Huh?
Sensei, weren't these supposed to go to Sasaki-sensei's relatives?
Well...
They asked me to handle it.
Huh?
His family said it'd be difficult to come all the way here,
so I thought I'd just ship them off in one batch.
Um, would it be all right if I took these to the family?
You want to take them?
They're his personal effects, after all.
I think it's best to deliver them personally.
To be perfectly honest,
I really wanted to know what kind of man Sasaki-sensei was,
for leaving a woman's bones here.
Something told me
that if I could understand him, I'd understand her better.
The Eighth Bone The Entrusted Bones, Part 2
That's how I felt.
What do you want?
I brought cakes. The ones Isozaki-sensei promised to get...
Um...
And I have a favor to ask.
A favor?
Thank you for doing this.
Taking them there by myself would have been really hard.
Sakurako-san, are you avoiding me, by any chance?
Did I do something?
Or is there some reason you don't want to spend any time with me?
It's nothing like that.
I'm just a bit tired.
By the way, we can't find the cat's bones.
Would you happen to know anything about that?
Cat's bones?
The specimen that was at the school.
I wouldn't know anything about a cat's bones.
No, I distinctly remember you telling me those bones belonged to a cat.
I must have been mistaken, then.
Mistaken?
Even I make mistakes, sometimes.
I am Sasaki Atsurou's older sister, Haruma Sayuki.
Please excuse me for not standing. I was born without the use of my legs.
Not at all. We're sorry to show up unannounced.
Um, so this is what we found at the school.
Thank you for taking the trouble to bring them all the way here.
Oh, not at all.
Oh!
You have unusual feet!
Pardon?
Your toes.
Your index toe is the longest,
followed by the big and middle toes.
And the ring and little toes are the same length.
This is known as a "Celtic shape."
It's very unusual.
S-Sakurako-san!
That does bring back memories.
My brother used to say the same thing.
He and his father had the same kind of feet, as well.
My uncle also says he likes looking at feet in sandals in the summer.
My brother was the same way.
I like it, too.
What are they even talking about?
I guess it broke the ice, though.
Oh, Mistletoe!
I see, so it was with my brother.
It used to be mine.
Nacchan also really liked it, so we often read it together.
Nacchan? Is that...
The woman whose bones we found?
Yes, that's right.
Sone Natsuko.
She was my caregiver and, in the past, a close friend.
I see...
In the past, huh?
At Shunkoudai, as I stand in remembrance of youth disemboweled, the autumn wind blows.
Um, is there more?
Oh, I'll take the rest out now.
This is the last one.
I see...
There were things related to the school, and clothes and such.
Should I have brought them?
Some old photos, too...
No, I just thought they'd find another set of bones.
Bones?
An animal specimen, you mean?
No...
The bones of a human... A baby.
A baby?
W-We definitely didn't see one of those.
Whose bones would they be?
S-Sakurako-san!
They'd be Nacchan's...
Natsuko's baby.
My family was a big merchant family.
One day, my father brought Natsuko home to be my caregiver.
Her mother, who worked in the red light district, had passed away,
and she didn't know who her father was, so my father took her in.
I only learned all of that later.
My brother and I became close to Natsuko immediately.
Those were the happiest days of our lives.
When I was around seventeen,
Natsuko became pregnant out of wedlock,
and she gave birth at the guest house where I was recuperating.
But it was a premature birth,
and the baby died right away.
Um, was the baby's father...
My brother seemed to have feelings for Natsuko,
but Natsuko knew her station in life.
That was how things were back then.
My brother was not the father.
In tears, Natsuko went to dispose of the poor child.
After a very long night,
Natsuko came back, pale and shaken, and told me
that my brother had found out that she'd buried the child.
Though our parents disowned him for pursuing a teaching career,
Natsuko and he did not get married.
I'm sure the incident created a rift between them.
When I married, Natsuko immediately left the household.
A few years later, we learned she'd passed away all alone,
so we accepted her bones.
My brother never forgot about Natsuko, I'm sure.
I still think about that poor baby often.
I think about how I'd like to lay Natsuko and her baby's bones to rest in our family grave.
But I see... They weren't with my brother's things...
But it's possible they are being kept elsewhere.
Mistletoe...
There's a monument to Mistletoe in Shunkoudai.
Roka
A place of significance for Roka and Mistletoe...
If someone buried anything around here,
it'd probably be at the foot of this birch tree.
What is it?
Not bones...
It looks like a music box.
I never thought they'd actually be here.
It appears the bones were unearthed once,
then placed in here.
Hmm?
What's wrong?
It's a fragment of a lumbar vertebra from an adult female.
An adult female?
Most likely, it belongs to the lady found in the resource room, Natsuko.
I see...
Sakurako-san?
Breasts.
I understand.
The mammillary process.
These two projections are called "little breasts" in Latin.
Then...
Sasaki-sensei probably put this in there.
How very like him.
So in other words, after Natsuko-san passed away,
he dug up her baby's bones, put them in a music box,
and reburied them?
Probably, yes.
What's this?
Is something wrong?
No.
Let's go back to the lady for now.
This is the music box I gave to Natsuko.
Sasaki-sensei must have received it along with her remains.
Where did you find this?
This is what you were looking for, correct?
Huh?
Then... Does this...
Now I can finally lay them to rest together, in the same grave.
That'd be best.
After all, the baby's real mother will eventually be laid to rest in the same grave, as well.
You'll be laid to rest in the same grave as Sasaki-sensei and Natsuko, won't you?
Sakurako-san, what are you implying?
Natsuko wasn't the baby's mother.
It was you.
What?
You said Natsuko went to bury the child herself.
I don't know where that may have been,
but doing so immediately after giving birth is highly risky.
Potentially life-threatening, even.
And why would she bother to give birth in your room?
That's...
That's because there was a reason it had to happen there.
The baby's big toe is the same length as its third toe.
The third toe?
In other words, the baby's foot has the same Celtic shape as yours.
The Celtic shape is quite unusual.
If we suppose Natsuko gave birth to that baby,
probability dictates that the father was...
Sasaki-sensei...
Or if not, then their father?
That's not true!
This baby just resembles its mother.
I'm the mother.
I fell in love with an acquaintance of my father's who sometimes came to visit.
Natsuko would write wonderful love letters to him for me,
and helped to make various arrangements.
When I learned he had a family of his own,
we parted ways.
But by then, I was already pregnant.
Unfortunately,
my father was trying to arrange a marriage for me.
I was at a loss, unsure of what to do, when...
The rest is as I told you before.
Natsuko protected me,
even though it meant crushing her hope of being with my brother.
Everyone's left me behind.
Before I knew it, I was all alone.
Maybe this is what I deserve.
If he loved her enough to keep her bones with him,
I wonder why Sasaki-sensei didn't get together with Natsuko-san anyway.
That's a bad habit of yours.
Huh?
Sometimes, there is more than one truth.
What do you mean?
Sasaki-sensei believed the baby was Natsuko's.
If he thought his sister was the mother, he wouldn't have put Natsuko-san's bone in there.
Because of that belief,
upon seeing the Celtic foot associated with his family,
he may have thought he and Natsuko shared the same father.
Huh?
But she said Natsuko-san didn't have a father.
She didn't know who her father was, so my father took her in.
Oh, I see.
It would explain the circumstances behind how she'd ended up in their family.
That's true.
She said her father brought her into their home.
Based on the bones' condition,
he must have dug them up a few years later.
That's when he made the assumption that he and Natsuko were half-siblings.
Oh...
So that was why.
I still don't think it's normal behavior to keep the bones
of a person you loved, or to dig bones up.
But Sakurako-san understands how Sasaki-sensei felt.
Oh, Sakurako-san!
It's okay!
I can take the bus home.
I just remembered I have some research to do.
I think the story's set in Asahikawa.
If I recall, there's an info panel about it in Hokuchin Memorial Hall.
I'm sorry to keep bothering you like this.
This is Natsuko and me. It brings back memories.
Um, could you look at the back?
At Shunkoudai, as I stand in remembrance of youth disemboweled, the autumn wind blows.
I looked up the meaning of this poem at Hokuchin Memorial Hall.
It's thought to have been composed by Tokutomi Roka at Shunkoudai,
when he learned the person he'd based the protagonist of Mistletoe on had died.
So you knew?
This poem expresses the grief Roka felt over saying goodbye.
It seems so.
I'd mistakenly assumed the poem was something negative,
so I didn't give it to you at first. I'm sorry.
I see!
That's just like Nacchan. She loved books so much.
Realizing she didn't have long to live,
she may have written this on the back of the photo, as a farewell.
I'm sorry.
I'm so sorry, Nacchan.
Sometimes, there is more than one truth, huh?
More than one...
Radius...
I get it now!
You've said that everything has a "bone" to it, a reason, correct?
What do you mean?
I'm talking about the reason you stole the bones from the school.
I'll hear you out.
If I think about it,
it's odd for you to steal bones of a cat, something that isn't even that rare.
After looking at the poster about bones in the science room, I realized...
The ulna is one of two bones that connect the elbow to the wrist.
The other is the radius.
The reason you chose that name
over the humerus or the femur...
Maybe there was another cat named after the ulna's complement, the radius?
That's the only kind of cat whose bones you could possibly want.
Those cat bones that you stole from the school...
They belong to Radius.
And there's one more thing.
Continue.
Sakurako-san, you're an alumna of my high school, aren't you?
Why do you think that?
Because that would connect the bones.
At the festival, you found the science room without getting lost.
No.
This is not something Sasaki-sensei put together.
You already knew Sasaki-sensei's name.
Further, Meisei High School was an all-girls school ten years ago.
A lady like you might well have attended an all-girls school.
Not bad for you, boy.
You may lack insight, but you have powers of observation.
It only seemed a little odd,
so I'd forgotten all about it.
You may be far more suited to detective work than I.
Huh?
I learned my skills from Sasaki-sensei.
He was a great teacher.
Like you said, this is Radius.
I'd wanted to see him,
but I never intended to keep him with me.
Then why?
Repairs were necessary.
I just wanted to bring these bones back because they were special.
Then you should have just said so.
It was you.
Huh?
It was your talk about when the cat was alive
that made me not want to return him.
Ulna and Radius were always close. They were inseparable.
I wanted to keep them together, like before.
This specimen could be thought of as mine to begin with!
What's wrong with my keeping it?
This is so absurd.
I'm acting just like an emotional, foolish human being.
Even dogs have better self-control.
It was raining that day.
Ulna and Radius died after being poisoned by someone.
Both of them suffered terribly.
Sasaki-sensei didn't ask me anything,
but he understood what I wanted.
He was an extremely gifted osteologist.
After that, he began to teach me his craft in depth.
He said that I was his one and only beloved apprentice.
So this specimen holds special significance, as the start of it all.
He wasn't one to engage in unnecessary talk,
but just once, he talked about his would-be partner in life.
He said that, while it wasn't meant to be,
they were finally together after her death.
She was finally with him.
That's what he told me.
So, by then, her bones were already...
To him, death was peace.
It meant becoming complete.
I believe he was, indeed, happy.
You don't need to return Radius.
What?
I already talked to Isozaki-sensei.
You can keep them in exchange for some fox bones.
Boy...
S-So let's not keep Radius shut up in this box.
Let's put him together.
I'll help you.
Gran!
Please make some tea for the boy!
So, um... Where do we begin?
Don't do anything unreasonable. This is beyond your control.
I don't intend to get in too deep.
I only want to know the truth.
If I don't,
I'll...