A Ghost's Message in a Dream

My last two remarks seemed to have struck the Old Lady's most vulnerable spot.

She looked at me in panic, with shock mingled into her expression.

Perhaps she couldn't understand how I knew what she and her son had done.

It was actually quite simple.

Song Xiaotian and I had caught Li Liang red-handed throwing something into the well.

Although the water in that well wasn't used for everyday drinking, there was more than one well in the village.

We didn't know whether Li Liang had put something into just that one well or into all of them.

But too many people had died in this village. The village chief had also said that almost all of them had died from illness, and that the dead were elderly. Few young people had died from illness; most suffered from infertility.

Thinking of what Li Liang had done at the well, Song Xiaotian and I had compared notes before coming here.

Li Liang had very likely been putting a slow-acting poison into the wells, though we didn't know exactly what kind. After drinking the poisoned water over a long period, the elderly villagers' bodies couldn't withstand it. Their internal organs were damaged, and they died in agony.

The young people were healthier, so perhaps the poisoning wasn't as severe and had only affected their fertility.

After they moved to the city, they stopped drinking the village's water. Given time to recover, they got better.

As for when Li Liang had started poisoning the water, I figured it was most likely after his father's death.

Li Liang was mentally disabled. He didn't know what poison was, let alone how to make it. So where had he gotten it? Someone must have put him up to it.

And the only person who could have done that was his mother. There was no one else.

The Old Lady had lost her husband, after all, and the villagers had driven him to his death. They also frequently bullied her and her son, so she hated them to the bone. It made sense that she would do something like this.

I had also asked the village chief whether the Old Lady knew anything about medicine.

He said the Old Lady didn't, but her father had. Her father used to be the village doctor.

I suspected it wasn't that the Old Lady knew nothing. She might have picked up a little from being around her father, and the bit she happened to know was how to prepare poison.

Of course, these were only guesses Song Xiaotian and I had made. We had no concrete evidence.

But the Old Lady's reaction now was no different from that of someone with a guilty conscience. She had practically admitted it herself.

I looked at her and said, "We don't care what you and your son have done, and we won't meddle. We just want to ask you a few things. Once we're finished, we'll leave."

The Old Lady sighed, the hostility fading from her eyes. "Go ahead."

I said, "Back then, Li Liang was seriously ill, and you couldn't afford treatment. Then you suddenly had ninety thousand yuan to pay for it. Who gave you that money? Did you ever meet him?"

The Old Lady shook her head. "I never met him, and I don't know his name."

I continued, "But you knew he existed. And afterward, you must have known that after your family received those ninety thousand yuan, your daughter committed murder. You must know how those things were connected. Did you ever hear your daughter mention that man?"

The Old Lady thought back for a moment and said, "All I heard my daughter say was that he looked cultured and refined, that he was from the city, and that he could give us money for Liang's treatment. I think she mentioned his name, too, but I didn't remember it. After all these years, I've forgotten."

"My husband and I didn't know what he did for a living back then. We just thought we'd met a kindhearted man."

As she spoke, the Old Lady suddenly began to weep, her voice choking up. "We even thought of him as our benefactor. How could we have known he was the one who told our daughter to kill someone? Our daughter was foolish, too. To pay for her little brother's treatment, she ruined herself."

"Our daughter was a good person, so obedient and devoted to her parents. But you police just wouldn't leave her alone. You forced her to run away with that Lü Zhengxian, and she still came to a bad end."

Everything that followed was the Old Lady's complaining.

She thought Li Xiumei was a good person and believed the police should have let her go. If they hadn't kept hunting her, Li Xiumei wouldn't have died. In her eyes, the police had driven her daughter to her death.

I couldn't be bothered to argue. There was no reasoning with a stubborn old woman like her.

"Ma'am, try to remember that man's name. Even his surname would help."

The Old Lady was probably the only person left who remembered anything about him.

But no matter how hard she thought, she still couldn't give me the answer I wanted.

"I'm old. There are so many things I can't remember."

"Sometimes I even have to think for ages to remember who Liang is. Pressuring me won't do any good."

Her words startled me.

That sounded like a symptom of Alzheimer's disease, commonly known as senile dementia...

Seeing that she truly couldn't remember, I stopped pressing her.

Instead, I asked another question. "Ma'am, how did you find out your daughter was dead?"

The Old Lady froze, and tears streamed down her face again. "My daughter came to me in a dream and told me."

A ghost delivering a message in a dream...

I swallowed and asked, "What did she say in the dream?"

The Old Lady choked out, "She said she'd died fifteen years ago. Someone had put her inside a wall, and she'd only just been released. She said she couldn't come home to look after me in my old age or see me through to the end, and told me to take good care of myself."

I remembered Seventh Master saying something about ghosts being restricted in where they could go. They could only remain in the city where they had died, unless someone took their ashes out of that city.

"Did she tell you who killed her?"

"She did."

The Old Lady gritted her teeth and stamped her foot as she said, "It was that Lü Zhengxian, and the man you just asked about. The two of them killed my daughter together!"

I drew in a breath, an inexplicable unease rising inside me.

Li Xiumei... had actually been killed by Lü Zhengxian and the principal culprit acting together.

Before, I hadn't known why that principal culprit wanted to meet me and help me out.

Now, I understood it even less.

I had finished asking everything I needed to ask. I took out another thousand yuan in cash and pressed it into the Old Lady's hands.

She looked at me in disbelief, and tears slipped down her face again.

She cried like someone who had suffered more than she could bear, not even daring to make a sound.

I knew that ever since Li Xiumei died, the villagers had been bullying her. Perhaps no one had treated her kindly in all these years.

"Stop now. Don't let your son keep poisoning the water."

"You've already killed a lot of people. If you don't stop, sooner or later someone will discover what you've done."

"When that happens, your son will be finished."

After giving the Old Lady that warning, I said nothing more to her.

Song Xiaotian and I left, ready to head to the neighboring Lü Family Gully.