It was quite impossible to foresee that less than an hour after the meal we had all shared, I would find myself in the company of Mr. Nakatsuki and Miss Iwakiri facing a lifeless body lying on the ground.
However, as if to leave no doubt as to the current situation, the power had gone out before suddenly coming back, accompanied by a flash coming from the ceiling light; thus blinding the three of us momentarily before revealing in full light the undeniable fact exposed in front of us: Mr. Yazawa, the owner, was lying face down on the floor of his room.
Faced with the inaction of the people present - and in particular that of Mr. Nakatsuki, who had remained frozen with fright during this brief moment of stupor - I was about to go and find out about the owner's situation; when Miss Iwakiri came to her senses and pushed me aside to run to the old man lying on the floor.
"Yazawa-san!" She exclaimed with a voice full of distress.
With a worried look, she crouched down and took the old man's pale wrist in her hand to check his pulse, before quickly shifting her position and putting her fingers on her employer's throat.
She stood still for a moment, hesitant; only our breaths and the storm animating the room with their presence.
I had the impression that time had momentarily frozen, as if the next moment was going to be decisive, and was consciously left to wait.
However, the young woman finally stood up, before turning back to us with a livid expression on her face.
"What's going on? Did he faint?" Inquired Mr. Nakatsuki.
The young woman, very agitated, opened and closed her mouth like a pond fish waiting for its meal under the water surface. As if she had momentarily lost the use of speech.
"Well, I'll call an ambulance!" Mister Nakatsuki declared.
He was already looking for his phone in his pockets, feeling with his hands his jacket and his pants, but a loud sniffing made him look up at Miss Iwakiri again.
"This is... This is unbelievable..." Finally managed to say the young woman on the verge of tears, her hoarse voice struggling to get out of her throat. "He... Yazawa-san... He died..."
"S... Sorry?" Was all my manager managed to say in shock.
The discomfort and unease could be seen on their faces, while the words of the young employee gradually became a reality that we could no longer deny.
This was probably the first time they had seen a lifeless body.
As for me, I wasn't sure if I should count the two times the detective had 'died' in front of my eyes in these disturbing statistics.
Probably not, on second thought.
Meanwhile, the other occupants of the boarding house had gathered curiously at the entrance to the room.
It was the same kind of behavior that made people slow down on the road when they came across the wreckage of a crashed car: driven by a morbid fascination, they could not look away, hoping to catch a glimpse of some detail.
However, instead of a car accident, stood there an old man whose cause of death still escaped us.
"Is he... Dead?" Asked the production assistant cautiously, her high-pitched voice rising slightly above the surrounding murmur.
Some people had heard the young employee's words, but the information seemed so abstract to them that they wanted to hear us confirm it in person.
However, Mr. Nakatsuki just nodded silently; maybe because he was afraid to say something that would be so meaningful that it could not be taken back once it was out of his mouth.
Then, turning to Miss Iwakiri and myself, he announced:
"For now, we'd better keep people out of the room."
The young woman and I nodded and gave him a serious look.
Almost immediately, a game of who would push the hardest began; my supervisor, Miss Iwakiri and I began to drive the crowd away from the entrance of the room and into the corridor.
The storm still echoed all around the building, its almost immediate proximity and intensity making the walls and windows shake.
"What happened to him?" Mr. Manabe asked, as Mr. Sakai approached right behind him.
That was also the question I was asking myself.
What could have happened to the old man to get struck by death, only a few seconds after we heard his voice through the radio?
Glancing behind us, I quickly observed the body and its surroundings.
There was not a trace of blood, nor any sign that another person had been in the room. This should have been obvious to me earlier, given the state of panic that this specific color caused in me.
However, I was both reassured and distressed by the absence of blood. I would not have to avoid a panic attack, but in return, the cause of death seemed much less obvious...
Had he had a heart attack, just like that? Or had someone hastened the old man's last hour against his will?
The door closed and blocked my line of sight into the room, with Mr. Nakatsuki quickly pulling the handle to hide the sad discovery from the others who had come to join us. I heard him click his tongue, either out of annoyance or because of the stress that was rapidly taking over, before he spoke again.
"Do you have the room keys with you, Iwakiri-san?" He asked in a firm voice.
No matter how hard he tried to keep his voice even, I could tell by his attitude that he was clearly not comfortable.
His trembling gaze could not focus on one particular person, and his strained posture betrayed the tension that had taken over his whole body. He clearly appeared to me as being very agitated, but trying to appear calm to reassure the others.
As for Miss Iwakiri, she seemed to have calmed down and dried her tears, although she still had a pale complexion and reddened eyes. I saw that she glanced at the closed door from time to time, when she wasn't trying to detail the people who had joined us.
"N... No," the young woman replied, shaking her head from side to side. "Yazawa-san always carries the keys to his room with him... Especially since..."
"Ah, no way I'm going through the pockets of a dead man!" Mister Nakatsuki interrupted him sharply. "You must have a spare, right?"
"I... I guess so..." she replied uncertainly.
I had gradually lost the thread of their conversation, to focus on the hurried whispers coming from all the other people grouped between our trio and the stairwell.
"Was it the ghost that killed him?" Kitta Kitta asked excitedly.
"Nonsense," said Mr. Sakai curtly, which surprised me. "There is no such thing as a ghost..."
The producer of a program about the supernatural being a great skeptic who doesn't believe in ghost stories? Who would have guessed it?
Certainly not me.
"Maybe the old man had a heart attack after getting so upset," Mr. Ishibashi suggested sarcastically.
"But we heard him say he saw something, didn't we?" The boy replied.
"It's true that, thinking back, Yazawa-san didn't seem to be alone..." Reflected aloud another person from the production team.
The young Utuber obviously didn't want to leave it at that, sensing the sensational deal that could earn him even more views on the video sharing platform. His enthusiasm had revived the ghost story I had been trying so hard to keep from my subconscious.
Yet there was no denying that the owner had seen something, or someone.
Mr. Yazawa's words of terror echoed in my mind, and most likely, in the thoughts of all the people who had heard the old man's words through Ms. Iwakiri's walkie-talkie.
'I can see him... He's looking at me.'
What could Mr. Yazawa have seen to be so frightened? Or more exactly... who?
And more importantly, was it directly related to his death?
Could a murderous ghost really exist, no matter how elusive?
It didn't matter what he saw - or thought he saw - in the end.
What was notable was the rapid succession of events that had followed those words. A loud noise, followed by silence and death.
"We won't know until the police arrive," Mr. Nakatsuki interrupted them, pulling his cell phone from his pocket.
He tapped for a few seconds on the screen of his smartphone, under the inquisitive looks of all the people crowding the corridor, then, with a confused look, raised his eyes to the audience he had gathered despite himself.
"Uh... Does anyone have signal on their phone?" He asked with embarrassment.
Within seconds, a confused sound of rummaging clothes and electronic sounds - accompanying the opening of flip phones or the unlocking of smartphone screens - was heard; accompanied by sighs of disappointment. Half of the people in the room had no signal, and the other half had too little signal to make a fairly stable phone call. I was in that category, the bars symbolizing reception on my smartphone blinking slowly.
"The phone signal keeps popping up and popping off..." Reflected aloud Mister Ishibashi, whose hair was still as badly styled as ever. "Maybe the network antenna in the area was hit by lightning..."
Mister Nakatsuki then turned quickly to Miss Iwakiri, which startled the latter.
"You have a landline phone at the front desk, right?" He asked hurriedly.
"Y... Yes" She answered with confusion.
"Okay, let's see if it still works," he said before turning to me. "Nijima, can you stand guard?"
I in turn returned a confused look to him.
"Stand guard? And why him?" A voice that I couldn't identify arose.
"Why?" Mister Nakatsuki repeated. "That's obvious!"
"But in what way?" Kitta Kitta insisted.
To everyone's surprise, it was Noel who spoke up, stepping forward to catch everyone's eyes, and make them more attentive to his words.
"We don't know what the owner died of." She explained calmly. "But we can be sure of one thing: If it was a murder, it's obvious that the people who were present on the first floor are innocent."
"A murder?!" Mr. Manabe exclaimed.
"That's really stupid," added Mr. Sakai mockingly. "This isn't a Saturday night TV show. Murders don't happen that often. Besides, who would want to kill an old guy like him?"
I could clearly see faces full of doubts and considering this possibility, opposed to incredulous looks and mocking giggles not believing for a second in such a far-fetched idea. It was really too early to talk about murder.
However, even though the opinions differed greatly, the result was the same.
At the mention of this particular word, it seemed to me that the temperature in the corridor dropped abruptly: a draft had blown through the whole floor, bringing in its wake suspicion and mistrust.
Mr. Nakatsuki glanced at Noel. They had obviously thought of the same scenario. This definitely put the whole situation in the horror and detective story genre; and as in any respectable plot, there already seemed to be suspects.
For my part, I was far from convinced. I was still missing too many elements to be able to properly analyze the situation.
"If someone killed him, it must have been the ghost..." Kitta Kitta cursed stubbornly.
"There's no such thing..." Replied Mr. Sakai exasperated.
However, it was already too late to dismiss this far-fetched hypothesis: everyone had in mind this story of a ghost haunting the place.
"It doesn't matter if the ghost exists or not," Mr. Nakatsuki said sharply. "A man died. And the last time I checked, that which is intangible cannot harm that which is flesh and blood."
He was right, and making an important point, there.
I didn't really know much about ghost stories; but if they all had something in common, it was that specters couldn't interact with the physical world. Their main characteristic was to pass through anything and everything, after all.
Of course, there was still some uncertainty about this, as I had not yet come across a real ghost, but I assumed that if zombies were real, ghosts could be real too. It was just a matter of knowing whether what was said about them in literary and audio-visual works was the strict truth, or a pure invention.
It wasn't certain either that Mr. Yazawa had been murdered: the old man could have been a victim of his own old age after all.
However, a strange sensation had run through my chest, like a kind of unpleasant tingling seeping into my muscles.
Something was wrong with this story.
The owner didn't look sick, especially when he had been arguing with others earlier in the evening. Moreover, he had died in one of the rooms - his own - where the ghost was known to appear, which made it a bit of a glaring coincidence.
"Let's be clear: I don't trust anyone but Nijima here," insisted Mr. Nakatsuki, pointing quickly at me with his hand still holding his phone. "That's why I'm asking him to watch the door while we go to call the police and get a copy of the keys.
I was indeed doubtful that anyone would risk going through the pockets of a dead person. He was also sure that the key was not on the door of the room: we had entered the small room without any problems, the lock not offering any resistance, which indicated that the door was not locked from the start.
My supervisor and Miss Iwakiri went down the wooden stairs to the first floor to use the landline telephone, passing through the crowd that had formed. Then, as the minutes passed, punctuated by the roar of the storm and the lightning striking nearby, the group shrank in size until I found myself alone in the hallway, which had become eerie and strangely narrower to my eyes.
I felt even more isolated than usual, and every creak from the building's frame echoing around me reinforced this anxiety that would surely have oppressed a normal person.
I started to explore my cell phone aimlessly, opening and closing applications without any real interest. I didn't have much to occupy me.
At one point, my finger hovered over the conversation log, and I saw the last message the detective had sent me.
Did this situation meet her definition of 'trouble'?
I didn't know her well enough to judge that, and in any case, the intermittent nature of the network would surely make communication difficult.
Of course, I regretted her absence in such circumstances, but I also hoped that I would not need her services. After all, I'd already gotten myself into enough trouble in the short time I'd been with her.
Turning off my phone screen, a distinctive squeak louder than the creaking of the carpentry made me look up at the other end of the hallway.
The door at the far end of the hallway with the small 'do not disturb' sign had been quietly closed, and I realized that I was not as alone on this floor as I thought.