The Vanished Gold Coins
After Xiayu left, the building sank back into silence, its dusty corners and scattered debris settling into the stillness of a place that looked as though no one had set foot inside for years.
The sky slowly darkened, and the moon rose.
A while later, four small figures appeared on the scene.
Just as in the original story, Conan cracked the cipher on the treasure map through his own sharp wits and tracked down the location of the treasure.
Conan walked to the exact spot beneath it and found the maple leaf gold coin Xiayu had deliberately left behind. He looked up — sure enough, several bulging sacks hung suspended from the ceiling. Those, presumably, held the rest of the coins.
Genta and the others spotted the coin on the floor too. "Ah—it's treasure! We found the treasure!"
Wild with excitement, Genta rushed forward to snatch it up.
At that moment, a hand darted in ahead of him and plucked the coin away — one of the Italian bandits. The three of them had been tailing Conan and the children the whole way, and had followed them straight to the treasure.
What came next unfolded exactly as it had in the anime: all four of the children were tied up. And it was here that the Detective Boys carried out their very first collaborative operation — working together, they sawed through the rope holding up the coin sacks, sending them crashing down onto the three bandits. Only this time, what knocked the crooks cold wasn't a rain of gold coins, but the stones Xiayu had packed into the sacks before she left.
Conan and the others cheered in unison at the sight. "We did it!"
Then, abruptly, something snagged in Conan's mind — what had tumbled out of those sacks wasn't gold at all, but stones. Someone had gotten to the coins before they did.
But this was no time to obsess over the coins' whereabouts. There was no telling when the bandits would come to, he and the kids were still tied up, and none of them stood a chance against the crooks in a fight.
The urgent priority was finding a phone and calling the police to have these three taken into custody.
Conan and Genta's group raced to the station and explained the situation, and Inspector Megure was quickly dispatched to the scene, where he arrested all three bandits.
It was also the Detective Boys' official debut, and Inspector Megure praised the children for their part in catching the criminals.
One thing, however, remained bitterly incomplete: afterward, the police combed the entire building from top to bottom, and still no trace of the stolen maple leaf gold coin turned up. Whoever had taken it had swapped in stones — but who, and why, nobody could say.
To this day, the fate of the maple leaf gold coin remains a mystery.
On the walk to school the next morning, Conan was still turning the previous day's events over in his head.
He retraced the cipher on the treasure map and every step of his own deduction. He had, without question, solved it correctly — the gold coin inside that building, and the sacks hanging from the ceiling, were proof enough of that.
But now the coin was gone. Who had taken it? And how had they known where it was?
Conan cast his mind back to the building's interior the day before. He distinctly remembered that when he and Ayumi and the others arrived, there had been no sign anyone had passed through recently. Could the coin have been taken long ago?
As a matter of fact, Conan harbored a few suspicions about Natsume Xiayu — the woman they'd happened to run into the day before.
Setting aside Genta and the other kids and the bandits themselves, she was the only one who had seen the cipher on the treasure map.
And yet it seemed implausible. Finding the treasure required the neon lights that only came on at night. He himself had cracked the code as fast as anyone could, and he'd never once crossed paths with Xiayu along the way. Surely she couldn't have solved the cipher almost immediately after seeing the map... could she?
Even so, Conan couldn't quite shake her from the suspect list. He decided that after school, he'd go back to the street where they'd met and see if he could find her — and, if he did, probe her a little.
When the final bell rang, Conan made to bolt for the door.
Instead, Genta's hand clamped down on him with lightning reflexes.
"Conan, what's gotten into you today? You've been out of it all day," Genta said.
"Yeah, we called you just now and you didn't even hear us," Mitsuhiko added.
Ayumi looked worried. "Conan, did something happen? Are you stuck on some kind of problem?"
Conan hurried to reassure them. "Ah, no, it's nothing. There's just something I want to check on real quick."
Genta leaned in close. "You're not planning to ditch the rest of the Detective Boys and go solve this all by yourself, are you?"
"Really, I'm not." Cornered by three relentless kids who plainly wouldn't let it go until he answered, Conan finally admitted — without breathing a word of his suspicions — that he meant to look for Xiayu-neechan from yesterday.
"Aww—no fair, Conan! We wanna see Xiayu-neechan again too," Genta groaned.
"Yeah! She left so fast yesterday, we don't even know where she lives," Ayumi said.
At that, the three of them exchanged a look of perfect, unspoken accord and shouted all at once: "Then the Detective Boys' second official operation begins now! Objective—find Xiayu-neechan!"
With that, Genta took point and marched off toward their destination.
Conan sighed and had no choice but to follow.
Back on yesterday's street, the three of them stared at the crowds flowing back and forth and found themselves at a complete loss. "Conan, there's so many people. Where do we even start looking?"
Conan thought for a moment. "We could ask the staff at the shops around here — especially the cafés and places like that. Xiayu-neechan might have stopped in to rest somewhere. She's pretty striking-looking, and it hasn't been that long, so someone might still remember her. We might pick up a lead."
"Mm-hm." Genta gave his analysis a nod, swept his gaze around, and immediately spotted one. "Oh, look—there's one over there! Let's go!"
He was off before he'd even finished speaking.
Ayumi and Mitsuhiko tore after him.
"Honestly..." Conan sighed and trailed behind them, because what else could he do?
Inside the café, Conan sought out a waitress who looked like she had a patient streak, walked up to her, and asked, "Hey there, miss? Can I ask you something?"
Seeing a group of little kids, the waitress crouched down and answered with a smile. "Of course you can, sweetie. What would you like to know?"
"Miss, did you see a really pretty lady here yesterday? She was wearing yellow and white, and she had golden hair — really eye-catching."
"Her eyes were golden too, like sunshine. They were so pretty," Ayumi added to the description.
The moment she heard those details, a face surfaced in the waitress's mind. "You mean Natsume Xiayu, don't you?"