The deeper we wade into this arc, the more I’m convinced that Nursie is somewhere close to the heart of this mystery. That she’s suspicious is so obvious that it almost makes you believe it has to be a feint, but… I don’t think so. She’s drugging Jougorou – and in more than just the normal nursie way – I think that much is almost indisputable. And as Osanai is usually a step ahead of Kobato-kun I think she’s figured this out. That would explain the “water the flowers” note, because she wants him to do something with his drinking water besides drink it.

Also – roquefort cheese chocolate? In any case, the narrative continues to flit back and forth between the current investigation and the middle school version. Mostly the latter, which confirms that it’s closely connected to the present mystery (though not by Yuki, I would wager – not as a target anyway). Jougorou gets some more intel from a Hisaka badminton teammate, namely that he had a girlfriend from the girls team named Okahashi-san. And that he had a charm on his bag, which he removed the day before the accident. It should also be noted that even at this age Jougorou was a skilled manipulator (more than Yuki, in this sense).

Present Jougorou gets a note from Yuki informing him that Hisaka-kun hasn’t participated in a tournament for three years, which I have to think is relevant and maybe the point of the whole accident. Both Osanai-san and Fujidera-kun’s involvement seems to have been coincidental. She was climbing up the levee and walked the other way; he was following at a respectful distance thinking Hisaka was with his sister. Interestingly he specifically says younger sister, although later developments suggest the girl was actually in high school. Fujidera kept quiet because Hisaka – who seemed oddly calm in the circumstances – ordered him to (right after ordering the girl to flee the scene).

Various possibilities suggest themselves here. Most obviously the girl could be the nurse, though even allowing that such a massive coincidence would be par for the course in Shoushimin Series I think she’s too old. Maybe, as Kobato suggests, Hisaka was cheating on Okahashi with the girl and wanted to cover it up, but that seems too simple. There’s a missing piece to that puzzle, seemingly to be found in the current timeline and not the contemporaneous one.

The means by which junior Jougorou and Yuki coerce Fujidera into filling in the blanks is amusingly artful. It’s she who first gets the brainstorm that Fujidera-kun might not be finding the right uniform because it’s not a JHS uniform at all (I confess that didn’t occur to me). Another interesting layer to this is the back-and-forth between the pair of them over Yuki’s presence at the scene. She insists it’s not relevant and says it’s a secret, he withdraws the question, she agrees to answer as a reward for withdrawing the request. It’s not much of an answer (“I was thinking”) but I still tend to believe she was not directly a cause of either incident. Still, it’s fun to see their future patterns – mostly him dancing at the end of her string and enjoying it – starting to take their eventual form.