Chapter 398: He Didn't Dare Say

At ten o'clock on May 14, Cai Qingru didn't show. She called to say it'd been raining in the city since the night before, and the two third-party evaluators had rescheduled too—they'd be on-site on acceptance day. The replanting plots would have to wait for clear weather; the soil was too sticky, seedlings wouldn't survive if they went in now. She asked whether the "seedling count" box had been finalized. Shen Zhixia told her it was set for acceptance day—whoever counted would sign, one line beneath their name.

"Then I'll be there to count alongside," Cai Qingru said. "Two people counting, counted twice—if the numbers don't match, there's a record either way."

Those two pages of forms had to be mailed that afternoon. Lu Jibai flipped to the end, pausing at the "Replanting Quantity Confirmer" line.

"This line stays blank. Once Director Cai signs, I'll make a copy and send it to the Intermediate Court."

"It was always meant to be blank," she said.

He squared the two pages together, slipped them into an envelope, and addressed it. His handwriting was small. Midway through he looked up: "Did you log the seal usage?"

"I did. That line in the register is mine."

"Mm." He stood the envelope upright against the corner of the desk.

Li Huilan had gone to the detention center early and hadn't come back by afternoon. At 12:20, He Xiufen carried noodles upstairs and stood in the doorway asking what Zhi'an wanted for dinner. Shen Zhixia said they had noodles at home. He Xiufen said, "Even if you have noodles, come down and eat once. The stove's still hot." She set the bowl down and went back downstairs without lingering.

At seven that evening she got home. Zhi'an was doing homework in the inner room; a skin had formed over the soup in the pot. She washed her hands, poured half a glass of water, twisted the desk lamp brighter, and pulled her chair half a foot closer to the table.

Volume Eight still rested where she'd closed it the night before.

Last night she'd only seen that one word.

The heading line read "March 22, morning." Beneath it, the first word: Pump House. That was as far as she'd gotten before she shut the notebook—shut it fast, as if afraid the words inside might keep walking out on their own.

Today she read from the beginning.

Her father's handwriting was small, the strokes crowded together, a line holding half again as much as anyone else's. Where the matter turned critical, the ink pressed heavy; but dates and times he wrote lightly, as if those weren't worth wasting ink.

"Pump house. One man watching the pumps. Didn't ask his name."

"He asked first if I was a reporter. I said no. He said lawyers, even less."

"On the night of the 20th, past one a.m., he went to check the pumps. A car was parked behind the village committee's back gate, lights off. Two people carried small buckets into the building, then back out. Twenty-some minutes. The car left toward town."

"He said he'd asked around. Two people told him. One tall, one shorter. Didn't see faces; both kept their heads down carrying."

"Asked if he'd told anyone else. He said no."

Mid-page, her father had drawn a square box. The first line inside read "Three Questions to Ask." She recognized the format—he used it the night before a hearing, and also before going to see someone. Three questions with answers beneath, one answer per line, like a form already filled in.

"One: On the night of the 20th, what did you see."—"See above."

"Two: The two men—do you know them."—"No. The lights were off."

"Three: Do you have a piece of paper with a name on it."—"No."

One line further down, the writing lighter than the rest, the strokes slightly unmoored:

"Would he put it on paper."

"He wouldn't dare."

On the last line, ink darker than all before: "He wouldn't dare say it. The name won't be written."

At the page's edge there was another line in pencil, small and slanted, pressed against the margin: The 24th, the 25th—two days, I went twice, the door was shut.

Twice, both times the door shut. Only after returning did he write this line, the nib fine, different from the fountain pen in the main text. After writing it, he'd added nothing about whether he'd go again.

When she reached the third question, her finger stopped on the page and didn't move down.

The cold storage line—she'd written that one down herself in her own notebook. Her father's "Three Questions to Ask" had the third question listed last, with a line beneath marking it unasked, ask next time. Next time was here. He'd asked it on March 22, standing before an old man who watched the pumps.

She pulled her finger back from the page and got up to pour water. The cup's base knocked against the wooden table with a sound.

The inner door cracked open: "Sis?"

"Finish your homework."

"Your water's gone cold." Zhi'an came out, took her cup away, poured out half, topped it with hot, and set it back by her hand. He returned to his room, leaving the door cracked again.

She read it through once more from the start, the second pass slower than the first, slowing at one spot: she was looking for "tape."

Not there. Her father wrote of two men carrying small buckets, in and out for twenty-some minutes, the car leaving toward town—but nothing about that strip across the box's mouth. That detail she'd heard from someone else's mouth on the stone steps on April 18. On paper, not a word. He wrote what he'd heard; what he hadn't heard, he didn't add.

The page's edges bore several crease marks, the folded corners pressed flat. On April 23 she'd pulled this notebook from the stack and hadn't so much as opened it. Now she knew every crease by heart.

[Thud. He asked. The one who answered has no name on paper.]

She pushed the notebook half an inch forward, then pulled it back.

She still remembered the half-line that had appeared at 9:00 on April 24—That night, someone saw. Seeing was real; but the one who saw didn't dare put it on paper, so her father didn't write it down either. He wrote "the name won't be written" and wrote it cleanly.

She turned the page.

The 15th and 16th brought nothing scheduled at the firm. She left the notebook on the desk, leafing through it twice during the day and sitting with it from eight to ten at night.

On the morning of the 16th she overslept. Zhi'an was already sweeping. When he reached the desk, he moved the notebook aside, swept, then set it back exactly where it had been, squaring the desk lamp too. That was a thing he'd said before: if you're not up, I'll just move the notebook out of the way. And he moved it steady—no page corners bent.

The late-March pages read quickly now. April went faster. The middle pages held nothing but retest and errand dates, each line short:

"24th. Retest. Qingyuan says two weeks for results."

"April 3. Director Cen called, asking about the seal on those two boxes from the second batch when they arrived. I wasn't there."

"April 12. Court called: retest results are in. They don't match the first batch."

"April 14. Director Cen—removed."

"April 25. At the family compound gate. He said: I tested the second one. It exceeded. I signed the report. I can't leave my house. Don't come looking for me again."

She recognized half of these lines.

Those five sheets in the hard drive were the retest report, dated April 1, with Cen Shouye's name in the issuer's column and no sixth page. The words at the family compound gate were spoken on April 25. By the time he said "I tested it" to her father, he'd already been stripped of the title of director.

She remembered what Lu Jibai had said in front of the steel cabinet: He still tested it.

The pages beyond were spaced wider apart. One entry, May 31:

"Police station. Asked who wrote the first-batch report. I answered: the signature is mine."

One entry on June 12, written lower on the page, the characters smaller than all before:

"Case filed. Released on guarantee."

Nothing beneath.

More than half a page sat empty between the two lines. What those days had been spent running after—the notebook held not a word. She flipped further back. The paper still had plenty of pages left, all blank; and in the years after, this volume held no more writing at all. The rest of those matters had all been written on other people's paper.

She closed Volume Eight, pressing her palms against its cover; the back board had begun to lift at the edges. The nine volumes sat stacked at the desk corner. The first volume still wore its two sheets of old newspaper, the edges yellowed through. Tucked after the title page sat that index page—four columns across: volume, date range, page count, what case it belonged to. The first seven rows were all filled in. For the eighth volume, the last cell in its row was still empty.

She took out her pen and wrote in that cell: Baixi Village, well water (II); pump house, retest.

She glanced at what she'd written—more cramped than the adjacent lines. Below, the last cell in Volume Nine's row was empty too. She looked at it, did nothing, and capped the pen.

She turned her own notebook to the "Still Unknown" page. Item one remained: Where is the sixth page. Item two, the line she'd added later, sat in its original spot with space after it for an answer—she drew a check mark at the end of that sentence and noted: Volume Eight, March 22—asked.

As she drew the check, the pen tip paused on the paper before it cut in.

[Thud. Three items. Still one not answered.]

At 9:50 p.m. she stood and dragged the cardboard box from under the bed, pulling it out half a foot.

A layer of dust covered the lid; her hand left a trail through it. On May 5 she'd taken the household register and those certificates from inside, then pushed it back—the dust had settled after that. There wasn't much in the box. The hardcover notebook lay at the very bottom, its cover fuzzed, corners curled.

She took it out and opened it flat on the desk.

The title page bore her father's name, and beneath it the line "Evidence Speaks for Itself," pressed dark with weight. Beyond that, the Baixi Village section: a visit form, the grid on the sheet drawn by his own hand; sample-receipt numbers copied from the first through third batches, all lined up neat. Then, one page further, a name struck through with a single stroke.

The line beside it she recognized: He didn't dare say it.

She studied that line for a while, then flipped back to the last line of Volume Eight.

"He wouldn't dare say it. The name won't be written."

On one page the sentence pressed heavy, every stroke running past its bounds. On the other, the same words written light, the final stroke ending in a slight hesitation. The same sentence, written in both places, both in his hand.

The crossing-out stroke ran from upper right to lower left with such force it left a groove through to the back of the paper. Only one side of the last character of the name remained, standing there as a vertical and a horizontal; everything else had been pressed flat.

She'd studied that strike-through before and couldn't identify it. Today, still nothing.

She pushed the hardcover notebook aside and laid it next to Volume Eight: on the left, paper yellowed evenly with age; on the right, the volume she'd handled often, its page edges gone soft. One lay open between the title page and the Baixi Village pages; the other at March 22. Under the desk lamp, the seam between the two sheets of paper showed black.

The pencil tapped twice against the desk corner, snapping a bit of lead. She trimmed it with a penknife, poorly—the point came out slanted. While she shaved it, she remembered something Zhou Yu had said over the phone late last year: Don't go into the village asking questions by yourself. Back then, he'd been talking about Qingshi Village.

She opened her own notebook and moved it squarely under the lamp.

Beneath the "Still Unknown" column there was still space. She'd picked up the pencil, not the pen. The point scraped twice against the paper before it deposited gray:

Who was the old man at the pump house.

When she finished, she smeared a finger over it. The gray spread slightly, but the words remained.

Hardcover notebook on the left, Volume Eight on the right, both open flat. That line of pencil sat beneath a stack of fountain-pen writing—light in color, heavy enough to hold the page down, erasable all the same.