Chapter 2

Half an hour later, I woke with a start.

The room was pitch-black. Outside, the mountains were silent.

Cold wind slipped through the gaps around the door. The old wooden bed creaked.

I sat up in the dark.

“Who's there?”

Every sense was alert.

It was too dark to see anything.

But I could feel it.

Someone was watching me.

Someone had entered my room.

4

Gripping my knife, I sprang from the bed, hurried to the door, and switched on the light.

It was dim, but my eyes soon adjusted.

A thin, dark-skinned little girl stood against the wall beside the head of my bed.

While I slept, she had been barely an arm's length away. Gooseflesh rose over me.

Still, she was only a child. Probably a pupil.

I put the knife away.

“Who are you?”

“Little Yu…” she whispered.

I remembered the class list. There was a Zhao Yu.

I explained that I was the new teacher and drew her down beside me on the bed. Frightened, she stammered.

“How did you get in?”

She pointed to the window.

“Why did you come into my room?”

“Before… nobody was here.”

It seemed she often hid here at night.

“Why don't you go home?”

“Don't want to…”

“Why not?”

Silence.

Sensing something she could not say, I told her, “You can tell me. I'll help. We can even call the police.”

“The police…” she murmured.

Her expression changed. I quickly showed her a photograph of Xia Cheng.

“Did you see this man last month?”

She nodded.

“…A policeman.”

“Do you know why he came?”

“Do I… have to tell?” she asked cautiously.

“Yes.” I held her shoulders. “Little Yu, you know something, don't you? Can you tell me?”

She stared for a moment, then burst into sobs.

Alarmed, I held and comforted her.

It took a while for her to calm down.

I was about to try again more gently when someone knocked.

“Miss Lu, is Zhao Yu with you? Her mother's looking for her. Did she come here?”

Principal Liu. I had to open the door.

“Running about every night! What if something happens?” he scolded.

Then he turned to me.

“She often does this. Didn't frighten you, did she?”

I shook my head. They took her away.

After that, I could not sleep.

5

Since I was awake anyway, I went out early on August 7.

People here rose and worked with the sun. At first light, the town showed signs of life, no longer as sinister as the night before.

I walked around, chatted with residents, and quietly sought information.

But their responses suggested that nothing had happened recently. Everything was normal.

Empty-handed, I returned to school.

I taught mathematics that morning.

There were sixteen pupils in total. One was absent: Little Yu.

I had risked asking her directly last night, effectively revealing my purpose. Her reaction showed that something had certainly happened.

Today, I could not go asking everyone indiscriminately. Little Yu remained my best lead.

At break, I talked to the other pupils about her family.

They were very poor. Since her little brother arrived, her father had treated her terribly, beating and scolding her. He did not even want her to finish primary school. She was to stay home, work, and mind the baby.

That was why she did not want to go home at night and hid at school.

After morning lessons, I paid her family a “home visit.”

Her mother was thin and frail, barely steady on her feet, yet she carried a fair-skinned baby boy—the newborn brother.

She welcomed me politely, fetched a chair, and poured water. She never put the baby down.

I went over to play with him and noticed the handsome gold lock pendant around his neck. A well-known brand.

Then I went into the inner room to see Little Yu.

Her mother said she had caught a cold and had a fever. That was why she had missed school.

Was it?

I sat by the bed. Even long sleeves could not hide every lash mark on her arms.

A child of seven or eight, afraid to go home. It was heartbreaking.

She looked at me with tears in her eyes. Then, as though remembering something, she reached under her pillow and quickly pushed something into my hand.

A crumpled piece of paper.

Soon afterward, her father came home.

Tall, broad, and fierce-looking, he was exactly the sort of difficult man the principal had described.

He stared coldly at me. I could not stay.

6

Back in my room, I unfolded the paper.

It was a simple drawing on a palm-sized scrap of exercise paper: a tree and a crescent moon.

Little Yu was trying to tell me something. Surely this was a scene she had witnessed.

But it was so simple, and there was no shortage of trees in the mountains. How could I find this one?

I set it aside for now and went to teach my afternoon class.

Art. I asked every pupil to draw the scene that had left the deepest impression on them.

That morning, I had noticed a girl named Zhou Xi who seemed to have an intellectual disability. Her drawing, however, was quite good.

She drew two little girls standing together. The entire background was black, creating a striking image.

I asked who they were. She struggled to answer. Her disability affected her speech too.

At last, she managed, “Me… and Little Yu… made to stand.”

“Why were you being punished?”

Her face reddened. She said no more.

…

I had thought Little Yu's picture useless.

Then, toward evening, I looked up and saw the crescent in the southern sky. I remembered her drawing.

It was August 7: Qixi, the seventh day of the seventh lunar month.

The moon on the seventh was at first quarter. By coincidence, it looked exactly like hers.

Suddenly, I understood.

Whatever Little Yu had seen must have affected her deeply. It would be fixed in her memory. Children had strong visual memories; she would remember that day's scene clearly.

The simple picture was not necessarily random. It might accurately reproduce what she saw.

I began studying it for information.

First, it was a first-quarter moon. That moon appeared only in the first half of the night. So she had witnessed the event in the early evening. That made sense: she would not be wandering outside at midnight.

Second, it appeared on the seventh or eighth lunar day. If this was connected with the Yanyun case, the event had occurred on July 9 or 10, while Xia Cheng was there.

Third, the moon appeared in the south after sunset, then moved west. The tree lay beneath it, so it was south or southwest.

Fourth, the tree leaned right. That might match its actual shape.

Fifth, Little Yu had been out at night, perhaps for the same reason as yesterday: avoiding home and hiding at school. She might have seen something along the way. The tree would be on her route to school.

Together, these details narrowed the search considerably.

I needed a tree west or southwest of her, leaning right, on the way to school.

I would try my luck.

Before full darkness, I walked her school route and found five or six possibilities.

Under one, the earth had been disturbed, as though recently dug. Suspicious.

I memorized the spot. Once night fell and the road emptied, I returned with a flashlight and dug with a stone.

About half a meter down, fabric appeared.

An Olympic T-shirt printed with the Fuwa mascots.

And the person wearing it had decomposed.

Little Yu had witnessed a murder and the disposal of a body.

From a preliminary visual assessment, death had occurred about a month earlier. Perhaps it was connected to the Yanyun case.

I did not uncover the whole body, only the clothes and an arm. Judging by its size, it was a child.

Yet from everything I had seen that day, no child in the county was missing.

Everything in Yanyun still seemed normal.

7

I realized that child trafficking might be taking place here.

Fuwa T-shirts were fashionable in cities, but unlikely to turn up in these remote mountains. Perhaps this child had recently been abducted from a city. No one here would care that they were missing.

Little Yu's baby brother was suspicious too. He looked nothing like the family, and wore a Chow Tai Fook gold lock pendant. He could well have been bought.

That was hardly unheard of. Trafficked children were often taken to remote mountain areas, with devastating social consequences. In 2007, China's Ministry of Public Security had even established a dedicated anti-trafficking unit.

The poorer and more isolated a place, the more brutal and bloody these crimes became. Driven by the instinct to reproduce, people were no different from beasts.

Perhaps the Yanyun case involved trafficking.

At that moment, I thought I had reached the truth.

Looking back, the case that would haunt me for years had only just begun.

…

For now, one thing was certain: a body lay beneath the tree.

But I could not raise the alarm yet. I had to understand everything first.

So I replaced the earth.

Just then, voices sounded in the distance. Flashlight beams swept about.

Many residents had come out, apparently searching for something. They normally slept early. That was why I had chosen this hour.

Not knowing what had happened, I switched off my light, filled the hole in darkness, and took another route back to school.

It was eleven at night.

I sat on the bed in the dark.

Voices still carried from afar. What were they looking for?

Could it be the body?

Or had I guessed wrong? Was the child local, and were they searching because someone was missing?

It made no sense.

From Little Yu's account and the decomposition, the child had died a month ago. Why discover the disappearance only now?

My thoughts tangled. Frustrated, I punched the bed.

Once. Twice.

On the third blow…

A large hand suddenly caught my fist.