Chapter 140: Something Is Wrong

The lunch gathering did not drag on for long and ended soon enough.

Qiao Jiu went to pay the bill; the meal had cost very little.

Afterward, she left with Liu Changyong. His assistant was already waiting outside with the car.

As she followed him down the steps, Qiao Jiu asked, “Uncle Liu, you’ll be able to stay for a while this time, won’t you?”

Liu Changyong nodded. “I’ll try, but I can’t say for certain. Who knows whether something else will go wrong at the company?”

Qiao Jiu saw Liu Changyong into the car and stood beside it, looking obedient and well-mannered.

Only after the car had driven away and she was sure he could no longer make her out in the rearview mirror did she let every trace of expression fall from her face.

Perhaps because he thought she was easy to fool, Liu Changyong had not bothered to conceal from her the calculations he used in the business world. Some of his intentions had been almost painfully obvious.

Qiao Jiu turned around and hailed a taxi. There was still some time before the end of the lunch break, and after a moment’s thought, she went straight to the former Qiao family residence.

She and Lu Fengzhou had been married there. Later, after her father passed away, the two of them divorced. She moved out, and Lu Fengzhou soon followed.

The house had been left empty ever since.

The old residence stood halfway up the mountain and occupied a vast plot of land. It would not be easy to sell, even if they wanted to.

After getting out of the taxi and walking to the main gate, Qiao Jiu looked inside. Lu Fengzhou seemed to have truly abandoned the place; he had not even left anyone behind to guard it. The grounds had become completely overgrown.

The side of the gate facing outward was fitted with a keypad lock. Qiao Jiu tried entering the old password, never expecting anything to happen.

To her surprise, the lock gave a soft buzz and opened.

She pushed the gate inward. The front courtyard was enormous. On the left was a parking area, though it was now choked with weeds and barely recognizable.

She walked farther in to the entrance hall. None of the locks had been changed, and all the passwords still worked.

After looking around the front section, Qiao Jiu entered the main house and went first to the room she had once shared with Lu Fengzhou.

Whether Lu Fengzhou had left in a hurry or for some other reason, he had not bothered to tidy the place. On the bedside table sat a bottle of skincare lotion Qiao Jiu had opened and forgotten to close.

If not for the layer of dust covering everything, it might have seemed that someone still lived there.

Qiao Jiu turned and searched through the wardrobe. Her clothes and Lu Fengzhou’s were still hanging inside.

A built-in safe was set into the middle section. Qiao Jiu entered the password and opened it.

Inside were several miscellaneous documents. She quickly took them out and looked through them, only to find nothing useful: her diploma and a few certificates she had received during her school years.

After waiting for a while, she turned and left. Her father’s room was at the far end of the second floor, and she hurried there.

When she pushed open the door, she found that this room had been tidied by someone. Everything had been arranged neatly, though it was covered in dust.

Qiao Jiu’s eyes grew hot. She quickly turned away and drew two deep breaths.

This was not exactly a return to an old place, but the sight of it still stirred painful memories.

She and her father had depended on each other for more than twenty years. After he passed away, her life had fallen into chaos.

There was no one left to stand up for her, no one to hold her in his arms and comfort her when others bullied her. She had to face the world alone.

The wall between her and death had collapsed.

Qiao Jiu raised a hand to wipe away her tears, then hurried to the bedside and searched through the drawers.

They were completely empty. Someone had clearly gone through them.

She immediately searched the wardrobe as well. The clothes inside were still there, but the built-in safe had been removed, leaving behind nothing but a large hole.

There was no need to guess. Lu Fengzhou must have hired someone to take it out. He probably had not known the safe’s password, so he had it removed and forced open elsewhere.

So Liu Changyong was not the only one coveting whatever her father had left behind. Lu Fengzhou was no different.

After a while, she went to the window and looked down. There was a small fountain in the courtyard, but it had long since dried up, and parts of it had cracked.

Her father had built the fountain’s base with his own hands. Back then, they had invited a feng shui master to inspect the property, and he had suggested installing a fountain there. With flowing water in front and the mountain behind, it would attract wealth and gather fortune.

Her father had believed deeply in such things. He had insisted on building the fountain’s base himself, saying that it would make the symbolism all the better.

Her heart aching, Qiao Jiu did not look for long before turning and leaving the room.

There was a small storage room along the corridor, usually used for keeping spare household supplies.

The door was unlocked. Qiao Jiu glanced inside, then, almost without thinking, pushed it open.

A wooden shelving unit stood inside. It would normally have been filled with spare necessities, but now everything had fallen onto the floor.

Qiao Jiu sighed and turned to close the door.

Then, in that brief turn, she noticed several magazines piled beside the legs of the shelf.

Those certainly were not household supplies.

Her movement halted. She stepped inside and picked up the magazines.

The covers alone showed that they were quite old.

She shook off the dust and flipped through them casually. To her surprise, the publication dates showed that they were more than a decade old.

The villa underwent regular maintenance, and the house was cleaned every day. In theory, magazines from more than ten years ago should never have remained in the storage room all this time.

Qiao Jiu quickly crouched down and picked up the remaining issues. Some were financial magazines, while another concerned landscape design.

She had no time to sit there and read them all, so she gathered them together and hurried out of the villa.

The taxi driver was still waiting outside. Qiao Jiu got in and rushed back to the company, timing her return carefully.

When she arrived at her office, she first took out the magazines and wiped away the thick layer of dust.

After flipping through them, she found that two of the magazines contained the same article. It concerned the property development her father and Liu Changyong had worked on in the beginning.

Her father had not built the entire development. At the time, he had merely brokered a piece of land. The site had originally been a run-down village. They negotiated for the land, then sold it to someone else and made a profit from the difference.

After the land was sold, however, the government released its development plans, and a hospital and school were built nearby.

Someone then invested in constructing residential buildings. The work progressed rapidly, and the units were almost completely snapped up as soon as they went on sale.

Qiao Jiu had never paid much attention to how her father had earned his first fortune. Now it seemed that this was how he had done it.

Back then, Qiao Siman and Liu Changyong had not had enough capital, nor the ability, to acquire such a large tract of land themselves. Most likely, someone had taken an interest in the site and asked them to mediate the negotiations and settle the price, rewarding them with a fee. Another possibility was that they had been given a share in the later construction.

She flipped through the magazine on landscape design. Most of it was devoted to explaining the structure of fountains.

That made sense. Her father had personally built the base of the little fountain at the old residence, and supposedly he had even drawn up the original design himself. He must have done considerable research.

Qiao Jiu set the magazines down. There had been nothing strange about their appearing in the house back then, but the fact that they had remained in the storage room for more than a decade made her uneasy. Perhaps she was simply being overly sensitive, but she could not shake the feeling that something was wrong.

She was still lost in thought when the phone in her bag suddenly rang.

It was Lu Fengzhou.

He had probably calculated that her lunch with Liu Changyong would have ended and was calling to ask how things had gone.

Surrounded by jackals and wolves—that was the only phrase Qiao Jiu could think of.

She answered the call, and Lu Fengzhou asked directly, “Finished lunch?”

“Finished,” Qiao Jiu replied. “I’m already back at the office.”

Lu Fengzhou asked, “How did it go?”

Qiao Jiu gave a quiet laugh. “We didn’t discuss much. Maybe he really did just want to reminisce with me.”