Chapter 26: Gan Ling’s Evaluation of Me

Now everything was clear, laid out between me and Gan Ling like a world map.

I wouldn’t reveal the killer’s appearance, build, name, age, or any other information. Not only that, I would do everything to block Gan Ling from seeking revenge. As for her chasing down every Zhang San, Li Si, or Wang Wu, I would intercept and block her every time.

I welcomed Gan Ling into the house, took several calm deep breaths of the outside air, then closed the door.

Gan Ling pulled a small trinket from her pocket and handed it over. It was a curved, glossy bone segment, smooth like polished jade—the kind kids used to trade five for one back in the day. The one Gan Ling gave me had been cleaned spotless, as if someone had treated it like a piece of jade and thumbed it constantly.

“Suits you,” Gan Ling said.

I had zero doubt she’d picked it up off the ground or from some trash heap while staking out somewhere, then tossed it my way to fob off a kid.

I tossed the little bone onto the coffee table and mentally rehearsed my words again: “Um… about that… after you harassed our principal…”

I’d dredged up some seriously incriminating dirt.

Gan Ling got the hint right away. She went straight to my bedroom like it was her own place, grabbed the charging cable, tossed her phone aside to mooch off my electricity, then came back to plop on the sofa. She rubbed her index finger along her lips, going through some thinking process I couldn’t tell was genuine or fake. “You’re suddenly so enthusiastic today. Are you finally going to tell me about the killer?”

“What did you find out from the principal?”

“Nothing,” Gan Ling said, looking up and brushing the stray hairs from her eyes. “You go ahead.”

“I think… wait, no, I’m the one supposed to be asking you.” I nearly fell into her trap. Gan Ling narrowed her eyes, her smile sharp and mocking. “Yo.”

I was standing next to the sofa while Gan Ling sat there all steady. Suddenly it hit me—I looked like an elementary school kid reciting poetry to strict parents. I immediately scurried along the armrest to sit down, twisted my head to glare at her. Gan Ling drew her legs in and sat up straight. “I don’t want to say.”

“…Then… then let me share my thoughts.”

In the end, it was still me doing all the talking. I felt like a bumbling startup founder pitching a PPT to an investor. My crude ideas were laid out in a simple one-two-three format across the slides. Gan Ling clutched her energy and time, weighing whether to invest, while I grew parched, my jumbled brain turning into stuttered ones and twos the moment I opened my mouth. Sweat beaded on the tip of my nose from the heat. “…Finally, as long as you promise me—not to harass anyone else, not to bother innocent people—I’m willing to make a deal with you. On weekends, you can come to my place. I’ll identify for you. If you got a photo of him, then you’ve found the killer. If not… you have to accept it. I—I can’t, no matter who it is, tell you directly what the killer looks like. Not when… I know you… you want to kill… um.”

I stammered to a finish. Gan Ling clearly got it. She shifted positions, right leg forward, left leg back, sitting in a very businesslike way. But her fingers tapped the back of the sofa irregularly, like she was mulling it over.

I wanted to shout that this was already the best plan I could come up with—you stingy investor, just dump all your time into snapping photos on every street! Even if it takes ten years and you never find him, going mad and killing me in the end, it doesn’t matter—as long as you don’t drag more people back to seven years ago!

But I knew the odds of Gan Ling agreeing were slim to none. It was like there were four lottery buckets in front of her, all guaranteed losers, and I was begging her to pick only mine, the one sure to hit… Only an idiot would go for it. If she was truly determined on revenge, she’d brush me aside and chase down every lead she could find herself.

“Okay.” Gan Ling pointed at her phone on the TV cabinet. I fetched it over. She unlocked it, and I started dutifully flipping through the photo album right in front of her. When I’d scrolled to some photo I couldn’t even remember the count of, Gan Ling suddenly cut in. “Your principal said you… told her about what happened back then. Say it to me again.”

To the principal, Zheng Ningning was at most three words in a newspaper—maybe under a pseudonym like Little Flower or Little Grass—like reading a novel. But Zheng Ningning, despite sharing the Zheng surname, was flesh and blood fallen from Gan Ling herself, carrying her genes. She was one of the reasons Gan Ling had decided to kill. My mouth felt glued shut, my head a foggy mess. I opened it several times but nothing came out.

Gan Ling: “Say it. You can keep the killer hidden. I want to hear what happened.”

“I’m sorry.” That was all I could manage. My mouth opened and closed like a live fish being transferred from basin to pot. Finally, I pursed my lips tight, terrified Gan Ling would rip them open and hear the low rumble in my throat.

It was hard to describe Gan Ling’s expression. I ducked my head to my chest, not daring to look. Describing a child’s gruesome death to its mother? Wouldn’t that just rile her up even more?

With my head down, the lamplight shadow suddenly flickered. Gan Ling’s silhouette loomed large as she raised her hand high. I flinched hard, squeezing my eyes shut and hugging my head. The slap I expected didn’t come. Instead, her hand landed on my head and rubbed hard—as if she were trying to unscrew it from my body like a bottle cap.

“Keep looking,” Gan Ling said, crossing her arms and leaning sideways against the sofa, staring at me. I passed the phone back for her to unlock, then lowered my head to browse the photos again. That indescribable gaze stayed fixed on my head the whole time.

The agreement was sealed.

Later, Gan Ling WeChatted me on Friday: I’ll come by tomorrow.

Jiang Huixiang: Ah?

Gan Ling: Look at photos.

Gan Ling had learned to screen mirror. She realized that with me hunching over like a quail, she couldn’t properly read my expressions. So after coming in, she acted right at home, turned on the TV, fiddled expertly with the remote, and took control of the photo-flipping pace herself to stop me from skipping any.

Sitting side by side on the sofa was good for both our necks. On the TV screen, I reviewed countless men from Neng County—on streets and alleys, indoors and out. Sometimes I’d even be shocked: “You were snapping photos near the police station and weren’t afraid of getting nabbed as a spy?”

“I did get nabbed,” Gan Ling admitted frankly.

“Ah?”

“But they all figured I was just plain crazy. After asking a few times, they got used to it.”

“What if you really were a spy?”

“Catch me and lock me up. I’d still do it after getting out.” Gan Ling was surprisingly nonchalant about it. She shoved my shoulder to make me focus, then flipped to the next photo for my inspection.

I felt a weird pang of guilt. If I hadn’t forced Gan Ling into this needle-in-a-haystack dead end of a plan, maybe if she’d pushed a little harder, she really could’ve pried that couple’s contact info out of our principal? As I idly speculated, I zoned out a bit. Gan Ling noticed right away and gave me another shove from behind, forcing me to scrutinize the appearances of Neng County men like I was hung up by a beam.

If big data grabbed every man’s face in Neng County and averaged them, that’d be the killer’s looks. The killer had a perfectly average face—one a stranger would forget at a glance. But because it was so average, it was actually kinda handsome. Compared to the national average face, you could tell he was a typical Neng County guy: square face, flat eyebrows, single eyelids, wide mouth.

It was like reading a book called Appearances of Neng County Men. I got to see all sorts of different looks. Gan Ling was so thorough she even included the lame old man who watched over the parked cars outside Jiaxing Supermarket. The old guy had a ragged, worn-out mask on, exposing his bulbous booze-red nose, with beard, nasal hairs, and eyebrows all growing wild.

I said, “Don’t you know him? Why’d you include him?” Gan Ling replied, “What if?”

Maybe because I was so actively and seriously reviewing the photos, Gan Ling occasionally shared bits about her own life tied to them.

For example, with one photo against the backdrop of Hongzhi Elementary School, Gan Ling paused for a beat and pointed to a small shop next to the school. “The first time I brought the paperwork to enroll, the owner here saw Ningning and said kids these days start elementary at six—seven’s a bit late.”

“Yeah, school starts earlier and earlier now, and it’s all by calendar age… Back in the kindergarten, we’d even get two-year-olds sometimes, but we couldn’t really care for them properly…” I chimed in naturally.

Gan Ling kept flipping down. It was a good while before she picked the thread back up. “I said, well, no helping it. Can’t turn back the clock to six.”

Only then did I realize how lame my earlier response had been. I tried to patch it. “So it was you who took Ningning to register at Hongzhi Elementary…”

“Who else? You think some illiterate elder could handle the paperwork?” Gan Ling’s tone went cool.

“Your parents…” The words were barely out when Gan Ling shifted, turning a third of her back to me—a clear sign she was shutting down the topic. I let it drop.

Sometimes we’d even chat about things beyond Zheng Ningning.

That day we flipped to Lu Jinshi again. He was just background; the main subject was another guy. But I still zoned out for a moment. They were in a park. Lu Jinshi was holding his phone, walking behind a pair of elders. His dad was pushing a stroller while his mom pointed at Lu Jinshi, who knows what she was saying.

“Still got an old flame?” Gan Ling asked.

“No… just flip past it.”

“Then you do.”

“No… aiya.” I was starting to find her a bit annoying. Gan Ling’s tone could be so cocksure sometimes, like nothing slipped past her—full of that smug certainty. And yet, she never dug into gossip or cared what anyone was really up to. She’d ask once at most, skim right over it, and slap a label on the whole thing. Which made me want to argue back—and that just locked in her rumor for good.

“I’m from Peng County… After my parents passed away, I was a bit at a loss and panicked. Later, I wandered around the city, took the wrong bus on the way back, and ended up in Neng County. Then at night, I was stumbling around on the street when a drunkard… kept following me. It was Lu Jinshi who happened to pass by and knocked that drunkard down with one punch.” I explained why I was so concerned about Lu Jinshi, but Gan Ling just casually flipped through the photos. “Repaying a debt of gratitude by offering yourself in marriage.”

“No… aiya!” I was so pissed I wanted to turn off the TV, but Gan Ling raised an eyebrow, and I knew exactly what she was about to say.

It was bound to be something like “exploded again” or “here we go,” so I held back, rubbing my knees anxiously.

“Actually, what I’m thinking is… even without that incident seven years ago… I still wouldn’t be able to marry him.”

The screen had switched to a different man—not the culprit. Gan Ling kept flipping through the photos, utterly indifferent to my romantic woes.

I shut my mouth too and focused on the photos.

After a bit, Gan Ling asked, “Why?”

“What?” I’d half-forgotten what I’d just said. Staring at Gan Ling’s blank, indifferent expression, I racked my brain for a moment. “Oh… you went quiet for ages.”

“Go on, then.” Gan Ling kept flipping photos, lips pursed as faces of men aged thirty to fifty flashed across the TV screen one by one. The killer wasn’t among them.

“I forgot what I was gonna say.” I dripped some eye drops into my eyes and closed them to rest.

Gan Ling said, “I think you two don’t make a good match either. You’re not good at saying no, he has strong opinions and seems pretty decent at first glance, but you get temperamental about certain things, dig in your heels and refuse to budge. It’ll be hard to make it work in the end.”

“…What the hell!” I snapped my eyes open, and a drop of eye medicine splashed onto my face—it looked like I’d been provoked to tears.

Gan Ling shoved me expressionlessly. I kept staring at the TV, stewing over her assessment of me.