Glass Beads
By the time they arrived at the restaurant, it really was rather late, and the place had all but emptied out.
The group ordered a few dishes, which came out of the kitchen before long, and Xia Xi even pitched in to help carry some of them over. Seeing that there wasn't much left to do around the shop, she told Xiangling to sit down and eat with everyone.
"Wow, everything tastes amazing!" Mouri Ran exclaimed after taking her first bite, unable to hold back the praise.
Mouri Kogoro said nothing at all — he was simply too hungry, shoveling food into his mouth like a man possessed.
Conan, for his part, let out a quiet sigh of relief. Thank goodness this menu didn't feature any of those "specialty dishes." Sure, they tasted fine enough, but the presentation was genuinely bizarre.
Xiangling beamed at the customers' approval. "Thank you! You should come back often, okay? Next time you're free, I can make some of my specialty dishes for you. And since you're friends with Lu— ahem, with Xia Xi, I'll give you a discount!"
Ran nodded eagerly. "A restaurant this good? We'll definitely be back all the time."
Conan noticed that Xiangling sometimes got a syllable wrong when calling Xia Xi's name. She always corrected herself quickly, but he'd caught it — the first sound out of her mouth was never quite "Xia Xi," as if the girl had another name, one Xiangling knew her by far better.
And there was something else. He couldn't shake the feeling that there was some kind of connection between Xiangling and Lisa.
"Ah! I completely forgot about the soup simmering on the stove — I'll go ladle it out!" Xiangling suddenly sprang up, and the accessory at her hip knocked against the table with a crisp little chime.
Conan's eyes darted instinctively to the ornament on Xiangling's waist — and then, struck by a sudden thought, he whipped his head around toward the necklace at Lisa's chest. There it was. Xiangling and Lisa both wore similar accessories. There had to be a connection between them.
He'd met Xiangling and Lisa days apart, and the colors and settings of their trinkets were different, which was why he hadn't put it together before. But seeing the two side by side today, it was obvious at a glance that they were pieces of the same series — beads of different colors, both faintly translucent, with a pattern visible inside each one. Conan's instincts told him that pattern carried some special meaning. First things first: he wanted a clear look at the design inside the bead on Lisa's necklace.
What Conan failed to notice was that Mouri Ran, watching him stare openly at Lisa's chest, was growing darker in the face by the second — until at last she couldn't take it anymore and slammed her fist down on his head. "Conan! What do you think you're looking at?! Have you been hanging around a certain dirty old man so long that he's taught you some very bad habits?" Ran demanded, her smile terrifyingly pleasant.
Kogoro bristled at that. "Why does this come back to me?! Besides, the brat was precocious to begin with — maybe he was just born a little pervert." He set down his chopsticks, having finally taken the edge off his hunger, and felt a hankering for a drink. He called over to Xiangling, who had just returned with the soup. "Say, miss, you got any booze here?"
At the mention of alcohol, Ran abandoned Conan's reeducation mid-stream and spun around to stop her father. "Dad, it's way too late to be drinking! You'll have a headache tomorrow."
Before Kogoro could argue back, Xiangling apologetically informed them that the restaurant didn't serve alcohol, and he slumped back into his chair in utter dejection.
Seeing that her father's prospects of a drink had evaporated, Ran turned back around, ready to resume Conan's reeducation.
Conan caught her gaze swinging back to him and hurried to explain. "Ran-neechan, I was looking at Lisa-neechan's necklace! I just thought the beads on it were really unusual, that's why I kept staring — I wasn't looking at... at, um... that." He scratched his head and turned up the full wattage of his big, innocent eyes.
"Really?" Ran had, in truth, already believed him. Of course — what would a little kid like Conan know about that kind of thing? It was all Dad's fault, always pulling inappropriate stunts and making her jump to the wrong conclusions herself.
"Mm-hm, mm-hm!" Conan nodded vigorously.
Ran's expression softened. She patted Conan's head, a hint of apology in her voice. "Conan, I'm sorry — I misunderstood. But you still need to be careful, okay? You can't go staring at girls like that." She couldn't resist slipping in the lecture at the end; the last thing she wanted was for Conan to grow up into a man like her father.
Then she turned to apologize to Lisa as well.
"It's quite all right. Children love pretty beads — perfectly natural." Lisa lifted the necklace from her chest with one hand and held it up, gazing at it for a moment.
Ran found herself looking at the necklace in Lisa's hand. It was purple — such a beautiful color, lending the piece an air of nobility and mystery. The pattern inside was hazy, hard to make out, yet for some reason it made her think of that flash of violet light that streaks through the sky in a summer thunderstorm, there and gone in an instant.
Lisa glanced over at her, then unclasped the necklace and held it out. "Interested, Ran? Would you like a closer look?"
Ran accepted it carefully. "Oh — are you sure? This must be terribly valuable."
She just... took it off, that easily?
Conan had assumed Lisa would guard that necklace closely, yet here she was handing it straight into someone else's hands. Could it really not matter to her?
No. Conan trusted his own judgment. That necklace definitely held a secret.
He leaned in close to the necklace in Ran's palm, studying the bead. Inside it he could make out a symbol shaped like three comma-hooks — a magatama — or perhaps it was more like a bolt of lightning? The setting around the bead resembled a pair of wings, whereas he remembered the frame of the bead at Xiangling's waist being square. Was there some meaning to the difference in their designs? And what did the pattern inside stand for — thunder? A magatama?
Lisa took a sip of her drink and laughed carelessly. "Heh. It's nothing but a glass bead, cutie. I only wear it because it has a certain... sentimental significance to me. The thing itself isn't worth a thing."
Ran and Conan gaped at her in unison. "A glass bead?!"