Chapter 289 - 287: Missing Person

Chapter 289: Chapter 287: Missing Person

"This is the information on the person who went missing from Yanjing Village a year ago." Zhao Yongliang pulled up the missing person file for Duan Wenrui.

The three cases in Yanjing Village were marked with numbers.

1, 2, 4.

If all the cases were truly connected, then where was "3"? It was likely that it had happened but hadn’t been discovered yet, which was why they were looking into missing persons.

After Duan Wenrui reviewed it, he passed it to Su Miaoyi.

Wu An, male, fifty-seven at the time of his disappearance over a year ago. Unmarried, lived alone.

According to his family information, Wu An had moved here as a young boy when his mother remarried into the village.

In Yanjing Village, Wu An had two younger half-sisters from his mother’s side.

They had both married into other villages long ago.

Ten years ago, Wu An’s stepfather passed away, and his mother remarried again, but Wu An remained in Yanjing Village.

Chu Xingrou and Lu Zhishen looked at Wu An’s photo together.

"What’s wrong with his leg?" Lu Zhishen asked.

"He had an illness as a child—polio," Su Miaoyi said, reading from the file. "It left him with a disability in his leg."

Su Miaoyi looked at the information in the report.

Because of Wu An’s disability, he couldn’t do farm work. He usually went to the market to sell small trinkets.

He didn’t earn much, and sometimes he was completely broke.

That’s why his two sisters would come to visit him every so often.

The exact time of his disappearance wasn’t clear. All they knew was that when Wu An’s sister came to visit, he was already gone.

It was the busy farming season at the time, so the neighbors hadn’t noticed when Wu An had gone missing.

At first, they searched around the village. When they couldn’t find him, they reported it to the police.

The police had searched Wu An’s house. There were no signs of a fight, no signs of a struggle, and nothing had been rummaged through.

No stranger had entered the room.

It was determined that Wu An had left his house and never returned.

Wu An’s phone could not be located.

Many people in the village helped with the search.

But they searched the nearby villages and almost the entire mountain, yet they still couldn’t find him.

"His leg is bad, so he couldn’t have gone far, right?" Chu Xingrou said.

"He didn’t use a crutch, he just walked slowly with a limp," Zhao Yongliang said. "It’s possible he went out to do something, got lost, and just kept walking farther and farther away. But people in the neighboring villages all said they hadn’t seen him."

"Is this the only missing person case in recent years?" Su Miaoyi asked.

"The only one in our town," Zhao Yongliang said. "We’ve had some elderly people wander off before. They get old, get a little confused. But none of them ever made it out of town."

Su Miaoyi looked at the file again and said nothing more.

’Wu An’s leg was bad; he shouldn’t have been able to go far. And aside from his leg, the file says he was in good health.’

’A man in his fifties, with no known cognitive issues, wouldn’t suddenly get lost and wander off. After all, this was a place he’d lived in for decades.’

’It’s also possible he had an illness that hadn’t been diagnosed.’

The case was being handled as a simple disappearance.

After breakfast, Duan Wenrui took his team back up the mountain to examine the spot where Wan Shuang was murdered.

In the daylight, they would be able to see more clearly and potentially find more evidence.

Zhao Yongliang led Su Miaoyi and the others through the village to question people.

"Where should we go first?" Zhao Yongliang asked.

As the group left the village committee office, Lu Zhishen asked, "Is Tian De’s house empty now?"

"Tian De’s house was sold. Tian De is in a nursing home, and the fees are high. His son has a family and a house in the city and doesn’t come back much. A year after Tian De’s incident, his son sold the house and the land." Zhao Yongliang was quite familiar with the case, and by extension, the families involved; he knew almost everything that had happened over the past three years. "Anyway, since no one was coming back to live here, he sold it to pay for Tian De’s nursing home bills. The house has been rebuilt now, and someone else lives there."

"What about Tian Dajiang’s house?" Chu Xingrou asked.

"His parents are still living there," Zhao Yongliang said, turning a corner to head toward Tian Dajiang’s home. "The old couple is nearly eighty, but they’re both in good health. Tian Dajiang used to live with them."

"Why didn’t Tian Dajiang ever get married?" Lu Zhishen asked.

Su Miaoyi listened to their conversation, her gaze fixed ahead.

The road they were on led to the street with the general store just around the corner.

In the distance, she could see someone leaving the store after making a purchase.

"Poverty," Zhao Yongliang sighed. "Everyone was poor back then. Your livelihood depended entirely on your labor. What girl wouldn’t want to marry into a better-off family? I heard that back then, Tian Dajiang’s parents weren’t in good health, and he was the only able-bodied worker. A family of three, and they couldn’t harvest much grain all year round."

"Some families had more children, which meant more labor. If the parents were young and healthy, they could work hard, and the family would have more grain and wouldn’t go hungry."

"But don’t more children mean more mouths to feed? Raising children takes grain too, doesn’t it?" Chu Xingrou said.

"Kids were easy to raise back then. They didn’t cost much. By the time they started eating a lot, they were old enough to work, so they became part of the labor force," Zhao Yongliang explained.

Chu Xingrou nodded.

Zhao Yongliang continued, "Any family would want to marry their daughter into a family with relatively better circumstances. Life was already hard; marrying into a poor family would only make it harder. Tian Dajiang’s parents were in poor health back then, but now that they’re old, they’re surprisingly sturdy."

"Are you a local?" Su Miaoyi asked.

Zhao Yongliang looked to be in his fifties.

His Mandarin was standard, without a trace of an accent. He even spoke Mandarin with the villagers, making it impossible to tell where he was from.

Yet he was exceptionally knowledgeable about the area.

"My hometown is another village in this same town. My family had a little money back then and sent me to school, so I left here at a young age," Zhao Yongliang said. "Later, I ended up coming back to the town’s police station. I’ll probably stay here until I retire."

As he spoke, they arrived at the entrance of the general store.

Su Miaoyi entered the store. There were five or six customers inside.

Business seemed to be good. As Su Miaoyi walked over, she’d seen people coming and going from the store.

They had met the store’s owner last night.

She was a woman named Tian Liu, thirty-four years old.

Her home was right next door, so after leaving the store last night, they went directly to her house to have a look.

She was home with her son.

Her husband was a migrant worker.

She had been a deep sleeper last night. Even though she was close by, she hadn’t heard the loudspeaker while she was asleep.

It wasn’t until someone from the village called her and her son heard the phone ring and woke her up.

Only then did she hear the nursery rhyme from the loudspeaker.

She was too scared to go outside and look, so she called the police.

Being such a deep sleeper, she hadn’t heard any other disturbances either.

"Cleaned up so fast? The door’s already fixed?" Lu Zhishen asked, glancing at the door Duan Wenrui had kicked open last night.

"I didn’t sleep at all after that last night. As soon as it was light out, I contacted the village carpenter to help fix it," Tian Liu said. "It wasn’t badly broken, so he got it fixed up quickly."

"Business seems good," Chu Xingrou commented, casually touching a banana next to her.

"Good? Hardly. They’re all just here to ask about what happened last night," Tian Liu said, glancing at the customers.

...