Following Mu Huaitong"s directions, we finally dug up some bones before dawn. They were definitely human bones, including a femur and ribs. The rest of the bones were still buried deep in the pile of garbage, but this was enough to report a case.
As the sky gradually lightened, Mu Huaitong stood by the car watching us, a pale smile on her lips.
"It"s time for you to leave," Ning Tiance said suddenly.
"Oh, yes," I said, looking at my watch. "Xiao Tong, you haven"t slept all night. You should go home and rest. Since Lu Guangxi has nothing to do with you, you should keep clear of this and leave it to me to call the police."
"What are you going to say to the police? You were digging through garage in the middle of the night?" Xiao Tong asked.
"Well..." I looked at the pile of garbage I"d been rummaging through. I really couldn"t find a reason.
"Teacher Shen is so honest and upright, of course he can"t think of a means for deceiving people," Mu Huaitong said with a smile, "but it doesn"t matter. Finding the bones is enough. Make Lu Guangxi hold Yin Yaqiu"s bones and don"t worry about the rest. I"m sure that he will find his conscience and turn himself in."
I didn"t quite understand what she meant, but Xiao Ning approved of this idea and put a bone into Lu Guangxi"s hands.
When Lu Guangxi felt the cold rib, he was at once startled into consciousness. He looked down at the bone in his hand and asked, "What is this?"
"Yin Yaqiu"s bone." I didn"t know if it was true, but I decided to trust Mu Huaitong.
"What?" He started to convulse as though he were having an epileptic fit. He foamed at the mouth and his eyes rolled up into his head.
I thought Lu Guangxi was sick. I quickly held him down and fished out my phone to dial 120.
The phone had just started to ring when Lu Guangxi suddenly reached out and turned it off. He resumed his earlier poised appearance. Holding the rib bone, he said, "There"s no need to call an ambulance. I want to turn myself in."
He took out his phone and dialed 110. "h.e.l.lo, Comrade Police Officer, I want to turn myself in. I killed my girlfriend Yin Yaqiu three years ago. I suppose this line is being recorded. I"ll tell you the whole story over the phone now."
It took him about ten minutes to tell how he had watched Yin Yaqiu bleed to death in front of his eyes, how he boiled her bones and threw them away like garbage. Then he told the police where he was, hoping that the officers would come to the dump to arrest him up.
Lu Guangxi also said that he had dug up the bones himself because of his own conscience. Xiao Ning and I hadn"t known what we were digging for, we"d only been helping.
After that, Lu Guangxi fainted again. He didn"t wake up no matter how I pinched him.
"What did you do to Manager Lu, Xiao Tong? You didn"t give him truth serum, did you? That"s illegal." I was concerned about Mu Huaitong, afraid she had involved herself somehow. But when I looked back, Mu Huaitong and the car Xiao Ning had driven here were both gone.
"Where"s Xiao Tong?" I asked.
"While you were focused on Lu Guangxi"s confession she drove my car away," Xiao Ning said. "It wasn"t suitable for her to stay here."
That was true. My own private view was that I didn"t want Mu Huaitong to be questioned by the police. She"d had a miserable experience similar to Yin Yaqiu"s. It wouldn"t be suitable for her to dig up those painful memories again.
The police arrived quickly. They collected the bones we had dug up in order to use DNA to verify the ident.i.ty of the deceased, and took me, Xiao Ning, and the comatose Manager Lu back to the police station. The skeleton was incomplete. The police would have to expend great efforts to find the rest of Yin Yaqiu"s bones among the garbage.
When we arrived at the police bureau, Yin Yaqiu"s mother was waiting at the door. She said that she had just had a dream in which her daughter told her to come to the police bureau to give evidence to help her address her grievances.
Yin Yaqiu"s mother told the police that she"d pretended to be a ghost to frighten Manager Lu. This was also because of a dream. These past few years, she had always had nightmares about her daughter being thrown into a pot and boiled. In the dreams, Yin Yaqiu wept and cried out to her in pain. Her mother couldn"t stand it anymore. She"d come to H City, then dreamt of Lu Guangxi boiling her daughter.
So she became a cleaning lady, came to our company to do the cleaning, and looked out for her chance.
"You have no education and there are no expert electricians in your family. How were you able to alter the wires so efficiently?" the police asked.
"My daughter told me," Yin Yaqiu"s mother said with a small proud smile. "She was a brilliant student at the University of Technology. After graduation, she went to work at a big company. She understood everything. She was so accomplished. I was the one who was wrong. I was greedy for a bride-price from the old w.a.n.g family next door. I wanted her to come back and get married instead of staying in the big city looking for work. I wanted the money for my son, so he could marry his fiancée. But… I didn"t want my daughter to die!"
As she spoke she began to cry bitterly there in the police bureau. She shouted, "I"m guilty. Comrade Police Officer, you should arrest me."
I was so upset that I didn"t even notice my nails digging into my flesh. Xiao Ning, who was beside me, uncurled my fingers one by one, then laced his fingers together with mine.
Xiao Ning didn"t speak. He waited with me for the police to question us. But with him by my side, I felt strong again.
With Yin Yaqiu"s mother there, the police were able to compare her DNA to the DNA extracted from the bones and confirm Yin Yaqiu"s ident.i.ty. When Lu Guangxi woke up, he denied what he had said, and resolutely refused to admit it. He said that he had been injected with hallucinogens and everything he"d said had been a lie.
However, the police found no traces of hallucinogens in his system.
When we had given our evidence, Ning Tiance and I were able to leave the police station. If there was any progress in this case in the future, the police would ask us to a.s.sist in the investigation. They hoped we would remain in H City while they were collecting evidence.
After leaving the police bureau, stinking all over and having stayed up all night, I was so tired that I fell asleep on Xiao Ning"s shoulder in the backseat of the taxi.
When I woke up, I found Xiao Ning had taken me back to his hotel. Xiao Ning had already bathed, while I was lying on the sofa, still stinking.
"I"m sorry, I"ll go take a bath right away." I smelled the rancid smell on myself. It was unbearable. I went straight towards the bathroom to scrub it off.
After my bath, I realized that I had no clothes to wear.
Just then Xiao Ning called from outside, "I"ve left my clothes out, you can change into them after you"ve washed. The underwear is new. It hasn"t been worn."
I stuck my head out of the bathroom and quickly put on the clothes. Xiao Ning"s clothes were a size larger than mine. The underwear especially felt loose.
Normally I might have gotten excited about wearing Xiao Ning"s clothes, but I wasn"t in the mood now.
I sat down beside Xiao Ning. I didn"t want to say anything. I just wanted to be quiet.
But Xiao Ning started a conversation with me. "Teacher Shen, why do you think Mu Huaitong and Yin Yaqiu"s mother know so many unknown things? Was it Yin Yaqiu"s spirit sending them dreams?"
I thought about it and said, "The sixth sense is amazing. I"ve experienced it, too."
My senior middle school was a boarding school. One evening during self-study I"d felt inexplicably irritable. When I saw my best friend I went crazy and started beating him. My teacher a.s.signed me to write a self-examination as punishment. Then I would read it out loud in front of the whole cla.s.s. This would ensure I wouldn"t do something like that again.
Actually, I"d also thought it was very strange. It had felt like there"d been a breath stopped up in my chest, as if something was pressing down on me. If I didn"t cry out, I would go mad.
I didn"t write a self-examination the next day, because my uncle called me out of the dormitory that night. It was past midnight. They took me to the hospital, and my aunt told me that my parents had died in a car accident just at the time when I"d had that terrible mood.
"I believe there"s a sixth sense that connects relatives. Science just hasn"t been able to explain it yet," I said dully. "It isn"t that science doesn"t have an explanation, it"s just that our understanding of humans and of our universe isn"t deep enough yet."
Ning Tiance looked at me gently and asked, "After such an experience, why do you believe so firmly that ghosts don"t exist? What if it was their souls saying goodbye to you?"
"The dead are dead. You can"t see them, hear them, or touch them. There"s no way to reach them anymore. No matter how difficult it is for the people left behind, they still have to rely on their own strength to survive. Yearning for those who have pa.s.sed on to return to help us through our difficulties is impossible. People have to depend on themselves to make their own way. They can"t rely on unreal things."
I look at Xiao Ning, hoping that he could understand this. "This talk of ghosts is just people who can"t accept that their loved ones are gone imagining things to comfort themselves. I don"t believe in it."
Xiao Ning reached out and hugged me. He said quietly, "I understand what Teacher Shen means. If you say they don"t exist, then they don"t exist."
Today"s subject was rather painful, and I was exhausted. Even though Xiao Ning was holding me in his arms, I couldn"t have any ideas about it. I just fell asleep right there.
When I woke up it was night. Because of my work, my days and nights had been backwards lately. I was always awake around midnight. Ah, if only someone would call me to go to cla.s.s now.
When I came out for a drink of water, I heard Xiao Ning standing at the door saying to someone, "I can make an exception and take down the array to let you in, but you can"t take any liberties."
"Come on. With Teacher Shen here, what are you afraid of, little tianshi probationer?" A familiar voice came from outside the door.
"Xiao Tong?" I asked.
"It"s me, Teacher Shen." Mu Huaitong waved to me from outside the door.
Xiao Ning opened the door when he saw me. Mu Huaitong came in and sat on the sofa. She looked very different today. She was even wearing a white dress instead of a red one. She still looked just as beautiful.
"Teacher Shen." Mu Huaitong looked at me with a smile. "I"m going to leave. I won"t be able to come to your cla.s.ses anymore."
"Why?" I had some idea.
"I want to integrate into society and live a normal life instead of going Teacher Shen"s cla.s.s in the dead of night." Mu Huaitong"s smile was full of relief. "I"m not full of hate anymore. Not all men are sc.u.m. I just... couldn"t see clearly before. I hadn"t met a person like Teacher Shen."
"Then I can rest a.s.sured." Although parting was sad, I was still happy for Mu Huaitong. It was good that she could walk out of the shadow from now on. "I can always contact you later."
"I"m afraid not. I"m going abroad," Mu Huaitong said. "If fate doesn"t intervene, we won"t meet again in this lifetime."
"Foreign medical facilities are better than ours. Going abroad is a good choice. Give me your address. I have something I want to send you."
It was something I"d wanted to give to Mu Huaitong for a long time. I just hadn"t seen her for a while. Now it might be my last chance.
"An address... Where can I get an address..." Mu Huaitong thought for a moment then said, "You can give it to Princ.i.p.al Zhang. She can burn... send it on to me."
But I didn"t have Princ.i.p.al Zhang"s address!
Ning Tiance suddenly said, "You can give it to me. I know Princ.i.p.al Zhang"s address."
I thought back to the very beginning, to the trouble with Mr. Saw. The professional Princ.i.p.al Zhang had invited then had in fact been Xiao Ning.
Right... Xiao Ning wouldn"t have taken Mr. Saw for a ghost, would he?
Mu Huaitong said good-bye to us after that. Probably she had to prepare to go aboard and didn"t have much time. I felt melancholy for a while. I picked up my phone and placed an order online with Xiao Ning"s hotel as the delivery address.
"What do you want to send her?" Ning Tiance asked, naturally sitting beside me.
"Two books, the Const.i.tution and Criminal Law." I sighed. "I"ve found that the students in our school, possibly due to their mental disorders, don"t take the law very seriously. This time Mu Huaitong went to the very edge of the law. It"s very bad. I was just lecturing about world view. How can you establish the basis of a world view without a clear understanding of the law? Only by knowing what to do and what not to do can we become independent people with personal dignity. I was going to talk about these two books at the beginning of next cla.s.s, but she graduated ahead of time, so I"ll send them to her so she can read them for herself."
"…she"ll certainly thank you."
"But I haven"t had a cla.s.s for a long time. It"s been almost a week. If this goes on they"ll forget everything I taught them before."
So I sent a message to Princ.i.p.al Zhang: Princ.i.p.al Zhang, could you tell me when the next cla.s.s is? I hope to teach new content as soon as possible, to avoid the students forgetting. Also, does our school give tests? Could I arrange a little quiz?