The shortcut through the mountains took nearly fifteen minutes, and soon the car was back on the highway.
Both the driver and the passengers breathed a sigh of relief.
After a few moments of relief, Mouri Ran's first concern was for Suzuki Sonoko, "Are you feeling all right, Sonoko?"
She carefully surveys Suzuki Sonoko's face, then glances at Ichijō Mirai, and again breathes a small sigh of relief, "Fine, fine, no..."
Conan, who was sitting in the passenger seat and looking back, also took a few glances at Suzuki Sonoko and found that she was in good condition, just looking a little droopy from the long bumps. Her face was normal, even a little flushed. He and Mouri Ran breathed a sigh of relief at the same time, and subconsciously said: "It's okay..."
Fortunately, there was no stress.
Halfway through the ride, when he realized that the dull crash of the bumps sounded like continuous gunfire, he remembered Suzuki Sonoko's kidnapping as a child.
Although she was rescued, she witnessed the rescuer destroying the entire factory with a cheerful look on his face. When she was finally sent to the police, she looked dazed, with a lot of blood splattered on her body, her eyes were red, and her face was exceptionally clean. It was obvious that she had been scared and cried, and her tears were wiped away. She was left with psychological sequelae, and could not bear to hear the continuous gunshots. Once she heard them, she would have a serious lack of security. She had to hold on to something tightly with red eyes to barely ease a little.
It was so famous it was the equivalent of Suzuki Sonoko's last name, and Mouri Korogō in the driver's seat wiped the sweat from his forehead and looked over in the rearview mirror as well, "I'll just skip the shortcut when I come back to pick you guys up, huh?"
He screeched to a halt, looking in the rearview mirror and then back again, deeply confused, "Now is the physical discomfort not pale, but flushed?"
Suzuki Sonoko sat in the center of the back seat, knees together, back straight, hands on knees, staring down.
It was a perfectly good behavior, so good that most people wouldn't sit like that, her cheeks were blushing, her eyelashes were drooping, trembling very lightly, the frequency of the trembling was unstable, light and heavy at the same time, occasionally blocking her upper eyelids.
Hearing Mouri Korogō's surprised turn of phrase and subconscious questioning, she bounced up a few centimeters, blew out her hair, and immediately sat down again, staring at the silver bracelet on her wrist and explaining in a dry manner, "Ah, ah, I do feel a little uncomfortable, like a little bit dizzy, maybe it's because Conan passed the cold on to me!"
Conan, who had a cold and was wearing a mask: "Huh?"
His eyes bugged out, "Come on, you're obviously,"
"Hahahaha what a shame you can't stay at the villa for the party because you have a cold, Conan," Suzuki Sonoko laughed hard, "I told them a month in advance that I'd bring my wife and child to the party, and you can't make it... it's a shame, isn't it, Mr. Mirai?"
Ichijō Mirai: "..."
Where's that serious, coy, shocking demeanor from when you were a kid?
...And so on.
"Wife," He repeated slowly, "child?"
Huh?
"Yes," Said Suzuki Sonoko, "it's not a good idea to reveal yourself as a high school girl on the Internet, is it? Some strange people might come after me, so I identify myself as a man."
She lowered the volume of her voice sheepishly, "A man in his twenties who has a child by his lover."
And more quietly, "Pro-, ahem, pro-monogamy..."
After the first sentence, she raises her voice in a rapidly accelerating tone, trying to override the first sentence with the second, "The child is currently in elementary school, and is a smart, cute kid who will become a detective in the future!"
Why is the support for monogamy being singled out?
It's the beginning of the age of monogamy, but most countries only support monogamy, right? It's the same in Japan, so there's no need to mention it.
Ichijō Mirai paused in confusion, looking first at Conan and Mouri Ran, who were silent, and then at Suzuki Sonoko, who in a non-dangerous state would never act, and whose tone of voice, eyes, expression, and body language were so blunt that it sounded like an attached answer, and thought, and grasped the key point, "Did they believe it?"
It's not that he's prejudiced.
It was just that Suzuki Sonoko was clearly a bright and cheerful sunflower, and Ichijō Mirai was sure it would be no problem for her to cheerfully strike up conversations with strangers and quickly become friends, but to disguise herself as a man in his late twenties with a wife and son, or for a long time...
There was only one thing to think about: did Suzuki Sonoko reveal herself in the first sentence or two, or in the first two days?
"Of course they believed me," said Suzuki Sonoko, without realizing it, and with a very clear conscience. 'They believed in my identity, and asked me all the questions they had, such as how to make up for a fight between a girl and her best friend from the same school, or how to spy on a man, or how to teach a seven- or eight-year-old child a lesson,' he said.
The prefix 'as a girl' was so frequent that she caught herself, hesitated for a few seconds in confusion, and nodded vigorously in self-persuasion, "Well! If you didn't believe that I was old, had been through a lot, and was a mature male, how could you possibly ask me anything?"
Turning his head, he asked Mouri Ran in a low voice, "Are you catching a cold, why are you coughing so much?"
From the moment Suzuki Sonoko said 'how to squat on men', Mouri Ran clenched her fist against her lips and coughed softly, and when she didn't get a response after two or three coughs, she coughed even harder, and it was only when her voice was torn that she coughed softly again, as if she were coughing weakly like a terminal cancer.
She was sad and desperate.
Suzuki Sonoko was worried about Mouri Ran.
Ichijō Mirai thought that Mouri Ran was probably more worried about Suzuki Sonoko: "...".
He translates, and in a subtle silence, he remembers: Suzuki Sonoko, who has experience with men?
Correction: Suzuki Sonoko, had she ever stalked him?
He didn't feel anything at all.
Ichijō Mirai had gotten so used to hiding from both surveillance cameras and human eyes that he had developed an almost intuitive instinct to feel when someone tried and succeeded in squatting.
In other words: "I can't believe I'm even asking you about men who are squatting? But you don't have any experience."
"And it's hard," he inquired, "what do you suggest?"
First of all, find a dessert store as a fixed refreshment point, go to the main job to eat dessert whenever you have time, part-time squatting?
Regardless of whether or not being a customer in a dessert store is considered squatting, as long as someone comes downstairs, it's considered squatting?
It's not squatting, it's getting rich.
Ichijō Mirai's blocking of the courtship signal is a way of saving Suzuki Sonoko's ass.
"I didn't make it," Suzuki Sonoko says, "ahahaha, yes, I did."
"My advice is to see if the male has any regular refreshment spots, and if he does, just go there often, and you're sure to get one! The success rate is very high!"
She looked ahead, her green eyes lit up a bit, "Hey, I can see the villa, it seems like there's still four or five minutes to go!"
"By the way, Mr. Mirai, the,"
Ichijō Mirai listens, "That?"
"That," Suzuki Sonoko's eyes darted all over the place, "when I declared my identity I said I was twenty-nine years old."
"Well, since I've entrusted you two or three times, and you gave Ran and I bracelets, I thought I'd return the favor, but I wasn't sure what you might like, so I asked them what I could give a twenty-something year old man as a gift."
"And since I had to say who I was giving it to, I said it was for my brother, who's a bit younger than me... and complimented you on being very attractive, very handsome, and super awesome... so someone might recognize you later..."
"But don't worry, I didn't say your name, I just used a nickname!"
A nickname?
Ichijō Mirai moved his eyes, and out of the experience of being called by a nickname for a second every time they met for the first time, a subtle feeling of foreboding appeared in his heart, "What was the nickname you used?"
Suzuki Sonoko: "It's 'Detective Fox'."
"It's because your eyes are a bit upturned at the end, and the color of your pupils is very pretty, obviously a deep red, but it seems to have a bit of shiny gold, and there's a texture that isn't quite the same as other people's, very much like a red fox!"
She explained, "They all think you're my real brother."
No, they probably don't.
Rarely, Ichijō Mirai felt a little sorry for the brains he'd played on Suzuki Sonoko: the child was already so stupid, and he was adding insult to injury.
No snowflake is innocent in an avalanche, and no brain crash is innocent of adding insult to injury when a person is stupid.
He coaxed the child, apologetically, politely and with great familiarity: "Really? Then they'll be surprised to see you, surprised that you're not an adult with a wife and children, but a high school student of only six or seven, sixteen or seventeen years old."
As he responded, he raised his eyes to Conan, who was making his eyes look like peas, and changed the subject, "You have a bad cold, aren't you tired of traveling so long, and Mr. Mouri is also tired of driving so long, right? Why don't you take a break at your destination?"
He thought that even Conan had realized that the netizens had already seen through Suzuki Sonoko, and were just pretending not to know, and were deliberately teasing the high school girl.
Mouri Korogō answered first, "Rest? No, no, no, no, it's only a few hours' ride, I don't have to rest, I can smoke on the way back."
"Besides," He said seriously, "Ms. Yoko's going to be on a program tonight, so she won't be able to make it if she takes a break."
Then he answered for Conan, "He's got a thick skin, he's even got a cold, he's got to come along, he'll be fine, he'll just sleep in the car."
The object of Conan's beady eyes shifted from Suzuki Sonoko to Mouri Korogō, and he tugged at the white mask that covered two-thirds of his face, letting out a dry laugh, "Ahahaha, right, right."
"But, we're going to send Ms. Ran and the others up later, aren't we?" He looked over at Mouri Korogō, his voice muffled, his tone childlike and innocent, "After all, they're people we've never met, in case there's a bad guy in there..."
"Of course, brother Mirai is very powerful, he'll be able to protect Ms. Ran and Ms. Sonoko, but..."
Mouri Korogō responded rightly, "Of course, we have to get them to the door, and not only to the door, but to make a statement as well!"
"Here we are."
The car stopped in front of the suspension bridge.
Because of the recent snowfall, the mountain is white, there are some staggered wheel marks on the ground, the road to the front not far away from the abrupt end, and farther away from a mountain in the middle of the interval of about thirty or forty meters, where there is a villa.
The two mountains are connected by a long suspension bridge made of ropes and planks of wood, about two meters wide and swaying gently in the wind high in the air, making it look particularly dangerous.
Ichijō Mirai had just gotten out of the car when he received a message from the light wind: the smell of gasoline.
His movement stopped.
As the others got out, Suzuki Sonoko stretched long and hard, not at all tired from sitting in the car for hours, and asked Ichijō Mirai energetically, "What's wrong, Mr. Mirai?"
She nodded heartily, "Does that look familiar to you? Me too!"
"It's the two separate mountains and the suspension bridge again, I read earlier that the mountain is so steep that there's no path at all, and the only way to get down is the suspension bridge, and the only way for vacationers to get out is to walk across the bridge to this side and then go down the mountain."
"If the same thing happens as last time...blah, blah, blah..."
The short-haired high school girl, who had all her intuition because she was afraid of being too smart, covered her mouth seriously and changed her words urgently, "How could something similar to the last time happen!"
'Although Mr. Mirai is a detective, but it's not the same as that Kudō guy's kind of detective who goes to the scene of a murder every day, it's a casual type of detective who doesn't need to take on commissions at all but only needs to receive offerings, so he won't be able to run into another murder again... I'm not so unfortunate that I can't have even a little bit of good memories, am I?!!!'
She didn't say it out loud, but the long mental journey almost materialized into solid words that bounced off her face and into the cool air that was sucked in.
Mouri Korogō was opening the trunk to get the luggage.
Ichijō Mirai glanced over and confirmed to Suzuki Sonoko, "Your commission, is 'fearing that the two girls attending the party will be in danger, so I commissioned a detective to protect them', right?"
"Yes, yes," Suzuki Sonoko, still covering her mouth and revealing only a pair of round eyes, as if quietly probing, nodded her head repeatedly as she listened, "My prayer is, ah no, my commission is this!"
Staring at Ichijō Mirai's expression, which did not fluctuate much, she was keenly aware of something, and inquired in a low voice, "What have you discovered?"
"Could it be that there is an unfortunate scent and an unsettling omen in the air?"
"Or is there someone in the villa who has a lot of blood on his hands?"
The voice was very low and the tone was very serious. He was obviously the only one there, but he was speaking in a quiet manner. The content of his words was even more amazing. It was as if he had drawn a fortune stick that said "very bad luck". He was horrified and quickly donated a large sum of money to calm himself down. While drawing the fortune stick again, he kept muttering to the gods what would happen to him and whether the donation could help save his believers.
But she wasn't at a shrine, she wasn't dealing with a god, she was dealing with a human being.
At that, Ichijō Mirai took his eyes off the drawbridge and slowly looked at Suzuki Sonoko.
He suddenly realized: no wonder he was called 'Fox' every time he reopened, it wasn't that he was so fox-like that even a child would recognize it in a second, it was Suzuki Sonoko himself who was too middle-aged Japanese-style.
"I almost forgot," He said, relieved, "this is Japan."
Right, the blonde who has fun and specializes in blindfolding and handcuffing people in public?
Right, the middle-aged guy with a mouth full of late-stage senior believers?