The First Day of the Rest of the Life of Oreki Houtarou

“Nevermind the formalities, just tell him your problem,” Satoshi said. He pulled a chair around beside the desk and turned the fan that way without so much as a by-your-leave.

“Um, okay...” The girl collected herself and brought her palms down on Houtarou’s desk with sudden vehemence. “I’m here to report a theft!”

“Uh... huh...” Houtarou slid a sideways glance at Satoshi, as much as to say “well, you’ve got a cop right here,” but the cop in question had taken off his hat and sat in smug bliss as the fan blew through his sweat-damp hair.

“But I don’t want to bother the people,” the girl added.

“Sounds complicated,” Houtarou allowed. At least it made sense now why Satoshi would have brought her here. “So, what happened?”

“Well, a little while ago I was in the butcher shop on Sixth Street,” she explained. “They were busy with the new shipment, so he and the assistant kept going into the back and then coming to the counter. One time when the assistant came up I heard him set a tray down, then he went around to check some people out at the register, but when he went back, it was gone!”

Houtarou blinked at her, feeling as if he’d missed something and gotten on the wrong streetcar. “Come again?”

“I heard him put that tray down, and then it just disappeared! He said ‘now where did it go?’ and there were customers right there but nobody saw what happened to it! It was just scraps they were going to throw away; he told the butcher, but—”

“What?” Turned out he’d heard her story right, and it wasn’t even about a filet mignon; she was seriously here about some missing garbage. He side-eyed Satoshi more sharply — apparently his friend had just brought this girl up here to screw with him and get out of the heat — but to no effect. “Look, this really isn’t —”

“But it just made me so curious!!”

Startled by her tone, Houtarou made the mistake of looking up into her eyes and suddenly found himself transfixed as the smell of broiling wood finish went cold, cold as Christmas. The yellow bars of sunlight coming through the blinds vitrified into jewel-blue layers of ice that wrapped around him where he sat, kissing the sweat off his neck and crackling “I’m curious! I’m curious!” like the girl’s voice echoing off a hundred Hope Diamonds. That wasn’t dirt or powder in her hair, it was snow, a crown of intricate branching crystal that would turn Marie Antoinette green with envy — and there the girl was, leaning toward him like she was the Snow Queen who’d just found some poor soul trapped in the ice and couldn’t bear to waste one second setting him free...

Only by tapping into his energy reserves for the utmost exertion of will did Houtarou manage to break contact, squeeze his eyes shut and throw himself back in his chair. That Satoshi would have brought this girl up here and fanned her hopes just to screw around suddenly made his blood boil — but not boil hot enough to take the job. “Just... Stop right there.”

“But...!”

“You saw it on the door, right? ‘Private Investigator.’ I don’t solve cases for free.”

“Um, okay. So...” the girl said slowly.

Houtarou rushed his agitated mind over some quick-and-dirty math, inexplicably desperate to beat her to the punch. “Five hundred.” When a girl showed up in dirty coveralls and this office was enough to impress her, there was no way she had that kind of money.