CH 2

Translation checker: GRain

Editor: Junyans

Krystyn flashed a smile at Arthur, held out her fist, and looked at him expectantly. 

Her father gave her a look that said ‘Who the hell did you learn this hooligan habit from?’ before he held out his hand and bumped her fist to celebrate their victory.

The girl smiled brightly and he smiled back. This was a smile that was very different from the one he typically used to greet people at parties or on the streets. It was light, but undeniably gentle and doting.

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Krystyn went to fist bump Chrissie to celebrate their victory, and Lynn found it really hard to connect the current Arthur with the man in the interrogation room.

Seeing Arthur looking sideways in his direction, Lynn held out his fist and said, “Shall we celebrate too?” 

Arthur walked away in the other direction after he gave him a look that said, “You’re out of your mind, we’re not friends”. It was quite a vivid expression for Arthur, who always had a steady, refined look.

Well, he still found the other person annoying.

In the hoop a toy game, they hooped all the presents they could and then returned most of them to the students who had set up the stall. Chrissie kept a brown monkey, and Krystyn took a red toy boomerang, looking interested in learning how to play with it.

And her father was carefully explaining to her how the boomerang worked, as if he had used it before.

Maybe he had.

While fishing for goldfish, they ran into Edith, one of the best caterers in town. Her eyes lit up when she saw Arthur. It was no news in town that Edith had a huge crush on Arthur.

She enthusiastically praised the two children for being as beautiful as pink daisies in the morning before inviting Arthur to her house for dinner.

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“I’m afraid I’m not sure if I have the time,” Arthur said. 

“I haven’t said which day.”

“I’ve been very busy lately.”

Lynn thought: Continue spewing your nonsense. You’ve been doing nothing all day these days. It’s not like I haven’t been keeping tabs on you.

“We’ll make my best roast veal and apple pie. Krystyn likes that best, doesn’t she?” Edith said. 

They conversed harmoniously for a while about how to prepare a specific dish, and Arthur sounded quite knowledgeable. Lynn wondered whether Edith saw him as a kindred spirit, but regardless of whether Arthur was a good cook or not, he knew he wasn’t the type to be kindred spirits with Edith.

The situation got a little more awkward when the topic of dinner came up again. “We can chat. It’s not easy living in town alone with a child, is it?” Edith said.

“I think it’s easy. It’s not like it’s not a crime-prone area,” Arthur replied.

“I mean, raising kids is very tough.” 

Arthur looked at Krystyn and said, “She’s not hard to raise.”

“Erm,” Lynn said, “I’m on my own with my daughter in town too, so when can I be invited to this dinner party?”

“Oh, of course, you’re always welcome, Officer,” Edith said.

“I’ll just have to see if I’m available at the last minute in the evening, but I’ll be there if I can,” Lynn said, putting a hand on Arthur’s shoulder, “I’ll bring Dr. Arthur along if I’m free.” 

It was obvious that Arthur was not accustomed to his shoulders being held. He tensed up and bore with it, managing to smile quite gracefully at the same time.

Both of their struggles were the same. Lynn felt that the people here were too… enthusiastic. They seemed to think that engaging in a little ‘socializing’ every now and then was normal, and indeed it was. But like him, this man also had a difficult time adapting.

They could work and live just like anyone else, but building intimate relationships sounded like a pipe dream. It was the same as decorating a Christmas tree with a gun covered in sequins or sprinkling a knife with sugar and baking it in the oven. People would just want to stay away from the whole situation.

A while later, a few other locals stopped by to chat about the upcoming art exhibition and the new chain of shops that was opening. The eager attendees were only able to disperse after thirty minutes of the dreaded small talk. 

Lynn put his hand down, and Arthur’s expression was cold.

“They really have a ton of energy,” Lynn said.

“I hate it here,” Arthur said.

It was clearly not a friendly remark, but Lynn almost laughed out loud. 

Krystyn rolled her eyes and said, “Speak more politely, Dad.”

“I don’t want to be polite, and your mother would have said the same thing,” Arthur said.

“Not even a female mosquito would dare come near you when she was around you,” Krystyn said, “Now, all the women in town think that you’re public property.”

Lynn laughed out loud and Arthur turned his head to glare at him. 

“You know you’re the same, Officer,” Krystyn said to Lynn.

“Yeah, we two are publicly-owned bachelors, so let’s fish for goldfish, while we still have the time to do so,” Lynn said, “The prize looks good.”

—They scooped up all the fish they could with one scoop, and the kid in charge of the stall looked like he was about to cry, so they had to put them all back. They even bought ice cream to coax him.

Cgateg vlvc’a kjca ab qijs atf atgff-ifuufv gjmf ujwf ja jii. 

But Krystyn looked at him expectantly, and the dad with an aristocratic aura became torn on whether to do so or not, sighed, and went to get a sack.

Bgsrasc rwlifv yglutais ogbw yftlcv.

Ktf akb ilaaif ulgir kbgxfv rb kfii abufatfg atja lo bcf vlvc’a xcbk yfaafg, atfs kbeiv tjnf wlrajxfc atfw obg aklcr. Oscc kjr tjqqs atja tlr vjeutafg tjv wjvf remt j mbwqjalyif oglfcv, jcv ktfc tf rjk atf ibbx bc Cgateg’r ojmf jr tf ibbxfv ja atfw, tf revvfcis gfjilhfv atja tlr rkbgc fcfws kjr bynlberis offilcu atf rjwf.

He’d come to such a small town as a single father with a child. No matter what kind of person he was, it was certainly not easy for him. 

Later, Lynn often recalled that game, perhaps because he hadn’t expected to have any physical contact with Arthur before. Even if there was, it would have involved things like fighting—but he couldn’t even imagine fighting with him. This guy didn’t seem to be physically violent at all.

The only time he was in close proximity to Arthur was in the interrogation room, where he had sat across from the man and tried to squeeze something out of the suspect, while the other man stared at his fingers expressionlessly. They had been at the two ends of the table, which was basically two extreme distances.

Then the man had raised his eyes and said in an icy and elegant tone, “May I go back, please, Officer?”

But now, they were at a boisterous garden party, surrounded by young housewives, students, and children. Lynn bent down to tie their feet together. Their legs were close together, and the other person had the temperature and strength of a  normal living person. 

Arthur watched his movements suspiciously.

“You know how to play two-man three-legged race, right?” Lynn said.

“I’ve seen it on TV. But even in my wildest imagination, I had never thought I’d play it myself one day.”

Lynn remembered that torn look on his face when he had watched others play the game. It was a look of real reluctance. But under Kristyn’s expectant gaze, he would have said yes to anything. Lynn himself was a father and knew that look and silent exchange, and it was at that moment he thought that Arthur was actually a pretty good guy. 

“It’s easy, just match the pace,” he said, looking at his wristwatch, “We have to walk in unison.”

Arthur held out his hand and synchronized his watch with Lynn’s like a pro.

They did not fall even once.

Their arms were close together. Lynn remembered the strength and warmth when he stretched his body, the count and the rhythm of his breaths, and the touch of the fabric of his clothes. 

Despite not moving quickly, they were the first to reach the finish line and were immediately regarded as the parents with the most coordination.

I like working with him, a voice in Lynn’s mind admitted reluctantly. Arthur’s body possessed excellent coordination and a sense of strict self-control, rather than being disorganized and inattentive.

It was very pleasant to work with him.

They won the prize, which was two huge teddy bears. Lynn was holding the white one from Chrissie and Arthur was carrying the pink one from Krystyn. Arthur’s detached but elegant look and the way he reluctantly held the big pink furry bear was hilarious, yet Lynn thought that it was very harmonious at the same time. It was probably because he was a father. 

By lunchtime, they had nearly finished playing all the games at the stalls in the garden party and their total points combined was more than five times the points collected by the team in second place. Lynn suggested they eat something and then continue playing in the afternoon.

Arthur looked at the chocolate cake on the table, sniffed it suspiciously, and then tossed it aside disdainfully.

“My dad’s a picky eater,” Krystyn said.

“There’s too much flavoring in it,” Arthur said. 

“I think it tastes pretty good,” Lynn said, finishing off the entire cake in one bite. The cake tasted how cakes usually taste, but the person next to him looked at him with suspicion.

“What’s that?!” Someone shouted.

Arthur raised his head and stared at the school building on the opposite side. Lynn turned his head and saw a person on the roof with the sun on her back.

It was a woman, of indeterminate age, and she was standing over the railing on the top of the building. The sun almost melted her figure, leaving only a small shadow. 

Lynn stood up abruptly.

The garden party still seemed peaceful and warm, and only a few people had noticed her. Some were saying, “That’s a person—” “Who is it?” “What is she trying to do?” “Oh my God!”

Lynn pushed past the server and rushed over, but it seemed as if he was entangled. Everyone was huddled together, having a pleasant and relaxing garden party. He just wanted to be with his child. His character had changed from before, when he could stand in the worst places without hesitation and look directly at the worst possibilities.

Everything happened in the blink of an eye. He seemed to not have taken even a single step before the figure leaped off the roof of the building. 

He heard a huge ‘thud’, and although it didn’t seem real in this joyous atmosphere, he knew it was the sound of a flesh and blood body falling and crashing against the hard ground, the sound of a life ending so thoroughly. He could almost feel the ground shake.

The music of the duck hunting game rang out merrily next to him, with the occasional sound of children hitting their targets and their giggles. Only in this tiny area, fear and silence spread, like a diseased spot on an apple.

Lynn turned around quickly and turned the wide-eyed Chrissie in the other direction so that she was facing the food on the table rather than prying into what had just happened.

“Don’t look over there, dear. Something’s wrong and Daddy has to go and deal with it,” he said. 

He looked at Arthur—the other parent sitting just across from him—whose facial features were as calm as an ice sculpture, and said, “Look after Chrissie for me.”

“Sure.”

Lynn ran towards the scene of the accident while calling the police officers at the station.

As he ran through the crowd, a little voice in his mind said: Are you crazy? Arthur is a dangerous man and you’ve known that since a year ago, yet you’re letting Chrissie stay with him? But he ran anyway, without hesitation. In the depths of his heart, there was a kind of reassurance that there was no danger in letting Chrissie stay with him. 

He pushed his way through the crowd and ran up to the body.

There was nothing pretty about a body that had committed suicide by jumping off the building. It usually looked very miserable, no matter how nice it had once looked. This woman, or girl, to be precise, used to be very beautiful when she was alive.

Even though her body had shattered beyond recognition, it was still evident that she was young, perhaps sixteen or seventeen, or a little younger, with long, curly blonde hair and a petite figure. She was wearing a long red dress, jewelry, and delicate make-up; like the flawless image she used to have.

Lynn knew her. This was Emma, who went to the town high school. She was a student who was good in both character and academics, and had participated in every extra-curricular activity. She had a great personality, too, and had been running the chocolate pudding stall at the garden party. 

He had met her before. She had sold him food with a big smile on her face, and she had not looked the least like she had been thinking about committing suicide.

Of course, you couldn’t always tell when someone was suicidal. In his career, Lynn had seen so many instances where the superficial appearance of an incident was completely at odds with what was actually happening inside. You could never know the darkness and misery of a person’s heart by just looking at their smile.

He leaned over to look at the body. Her makeup was very exquisite, and her clothes were too expensive and formal for her age. She looked like she was about to commit suicide. When people committed suicide, they often wanted to maintain their most beautiful appearance. It was a little ironic.

He touched her head and turned her face around. She wore a bohemian earring in one ear, the kind of exaggerated earring that little girls liked to wear, and it made her look very charming. 

But her other ear was empty, and there was a trace of blood oozing from the ear hole.

Nearby security guards had run over to keep order, separating the crowd from the body, and after a while, officers from the station would arrive too.

Lynn stood up and looked at the top of the floor. It was empty, the sun washing everything clean.

He asked the security guard to maintain order before he ran upstairs. 

It was an old building. Most of the buildings in the town were old but looked brand-new after undergoing numerous renovations.

When he got to work, he gave it his full attention, without the slightest distraction.

He hadn’t been able to be like this for a long time. Before, when he had handed Chrissie over to his wife to take care of, he had been able to give his full attention to his work, as was only natural. But after her death in a car accident, he had never been able to relax for a moment.

Keeping his little girl safe was the most important thing in the world, the voice in his head said. She had lost her mother, he was the only family she had left, and he must ensure that nothing bad ever happened to her again. 

But now, as he got to work, he didn’t think for a moment, as he had done before, that she might bruise herself or run into a gangster or something—he knew how dangerous the world was, so he could never rest easy.

Instead, he felt that he had put her in an extremely safe place and that Arthur would take care of her. He had the kind of power to keep the people he wanted to protect extremely safe.

He stopped dwelling on it. With his hidden darkness and secrets, Arthur was once thought of by Lynn to be a highly dangerous person. He couldn’t change his attitude towards the other person just because of a small garden party and some games of hunting ducks and catching goldfish.

He ran all the way to the top floor. It was empty, as if it had just been washed with water, leaving no traces behind. 

He stood for a moment at the spot where Emma had jumped and looked around.

Did someone pull her earring off? Or did she take it off herself? Most likely, she had done it herself in a rough manner. But her hairstyle was not very disheveled, and her ear holes had not been torn.

He walked around the fence. Next to a railing, a small rhinestone shone was shining on the cement ground. He recognized that as the small gem inlaid in her earring. It seemed that the earring had hit the railing and a rhinestone had come off.

She had thrown the earring away before she had died, but why? He craned his neck and saw some sparse trees below and nothing else. 

He rushed down the building and walked toward the forest.

He hadn’t been this busy in quite a while.

He found the other earring, whose gems had been torn off, in the woods and when he picked up a ruby in the grass, he held it up to the sunlight. As an earring worn by a high school student at a garden party, it was too obscure and garish.

It was a busy afternoon after that. He only had enough time to call Arthur—he had gotten his number from the station’s registration information—and tell him that he would try to make it to the school dance in the evening. 

The children sounded fine and seemed to be having a good time. Neither the murder nor his absence had affected their fun the slightest. Arthur would look after them and would not let anything bad happen to them, Lynn thought to himself. Although part of him still denounced the absurdity of it.

The case was not difficult to investigate. The victim herself had left clues.

Maybe she had just been showing her resolution and anger, but if she hadn’t dropped the earrings, no one would have noticed the gaudy jewelry on a high school student, and if one of them hadn’t been lost, the standard treatment of it in the town would have been to put it in an evidence bag and wait for the family to take it straight home.

It would not have been discovered that it was worth millions. 

And this was the message she had wanted to leave behind.

Donald asked whether it was gemstone smuggling. Obviously, it was not. This earring was not cheap for sure, especially for a high school student, but it was only a drop in the bucket for the rich in this town. Lynn quickly found out where it had been sold on the Internet. This thing had not been designed by a jeweler but had been custom-made for Emma. Finding shops that offered this kind of service was not too difficult.

Naturally, the store said that the client’s information had to be kept confidential, but he was willing to cooperate if he got a search warrant.

And Lynn didn’t even need to wait for the search warrant. If you checked Emma’s part-time job history, you would find that there was only one family she had had contact with that had enough money—she had been working part-time as a nanny for Mr. Caviezel’s child. 

Mrs. Caviezel had schizophrenia. Although she was generally quiet, she couldn’t take care of a three-year-old child. Mr. Caviezel was the CEO of a large group. Although he was a family man, he also had to fly around the world from time to time. Finding a trustworthy girl to take care of his family as a nanny was totally understandable.

The anonymous purchaser was clearly connected to the Caviezel family.

When things were investigated to this stage, the truth was easily revealed. It was the case of an extramarital love affair that had led to a murder. The girl had threatened to tell the truth, a respectable man hadn’t wanted the story to come out, and the girl had thrown her earrings in anger. There had been no room for negotiating on the matter. One of them had had a murderous intention.

It was a typical small-town murder case and was sure to be a hot topic for quite a while. 

After investigating for the entire afternoon, the truth came to life. This was an extremely fast speed of solving cases for a small town, but it was no problem for Lynn, who’d used to specialize in vicious cases.

Arthur hadn’t called once throughout that time, and Lynn hadn’t needed to worry from time to time about his kid getting bruised, getting lost, being disobedient, or had to answer whether she was allergic to something. It was as if nothing would happen when Arthur was there.

By the end of the evening, although he hadn’t actually found Mr. Caviezel to talk to and arrest him—he kept refusing to open the door and the police hadn’t got a search warrant yet—he still found a little time to attend the dinner party the school had hosted.

The party required formal dress to attend. When Lynn went back home to find a formal dress, he found that it had been buried beneath a mountain of dirty laundry since he had forgotten to take it to the laundromat. When he took it out, it was wrinkled and crumpled like a fresh pickle. 

But since he didn’t have another suit, he had to bite the bullet and put it on. He felt like he looked awful all the way and just hoped Chrissie wouldn’t feel too humiliated.

He had just entered the venue when he saw Arthur, holding a drink and talking to someone, looking infinitely impatient. He smiled.

But when he saw Arthur like that, it suddenly occurred to him that in fact, in this case, he should have handed Chrissie over to a teacher he knew well, and asked her to look after her for him as he had done in the past. Instead, he had handed her over in her entirety to Arthur, who was also a single father who wasn’t very good at his own job and had to take care of two children for a day.

Arthur turned to face him, and there was no smile on his face. 

Lynn ran over to him and said, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, I can handle it.”

“I shouldn’t have just left her like that…” Lynn trailed off.

“Maybe you can say hello to the murderer and ask him to not kill at the primary school students’ garden party. It’s too immoral, and harmful to their physical and mental health.” 

“How did you know it was murder?” Lynn asked.

“Ohh, that’s fast. Did you find the murderer?”

“Almost… How do you know I found the murderer?”

“Otherwise you’d think I was the killer,” Arthur said, “I’m the number one suspect in your eyes.” 

“I don’t think you’re suspicious enough to not even let female high school students off the hook.”

“I don’t know, demons don’t spare even a flower or a plant, they’re evil by nature,” Arthur said, “But this party, I’m afraid, is what hell is like.”

As he said that, he smiled politely at the host of the party.

Lynn shared the same opinion as him about the party, but he kept this thought to himself. 

“I thought you were quite used to social occasions,” Lynn said.

“I hate social occasions,” Arthur said.

But he stood there anyway, smiling at the person across the table, probably just like how he had hated the two-man three-legged game but played it anyway. He understood that feeling: we don’t always get to live in the environment we are most accustomed to and like the most. 

“Daddy!” came a yell from behind. Lynn turned his head and Chrissie threw herself at him. 

Lynn spun her around in his arms. Children didn’t care if their father was dressed badly compared to others. They merely desired their father’s presence.

“I thought you weren’t coming,” she said.

“Of course not. I promised you, honey.”

“You used to say you were going to work and would be back in a bit, but you never came back.” 

Lynn didn’t know what to say for a moment. He talked a lot unknowingly to appease Chrissie. Although he didn’t know what he was talking about, the child seemed to understand. She patted his arm comfortingly and ran off to play with Krystyn.

Lynn turned to look at Arthur and pulled out a smile. The latter made a toasting gesture to him.

I like to stay with him very much, Lynn thought reluctantly.

He knew what it was like to socialize with his neighbors and to meet people he got on better with, but never something such as Arthur’s case. 

He had experienced the feeling of apologetically handing over his child to others or being forced to spend a whole day with a parent who was a completely different type of person than him at the school garden party before. He had even worn a wrinkled suit and chatted with a fairly nice person at a dinner party before, but that was not the same feeling.

Communicating with Arthur, that process was orderly and straightforward. It was… as if you were borrowing bullets from a fellow soldier during a raid. It felt real and simple, without any of those subtle interpersonal nuances that made his head spin.

He warned himself that this good impression had to stop in moderation. Even though Arthur had performed well today, he was still a dangerous man. He was accustomed to gore, hid too many secrets, and had a sociopathic streak in his behavior, and most sociopaths were charming.

He asked Arthur, “You still haven’t answered me, how did you know that it was murder?” 

“Miss Karina just said that Emma had an appointment to get her nails done tomorrow. Now that she had found a very good shop, she didn’t like how her nails had looked,” Arthur said. Miss Karina was the guest he had just been talking to. In a small town, all the people chatted with each other.

Arthur added, “I think before Miss Emma decides to go to hell, she must also hope to see her beautiful nails along the way. She will not jump off the building rashly unless it was a murder.”

“Hmm, that makes sense,” Lynn said.

“Thanks for the compliment,” Arthur said, even making a small bow. 

Lynn laughed.

He really shouldn’t have thought that the other person was a pretty great guy.

He had seen many criminals with a high IQ, some of whom were very charming, but he knew how to avoid their charm. He was focused more on observing the dark, broken parts of their souls rather than their superficial goodness.

Could it be that he had been in the town for too long and had lacked vigilance to that extent?