Before the doorbell rang, Jania was dreaming of a strange sun.
The sun is alive. It is not only the star hanging in the sky, but also the head of an old lady with pearl hairpins and wrinkles on her face. Her brown curly hair has turned gray, her cheeks are dark and rosy, and her eyes are shining with a shrewd but suspicious light. She is hanging high in the boundless blue sky and looking around to see who hasn't noticed her shining in all directions.
When she did this, the pearl hairpins inserted in radiating rows on her bun all shone brightly, releasing a bright threat to the lower world. Such a unique hair accessory led Jania to recognize the sun head as that of a distant aunt of Malcolm's. She lived in the south of France all year round and only came to Regenberg a few times when Jania was very young.
Grandma Sally! She shouted to the sky - not sure she got the name right - you have to come down from the sky! What do you want to do there?
The old lady's energetic head shook twice in the air. Now she is the sun in heaven and the grandmother of the world. No one can fly up and pick her off, or say to her, "Can you please show me your driver's license?" She is now a purely free old lady who can do whatever she wants. And just as Jania feared, the old lady soon began to do what she loved most when she lived in Regenberg - she talked to the whole world about the relationship between grammar and culture.
language! The old lady said loudly that it is the best mirror of civilization. It is a metaphor for all the qualities of a society, whether virtue or vice. This is more important than anything else, more important than toy guns and those messy yarns. It is what a young girl like Zhannia needs to learn most. When she lived in Regenberg, Jania was always mischievous and never listened to her lessons properly. Well now, there is no place in this world that can escape the old lady’s teachings. This is completely reasonable, after all, grandmothers are the smartest and most respectable people in the entire human civilization. She wanted to give Jania a good lecture on the subtle differences between French and German.
No! Jania shouted in despair. I know how to talk!
Oh, you don't know, little girl! Said Grandma Sally in Heaven. You are just learning how your parents speak, which does not mean that you really understand what the words you use mean - let's start with the word "sun". In French, the sun is a feminine word, and in French It’s masculine in German, do you understand why? In your mythology, the sun god is Sur driving a chariot of fire, and after the wolf swallows her, the doomsday war will come. But that is not the end. When the world recovers, her daughter Suna will become the new sun. A gentler and more creative Sun, just like your mom and you.
I will never be a lawyer! said Jania angrily. I won't be paid to say something that makes me sick!
Grandma Sally looked down at her from the sky disapprovingly, as if she were looking at a kitten waving its paws at the mirror. This attitude towards children made Jania even more angry. She decided not to endure the nagging of the old lady like she did when she was a child, but to find a place in the wilderness that could isolate her from the sun. She is willing to go anywhere, even the underworld.
die. Grandma Sally said solemnly. It's a feminine word in French, but it's a masculine word in German. What you portray is a male god of death, a thin, cold and cruel man. der tod! Some say it points to Thanatos. Your language is indeed mixed with all kinds of myths. Don't disobey the old lady, little girl! It's time for your hair to be combed. If your hair is disheveled, your thoughts will be slack and you will be confused and confused all day long. You have to remember to always organize your thinking in the form of language and keep it strictly grammatical. If you don't, my dear, sooner or later you're going to bring bad luck!
I have invited bad luck. Jania thought in frustration. If I can't get out of this damn place, that's the greatest misfortune. She doesn't like being judged by adults. She even began digging a tunnel to Hades with her fingers. This matter was not that difficult because the soil was so soft and warm that she could knead it like dough. In the blink of an eye, she had dug a big hole, which made Grandma Sun Sally very angry. She shouted threats to the ground in a loud voice characteristic of a deaf old man, demanding that Jania stop her terrible and rebellious behavior, otherwise the beast would take her away.
Jania didn't care at all about the threat. Spiders, rats, maggots, witches... She has not been afraid of things that adults use to scare children since she was a child. Grandma Sally couldn't threaten her when she was sitting in her living room, let alone 150 million miles away.
grim Reaper! Grandma Sun Sally shouted sharply. Your evil deeds will definitely lead to death!
You vicious, stupid, annoying old fool who talks nonsense. Jania thought as she dug. She didn't dare to say this because her mother would never allow her to speak like this to the elders in the family. But Grandma Sally, who was promoted to the Eternal Planet, is obviously crazy. She is just retaliating with tooth, let this annoying old guy go to the west as soon as possible!
Suddenly, Zhaniya felt uneasy about the thought she had just had. Even though she was dimly aware that she could think of anything here, it still seemed immoral to curse a familiar old man. In fact, Grandma Sally is much cuter in reality. She certainly doesn’t want anything to happen to the old lady. Will that become her responsibility?
But it was too late. No sooner had she felt the slightest feeling of guilt than Grandma Sally disappeared from the sky. Dark night falls, but there is no moon. The hole she dug suddenly became deep and long, and many strange claws with sharp nails protruded from it. They pulled her toward the abyss, and Jania could only cling desperately to the ground at the edge of the pit. The soil was too soft and slippery for her to hold on tightly, and deep down she knew that she could not escape the underworld and that she had made a huge mistake. Her curse actually destroyed the sun. Although she didn't mean to do it - and this mistake happened too easily, she complained secretly - but after all, it was irreversible.
A hand was passed to her from the edge of the pit. It was a normal and white hand. Zhannia grabbed it without thinking and climbed out of the pit with all her strength. She wanted to express her gratitude to this kind person, but what was exposed outside the pit was a round, slightly childish boy's face. When he smiled at her, his eyes seemed to sparkle with a dark green light. Jania instinctively uttered a curse word. No. Mom can't control her anymore. She needs to leave this hellish place now.
She turned and jumped into the abyss. The feeling of falling was not really scary in her dream. When she landed in the air, she even turned over neatly so that she could at least take a look at hell first - until her cheek and chest hit hard On the carpet.
Jania moaned. She was dizzy for a few seconds, and then she realized that the pain and falling sensation she felt were not because she fell to pieces, but because she rolled off her bed again. Again. She wasn't the type to sleep particularly well, and she stayed up late last night.
The door creaked open. Hearing the noise, Leo trotted in from outside the door, wagging his tail enthusiastically and smearing saliva on his little master's face. It is already a very old dog. Since it was given to Yu Qingshu by a neighbor when he was two years old, he has always been loyal to mother and daughter - Malcolm's case is a bit exception, and Leo seems to be very loyal to this frequent dog. Suspicion arises from a man who disappears with a strange, strange smell. It allows him to join the family in a peaceful manner, but if Malcolm pretends to attack Jania, then it will yell as much as it wants and take the opportunity to tear down some things it doesn't like.
Jania pushed Leo aside and climbed unsteadily back onto the bed. Since she had spent Friday night checking information for so long, she was fully qualified to sleep in on Saturday morning. She falls asleep more easily during the day, perhaps because most of the noise during the day comes from outside the house. She first buried her face in the sheets, and then tried covering her face with a pillow. Neither method was very comfortable. Her blindfold was probably secretly buried by Leo.
Leo didn't bother her any more, maybe because he wasn't tired of playing with the butterflies in the yard and wasn't in a hurry to urge Jania to take him out. During the days when Yu Qingshu was on a business trip, he often left many muddy footprints in the corridor unscrupulously, and even quietly climbed onto the bed to sleep with his little master. Although he was good at wagging his tail with an innocent look in his eyes, no one in the family didn't know that he was a very cunning dog.
Dogs never miss an opportunity to gain something. Jania thought as she buried her head in the pillow. Canines are not the best or smartest, but their resilience and patience are truly amazing. Canines kill far more people than cats, and dogs far more than wolves—but they are still less effective than mosquitoes, viruses, and humans. From this perspective, of course the human God of Death will not be a dog... So how to explain Anubis? She really shouldn't think about these things. Nowadays, sleep on weekend mornings is more valuable than anything else. She must try her best to capture the sweet aftertaste of her dream, even if there is a sun in her dream, Grandma Sally.
That's when the doorbell rang. It echoed throughout the house, followed by Leo barking. It was a ferocious cry with bravado, which showed that the person was not a regular visitor, but it was not blacklisted from visiting. Jania vaguely thought that her mother might have ordered something online. It didn't matter, the courier would call her mother and leave Dong Ouxi at the door. In a small place like Regenberg, where almost everyone in the community knew each other, no one would steal anything from her door—and there was Leo. It's not an angelic sweetheart that everyone loves.
Jania poked her face out from the stuffy quilt and breathed in fresh air. But the light outside the quilt was so bright, she covered her eyes with her arms angrily. But it's also not a good position to relax into and fall asleep.
As a child she never worried about falling asleep during the day. Jania thought in frustration. It's strange. In the past, her hearing was sharp and her thinking was active at night, but she could sleep peacefully in the brightest sunshine during the day. She really believed that she might be some kind of nocturnal animal by nature. But I don’t know since when, what the sun brought her was no longer relaxation and security, but the anxiety of being left behind by daily life and society. This is the adult world, my dear!
She threw her arm away from her face and it hit a rough sphere. Zhannia suspected that Leo had secretly put the toy on the bed again. She groped for the sphere and looked hard at it with sleepy eyes. Not a tennis ball or a stuffed mouse, but a wad of crumpled newspaper. She unfolded it groggily, revealing the square void in the center. Behind the hole, the sea snake skin that Mademoiselle Antique had generously given to her was hanging on the top of the cabinet, looking at her vividly and sinisterly.
The empty space in the newspaper suddenly awakened Jania. It was a very sudden change, like pressing some kind of switch, and she suddenly forgot all about Grandma Sun Sally and the German Death she summoned. Of course, Leo would not hold a carving knife in his mouth and cut out such a precise piece of report from the newspaper. She did it herself last night. The clipping now hangs on her "detective board," or that's what Malcolm calls it. Every detective game must have such a board, he said. It is the best time for players to enter the puzzle-solving process.
Of course, Jania has her own "detective board", and it is a classical, elegant and unique "detective board". It came from Malcolm's wonderful idea, and the materials were collected from fallen wood from the surrounding woods and velvet, carvings and paints donated by neighbors at the bazaar. When these ordinary sundries fall into the hands of the artist, they become an exquisite tool with a dark red velvet surface and a light gold frame decorated with four-leaf clovers and wild chrysanthemums. Then he wrapped it in wrapping paper filled with question marks and a magnifying glass, making it a birthday gift for his beloved daughter. A pure product of Regenberg, he once said happily, for the most famous local detective of Regenberg!
Even though Jania now has a more realistic rather than romantic understanding of detective work - for example, in fact not many detectives still use such outdated and inefficient tools to do cognitive mapping, they can do it on the computer A more secure, private and detailed mind map, and then type out a thick stack of case briefs, or simply turn on the projector and smart TV - but she still likes this beautiful hanging board. She fixed it with thumbtacks on the empty wall opposite her bed with her own hands, and used it to track down the mystery of a school classmate's disappearance during recess, or why her neighbor always went out quietly in the middle of the night. She once grabbed a thumbtack, pinned a photo of her ex-boyfriend to a piece of velvet, and used a red string to connect the photo to a news report about local drugs. The results afterwards proved that although her idea was not completely correct, she had somewhat grasped the key point.
This was once the most important clue on this information board, but after that Jania's interest in the game slowly dwindled. It wasn't because her mother and brother were frightened by the ex-boyfriend's story, she gave up on her own initiative. When the world was exposed to her in the form of reality instead of fantasy, she, like everyone who had been strongly addicted to detectives, realized that her reasoning was just child's play after all. There are no real detectives active in reality anymore, this is the age of technology and information. What's more important is reality - reality will never provide a perfect reasoning environment like Li does. It won't give you all the information, it will only allow you to try to make sense of things within the scope of your own experience. It's easy to make sense of something on the surface... but you may never know if you're right.
The "detective board" has since been left out in the cold by her. The red rope hangs empty from the rusty thumbtacks, as unnoticed as the ukulele lying under the bed. Until yesterday, its owner once again stood in front of the wall and tacked a small piece of newspaper clippings or old printed photos into the velvet. Her eyes were filled with thought again, and she was exploring and searching in the dense forest woven by her imagination.
At the bottom of the "detective board" is a printed photo. Before he was imprisoned, Lenny Klein looked directly at the camera with his cannibal eyes. Paper reports about his imprisonment back then were hard to find. Jania downloaded this photo from a news website, reminding herself all the time that there was such a pair of devil's eyes prying in the dark. Pinned next to Klein's photo was a small, brand-new newspaper clipping that still smelled of printing ink. Jania had gone to great lengths to find such a copy—space was at a premium in lawyers' files, and her mother had long since given up reading print media—and then she cut it out with her own hands and pressed the thumbtacks on it with secret excitement and worry.
In this small piece of reporting, which had been in a relatively unnoticed section of the newspaper, the writer downplayed the story of a prison that was collapsing due to termite infestation. Several prisoners were missing as a result. The answer the article wanted to imply was that they all died under the rubble, waiting for the inefficient construction team to dig out their bodies, but Jania didn't think so. She couldn't understand why termites were interested in concrete buildings, and every time she stared into a water-filled wash basin or a rain-collected depression, Lenny Klein's ghoul-like eyes loomed in the water's shadow.
This is an unsolved mystery, Jania thought as she lay in bed, and an extremely dangerous one at that. She's thankful that Anti-Pierre didn't tell her mother about the night she disappeared on vacation at the beach, thus sparing her a major family turmoil (and even grounding and scrutiny!). But she is no longer a brat, and she has long understood that there are scarier things in this world than an angry parent. If Lenny Klein showed up at her door...
The sleepiness had completely left Jania. She stared at the detective board with wide eyes, wondering if she had a chance to visit that prison. Not a particularly good idea, there was probably nothing there, and she didn't have much time to spare. Maybe she shouldn't start with Koline. There was another, clearer clue that could lead her to figure out what was going on.
She didn’t put up a picture of “that guy.” It wasn’t because she couldn’t find a suitable picture—it was hanging on the homepage of her brother’s social account anyway. Even though they were all old group photos from her school days, her keen observation skills helped her easily distinguish among the many people wearing school uniforms. Find the familiar one among the dull faces. "Mr. Glove" didn't look much changed, she thought as she looked at the photo, but her brother looked very different, more or less like a suspicious person. But people are meant to change, right? Maybe Mr. Gloves just didn't look that old - the skinny little Judith looked nothing like her classmates, but she still insisted he was suspicious. She wouldn't be particularly surprised if he showed no signs of aging after more than ten years.
Some movement downstairs interrupted Jania's thoughts. Her keen hearing told her that there seemed to be some unusual movement downstairs. Leo sometimes plays tumbling games with his beloved stuffed animals, or lunges and bites at the back of the couch (although Jania thinks he's pretty well-behaved for a hound). Jania had long since learned to distinguish the entertainment activities suggested by different noises, but this time it was a little different. She thought she could vaguely hear the sound of rollers scraping across the rough ground. Did someone pull out the squeaking wooden chair in the living room? Or was that just noise from outside in the yard? She was sometimes wrong; after all, a well-developed imagination was not always bad.
She didn't hear Leo's voice. Whether he is greeting favorite acquaintances or suspicious strangers, Leo always expresses his opinions and emotions at the loudest volume, even if it is a hungry raccoon who just wants to plunder the trash can. But now, the living room downstairs is so quiet. Jania sat on the bed and listened carefully, feeling the hairs on her back stand up like a cat. Now, she had to go and see for herself.
In this room that belonged entirely to Jania, there was no shortage of objects that could potentially become murder weapons. Baseball bats and basketball trophies, a "human bone knife" that Malcolm made out of resin (sharp enough to cut bread, which Jania promised her mother would never find out), and a dusty A large box of pointed darts. But these are somewhat childish. Jania knows that there are at least two pistols at home, and even when she faces the greatest external pressure in her career, her mother will only put one of them in her handbag.
She got off the bed with her bare feet and tiptoed to the stairs skillfully. The wooden floor didn't make any unnecessary noise. This is trivial for someone who is used to sneaking out in the middle of the night. She considered searching in her mother's bedroom, but she didn't know the combination to the safe, and it was too easy to hack. So she changed her mind and wanted to find out where Leo had gone first. If it was lying in the living room, it would mean that she was having wild dreams again.
The small statue of Cobb standing on the handrail of the stairs was holding a broom and looking at Jania with encouragement. The sculpture, also associated with Malcolm, was a gift from a friend to celebrate Jania's cultural coming of age (even though her mother never agreed that a fourteen-year-old girl could be called an adult). Malcolm suggested embedding it at the top of the stairs, facing Jania's bedroom, to remind her that participating in housework is a mature family member's unshirkable responsibility - otherwise you could use it as a prop in a puzzle game. ! He changed his story in time before Jania got angry at the joke and said that he could find the local detective's secret base by following the elf's guidance.
There are so many things like that in this home. Jania was so familiar with each of them that she could almost trace the topography of the house through them. She might be able to live at home for a whole week, blindfolded, just by feeling for these signs. When Jania put her hands gently on the wings of the Cobb statue, she knew that she was facing the wall on the entrance side of the living room, where photos of family members and her mother's favorite oil paintings were hung on the wall. If she stretched her head to the left side of the Cobb statue and looked down, she could see what was happening across the living room and in the kitchen through the small round mirror on the bookshelf. She took a deep breath and pushed out the fragments of scary stories from her mind - the body of the pet dog hanging on the chandelier, the stranger wearing a mask standing outside the window, the doll sitting on the sofa in the living room for no reason - in It's almost impossible to encounter these plot points in real crime cases. Arrange them so that there will never be any movement at all.
But what if it was done by a ghost? she asked quietly in her mind. This annoying question has appeared in her head from time to time during these days, interfering with her judgment on various daily matters. She can no longer pretend that the world is completely rational, and if the murderer can fly through the sky, escape from the ground, become invisible and walk through walls, what can a detective who is good at reasoning do? Her life was really messed up by these nasty things.
But when she put her head over the railing to Cob's left, Jania realized that her life might not be so bad after all. At first her heart beat violently because there was a silhouette standing in front of the oil painting. She saw the back of someone's head that seemed to belong to a man, and the collar of a floral shirt was exposed at the neck. This stranger who suddenly appeared in her house really frightened her, but then she realized that the back of the head looked somewhat familiar, and anyway, not many people would wear such a striking and silly outfit. Forest pattern floral shirt to commit trespass. This pattern looks so familiar, as if Malcolm designed it for Environmental Protection Day one year. And although the town residents loved the passionate artist, not many really loved him enough to wear such a piece of clothing.
She felt suddenly joyful. It seemed that some kind of instinct figured out what was going on before she could consciously think about it. Something like telepathy. She didn't really believe in this ability - but, how amazing it was, when she stared straight at this figure (she could swear that she never made any movement, let alone gasped as written in the book) The cold air or stepping on dead branches or leaves or something), the other party suddenly turned around. They looked at each other for half a second, and an overly exaggerated smile quickly appeared on the blank face downstairs.
"Follow!" her old man in the silly forest floral shirt shouted cheerfully.
. The fastest website for updating the mobile version of Apex:
