly loosened.
Kawashima took one step backward and fell stiffly onto his back. The back of his head struck the floor, and his eyes remained painfully wide open.
"?"
Conan's expression turned grave as he approached and checked him.
Already dead?
"Yimi, hurry and find Ran-onee-san! Tell her to call the police!"
"Are you two all right?!" Dr. Narumi hurriedly opened the door after hearing the shouting.