Chapter 189
Chapter 189
After dinner, I took Anning back to the entrance of her apartment complex.
She was officially starting work at the shop tomorrow, so I went over a few things she needed to keep in mind.
Once I was done, I was about to get in the car and leave when she suddenly called out to me again.
“Chen Mo!”
“From now on… what should I call you?”
I froze for a second, not quite catching on at first.
But I understood soon enough. I smiled and said, “Just call me Chen Mo. The name Li Fuguang feels very unfamiliar now. His parents are both dead, and the only person who still remembered him is gone too.”
“So just call me Chen Mo.”
She nodded, then turned and went upstairs.
I drove home. Meng Yifan and Song Xiaotian were already there.
The two of them were cracking sunflower seeds while looking at me with these half-smirking expressions.
“We thought you weren’t coming back tonight.”
“Not coming back?”
I was baffled. “If I didn’t come back, where would I sleep?”
The two of them started laughing again.
I immediately realized what they were getting at and cursed, “Are you two bored or what? Why does everything have to go in that direction? So vulgar!”
I walked over and sat down, and saw two sets of documents on the coffee table.
I picked them up and took a look. These were the files for two Stigmatized Property listings that clients had entrusted to our agency a while back, before Meng Yifan was arrested.
We had been improving our workflow. Any Stigmatized Property listed with our shop had to have a complete file put together: when the deceased died, how they died, whether it was a natural death or an unnatural one, and whether anything abnormal had happened in the house after the death. All of that had to be investigated clearly.
Later, Meng Yifan got arrested, so we never had time to look into these two Stigmatized Property listings.
“Why did you bring these files home? Isn’t that unlucky?” I asked them.
Song Xiaotian said, “Unlucky, my ass. We deal with Stigmatized Property every day and that’s not unlucky, but bringing a couple of files home is? Someone wants to buy these two Stigmatized Properties. They’ve already paid the deposits, but there seems to be a problem. We need to go handle it tomorrow.”
That meant tomorrow was going to be busy.
For buyers who had already paid deposits, we had to get things sorted out for them as quickly as possible.
If there really was something wrong with the house, even after it was dealt with, they still couldn’t move in right away. They would have to wait a while and let the yin energy disperse.
I quickly picked up the files and carefully read through them again.
In one of the Stigmatized Property cases, the deceased was a woman. She was twenty-eight, and had just given birth. Her baby had only recently turned one month old.
The female deceased seemed to have suffered from postpartum depression. Just a few days after the baby turned one month old, she killed herself. And she hadn’t died alone-she took the child with her.
She smothered the baby first, then hanged herself in the room. By the time her family found them, both bodies, the adult and the infant, had already gone stiff.
After the seventh day following their deaths, strange things started happening in the house all the time. As for what exactly happened, the file didn’t say.
I asked Meng Yifan, and he said the family wasn’t willing to talk about it.
Li Xingyang had gone to investigate this Stigmatized Property in person. That young man really did take his work seriously. Since the family wouldn’t say much, he started asking around the neighborhood.
Hard work paid off. After staking out the neighborhood for two days, he heard from a neighbor that someone had been walking their dog in the complex at night, and the dog kept barking furiously at one of the bedrooms in that Stigmatized Property.
And that bedroom was exactly the room where the woman and the baby had died.
After the two of them died, some people even saw the female deceased herself. Around nine o’clock at night, she would be holding the baby and walking back and forth by the window.
And there were even wilder stories. Someone said that one night, when he came home from work, he instinctively looked up at the bedroom window of that apartment-and happened to meet the dead woman’s eyes. The dead woman even waved hello to him. After he went home, he fell sick for several days, and only recovered after going to a temple to ask for a Peace Talisman.
That was the situation with one of the Stigmatized Properties.
The person who died in the other Stigmatized Property was a man, middle-aged, and a corporate executive. He had also killed himself at home.
This man slit his wrists. In the middle of the night, while his family was asleep, he secretly went into the bathroom and cut his wrists.
His mother was already in her seventies. She got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, and when she went in, she saw her son lying in the bathtub. The whole tub was filled with blood. The old woman fainted on the spot from fright.
It was a serious shock. In the end, his mother passed away a month later as well.
When I looked at the man’s time of death, it had been two months ago.
Two months ago…
I immediately frowned and hurriedly checked the time of death for the female victim from the previous file again.
I discovered that these two people had both committed suicide two months ago, only a few days apart.
“Why are there so many suicides…” I muttered.
“That’s totally normal,” Song Xiaotian said as he cracked sunflower seeds. “This guy had a mortgage and car loan to pay off. His old mother was sick and needed treatment, and he had two kids at home to raise. Add all those expenses together, and it’s no small amount of money.”
“He was the pillar of the family, too. Sure, he was a corporate executive, but his company was facing layoffs this year, and he just happened to be one of the people cut. Imagine how much pressure that was. He couldn’t take it anymore, so he took his own life.”
“As for that woman who’d just had a baby, she already had postpartum depression. That illness makes people prone to suicide.”
I nodded. I could understand it.
After all, I’d jumped off a bridge before myself.
“I’ve already communicated with the clients. If the houses are unclean, we can help handle it, but there’ll be an extra charge.”
Meng Yifan said, “For the female victim’s place, I’m charging ten thousand. For the male victim’s place, considering his family’s situation, I only asked for a token two thousand. This extra income will count as your own. Whoever handles it can split the money among themselves.”
I thought that was reasonable. After all, the extra income from dealing with a Stigmatized Property came with risks. Sometimes, people even got injured.
And when it came to handling Stigmatized Properties, Li Xingyang and the others wouldn’t know how. It would just be the three of us going.
Meng Yifan looked at me and said, “Tomorrow, you and Anning take one place. Brother Tian and I will take the other. Let’s get this resolved as soon as possible. The clients are in a hurry to renovate.”
I nodded, but then suddenly felt like something was off.
“Wait, why do you have to pair Anning with me?”
I said contemptuously, “Can you guys stop trying to play matchmaker?”
Meng Yifan cursed, “Matchmaker my ass. Can you stop being so damn jumpy? Think about it. The two of us are already scared of Du Yuwei, and now we’re going to a haunted Stigmatized Property. It’s dark as hell, and if we turn around and see a face exactly like Du Yuwei’s, tell me-are we going to be scared or not?”
He actually made me laugh.
“Fine, then.”
I agreed.
To be honest, Meng Yifan really was a decent guy.
The reason he wanted me to bring Anning along was so she could earn some money.
Just the commission from this one job would be a pretty good sum for her.