Chapter 43
Chapter 43
Another five hundred meters ahead was a pedestrian crossing. Guardrails lined both sides of it, and hardly anyone ever crossed there.
Yu Lu yawned again without the slightest intention of slowing down. She had a clear, unobstructed view, and there was no one anywhere near the crossing. There was no need to slow down.
Bang!
The instant her car sped across the pedestrian crossing, a tremendous impact left Yu Lu’s head reeling.
The next moment, an old woman’s face was pressed against the windshield.
Yu Lu slammed on the brakes in terror. The car swerved wildly before coming to a crooked stop across the middle of the road. The old woman’s deeply wrinkled face remained plastered against the windshield as blood slowly trickled down from the top of her head.
Her eyes were wide open, her cloudy pupils trembling faintly.
Her lips seemed to be moving as though she were trying to say something, but Yu Lu couldn’t hear her.
In the end, the old woman lay sprawled across the hood, dead with her eyes still open. Through the windshield, she stared fixedly at Yu Lu in the driver’s seat.
With trembling hands, Yu Lu fumbled for her phone. She couldn’t remember how she called 120 or 110. She even called her insurance company.
She shakily opened the door and got out. One glance at the old woman revealed that her entire abdomen had caved in unnaturally while her back bulged outward, as though the impact had displaced all her internal organs.
How fast had she been driving?
Eighty kilometers per hour?
Or a hundred?
It was more than twenty minutes before sirens sounded. The moment Yu Lu spotted the police in the distance, she instinctively stumbled toward the patrol car.
Two officers got out and walked toward her.
At the sight of them, Yu Lu gave a bleak smile. The thread holding her mind together finally snapped.
Her vision went black, and she lost consciousness.
She had no idea how long she was out. When she opened her eyes again, she was lying in a hospital bed.
Her mother, Wu Sulian, was beside her.
“Mom? Where’s Dad?” Yu Lu asked instinctively. Then the details of the accident came rushing back. She shot upright and seized Wu Sulian’s hand. “What happened to that old woman?”
Wu Sulian’s eyes were red. She gave Yu Lu a small shake of her head. “She died at the scene.”
Yu Lu felt as though she had been struck by lightning. Tears rolled down her cheeks in heavy drops. “I didn’t see her! There wasn’t anyone on that road. I didn’t see her!”
“Your father…” Grief crossed Wu Sulian’s face, but before she could finish, the door opened and two police officers entered.
One was a man and the other a woman. Yu Lu needed to cooperate with their investigation, so Wu Sulian was asked to leave. Whatever she wanted to say would have to wait.
The female officer took notes and recorded the interview while the male officer questioned Yu Lu.
He asked the standard questions about the accident. Yu Lu could recall every detail, and nothing struck the officers as unusual.
Then the male officer asked, “Why didn’t you slow down before the pedestrian crossing?”
“There was no one there! The entire street was empty! I was in a hurry to get to work, so I didn’t slow down.” Realizing how agitated she sounded, Yu Lu hurriedly calmed herself.
The female officer looked at her in surprise. “But we checked the surveillance footage. The elderly woman had been sitting on the guardrail beside the crossing for over an hour. Just as your car was approaching the crossing, she jumped down from the guardrail and stepped onto it.”
The male officer’s expression turned stern. “Don’t lie to us. There is a surveillance camera at that intersection. This was a very serious traffic accident, and you have to take responsibility for your actions.”
Yu Lu stared at them blankly, unable to believe what she was hearing.
Of course she knew there was a camera at that intersection. She wasn’t lying! When she had looked down the road from several hundred meters away, the entire street had been deserted. Even when she was only fifty meters from the pedestrian crossing, there had been no one sitting on the guardrail!
“Impossible! There was no one there! There was nobody there when I drove past!” Yu Lu shrieked. “You’re lying to me! I want to see the surveillance footage! Let me see it!”
The police normally would not have allowed Yu Lu to view the footage, but she became so hysterical that she ripped the IV needle from her arm and tried to run outside barefoot.
In the end, the policewoman took pity on her and agreed to let her watch it.
The policeman had a copy of the footage on his phone and played it for Yu Lu right there.
In the video, the old woman sat motionless on the guardrail for more than an hour. She had been sitting there quietly from 6:10 a.m. until 7:20 a.m.
At 7:21, Yu Lu’s car headed toward the sidewalk. At that exact moment, the old woman jumped down from the guardrail and walked toward the sidewalk.
The tremendous impact sent her flying before she crashed heavily onto the hood of the car.
“Now that you’ve seen the footage, are you still not going to tell us the truth?” The policeman put away his phone and stared at Yu Lu in displeasure.
But after watching the footage, Yu Lu broke down even further. Clutching her head in agony, she screamed, “It’s fake! That video is fake! I didn’t see anyone! There wasn’t a single person on that road!”
The policewoman tugged at the policeman’s sleeve. “The fog was thick at the time, and she was driving while exhausted. It’s possible she genuinely didn’t see anyone. She’s still just a young woman, and she’s in shock. If you keep pressing her, she won’t be in any condition to give a statement.”
“There was no fog! There wasn’t any fog at all!” Yu Lu looked deranged. She remembered it clearly. The fog had already dispersed by then!
Wait…
Yu Lu suddenly recalled that in the surveillance footage she had just watched, the entire road had been shrouded in dense fog.
Then why had she been able to see everything so clearly at the time?
Seeing the state she was in, the policewoman sighed and said to her colleague, “Let her rest for a while. We’ll speak to the victim’s family and come back later.”
After the two officers left the ward, Wu Sulian walked in.
She looked at her pale-faced daughter. There were things she wanted to say, but she could not bring herself to speak.
It took Yu Lu a long time to calm down enough to form a complete sentence. “Mom, what did you want to tell me before you went out?”
Wu Sulian hesitated again and again before finally saying in a pained voice, “Your dad was repairing the roof of the pigsty when the police called to tell him you’d been in an accident. The shock made him fall. He broke his leg, and he’s in a ward on the fifth floor now.”
Yu Lu’s hard-won composure shattered once more. She scrambled out of bed, desperate to go to the fifth floor, but Wu Sulian stopped her.
“It’s nothing too serious. The doctor just said he’ll walk with a slight limp from now on.” Wu Sulian tried to comfort Yu Lu, but her own tears began to fall first.
Her husband was only fifty. He still had another twenty or thirty years ahead of him, yet now he would have to spend the rest of his life disabled!
“It’s all my fault. I did this to Dad. It’s all my fault…” Yu Lu clung to Wu Sulian, sobbing so hard she could barely speak.
Mother and daughter were both weeping uncontrollably when the door to the ward was suddenly slammed open. Five or six furious middle-aged people stormed inside.
“You’re the one who ran my mother over and killed her! I’ll make you pay with your life!”
A middle-aged man with bloodshot eyes lunged forward to hit Yu Lu. Wu Sulian instinctively wrapped her arms around her daughter to shield her. Within seconds, several heavy blows landed squarely on her body.
The police rushed in and struggled to pull the attacker away, but to no avail. Finally, the policeman roared,
“Enough! You’re assaulting someone right in front of the police! Do you all want to be detained? If every last one of you gets arrested, who’s going to arrange your mother’s funeral?”