Chapter 115

Chapter 115

On the fourth and fifth days, Qin Song still went to that pizza shop every day to eat.

He went twice each day, always sitting at the same window seat, ordering the same food. After eating, he didn’t go anywhere else, just stared out the window in a daze.

The owner’s little boy would run into Qin Song every afternoon while doing his homework in the shop.

That day, after finishing his homework, he ran over to Qin Song and sat down in the seat opposite him.

Qin Song snapped out of it, staring blankly at him.

The little boy waved five fingers in front of Qin Song’s eyes. “Bro, you spaced out again! I’ve been counting these past few days – you average six zone-outs a day!”

Qin Song lifted his coffee and sipped through the straw. “So you can calculate averages. Your math’s pretty good.”

The boy grinned smugly and leaned in. “Bro, you got something on your mind?”

Qin Song couldn’t help but curl his lip. “You’re just a kid – what do you know about ‘something on your mind’?”

The boy set down his pen and said with great seriousness, “I’m already ten years old. I know everything.”

With that, he went to the counter and got two cans of cola, handing one to Qin Song.

“Here, this one’s on me, no need to pay.”

Qin Song found it even funnier and reached out to take the cola.

The boy pulled the tab, took a sip, and asked, “Why’d you come to Singapore all alone?”

Qin Song thought for a moment. “To clear my head.”

The boy: “Let me guess. Bankrupt? Unemployed? Or divorced? Anyway, you must’ve taken a huge hit.”

Qin Song looked down at the table. “Something like that.”

The boy: “What do you mean ‘something like that’? Did any of my guesses hit the mark?”

Qin Song nodded. “Yeah, one did.”

The boy clasped his hands together and rocked them. “I’m so sorry to hear that, bro.”

Qin Song gave a small smile. “It’s fine.”

After thinking, he added, “I envy you.”

The boy: “Me? What do you envy about me?”

Qin Song: “I envy your youth, your innocence, your sunshine. If I could go back to your age and start everything over, that would be great.”

The boy: “You’re not old. No matter how big the deal, you can just start from scratch.”

Qin Song: “Mm, thanks.”

The boy suddenly asked, “For real though, why’d you make me go listen to those two people talk that day?”

Qin Song: “Oh, so you came to dig for gossip.”

The boy: “I do care about you! Gossip… no way.”

Qin Song didn’t feel like explaining much to a kid, so he brushed it off. “Just pretend that day never happened.”

The boy lowered his voice. “Honestly, were you scared by what that lady was talking about?”

Qin Song: “What thing?”

The boy: “The thing about a man killing a woman and stuffing her under the bed.”

Qin Song glanced out the window carelessly. “Oh, that was fake. She made it up.”

The boy said in surprise, “How could she have made it up? It’s real!”

Qin Song snapped his head back and stared into the boy’s eyes.

The boy: “Really! Everyone around here knows about it!”

Qin Song: “What do you know? Tell me.”

The boy: “It was last summer, a couple came on vacation and stayed at a hotel near here. They got into a fight, and the man hit the woman in the head with something heavy. She died on the spot, and then he stuffed her under the bed.”

Qin Song narrowed his eyes. “Stuffed her in face-up or face-down?”

The boy: “Man, you’re asking for crazy details! I’m not her, how should I know?”

Qin Song: “What happened after? Was the guy caught?”

The boy: “He turned himself in later. Supposedly he tried to kill himself but couldn’t, then voluntarily turned himself in, but the weird thing is…”
The little boy paused.
Qin Song: “What is it?”
The little boy: “When the police arrived, they didn’t find the woman’s body.”
Qin Song: “Where’s the body?”
The little boy: “No one knows. Even the man himself was dumbfounded. He was sure she was dead, and sure he had stuffed her in there.”
Qin Song: “That’s too strange.”
The little boy: “Yeah, during that time, everyone on our street was on edge. My classmates’ stories got more and more outrageous, saying the body got up and walked away on its own…”
Qin Song: “Kids shouldn’t believe in such supernatural things.”
The little boy: “But it really doesn’t make sense. Who could have known he killed someone and hid her under the bed? And who would move the body? Maybe after the man left, the body crawled out from under the bed on its own.”
Qin Song shivered. An image flashed in his mind: inside the pitch-black hotel room, everything was silent. Then the body under the bed stirred uncomfortably, struggling to inch its way out. It walked to the bathroom, washed the blood from its head in front of the mirror, combed its hair, opened the door, and stepped out into the street, blending into the crowd…
He glanced nervously at the people walking on the street.
The little boy followed Qin Song’s gaze to the street and said, “Last Halloween, we were really scared.”
Qin Song: “Scared of what?”
The little boy: “There were so many people dressed up as ghosts on the street. What if a real one was mixed in?”
Qin Song: “So there was no conclusion to this case?”
The little boy turned his head back: “The body still hasn’t been found to this day.”
Qin Song lowered his head and said nothing.
The little boy: “After that period, our parents wouldn’t let us play outside too late. The murdered girl was from out of town. Her soul couldn’t return home after death, so it must be wandering around our area.”
Qin Song: “How old was she?”
The little boy: “In her twenties, I think, not sure. But everyone local knows her name: Wang Mengmeng. For a while, she really became my nightmare. I kept having dreams about it… Because of this, that hotel barely gets any guests now. The owner is really unlucky.”
After leaving the pizza shop, Qin Song’s mood sank again.
This matter actually had little to do with him; he just found it too coincidental.
He had killed a woman and fled here, only to find a widely known true story about a man killing a woman.
Even more coincidentally, the man had also used a heavy object to injure the woman’s head.
Qin Song thought, actually, this doesn’t really connect to me. After all, when two people have a conflict and fight, if one wants to kill the other, the most likely method is to strike the head.
Almost back at the hotel, Qin Song remembered something, raised his phone, and took a photo of the whole street.
He turned back to the pizza shop, found the little boy, and showed him the photo.
“Little brother, which hotel did that guy kill someone in?”
The little boy dragged to examine the photo carefully, thought for a moment, and used two fingers to zoom in on one hotel in the image.
“Seems like this one. My mom never lets me play near this hotel’s entrance.”
Qin Song leaned in to look and drew a sharp breath – it was the hotel he was staying in now.
So the reason this hotel’s business was so dead was because someone had died there!
He immediately sensed Jingjing’s malice.
To attract guests to her own hotel, she had pinned a murder that happened in her hotel onto another one.
Qin Song opened Jingjing’s WeChat, intending to confront her.
After typing a few words, he paused, then deleted them with a tap-tap-tap.
He scrolled up through the chat history to the very top and finally saw clearly the message Jingjing had sent when she first added him.
“Hey there, gege, I’m Wang Mengmeng.”