Fake Divorce Turns into Murder Case (11)

Chapter 63

Yun Song had obtained the information she wanted from Old Madam Zhang and was ready to leave. Just as she reached the pigpen, the old lady called out to her.

“Officer! Wait a moment! I just remembered something.”

The two had just mentioned the old lady’s daughter, who had married off to Yulan Town. This reminded the old lady of another woman who had also married into the area from far away and was connected to the Yang family.

“When you go looking for the Yangs, pay more attention to Huixiang. Among all the daughters-in-law in that family, she’s the most pitiful.”

She began to recount Huixiang’s situation.

Yun Song noted everything down. After leaving the old lady’s house, she headed straight for the Yang residence.

The Yang family was extremely hostile toward the police. As soon as the officers arrived at the door, the men of the house immediately began wailing and causing a scene.

“I’ve already lost a son! What more do you want?”

“Do you want an old man like me to die right in front of you before you’re satisfied?”

There was really no need for that.

Yun Song tried to reason with them. “We are just performing a routine inquiry. We only have a few questions.”

The men were the ones in charge, while the women remained mostly inside the house.

Yun Song considered the situation. The family’s pigs had to be fed, which meant someone had to go to the hillsides to gather fodder.

They waited a while longer until, finally, a woman emerged from the house.

Huixiang carried a wicker basket on her back as she walked across the slope. She soon spotted the police.

The two officers stood there, waiting for her to approach.

Her heart began to race with panic.

“Are you Huixiang? My name is Yun Song, and this is Tong Jin. We just want to ask you a few things.” Sensing the atmosphere of the Yang household, Yun Song spoke soothingly. “There’s no one else here. No one will know what you tell us.”

Huixiang looked up quickly, glanced at the two officers, and then immediately lowered her head to stare at the weeds on the ground.

“I… I don’t know how Yang Laosan died.”

“We aren’t asking about that,” Yun Song said. “Let’s find a place to talk first.”

Since the questions were private and complicated, the woman would likely feel insecure in an open field, making it difficult for her to speak freely.

Yun Song led her to a nearby cave. With a roof over their heads, the conversation felt easier to initiate.

They found two stones inside the cave to sit on.

Only then did Yun Song speak. “We just want to ask you about some matters regarding you and Yang Laowu.”

At that moment, Huixiang’s nervousness turned into a deep sense of shame. Her face burned with heat. She felt it was simply too humiliating; these officers were from the city, and surely they had never seen such things.

“Don’t worry. We’re just trying to understand the situation.”

Yun Song continued, “I heard that you two had a fake divorce so you could have more children. Is that true?”

Huixiang didn’t want to speak. She didn’t know where to begin. Too many things were piled up in her heart and stuck in her throat, leaving her unable to utter a single word.

Yun Song said, “I’ve heard people talk. They say you’ve suffered a lot with the Yang family. You’re a good woman, marrying into a place where you’re a stranger with no relatives or friends. You’ve had a hard time.”

This was what Old Madam Zhang had said. Because her own daughter had married far away in the neighboring Yulan Town, she felt a pang of sympathy whenever she saw Huixiang, who was in a similar position.

Yun Song went on, “The people in the village wanted me to talk to you. They feel you’ve been treated very unfairly, but they didn’t know how to help you.”

Suddenly, Huixiang snapped out of her daze. Previously, she had been immersed in a mess of emotions, her mind constantly attacking her as she imagined how everyone must be cursing and insulting her.

But now, hearing Yun Song convey the kindness of the other villagers, Huixiang finally realized something.

When she divorced Yang Laowu and married Yang Laosan… the villagers actually hadn’t said much of anything.

She thought back carefully, filtering out the imaginary insults she had conjured in her own head.

It seemed… it seemed no one had actually said those things to her face.

Most of the women in the village were like that. If there was no personal grudge, they might gossip for hours over a minor trifle. But when something this significant happened, they tended to fall silent instead.

Huixiang had always been an honest, hardworking woman. In the village, she did nothing but work and rarely spoke to anyone. Because she had married from far away into a family like the Yangs, people generally felt more pity for her than anything else.

However, the villagers hadn’t known how to approach her. It was Yun Song, in her official capacity, who found it easier to bridge that gap.

As Huixiang listened, the weight blocking her chest slowly began to dissolve. She said in a small voice, “It was Yang Laowu who insisted on the fake divorce. I didn’t agree at first, but he didn’t care about my opinion. Instead, he went around looking for someone for me to have a fake marriage with. He even found the simpleton son of a distillery owner in town.”

Yun Song was surprised to learn there was so much more to the story.

As Huixiang spoke, she remembered the panic and helplessness of having no one to turn to back then. Tears began to fall.

At that time, she couldn’t have gone to the police. She assumed they wouldn’t interfere in family matters like theirs.

Now, using the investigation into Yang Laosan’s death as an outlet, she poured out all the terror and desperation she had been suppressing.

“They wanted me to have a fake marriage with that simpleton so they could transfer my two daughters’ hukou over to him. Then, after the divorce, they would give my daughters to them. Isn’t that just human trafficking?”

Yun Song was quick to process the information. There was indeed a distillery in town, and the owner did have a son with a mental disability who likely struggled to find a wife. But it seemed this elaborate scheme was aimed at taking Huixiang’s two children?

“I was afraid they had other motives, and since Yang Laowu was dead set on the fake divorce and remarriage, I told him I’d only do it if I could choose his third brother. I thought that since I’d still be in the Yang family, I could handle whatever happened.”

“You’ve had a hard life.”

“Yang Laosan usually seemed like an honest man, but once the fake marriage was official, he started harassing me. He said that since we had the certificates, I was his woman now, and he wanted me to give him a son. When I refused, he would beat me.”

“I originally thought that if Yang Laosan really was an honest man, Yang Laowu and I would treat our fake divorce as a real one, and let the two brothers fight it out.”

She had been actively trying to find a way out, but things were becoming increasingly complicated.

“As it turned out, I didn’t need to do that. Yang Laosan simply refused to get a divorce. That was when Yang Laowu finally revealed that our divorce was a fake.”

“Did the two of them engage in any other extreme behavior? Fighting, for instance?”

“They never fought. Yang Laosan kept trying to coax Yang Laowu. Whenever Yang Laowu suggested putting the two children’s Hukou under Yang Laosan’s name and then having me divorce Yang Laosan, Yang Laosan would say that if we did it so quickly, the production brigade would definitely realize we were doing it for the Household Registration and fine us. So he just kept stalling.” In any case, her own thoughts didn’t matter; the two brothers simply bypassed her to negotiate who she belonged to.

“And Yang Laowu believed him?” Yun Song asked.

“Yang Laowu thinks Yang Laosan is an honest man who wouldn’t lie,” Huixiang said, finding it almost laughable as she spoke of it. “It seems Yang Laowu has always believed that Yang Laosan is an honest man.”

Yun Song recalled things she had heard before. Yang Laosan was likely at the bottom of the hierarchy in the Yang Family. Living in that environment, Yang Laowu had naturally grown accustomed to Yang Laosan’s submissiveness.

“Yang Laosan has been missing for so many days. Did you not notice anything unusual?”

“About that…” Huixiang thought for a moment and shared what she could. “The Yang family all thought Yang Laosan had run away from home. That night, my father-in-law and mother-in-law had given him a scolding. Even though I dislike Yang Laosan myself, my parents-in-law are truly strange. They live with Yang Laosan now, yet they still curse at him at the slightest provocation.”

When Yang Laosan was gone the next day, everyone assumed he had simply left home.

Since everyone else felt that way, Huixiang naturally had no say in the matter.

“Was there anything out of the ordinary during those few days?”

Huixiang searched her memory and said, “He cooked a bowl of noodles for me the night before.”

That qualified as something relatively unusual.

Yun Song asked a few more questions and then stopped. Huixiang had to go work in the mountains soon.

They emerged from the cave, and once they were certain no one was around, Huixiang went to work in the fields.

Yun Song returned to the town to inquire about the autopsy results.

“The autopsy results are out.”

“The man did indeed die from drowning, but there were sleeping pills in his system.”

“Then that makes things simple.”

This was a village; sleeping pills wouldn’t just appear out of nowhere.

There were only three possible sources for sleeping pills: one was a barefoot doctor down in Sanli Village, another was the town’s medicine shop—which, though a traditional Chinese medicine shop, also sold some Western medicine—and the last was the town’s health clinic.

The barefoot doctor said, ” I don’t have sleeping pills here. In a place like this, we only have people who can’t wake up, not people who can’t fall asleep.”

“Besides, even if we assume someone couldn’t sleep, do you think they’d be willing to spend money on sleeping pills?”

That was a fair point.

Because of this, anyone who came to buy sleeping pills would be remembered very clearly.

Chang Fang, an apprentice at the medicine shop, remembered it vividly. “It was probably Tuesday before last. A middle-aged man came to the shop saying he couldn’t sleep all night and wanted some medicine. He bought a three-day supply of sleeping pills.”

Chang Fang remembered it well because she had suggested he try some Chinese herbal medicine to regulate his system, but the man refused. He said brewing herbal medicine was too much trouble and insisted on Western medicine. In the end, Doctor Tang prescribed the pills for him.

Chang Fang was originally from the village herself, so she naturally knew of the Yang family, who were quite famous in the area. She couldn’t understand why someone from their parts would actually come to buy sleeping pills because they couldn’t sleep.

“I remember the person who bought the medicine was Yang Laosan.”

Yun Song asked, “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.” Chang Fang looked a bit displeased mentioning it, but to ensure she wasn’t mistaken, she added, “My Eldest Aunt originally wanted to marry me off to that Yang Laosan, so I remember him very clearly.”

So, Yang Laosan had bought the sleeping pills himself?

As Yun Song walked back, she recalled what Huixiang had said about Yang Laosan cooking her a bowl of noodles, which was considered unusual.

Based on Huixiang’s words and the habits of the villagers, Yun Song truly couldn’t imagine why Yang Laosan would go buy sleeping pills just because he wasn’t sleeping well.

Unless Yang Laosan hadn’t bought those sleeping pills for himself…