The Mystery of the Phantom Ballplayer (1)

Haruhi had been reading today’s copy of the Kamijousaki-zaka, the Newspaper Club’s daily paper, when I walked into the clubroom. I slid the door shut with a forceful thud, but the noise garnered no movement from her; in actual fact, she did not even look up from her newspaper, or acknowledge my presence in any way.

I took in the layout of the room – it was roughly the size of a regular classroom sans the chalkboard and teacher’s desk but a slew of school tables, adorned with chairs, piled at the back made it seem smaller. Haruhi was seated at the head of a long table which had been placed in the middle of the room. I grabbed one of the free chairs and sheepishly set it down on the opposite end.

“Sorry I’m late.”

No reply.

“Haruhi?”

She turned the page.

“Haruhi…?”

Zilch.

“I’m sorry for being late, Vice President.”

At last, she began to shuffle, and I caught a glance of the paper’s headline: the school’s new sports complex was due to open at the end of the month with state-of-the-art facilities such as batting cages, an Olympic-size swimming pool and spa area, and so on and so forth…

She set the newspaper down and asked derisively, “Why are you late, Watson?”

“I went to the Special Purposes Building instead of the clubroom,” I murmured, somewhat embarrassed.

It had only been two days since our encounter in the Special Purposes Building; yesterday, I formally tendered my application to join the New Wave Mystery Society and today was my first day as a full-fledged member. In my ‘excitement’, I had forgotten that the scene of our last meeting, that room in the Special Purposes Building, was just a rental and not the actual clubroom.

Actually, I hadn’t known where the clubroom was at all, which is why I had been an hour late. I explained this to Haruhi but she didn’t seem too impressed.

“You’re not too bright,” she said; the fact that it was phrased as an outright statement as opposed to a rhetorical question did little to soften the blow.

“It doesn’t matter anyways, does it?” I countered. “I’m only here to make up the numbers. I brought some books and -” I was cut off.

“I think you’re misunderstanding something,” Haruhi spoke. “As a member of the New Wave Mystery Society, you’re expected to take part in club activities.”

“I thought you just needed an extra member so your club wouldn’t be shut down?” I responded.

“Correct,” she agreed readily. “But we don’t have any need for dead weight, do we?” she looked contemptuously in my direction, and I let the book that I was holding drop back into my bag.

“OK,” I straightened up in my chair, a mixture of curiosity and annoyance had crept into my voice. “What club activities?”

I had been under the idea that our quid pro quo involved allowing my name to be put on the club’s register in exchange for permission to use the clubroom as a study room. Although I didn’t think that I would be asked to participate, I would be lying if I said that the question of club activities had not crossed my mind at least once.

After all, what exactly did the New Wave Mystery Society do?

“Naturally, we solve mysteries,” she explained casually.

“Is there any mystery in particular we have to solve?” I queried.

“Not at the moment,” she shook her head. “I was hoping you could help with that.”

“Me? Why me?” I replied dubiously.

“Well, you were an hour late, no?” Haruhi chided. “I thought you were onto something. How was I to know you were running around the school like a lost monkey?” she said with an exaggerated sigh.

“Holmes never abused Watson like this in the stories,” I said, feigning resentment.

“You’ve read the stories, then?” she asked. For a second, her eyes glimmered.

I hesitated before replying, “Well, I’ve read a few of them.”

At that moment, Haruhi rose and made her way towards my end of the table. Looking down at me, she lay the palm of her hand on my bag which had been resting on the table.

Instinctively, I reached for the bag at the same time – our hands brushed against each other, and we flickered slightly at this unexpected physical contact. I flushed, but Haruhi was otherwise unfazed.

“What kind of novels are you hiding in here, I wonder?”

“I only have textbooks.”

“You can drop the act, Watson,” she said. “I’ve been observing you, remember? I know you don’t stay after school to study.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean you’re the type to spend ten minutes looking over a textbook before giving up and starting on some adventure novel. Really, Watson, if you’re a diligent student then I’m a bottle of Pokomaru-kun branded green tea…”

“Huh? A bottle of Pokomaru-kun branded green tea?”

“You’ll go and get me one then? I won’t say no to that.”

“Stop playing around, Haruhi.”

She produced her coin pouch, likely with the intention of actually sending me on an errand to buy her a drink but dropped it at the mention of her name. She scowled at me. This seemed to be the most potent weapon I had against the Sherlock of Saitama’s silver tongue – well, it was the only weapon, really.

“I’ll give you an extra ¥200, so you can get something for yourself too,” she offered, but frankly, her attempts at cajoling were pathetic.

“Do I look like some crooked politician to you?” I replied. “You can’t buy and sell me.”

She considered this for a moment. “Hmm… can you turn to the side a little bit? At certain angles, you look a bit like the younger Koizumi.”

“Are you implying he’s a crook? Yikes Holmes, apologise to Koizumi right now,” I said, before continuing, “Apologise to me as well. That’s a 40-year-old man you’re comparing me to.”

“Oya, oya? But don’t you think he’s quite handsome?”

“Oh yeah, he’s the darling of bored housewives everywhere. He must be number one on their list of – hey!”

The free-flowing banter had lulled me into a false sense of security. In a mere instant, my bag had been whisked away and four ¥100 coins deposited in its place. I had made a lunge for it, of course, but my fingers grasped nothing. Looking up, I saw Haruhi wafting back to her place at the other end of the table, my bag in her arms.

“Politics is such a tiresome topic, Watson. Let’s get back to the important things…” she sat down. “Like your reading habits.”

The next thing I knew, the contents of my bag had been placed neatly in front of her. She had no interest in my textbooks and set those to one side. This left what one might call my ‘extracurricular reading materials’, and these she inspected thoroughly.

“What, no magnifying glass today?” I murmured bitterly.

“I lent that to Shota,” she informed me without looking up. “He’s using it to set his schoolbooks on fire.”

Don’t joke about arson like that so casually, I thought to myself. Also, who the hell is Shota?

“An Ellery Queen novel, a manga anthology and… what’s this?” she held one of the paperbacks in her hands and was reading its blurb. “Oya? Some kind of smutty, homoerotic novel?”

I had completely forgotten about that.

The excuses suddenly started pouring out. “It was a recommendation from a friend!” I insisted. “It’s won a lot of literary awards, you see. It’s of academic interest as well. You know, Achilles and Patroclus we-,”

I was cut off by the sound of the clubroom door being slid open.

“Are you here, Tanizaki?! My god, I heard it again,” the voice rasped – panting heavily and leaning against the doorframe was my classmate and Kamijousaki High’s star baseball player, Kei Kazami.

“Kazami, what’s wrong?” I stood up immediately.

“It’s those phantoms again, man. Oh, hey, I’m kinda dizzy…” Kazami’s voice began to slur, and he looked as though he was going to topple over. I moved out of the way as he staggered across the room and practically collapsed into the chair I had just vacated.

I glanced over at Haruhi, who was alert. She seemed to be mouthing the word ‘phantoms’ excitedly to herself.

“Empty… voices… English… baseball…” Kazami continued to breathe heavily, his story completely incoherent.

“Aren’t you meant to be Kamijousaki’s ace?” I walked over to Haruhi’s side of the table, plucked a bottle of water from my bag, and handed it to Kazami who gratefully gulped half of it down.

“That’s a lot better,” he said. “Also, I’m a pitcher. The coach doesn’t care about my cardio so long as I can throw 155kmph. And I ran up here like hell.”

“Never mind all that,” Haruhi remarked curtly. “What’s this about phantoms?”

Kazami looked bewildered. “The voices that can be heard on the baseball field late at night. What, you’ve never heard of the seven mysteries?”

“I have, but not that one,” she clarified.

“Well, it’s not just voices either. It’s noise, you know? It sounds like a game of baseball is going on. I can hear the foul balls hitting against the net, the sound of the bat hitting the ball, that kind of thing. But listen, the baseball field is completely empty, and it’s also pitch-black outside. Who’s playing ball in the dark? Hell, I tell Tanizaki about it all the time since we’re in the same class and all,” he said.

“You knew about this, Watson?” she shot me a curious glance. “And here you were telling me that you hadn’t heard of any interesting mysteries…”

I felt a tug at my sleeve. It was Kazami.

“Hey, are you meant to be Watson?” he grinned broadly. “Tsukishima really does take this whole Sherlock Holmes shtick seriously, huh?”

Although he was a reliable friend and a fine baseball player, Kazami lacked what one would colloquially refer to as ‘tact’. I had long theorised that my classmate, having devoted so much of his life to the game of baseball and nothing else, had not a single malicious bone in his body as a result of that single-mindedness.

“I don’t mean anything by that, obviously!” Kazami added immediately; of course, he had no intention of poking fun at Haruhi’s eccentricities right in front of her. He opened his mouth again, as though he wanted to change the subject, but Haruhi had beaten him to the punch.

“Tell me, friend of Watson, where exactly did you hear these sounds?” her voice was soft and her features stony. If she was offended, she did not show it.

“I took a shortcut by cutting through the baseball field. That’s when I heard it.”

Haruhi stood up and flung open the windows behind her. We were greeted by a faint summer breeze and the cawing of nocturnal birds. The sun had already set at this time, and it must’ve been difficult for her to make anything out. Even so, Haruhi looked contemplatively out into the darkness.

“So you were standing below right out there?”

“That’s right,” Kazami nodded.

“And when did you start hearing it?” she asked.

“About twenty minutes ago,” came the reply.

“And Watson, did you hear anything twenty minutes ago?” she turned to me this time.

I paused for a second. “I was here with you twenty minutes ago. How could I possibly have heard anything?”

“Really? No phantasmal voices? No cracks of a baseball bat?” she asked again.

“No, of course I didn’t,” I told her. All I could hear at that time was the shuffling of Haruhi’s newspaper as she ignored me.

“Even though this room literally overlooks the baseball field?” she pointed out into the darkness beyond the window.

My vantage point from the opposite end of the table afforded a poor view of the world outside the clubroom. I marched over to where Haruhi stood and had another look out. Sure enough, the familiar outline of a baseball diamond was vaguely discernible in the darkness.

“I didn’t know we were right above it.”

“Speaking from experience, Watson, the sound of the baseball team practising can certainly be heard from this room. If phantoms were making use of our baseball field, then we absolutely should have heard it.”

“You must’ve been imagining it, then. Or it was a radio or something,” I turned back to say to Kazami.

“It definitely wasn’t coming from a speaker or anything like that. It was clear,” he insisted. “Also, I’m not the only one who’s heard it. Haraguchi, Inui, Maeda, they’ve all heard it too at some point or another.”

“I agree with your friend, Watson,” Haruhi said to me defiantly. “A radio or even a television… that wouldn’t be a very interesting solution. We should investigate.”

She turned and spoke to Kazami.

“You’re on the baseball team, yes? Then you should know how to turn on the floodlights. I want you to do that and meet me on the field in five minutes,” she said, and my classmate marched out of the room with a roguish salute.

“Are we going down to the field now?” I asked.

“I am,” she replied, skirting around the table to where I, and later Kazami, had sat. “But actually, I have a special job for you.”

In mystery stories, the detective often sends his or her assistant on seemingly trivial tasks which later turn out to be crucial to solving the mystery – to say I was intrigued, therefore, would be a gross understatement although I certainly wasn’t overly enthusiastic with the idea of playing second fiddle to a high school girl with an overactive imagination.

There would be many occasions in the future where Haruhi would display the trenchant ingenuity expected of a detective by doing just that. Unfortunately, this was not one of those occasions. She picked up the coins she had placed on the table earlier when she had taken my bag. Holding them out to me, she spoke expectantly.

“Here’s ¥200. Please go to vending machine on the ground floor and buy me a bottle of Pokomaru-kun branded green tea.”