Fake Divorce Turns into Murder Case (13)

Chapter 65

The police had hit a major snag.

There were no other leads found on Yang Laosan’s body. He had purchased the sleeping pills himself, and his family members all insisted it was a suicide. The only person with any connection to the matter, Huixiang, had vanished.

A murder occurring within a family is inherently difficult to uncover due to its private nature. Compounded by the fact that the victim had been dead for over a week in a remote mountain forest, the case had fallen into an unprecedented deadlock.

Every time the police interrogated the Yang family, they either remained silent or stubbornly insisted that Yang Xi had committed suicide.

Old Man Yang was the most aggressive among them.

“That’s just how you police are,” he barked. “You want to turn a suicide into a murder just so you have an excuse to arrest more people.”

Yun Song was now accustomed to the hostility of the locals. She looked him in the eye and said, “You should know better than we do whether this was truly a suicide or not.”

Old Man Yang immediately retorted, “It was a suicide. Don’t I know my own son?”

He spoke with his usual overbearing dominance.

Yun Song recalled the descriptions of him she had gathered from other villagers. He was a man who felt superior to everyone else simply because he had five sons.

For the past twenty years, he had relied on that numerical advantage to ensure no one dared offend him. Naturally, he would never allow a scandal to touch his family or give people a reason to mock them.

Yun Song continued, “We must find the killer, not only to bring justice to the victim, but also to protect those around the murderer.”

“If a person kills over a trivial matter and feels no guilt, and if they face no punishment, they are very likely to keep using murder as a way to solve their problems.”

Yun Song’s words struck a nerve. It wasn’t that Old Man Yang feared the killer would strike again; rather, he felt a deep, internal ache. How could someone kill their own brother?

No matter how great the conflict, they were brothers – brothers who had grown up together!

But he had already lost one son; he couldn’t afford to lose another. More importantly, if word got out that brothers had turned on each other, the entire village would spend years laughing at his family’s expense.

How could Old Man Yang accept that? He kept his face like a mask and said, “Say whatever you want.”

Seeing no other way forward, Yun Song left two investigators behind.

She had to lead a team to find Huixiang. Their officers had already checked Baihe Town, and Huixiang had not returned to her parents’ home, which came as no surprise.

From her previous interactions, Yun Song sensed that Huixiang was terrified of social contact. She suspected the woman hadn’t sought help from anyone, but had instead fled into the deep mountains with her children.

It was winter, and wild boars roamed the deep woods. Worried for the safety of Huixiang and the two children, Yun Song prepared to begin a mountain search.

Down by the Reservoir, ever since Huixiang disappeared, Old Lady Yuan couldn’t stop thinking about the night Huixiang had come to the water’s edge.

She was truly terrified that Huixiang had taken the two children and jumped into the reservoir.

As a result, she couldn’t sleep at night. She began patrolling the reservoir with her dog.

Occasionally, something would surface on the water and give her a fright, but a full night passed without incident.

The next morning, she overslept. She woke to the sound of her dog barking incessantly. She hurried outside to find the dog barking toward the water.

Something was floating on the surface. It looked like three people…

Her vision went dark for a moment. She quickly untied her boat and rowed out. When her bamboo pole prodded a child’s garment, her heart skipped a beat. Fortunately, the pole hit nothing but fabric.

It was just three pieces of clothing.

An adult’s padded cotton jacket, a child’s coat, and a garment for a one year old.

Old Lady Yuan had lived by the reservoir for years. She might not know much about other things, but she knew everything about drowning.

Even setting aside the fact that winter clothes are usually buttoned tight, even a short-sleeved shirt worn in the summer wouldn’t just float away on its own if someone drowned in the reservoir.

She examined the three items. The cotton jacket had buttons, but there was a hole burned into one of the sleeves, likely from an accident while cooking over a fire.

The clothes for the older and younger children were poor quality. They were either covered in permanent stains or had been patched multiple times.

Seeing this, Old Lady Yuan understood the situation. She didn’t go to the police. Instead, she took the adult jacket she had just fished out and ran toward the Yang Family home.

To her, this was familiar territory.

The Yang family was still holding the funeral. Yang Xi had died a violent, unnatural death, which was considered highly taboo in the countryside. Consequently, the coffin was kept outside, and Taoist priests had been hired to perform exorcisms.

Old Lady Yuan shouted for Yang Laowu as soon as she arrived.

“Come quick and see, is this your wife Huixiang’s jacket?”

“I went to check the reservoir this morning and saw this floating there. Look, is this your Huixiang’s?”

Huixiang’s eldest sister-in-law recognized it instantly. “This is Huixiang’s. There’s a burn hole here. Last year, when we went to help out at her second cousin’s place, Huixiang burned it while she was tending the fire.”

The others remained silent, but the realization hit them immediately. Huixiang… had Huixiang jumped into the reservoir?

The rest of the village didn’t know about the two children’s clothes yet; Old Lady Yuan had only brought Huixiang’s jacket for identification.

The clothes were found, but where was the person? And the two children?

“Yang Laowu, come with me to the reservoir to fish them out. At my age, I can’t handle going into the water in this cold.”

Yang Laowu instinctively didn’t want to go. On one hand, it was freezing; on the other, he felt it was unfair.

“Huixiang was already my third brother’s wife.” Huixiang hadn’t given him a son, and then she had been involved in that messy affair with his brother. Now that she was dead, he was expected to go into the water in the dead of winter? By what right?

He naturally refused.

Nearby, Old Man Yang spoke up. “Go with Old Lady Yuan and recover the bodies.”

Yang Laowu was still unwilling. He felt a surge of resentment toward his father. He felt his father should understand exactly why he didn’t want to go to the reservoir to pull her out.

“I’m not going. I have things to do.”

At this, the onlookers finally felt something was wrong.

Yang Laowu… his wife was dead, yet he didn’t show the slightest reaction.

Even though it was said that Yang Laowu and Huixiang were divorced, everyone knew they had gone through a fake divorce just to have a son.

Huixiang was naturally still considered his wife. Now that she had jumped into the reservoir, how could Yang Laowu show no emotion at all?

Yang Laowu didn’t have any spare emotion during this period. After all, his nerves had been stretched thin for the past few days. Now, even hearing that Huixiang was gone, his first reaction was to blame her for causing him trouble at a time like this.

But once he returned to the inner room, a new idea took hold in his mind.

The police were insisting that Yang Xi had been murdered and were refusing to let their family go. Although his father hadn’t said anything incriminating to the police, Yang Laowu could feel that, in private, his father was looking at him with increasing distaste.

Now that Huixiang had committed suicide, could he make everyone believe that she was the one who killed Yang Xi? Could he claim she killed herself because the police were closing in and she was afraid of going to prison?

The more he thought about it, the happier he became.

He began to calculate how to convince everyone that Huixiang had killed Yang Xi and then committed suicide out of fear of being caught.

Before he could come up with a plan, things took an unexpected turn.

Rumors began to spread through the village that he had killed his brother and then killed Huixiang.

“It must be because Huixiang divorced him and married Yang Laosan. It was definitely supposed to be a fake divorce and a fake marriage, but Yang Laosan has a better temper than Yang Laowu. Huixiang surely didn’t want to divorce Yang Laosan anymore.”

The easiest gossip to spread in the village was this kind of drama involving love, hate, and resentment, especially when it involved the pursuit of a son and a fake divorce.

Everyone had their own interpretation.

The women who were mothers themselves would say:

“Anyway, there’s no way Huixiang committed suicide. She still has two children. How could she possibly leave her two children behind and kill herself?”

Those who had attended the funeral recalled Yang Laowu’s reaction at the time and added, “You didn’t see it. When Old Lady Yuan came to find them and said Huixiang was dead, Yang Laowu didn’t react at all. They lived together for so many years; how could someone have no reaction when their spouse dies?”

“You don’t know the half of it. I went back later and peeked. He was by the drainage ditch, secretly gloating. What do you think he was so happy about?”

Old Man Yang also heard these whispers. His previous mindset was that he had already lost one son and couldn’t let another go to prison. He couldn’t let his family become the laughingstock of the village. They had bullied people in the village before, so they knew exactly how others would mock them if their family fell from grace.

But now, his attention was fixed on his youngest son. How had he become such a degenerate?

He thought back to the things the police had said.

The more he looked at his youngest son, the more uncomfortable he felt.

On the other side, Yun Song had been walking in the mountains for a whole day. They had chosen not to head toward Baihe Town.

Yun Song felt that since Baihe Town was Huixiang’s hometown, the fact that Huixiang hadn’t returned there at a time like this meant that, for her, her parental home was also a place she needed to stay away from. Therefore, when Yun Song led the search through the forest, she headed toward Yulan Town.

They searched cave by cave. Most of the caves in Tonglin Town were filled with dry firewood, making it easy to see at a glance if anyone was inside.

By the time they reached the border of Yulan Town, even Yun Song began to doubt if she had made a mistake.

But since they had already walked this far, they might as well keep going.

As they moved forward, they soon found another cave.

This time, there was spring water trickling down at the cave entrance, pitter-pattering. As they walked down from the side, the first thing they saw was a wooden bucket. The mountain spring water falling from above dripped into the bucket, which was already half full. A gourd ladle¹ had been placed inside.

It was actually quite a suitable place to live.

The faint, lighthearted voice of a woman drifted from inside.

“The crab is going to run away, catch it quickly!”

It was Huixiang. She had briefly become a hermit of the wild.

A wild person in the mountains and forests didn’t have to care about what others thought, didn’t have to think about Yang Laosan’s death, and didn’t have to worry about Yang Laowu’s obsession with having a son.

It was the first time Yun Song had heard her voice sound so relaxed.

Translator’s Notes