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!”