by Cai Jun
“Sorry, I must have read too much Detective Conan. My mom runs a bookstore. We have tons of suspense books. My dream is to be a policeman.”
“I thought the killer had broken in. If you weren’t sitting there, I might have shot you.” He made a gun using his forefinger and thumb and pointed at the young boy’s head. “Just kidding, I wouldn’t do that.” His eyes were very calm, like he was holding a real gun.
Si Wang seemed really afraid, however, and handed over the keys. “Sorry, I won’t come here again.”
Ye Xiao watched the dark night outside the window. “I’m in charge of Huang Hai’s cases now.”
“Please promise me you’ll catch that evil person. You must avenge Huang Hai’s death!”
“It is my job to do so.”
“Can I be your assistant? I have lots of useful information!”
“Like that damn DVD store?” Ye Xiao shook his head, his eyes finally revealing some emotion: sad frustration. “Sorry, I’m not blaming you. You did very well. I should thank you for bringing us closer to the killer.”
“I already said this many times. A friend of mine told me about it. You guys questioned her, too.”
“Right—Yi Yu. I talked to her just this morning.”
“Did you scare her?”
Ye Xiao grimaced. “More like she scared me. What a weird kid. She didn’t cooperate at all, even though she said all the right things.”
“Can I go home now?” The young man walked to the door, carrying his backpack.
Ye Xiao called after him. “Hey, Si Wang, famous detective.”
Si Wang stopped and Ye Xiao strolled over to hand him one of his business cards. “If you know of anything, or you ever need any help, call me. Anytime. I’m always working.”
Si Wang got into the elevator and took a deep breath. He reached into one of his pockets. It was good that Ye Xiao didn’t search him. He’d hidden a strand of necklace that had been in Huang Hai’s cabinet.
The necklace was tagged: “June 22, 1995. Evidence from Shen Ming murder scene. Found in victim’s hands.”
CHAPTER 43
Two weeks after Chinese New Year—Rice Dumpling Festival 2011.
Ma Li hadn’t been back in this city for a long time. He streamed The Walking Dead on his computer, and felt a real kinship with the show.
His cell phone rang. A voice said, “Hey, this is Shen Ming.”
It was a clear, youthful voice—and it didn’t belong to either the elementary school student or the high school teacher who’d died sixteen years earlier.
“You—”
“We haven’t seen each other for a while. I’ve missed you.”
Panicked silence.
“You there?” asked the voice.
Shen Ming or Si Wang? Ma Li felt trapped. “I’m here.”
“I want to see you. Right now.”
He paused. It was eight o’clock, and he’d just finished dinner.
Before agreeing, instructions were given. “Let’s meet at the bird-and-flower flea market. You know where it is?”
“The old Workers’ Cultural Palace?”
“Yes.”
Ma Li wanted to say more, but the other person hung up.
Half an hour later, the moon was hanging low. People said the Double Seventh Day was Chinese Valentine’s Day. But according to tradition, two weeks after Chinese New Year was the real lovers’ day. In ancient times, single people could only meet at this time.
The bird-and-flower flea market sold plants and pets. Tonight it was decorated with flower lanterns. Ma Li had aged well and still looked good with a clean shave and longer hair. He stood alone by the entrance, watching the teenagers coming in and out and feeling unsure about everything.
“Ma Li.”
Alarmed, Ma Li turned around to find a good-looking young man. The boy was unrecognizable. He’d grown up and looked completely different. His chin had whiskers and his Adam’s apple bulged. He no longer needed to look up at Ma Li.
Ma Li wondered if he should call the young man Shen Ming or Si Wang. They hadn’t seen one another for five years. In early 2006, Ma Li had helped the boy complete his revenge against the Gu family and helped strip Lu Zhongyue of illegal assets. As a result, he’d made tens of millions of yuan himself and gone abroad to start a business.
As far as he knew, Si Wang’s and He Qingying’s accounts hadn’t grown by one cent.
Ma Li had been scared to contact the boy again. Whether or not the kid was possessed by Shen Ming’s ghost, he was afraid to get more involved. Everything he made could disappear as easily as Lu Zhongyue’s money had. He could have been killed.
“As you’ve seen, I’m still looking for Lu Zhongyue. The truth is a lot more complicated.”
It was him. A young man’s face but talking like a grown-up—virtually the same as Mr. Shen.
The two walked past a stone bridge. Groups of couples were trying to guess the riddles on the lanterns. Fireworks flew overhead, and bits of those would fall and illuminate all the happy faces.
“Sixteen years ago, this was still the Workers’ Cultural Palace,” Si Wang said. “There was a stamp market right where we’re standing. If you were a stamp collector, you could buy random stamps and hope they’d appreciate. But usually they were worthless the next time you came to the market.”
“I remember borrowing twenty yuan from you to buy a set of Romance of the Three Kingdoms stamps,” Ma Li said. “I don’t know what happened to those after I graduated high school.”
Si Wang nodded in a way that was beyond his years. “Kids today have no idea what stamp collecting is. That summer day in 1992 when I first became a teacher, you also reported to Nanming High. You were wearing a gray shirt, blue track pants, and Saint Seiya stickers on your backpack. I found out later that your favorite was Dragon Shiryu. You were tall and had big eyes. All the girls liked you.”
“I almost forgot. It was so many years ago.”
A biting wind blew. Ma Li watched puffs of hot air escape from his mouth and rise in the night sky, joining the fireworks.
“The army training was on the hottest days of the summer,” Si Wang said. “I remember the intense sun. The oleander trees were the students’ only shade. Everyone went to the shade during the breaks, but they still sweated so much, especially with those uniforms. You had heatstroke. I carried you to the hospital. You didn’t have enough money to be admitted.”
The conversation made Ma Li touch his cheek unconsciously. “Now I’m too pale.”
“You were the first student to discover the Demon Girl Zone.”
“In eleventh grade, there was a girl from another class who drowned while swimming. Everyone ran to that abandoned factory at midnight and burned all the stuff there to memorialize her. Everyone bought a stack of joss paper. They said the place was haunted and that the dead could get blessings and the living could stay protected. That was the Demon Girl Zone’s only purpose for us.”
“It’s where I died.”
Ma Li seemed lost in his memories. “I had a stack of books by my bed, all sorts of reference books and an Einstein biography. After dark, I’d go to Mr. Shen’s room and talk about relativity and the origin of the universe. We’d talk about everything in the Milky Way, black holes, white holes, worm holes, neutron stars, quark stars, soliton stars, dark matter, dark energy.”
“I knew you were an odd kid back then. You studied like crazy before the college entrance exams. You studied with Zhang Mingsong. Your dream was to attend Tsinghua University, which wasn’t easy to get into. But Mr. Zhang graduated from there, and he was an elite math teacher. One night you were crying in the study room. I asked you what was wrong. You only said, ‘I don’t want to go to Dead Poets Society anymore.’ ”
“Shut up!” Ma Li acted like he wanted to cover Si Wang’s mouth.
“I’m
Shen Ming. I’ve been sitting on this boy’s shoulders for the last sixteen years, and I’ve been watching you!”
Another blast of fireworks filled the sky. Si Wang was like a fighting dog. He stared at Ma Li until the grown man lowered his head in fear.
“Don’t look at me. I’m no longer Ma Li the student. But you’re still Mr. Shen. I’m envious.”
“You envy me? For what? For being murdered when I was twenty-five? For wasting away in the Demon Girl Zone for three days? You envy me for being a lost ghost, living through Si Wang? Do you think I will leave him now and possess you?”
“No—”
“You’re still afraid of me? Ha!”
“To be honest, I used to dream of the dead Mr. Shen. But now I dream of the ten-year-old Si Wang.”
The young man stroked his face. “Am I that scary?”
“In 2005, you manipulated so many people and arranged to bring down a family. You gave me their secrets, telling me about insider trading and bribing officials. I was terrified that I’d be destroyed. But you were so confident, like the Gu family was already sentenced to death.”
“They’re the ones who betrayed me sixteen years ago. I swore I’d have revenge the day I was born. I had a list: Gu Qiusha, Gu Changlong, Lu Zhongyue, Zhang Mingsong.”
Ma Li tensed. The list included Zhang Mingsong?
“So from the first day you met Gu Qiusha, you’d planned all this?”
“I used everything I knew about Gu Qiusha to make her fall in love with me, like I had romanced her in my last life. After I was adopted, I discovered all of their problems and figured out all their weaknesses, including Lu Zhongyue’s.”
“Like the pills you had me give Lu Zhongyue. He was really destroyed.”
A cruel look passed the young man’s face. “I was trapped in the body of an elementary school student then. I needed a helper I could trust. Someone who could control the situation, and make Lu Zhongyue act a certain way to help destroy the Gu family. Lu couldn’t escape, either. I thought about it and decided you were best.”
“Did you plan the school reunion and all the online chats, too?”
“Too bad Long Zhongyue still got away. I underestimated him.”
“You hate him that much?”
“After the Gu family went bankrupt, I figured out the combination to Gu Changlong’s safe. There was a letter from 1995. The letter faked my handwriting to look like a letter from me to He Nian—my college classmate. He Nian worked at the Education Bureau and then Erya. He went missing for two years before his body was found by the river. Maybe it was jealousy, but He Nian backstabbed me with that letter. The only person who could have faked my handwriting was Lu Zhongyue.”
“Lu Zhongyue and He Nian plotted against you?”
“I didn’t want either of them to die. It’s too late for He Nian. But I want Lu Zhongyue to live and suffer. That’s how he can pay for what they did to me.”
“Mr. Shen, you’re scaring me right now.”
“Humans are like animals. When everyone around you is cruel, your killer instinct comes out.”
They returned to the flea market entrance. Ma Li took out his car keys and said, “Let me drive you home.”
He had a black Porsche SUV. The young man got into the front passenger seat and buckled up. The stereo was playing Leslie Cheung’s “I.”
Fireworks rose above the car. Neither man spoke another word.
CHAPTER 44
June 9, 2011.
Nanming High hadn’t changed much, except for all the high-rises around it, creating an expansive and cluttered skyline.
She signed in with the doorman and crossed the familiar sports field. It was almost summer break. The students were preparing to go home, but they turned to look at her as she passed in her white dress. Her face was as even as ivory. Her old-fashioned bangs and shiny almond eyes made her look like a goddess whose real age was impossible to guess.
The fence at the edge of the sports field was still lined with rose bushes. She stood by them and petals falling on her face turned the scene into a simple, beautiful watercolor. She plucked a few petals and crushed them into a red ball, then ground that into the dirt.
“Fallen like mud and ground like dust, only the scent remains.” She whispered this line from the poet Lu You, and remembered a day from sixteen years ago: June 19, 1995.
It was the rainy season, and it always rained after lunch. She was in Section 2 of the senior class. Pacing by the sports field, she ran into the dazed Mr. Shen. The man who had just lost everything looked at her with an unreadable expression. He backed away.
“Don’t talk to me . . . don’t come any closer.” Shen Ming avoided her eyes. “I’m not a teacher anymore.”
“I heard you’ll have to leave. When will you go?”
“Tonight—eight o’clock.”
“Can it be later? I’ll wait for you at 10:00 p.m. at the Demon Girl Zone.”
“Demon Girl Zone?” He looked at the petals at his feet.
“There’s something I need to tell you, but it’ll be better to tell you later.”
She looked around, careful of eavesdroppers. Why ten o’clock? Because she needed to go over the school’s fence. Part of it was low and easy to flip over, but people would see her if she did it any earlier.
“Fine, I promise you. I need to tell you something, too.”
The eighteen-year-old girl went deeper into the bush, brushing back her hair. “Ten o’clock, Demon Girl Zone.”
That was the last time she saw Shen Ming. He had been so preoccupied. Thinking about it now, she wondered if it was because he’d been thinking about the murder he ended up committing that night.
She was Ouyang Xiaozhi.
He went to the Demon Girl Zone.
Then he died.
Sixteen years later, she was still here. But where was he? In another life? Or was he a ghost?
Ouyang Xiaozhi straightened her hair and walked to the teachers’ building, heading for the top floor. She knocked on an office door.
“Come in.”
Sitting behind the desk was Nanming High’s most famous teacher. Most people would be flustered by her stunning beauty, but Zhang Mingsong seemed unaffected.
“Mr. Zhang, I’m Ouyang Xiaozhi. I’m here to report for my first day.”
“Ms. Ouyang, welcome to Nanming High. I got your file from the Education Bureau.”
She nodded at Mr. Zhang politely and looked outside at the multipurpose building. “It’s great being back at the alma mater as a teacher!”
“You graduated in 1995, right? I think I remember you. It doesn’t look like you’ve changed much all these years later.”
Zhang Mingsong spoke in an official manner. He’d aged well and didn’t seem much older. A giant bookshelf stood behind him. She remembered his face from the college entrance exams.
“You were always my idol. I’ve wanted to be a teacher ever since attending high school here. I went to the Teachers’ College as a Chinese major. Then I went to Xihai as a volunteer and taught six years of high school Chinese at a remote village there. After that, I worked for another six years at a city high school. I’ve been a teacher for twelve years now.”
“That’s all very admirable.” His voice darkened. “Now, Ms. Ouyang, I read your old school file and I see that your homeroom teacher was Mr. Shen.”
Xiaozhi frowned. “Yes, that’s correct. Everything about that was so sad and awful.”
“Let’s not talk about the past anymore. I’ll take you to the administrative office so you can complete all the paperwork.”
Half an hour later, Ouyang Xiaozhi had finished all of her first-day procedures and was ready to be Nanming High’s Chinese teacher.
Zhang Mingsong seemed a bit standoffish. As they parted, he coldly shook her hand and walked away without another
word.
She exited through the school gates and crossed the busy Nanming Road. She didn’t leave right away; instead, she thought back to twenty years ago. The building behind her disappeared—concrete, steel, and tiles flew into the sky. It was like the end of the world. After the universe of dust and mud fell away, the impoverished huts that used to line the road were all that remained.
June of 1988, not long after she first saw Shen Ming.
Fire.
An unassuming match turned into a ball of fire. Black smoke and dust fanned into flames. It only took a few minutes for the fire to turn uncontrollable, destroying everything in its path. Flames lit up the forest like it was day-night.
Coughing, yelling, cursing, screaming, crying, sounds like firecrackers . . .
She was just eleven. The lethal fumes filled her nose and mouth. She always thought people burned to death in a fire, but now she realized they actually choked to death from the smoke. She instinctively tried to stop breathing in, coughing as she ran. Tears streaked her face, partly from the smoke, partly from regret and guilt.
The smell of burning flesh. The illegal huts made from cardboard and wastepaper were very flammable. The smell of burning rubber tires sickened her. Just as she was about to lose consciousness, that man appeared again.
He rushed to her like a ball of fire. In fact, he charged right into a ball of fire to get to her. He held her tight and ran through the flames.
She leaned against his chest, listening to his heart racing and wishing she could melt with the fire.
He carried her out of it.
She opened her ash-streaked eyes. The night sky was bright with the fiery glow. Stars still twinkled, and the moon looked even more beautiful.
As she regained her breath and took in some fresh air, she recognized her savior. It was the same man who’d rescued her from the Demon Girl Zone.
“We’re still alive,” eighteen-year-old Shen Ming said.
She looked at his smoke-smeared face, his slightly burned face and scalp. She fought herself to say, “I didn’t mean to do this.”
She felt his heartbeat speed up. He shook his head sadly. “Remember, don’t say anything!”