Chapter 2

But after Chí Kiệt, someone else appeared.

A woman named Từ Lệ Lệ.

She was not local.

Yet the moment she arrived, she rushed to the station and insisted:

“I believe Huệ Quyên was killed. The woman I knew would never have committed suicide!”

I found it strange.

She admitted she had never lived here.

She had never even met Huệ Quyên in person.

Yet she was absolutely certain.

Because she had information about her.

Her arrival meant we could no longer exclude homicide.

We had to change direction.

She gave us a thick bundle of letters.

Around 2000, mobile phones were still uncommon.

In poor, remote villages, even landlines were rare.

There was therefore a kind of relationship called being pen pals.

Friends who corresponded by letter.

“We wrote almost every week,” Lệ Lệ explained. “Her last letter was about two weeks ago. In it, she said…”

“She felt that person wanted to hurt her.”

We immediately checked the final letter.

Sure enough, it contained words to that effect.

Then…

Who was “that person”?

In fact, we already had a vague idea.

5

The letters were like a key, abruptly breaking through our entrenched assumptions.

The handwriting was delicate but slightly unsteady.

In her last letter, Huệ Quyên wrote:

“Lately, I keep feeling someone watching me from behind. Especially beside the press. It’s like being stared at by a venomous snake. It gives me goosebumps. The way he looks at me is strange. I dare not tell anyone. I can only be more careful…”

Who was “he”?

We immediately focused on every male worker present that day.

Of the six men, Vương Cường and Triệu Lỗi had been operating machinery.

There were also Old Trương and Old Lưu, who handled odd jobs.

And the owner, Tông Minh.

We began with Cường.

In his thirties, he was quiet and straightforward.

He operated the other press on the same shift as Huệ Quyên.

Colleagues said they hardly spoke.

Lỗi was younger, in his early twenties.

He liked joking around, but was supposedly afraid of his wife.

She lived in the next village.

He went straight home after work every day, and no one had heard of him quarreling with anyone.

Trương and Lưu were local men over fifty.

Longtime mill workers with mild temperaments.

Their relationship with Huệ Quyên was limited to work.

That left the owner.

Tông Minh.

This immediately put us on alert.

He was divorced, in his forties.

The village considered him capable. The mill had earned him a substantial fortune.

During his earlier statement, he had seemed distressed and helpless, repeatedly stressing that he had followed every safety rule.

Huệ Quyên had simply failed to obey them herself.

In hindsight, those words seemed designed to shed responsibility.

More importantly, Kiện, who should have been beside her, had been called away for a “talk.”

The timing was too convenient.

We found Kiện again.

After much hesitation, he admitted that Tông Minh had neither reprimanded him nor discussed work.

He had merely drawn him aside and talked about family matters.

His son studying away from home and disobeying him.

Household affairs.

Nearly ten minutes of chatter.

“I thought it was odd,” Kiện recalled. “The boss is usually so busy. Why pull me aside to talk about all that?”

6

Following this lead, we found more suspicious details.

We questioned the women again.

One remembered something.

In the days before the incident, Huệ Quyên had often looked at her phone furtively.

Few villagers owned mobiles then. Hers was an old one her husband had sent from his workplace.

Sometimes she hid in a quiet corner to take a call, looking anxious.

Another worker had seen Tông Minh summon her privately to his office.

They closed the door and talked for a long time.

When she emerged, her eyes were red, as though she had cried.

Details we had overlooked now came together to suggest something frightening.

There was an unusual relationship between them.

Perhaps even a serious conflict.

We approached Tông Minh again.

This time, we asked directly about their relationship.

His expression changed at once.

At first, he tried to deny it.

Faced with the women’s statements, he finally spoke.

A year earlier, taking advantage of Chí Kiệt’s absence, he had repeatedly harassed Huệ Quyên.

She was timid.

Afraid her life would become even worse if word got out and her husband learned of it.

So she could only endure it.

Until six months earlier.

She discovered she was pregnant.

The child was not Chí Kiệt’s.

Panicked, she went to Tông Minh.

Either he accepted responsibility, or she would report him.

He feared exposure, damage to his reputation, and harm to his business.

Outwardly, he pretended to agree to resolve it.

Inside, he began contemplating murder.

He knew the mill’s regulations.

And the danger of the old press.

Step by step, he laid his plan.

First, he “accidentally” damaged the cameras.

On the day, he deliberately sent Kiện elsewhere.

Then, while Huệ Quyên concentrated on the machine, he quietly approached from behind.

Suddenly, he tore the protective cap from her head.

Before she could react, he forcefully pushed her hair toward the press’s intake.

7

When the truth emerged, the whole unit fell silent.

No one had imagined such a vile, disgusting plot behind what seemed a workplace tragedy.

The forensic team also sent news.

Detailed testing at a higher-level agency showed that the drug in her blood was not a sedative, such as the diazepam previously suspected.

It was a drug that relaxed muscles and slowed reflexes.

The amount was small, just enough to prevent her from escaping or resisting promptly when something sudden happened.

That explained why she could not react or call for help in time when her hair caught.

The words in her notebook—“还，是，不，活，了，吧” (“Maybe… I shouldn’t go on living”)—had actually been written in despair after she discovered the pregnancy and was threatened by Tông Minh.

At that point, she had thought of leaving the world with her unborn child.

She had never imagined death would come so horribly.

After returning to the village and learning the truth, Chí Kiệt—the man who had repeatedly beaten his wife—squatted outside the station and cried for a long time.

Perhaps only then did he realize that his coldness and violence had also helped push her into the abyss.

Tông Minh was finally arrested.

The severest punishment under the law awaited him.

The once-busy little sugar mill was abandoned after the bloody case.

The rusting press stood silent, as though still telling the story of that fateful afternoon at the turn of the century, when a woman died in despair.

Occasionally, sunlight slipped through the broken old windows onto the floor.

There, dark dried blood had mingled with the cane juice.

It could never be washed away.