The Devoted Gardener, Part One

Two weeks after the assembly, on a Tuesday morning, Hui Nan walked into the main office and found Principal Chen Daipeng sitting at his desk with a kitchen knife pressed against the front of his throat.

The person holding the knife was Hui Nan.

Not the Hui Nan who had just walked in through the door — but the same face, the same body, the same voice, now turned toward the door with the knife in her right hand and a calm she had never shown in any staff meeting or classroom.

"Come in," she said to herself. "And close the door."

Hui Nan closed the door. Her hand was shaking. She could feel the unreality of the moment like a physical pressure against her skull.

The woman with the knife — who had Hui Nan's face and was not Hui Nan — said to Chen Daipeng: "You can call me by my real name now. You remember it."

Chen stared at her. His throat moved against the blade. "Fang—" he started.

"Say the whole thing."

"Fang Chuchua."

The woman smiled. It was not Hui Nan's smile. "Good. You haven't forgotten." She glanced at Hui Nan at the door. "I borrowed her for a while. She won't remember any of this. But you will." Back to Chen. "Let's talk."

What came out of her mouth in the next twenty minutes was a complete account. She had been fifteen years old when Chen Daipeng had come to the room where the senior students were working late. She said what he had done there in plain and unsparing terms. She named Ma Dahua, who had been posted outside and had kept watch. She named Xiao Jin, who had been told afterward and had kept silent in exchange for a promotion. She named Uncle Du, who had built a false bottom in the flower bed and sealed her inside it when she began to bleed and lose consciousness, on the assumption that she was already dying and a scandal was worse than a corpse. She had not been dead. She had been unconscious.

The earthquake had found her three days later. The ground had shifted and cracked and she had crawled out through a gap into the maintenance tunnel and from the tunnel into the sewers and from the sewers into the river. She had been found downstream by a family from another province, taken in, slowly healed, slowly remade. New province. New hospital, different doctors. New face, eventually — she had saved for four years and then found a surgeon in a city where no one knew her. New name. New teaching qualification. New identity applied for by forged documents. She had spent the better part of fifteen years preparing to come back.

The teachers she had killed: she described each one and why. Ma Dahua — for keeping watch. Huang Lu — for helping dispose of the evidence later, the girl who had seen and said nothing and had prospered. Xiao Jin — for the promotion. Wang Qin — for refusing to hear the complaints of students whose teachers were doing the same things that had been done to her. Jia Shi — for the cover-up, for helping keep the record clean. Zhang Yao — for six years of buried disciplinary complaints. Tang Sui — not a murder; Tang Sui had come to the mountain and made a choice to end things on her own terms, and Fang Chuchua had sat beside her through it. Uncle Du — for the coffin, for the dirt, for the flower bed.

She had not killed Zhai Jia. The police had done that themselves.

When she finished speaking, Chen Daipeng had tears running silently down his face. He had not moved throughout.

"The police will come now," the woman with Hui Nan's face said. "I called them before you arrived." She looked at the door. "Or she did. She doesn't remember doing it, but she made the call."

Chen looked at the door too. Hui Nan understood, from the way he looked, that he had already known — or suspected — for some time. That the person who had borrowed her colleague's face was real, and had been moving through the school for months. That this was not the end of it for him, but the formal beginning of the end.

Outside, in the corridor, shoes on linoleum. Getting louder.