The Bizarre Detective Agency Chapter 58

[Belfast. A steady drizzle has fallen all day, and meteorologists predict it will continue until the start of the rainy season.]

Lu Li set the newspaper aside, the crisp rustle of its pages disturbing the quiet.

The overcast sky choked out the sun, and the steady streams of rain tracing paths down the windowpane confirmed the downpour was far from over.

A quiet stillness filled the dimly lit living room.

Perhaps because the rain had been falling for three straight days, a damp chill hung in the air. Anna was tidying up, trying to drive out some of the moisture.

Though her movements were clumsy, her pretty face was etched with concentration.

The cozy atmosphere was short-lived, shattered by a sudden knock on the door.

Knock, knock, knock.

Anna, who had been about to open a bedroom window to air out the room, froze, instantly on alert.

Michelle, who had been hovering over the bed, drifted down and floated silently into the living room.

She seemed oblivious to the sound at the front door. Mechanically, she turned her head and, her face a blank mask, spoke toward the empty dining table:

"Mom, Dad, I'm off to my interview."

She paused for a few seconds, as if listening to a reply, and then a smile touched her impassive face. Nodding, she replied, "Yes, I'll be back before noon."

She passed through the door, drifted down the dark corridor, and emerged onto the street, gliding through the noise and bustle outside.

Beneath the overcast sky and through the drizzling rain, Michelle followed the familiar route she had taken countless times in life, floating down the bustling street.

A carriage pulled up to the curb, and the coachman leaned out. "Where to?" he asked.

"Gasner Street, please."

"Sailor Street," a woman standing before the carriage replied.

"Hop in," the coachman said, pulling back the flap and helping the woman aboard.

Michelle followed her in.

"It's so cold out there..." the coachman shivered, feeling a gust of frigid wind sweep into the carriage.

"Still, it's better than it was a few days ago. I thought I was going to have an asthma attack," the woman complained, pulling her wool coat tighter around herself.

Twenty minutes later, the carriage came to a stop on Sailor Street.

While the woman haggled with the coachman over the fare, the girl slipped out of the carriage and began to drift aimlessly down the street.

She unconsciously avoided passersby, as if she were still alive. But no one could see her. People who passed her only felt a piercing chill and shuddered involuntarily.

Upon reaching a certain spot, Michelle, as if drawn by some unseen force, floated through the front door of a house.

...

Lu Li sat with an impassive expression. Across from him was the girl he had seen yesterday. Her face, too, remained utterly devoid of emotion.

Anna did not share the composure of the man and the ghost. Her pretty face was a mixture of disgust and a hint of sympathy.

"Shall we continue the story?" Lu Li asked.

"Yes."

"Please, continue."

There were still two hours until noon—more than enough time for her to tell a very long story.

Michelle picked up her story where she had left off the day before: at the very beginning of the disaster.

One of her classmates told Michelle she had seen her father going into an aristocrat's mansion. Michelle didn't say anything, because her father was simply there to repair the roof.

Her silence was taken as confirmation.

The next day, two students got into a fight at the academy over some personal disagreement. Moved by a sense of justice, Michelle tried to break it up, but she was accidentally pushed, and fell, scraping her knee.

The girls stopped fighting for a moment. Just then, a voice called out from the crowd of onlookers, "Her father's an official at the city hall! If you don't listen to her, she'll tell him and he'll have you punished!"

The students began to whisper among themselves. A teacher arrived and dispersed the crowd, and that was the end of it.

Temporarily.

A few days later, a rumor began to circulate in the next class over. It claimed that a student had scraped her knee after being pushed and was now demanding a thousand shillings in compensation from the girl who did it, threatening to have her father at city hall pressure the academy if she didn't pay up.

The accused student was from a poor family, and she was beaten several times because of the incident.

Although Polis Aristocratic Academy was a school for the nobility, seventy to eighty percent of its students were children from common families. This led to a predictable result: the rumor spread through the school like wildfire.

Soon, the "culprit," Michelle, was identified.

A barrage of caustic remarks rained down on her: "Of course, the children of officials, these aristocrats, are so high and mighty! Even a scratch on them is worth a fortune!" "I know her, she just enrolled this year." "They say she's a poor student, and a professor gives her good marks only because of her influential father." "Who knows where she really got that scrape on her knee? Maybe in some old nobleman's bedroom?"

At the time, Michelle suspected nothing. She had, of course, heard the story that was spreading through the school, and had even been outraged by it.

She simply had no idea that she was the subject of it.

The rumors continued to wander, take root, and sprout, finally bearing fruit. The fruit fell to the ground, and once again took root, and sprouted...

Perhaps because life at the Academy was dull for these young men and women, new rumors surfaced. Someone claiming to be a former classmate of Michelle's revealed that she had given birth to a child at fourteen, and that her father had moved them to Belfast out of shame. To lend the story an air of authenticity, the rumors even specified the child's hair color and age.

The young students, of course, couldn't tell truth from fiction. No one, for instance, questioned how the source of the rumor could remember every detail with such precision.

Instead of thinking for themselves, these people preferred to follow the herd.

"The black sheep effect," Lu Li murmured at that moment.

When a person is part of a group, their individual consciousness is supplanted by that of the collective.

The girl's faint aura began to shift. A new, icy chill started to permeate the detective agency.

"Flowers of evil bloom in the darkest of corners," she said.

The unsuspecting Michelle gradually began to notice a change in how her classmates treated her. Her new friends started avoiding her, students at the Academy constantly stared and whispered as she passed, and some of the boys would give her leering looks.

A classmate who also lived on Ira Street finally told her the truth.

The naive Michelle thought she could solve the problem on her own. She tried to explain things to her friends, to convince them that she didn't have a lover and had certainly never given birth to a child.

But her words fell on deaf ears.

The rumors continued to spread, spilling beyond the Academy's walls.

Countless outsiders joined the discussion, muddying the waters further and adding their own gossip to the mix. "Everything" about Michelle became public knowledge, thanks to the ever-growing rumors. It came out that her father worked for the city's department of education. Someone claiming to be Michelle's ex-boyfriend declared that the child couldn't be his, because he had brown hair, while the boy's was red.

At the time, Michelle was in incredible pain and felt completely helpless, but that wasn't even the worst of it.

The worst was yet to come.