Having heard all these sales pitches for Tao Ran, Chang Ning at least knew that he had made plenty of good friends. She couldn’t help turning to smile at Tao Ran.
But Tao Ran’s limit while drinking was, at best, a single glass, and he was now more than half a glass in. He was already dizzy, and with his crush staring at him, a smile curling on her lips, he nearly lost any ability to think; he was so flustered that he started to speak nonsense. “No, no, r-really… I wasn’t the only one taking care of little Fei Du back then. Everyone cared about you, Xiao-Fei. After my shifu heard about you, he asked about you every so often… And what’s his face—Wenzhou,” Tao Ran continued, casually betraying his comrade. “He’d never admit it, but he secretly went to see you a bunch of times. And that video-game console, it was him who asked me—”
Luo Wenzhou swiftly kicked Tao Ran under the table, but it was already too late. That kick crushed what was left of Tao Ran’s balance, and he fell sideways, knocking over a cardboard box of books and documents on the way down. Reference books, light reads, file folders, and notebooks fell haphazardly to the floor.
At their separate corners of the table, Fei Du and Luo Wenzhou both froze. Lang Qiao elbowed Luo Wenzhou, oblivious. “Really, Boss? You did that? Tough on the outside, soft on the inside—kind of embarrassing.”
Why are you announcing it, then?! Under Fei Du’s intense gaze, Luo Wenzhou coughed once, awkwardly, then stood up to tidy the cardboard box Tao Ran had knocked over. “Speaking nonsense when you’re just barely tipsy. Goof.” Picking up a yellowing notebook and shaking out the dust, Luo Wenzhou changed the subject awkwardly. “Hey, how come you’ve got our shifu’s old notebook?”
Even before he finished the question, a pencil portrait dropped from the notebook. It depicted a man with well-proportioned features; he looked gentle and refined, yet his gaze seemed to contain something dark and heavy.
The date on the page was from over twenty years ago, and there was an annotation in the corner: Wu Guangchuan—the six girls’ corpses still haven’t been found.
Lang Qiao wasn’t done teasing Luo Wenzhou; she wanted to prolong her victory. She and the rest of their coworkers surrounded Luo Wenzhou—but that was when they made eye contact with the portrait on the floor. The police system included specialized portrait artists, each more talented than the last; the artist behind this portrait, in contrast, had seemingly been a beginner. Still, the person in the portrait somehow seemed especially alive. It was like the artist had sketched this face in their head countless times and then, unable to bear it anymore, finally laid it on a sheet of paper.
“What’s that?” Lang Qiao asked curiously.
Now that Luo Wenzhou’s kick had sent him flying, Tao Ran had sobered up slightly. Realizing that he’d said something he shouldn’t have, he stood up—not without the help of the couch—and diverted everyone’s attention as he helped Luo Wenzhou tidy up. “The Lianhuashan case, right? The old man spent his whole life talking about it.”
Lianhuashan was on the northern outskirts of Yancheng. Years back, it had been a county seat under Yancheng’s jurisdiction; back then, it had been called Lianhuashan County. Now that the city had expanded, it had become one of Yancheng’s development zones.
A few yellowing photos were taped into the notebook alongside the portrait. But too much time had passed, and the tape had lost its stickiness. A single touch was all that was needed for the photos to start falling out. Some were blurry candids, and others were studio shots that were characteristic of their time—they all had backdrops of Dutch windmills and dramatic lighting. The girls’ smiles were all a little stiff, as though the photos had been taken with long exposure times. There were six photos in total.
Old photographs had an interesting quality. After dozens of years, they all faded to the same yellow. If the person in the photo looked happy, that yellowing lent the artifact a wistful, nostalgic quality; if, on the other hand, something unfortunate had befallen the photo’s subject, the yellowing seemed eerie and weighty. It was like the subject’s fury and resentment became part of the static photograph, as if they were hinting at something from the great beyond.
“Lao-Yang?” Lang Qiao asked. “How come he was looking into a case all the way out in Lianhuashan?”
“At that time, the municipal bureau’s policy was that officers under age thirty-five had to go to a grassroots unit for experience. They’d either go to a local station or get sent off to the counties. My shifu was sent to Lianhuashan, and he was there about six months.” Luo Wenzhou carefully picked the photos up by their edges and slipped them back into the notebook. “He hadn’t been there long when this case popped up. Er-Lang, you might never have heard about it. Even I hadn’t started school at that time.”
“At the beginning, a man reported a lost child.” Tao Ran flipped through the notebook. Aside from the photos and portrait, most of the notebook was full of writing. The old officer’s handwriting was beautiful, elegant, and powerful, as well as very shapely. On the page just before the photos was written the name Guo Heng; it had been underlined three times. “Right—Guo Heng was his name. His eleven-year-old daughter had gone missing. Her nickname was Feifei.”