Title: Nineteen Years of Murder: A Story

Author: Nathan Grey

　　Publisher: People's Literature Publishing House

　　Publication Date: 2018-8-15

　　Synopsis:

　　Correspondence with a murderer, with the other side of life and death, with impossible love, with unpredictable fate. Letters string together nineteen years, connecting anger, sorrow, unwillingness, and longing, as well as a series of murder cases. When Fiona Bennett witnessed a murder unfold before her eyes, she thought it was the beginning of all tragedy. In reality, she had stepped into the middle of a dark undercurrent—whether she traced it upstream or followed it down, it was filled with deadly whirlpools.

　　Editor's Recommendation:

　　Five murders over 19 years. Medical student Fiona Bennett goes from bystander to participant, witnessing a life-and-death struggle that spans dormitories, dissection rooms, morgues, and classroom desks. Her pure-hearted nature is dragged into a wicked duel between a genius killer and a genius victim. Upon graduation, it seems all evil has settled... Nine years later, her seemingly happy life is shattered when she realizes she has been living in a web of lies; as the truth begins to surface, does she have the courage to step into the fog again?

　　A perfect scheme: unraveling the threads, the truth revealed only on the last page;

　　Solid plot: everyone has no choice—if you were in their place, you would be no different;

　　Skilled writing: Nathan Grey spent six years observing human nature, resulting in this distilled work.

　　If fate goes wrong, can you still hold on to kindness? If success is your only option, what would you betray? If you had the chance to judge others, how would you cast your vote?

Part One

　　I. Poisoning

　　1

　　This was thirty-three hours before she confirmed there was a murderer among her classmates.

　　Everyone is an hourglass, with time flowing out from the moment of birth until it runs out at death.

　　Fiona Bennett could count the grains of sand; she knew it was now 1:30 a.m., with a margin of error no greater than ten minutes. This was the result of over a decade of semi-military training from her ex-soldier father, Frederick Bennett. "This way, you'll know life is short and you must seize every moment," he told his daughter. But I feel every moment that time is running out, time is running out, Fiona Bennett replied in her heart.

　　Fiona Bennett closed her eyes, and before her appeared halos like flowing fire. She knew it was her photoreceptor cells firing randomly. Or maybe it was a hallucination, she thought. Everyone has some mental issues, more or less.

　　The halo swirled into a human face: sallow skin, eye sockets so deep it seemed the eyeballs didn't exist. Of course they did—those curled-up, stubbornly unrotted eyeballs hid behind the eyelids, watching as Fiona Bennett stabbed a knife into the neck. It had been days since the incident, but that stab was as clear as ever—the thin blade sliding into the skin, into the fat and muscle, the handle glued to her right palm, impossible to shake off.

　　Fiona Bennett struggled out of this half-dream, half-awake state, opening her eyes in the darkness. The dead face lingered faintly inside the bed curtains for a while, then dissipated like smoke.

　　1:35 a.m.

　　The blurry outlines of objects in the room slowly emerged through the gaps in the bed curtains. Then she heard that sound.

　　Creak... creak... creak... creak, continuous and fine, like a door being slowly pushed open.

　　The sound wasn't far away; it was right by her ear.

　　Fiona Bennett felt the bed shake. The bed curtains rippled gently like waves, and at the source of the wave, two dark shapes appeared, hanging quietly outside the curtain from top to bottom.

　　The noise stopped.

　　Fiona Bennett couldn't move. Every muscle in her body was stiff, even her vocal cords seemed frozen. She opened her mouth but couldn't make a sound, fear flooding over her like water.

　　The suffocating feeling lasted a few seconds, then her heart started beating again, pumping blood so fiercely her face burned. She finally realized the dark shapes were the legs of Susan Wright, who slept on the upper bunk.

　　Only now did sweat pour from her pores.

　　The dormitory was still silent. The two legs dangled for a while, then swung back up. The sound started again, but this time Fiona Bennett wasn't scared—she understood it was Susan Wright climbing down.

　　This was the girls' dormitory for the joint training class of Shanghai Medical College and the affiliated hospital. It was November 1997. The class was already in its third year, but Fiona Bennett had joined less than four months ago.

　　Three months was enough for her to get to know all her classmates. Including herself, there were only twelve: five boys, seven girls, two dorm rooms.

　　The noise stopped; Susan Wright had climbed down from the upper bunk. Fiona Bennett felt the urge to pee, but then sensed something was off—Susan Wright hadn't left the room, just stood by the bed.

　　As Fiona Bennett began to wonder, Susan Wright moved.

　　She slowly edged between the beds and the long table in the center of the dorm, not bumping into anything, making no sound, ghostlike. Was she barefoot?

　　November weather, walking barefoot on concrete. Just thinking about it made Fiona Bennett feel cold, cold all over.

　　There was a faint light in the room, seeping through the thin curtains—a cold moonlight, maybe mixed with the pale light from the hallway outside, filtering through two frosted glass panes above the door. Fiona Bennett had adapted to the darkness; the shadow representing Susan Wright became more defined, and she could gradually make out her light-colored pajamas. Fiona Bennett remembered the pajamas had vertical stripes, like a hospital gown.

　　Susan Wright walked to the end of the long table, just a step from the door. She didn't stop, but circled to the other side of the table, standing in front of Selena Adams's bed.

　　Selena Adams slept in the first lower bunk to the right of the door, with some odds and ends on the upper bunk. Fiona Bennett hoped she was already asleep; otherwise, seeing a shadow standing outside her bed curtain in the middle of the night would be terrifying.

　　Sleepwalking?

　　Fiona Bennett hadn't inherited Frederick Bennett's courage. Although in the whole class, Susan Wright was the one she got along with best and admired most, at this moment, watching this scene in the dark, she was still afraid.

　　Her heartbeat pounded in her ears: thump, thump, thump, thump.

　　Susan Wright slowly pulled open Selena Adams's bed curtain.

　　Selena Adams didn't speak to Susan Wright, at least Fiona Bennett had never seen it. She was the most fashionable girl in the class, and indeed had the looks for it. Honestly, she was almost as beautiful as Susan Wright, and her family seemed well-off. Anywhere else, she would be the center of attention. But unfortunately, there was a Susan Wright.

　　Fiona Bennett never felt that Susan Wright was trying to outshine Selena Adams. She wasn't competing with anyone; it was a natural aura, an innate talent. She never talked about her family background, but the hints she let slip, and her calm, dignified manner, made it clear she came from a much more cultured family than Selena Adams. She never dressed up deliberately, nor wore conspicuous brands—often in well-tailored plain clothes—yet she shone wherever she went. She was gentle and polite, talented in many arts, played the xiao and harmonica beautifully, sang well, and none of this affected her excellent grades—she was top in every subject.

　　Such a person made Fiona Bennett, as a fellow woman, only want to be close to her, without a trace of rivalry. Selena Adams wanted to compete, but how could a plane tree compete with a phoenix, or a river with the sea? Fiona Bennett had only just joined the class and didn't know what conflict Selena Adams and Susan Wright had that made them stop talking. But it was undoubtedly Selena Adams's issue; Susan Wright would still try to greet her sometimes, and even if she got no response, she didn't mind.

　　Now, was this ghostly figure standing at Selena Adams's bed really Susan Wright?

　　Susan Wright pinched the bed curtain with her right hand, slowly bending her upper body down. Fiona Bennett watched as she bent lower and lower, until her head disappeared. In such darkness, to see someone's face clearly, you had to get very close.

　　For a full four minutes, in Fiona Bennett's eyes, only half of Susan Wright's body remained.

　　It was a long time, and all sorts of guesses tangled in Fiona Bennett's mind, whispering and entwining, pulling her deeper into fear. The Susan Wright in her memory and the shadow before her felt like completely different people—she couldn't understand or accept it.

　　Sleepwalking, probably.

　　Susan Wright's upper body reappeared; she straightened up and closed Selena Adams's bed curtain.

　　Sleepwalkers wouldn't think to close the curtain.

　　Not necessarily—sleepwalkers can do anything, even kill. Fiona Bennett was startled by her own sudden thought.

　　Susan Wright silently disappeared from Fiona Bennett's sight. She didn't turn back, but kept moving forward, vanishing into the area blocked by Fiona Bennett's bed curtain. Ahead were the beds of Winnie Hayes and Queenie Adams; Winnie Hayes slept on the lower bunk, Queenie Adams on the upper. Past there, circling back from the other end of the long table, were the beds of Lily Carter and Crystal Nelson, and then the bunks of Fiona Bennett and Susan Wright. Four bed frames, eight beds, seven people.

　　A faint rustling, so light it was almost imperceptible. If she hadn't just heard it, Fiona Bennett wouldn't have known what the sound was.

　　It was the soft, slow sound of pulling open a bed curtain.

　　Susan Wright had opened someone else's curtain—was it Winnie Hayes or Queenie Adams? Fiona Bennett couldn't tell.

　　Three or four minutes later, the same sound came again, and again. Fiona Bennett counted silently in her mind: opening the curtain, pulling the curtain...

　　It wasn't just Selena Adams—it was everyone in the room.

　　Closer and closer.

　　Everyone, so that included herself.