Mrs. Ogata, who had suddenly been singled out: "..."
"Mom?" The Ogata brothers saw her expression and immediately understood everything. "It really was you? Why would you do all this?!"
Jiang Xia looked at Mrs. Ogata. "You must have associated the song in the music box with the guqin in the old man's room. So during dinner, you used cleaning the guest room as an excuse to leave the dining room and set up these mechanisms.
"Once a car finally passed by the back courtyard, and Miss Haruna and the others saw the black shadow in the window and screamed, you followed everyone into the guest room. Then you pushed open that seldom-used paper door, triggering the mechanism that dropped the guqin.
"When everyone heard the commotion and rushed toward the room where the guqin had been placed, you deliberately lagged behind amid the chaos and tore down the black paper silhouette stuck to the glass window in the corridor.
"At the same time, you ran to the Landline Phone and quickly sent Miss Haruna's Pager a message that said, 'I'm waiting for you, Haruna.'
"You thought that by creating the illusion that the late Mr. Aki-Satoru and his wife were haunting the house, you could frighten Miss Haruna into giving up on those stamps completely and staying far away from all of you.
"But contrary to your expectations, your eldest son happened to sneak into that room at the time. The falling guqin landed squarely on him and nearly caused a Murder Case."
Ogata Younger Brother refused to believe it. "But I remember that not long after we saw my brother lying on the ground, Mom ran over too. She shouldn't have had time to clean up that silkworm thread stretching across several rooms—could someone else have made the