There were so clotheslines in front of the second floor, with clothes that had been washed and hung out to dry, exuding a lively sense of daily life.
Yang Xiao and the others imdiately realized that this was the school staff dormitory since the jackets and skirts hanging there didn’t seem like sothing the students would wear.
"The person who threw the stones last night, he returned here, so... he’s a teacher at the school?" Yu Mi realized.
Yang Xiao led the way to the dormitory, "Let’s go and take a look."
As they approached, a window on the ground floor to the far left was pushed open, "Who are you looking for?"
The speaker was an old man in an old-fashioned white vest, wearing reading glasses and a sowhat balding head. The vest was inscribed with the red characters for "outstanding staff," which were now blurred and indistinct, presumably from being washed too many tis.
"Hello, we’re looking for Teacher Xu," Yang Xiao said very naturally.
"Is it Teacher Xu Yu?" the dormitory caretaker asked as he adjusted his reading glasses.
"Yes, may I ask which room she lives in?" Yang Xiao’s appearance was very deceptive. He smiled, his acting still on point.
"The n’s dormitory is on the first floor, the won’s on the second. Go up the stairs and it’s the third room on your right, the one with a big Mickey Mouse poster on the door," the caretaker seed to rember sothing and reminded them, "You can’t stay too long."
"Got it."
Leaving the caretaker, Yu Mi was completely baffled. She didn’t understand how Yang Xiao could determine the teacher’s last na from just a shoe print and directly extract more detailed information from the caretaker.
But Song Yan understood. It was also a guess on Yang Xiao’s part; the two of them had once overheard a conversation between Principal Wu and a teacher, which involved a teacher surnad Xu.
This Teacher Xu was highly resistant to them filming a movie at the school and even threatened to resign over it.
The person who threw stones attacked their film crew twice but was never found, which showed that this person was very familiar with the school’s layout. Piecing these pieces of information together, Yang Xiao believed that Teacher Xu was highly suspect.
Following the caretaker’s directions, the trio reached the second floor. The building was quite old, and the outside corridor was a long strip hanging outside. The cent had peeled badly under the influence of wind and sun.
Soon, they located Teacher Xu’s room, on whose door hung a large and adorable Mickey Mouse poster.
Each dorm room had a small window facing the corridor, the wooden fras of which were sowhat rotting. On their way, most of the female teachers’ dorm windows were clean and clear, with no coverings, allowing direct visibility into the rooms and facilitating the entrance of sunlight on clear days, especially since it had been raining frequently lately.
However, Teacher Xu’s room was odd. Not only were the windows firmly shut, but they were also obscured by a dark-colored curtain, making it impossible to see the specifics inside the room.
Yang Xiao pushed at the window, but it barely budged, clearly locked from the inside.
Looking at the lock on the door, Yang Xiao was troubled since this was inside the school, and they couldn’t just break in. In truth, he was already 80% sure that Teacher Xu was the culprit.
"Chu, step aside," Song Yan said as he stepped forward, tipped-toeing and feeling around the door fra. Finally, he withdrew his hand with a slight sigh of regret, "It’s not here, I rember my parents would always leave a spare key on top of the door fra."
"This person is very cautious, but being cautious just proves she has sothing to hide," Yang Xiao analyzed.
Song Yan looked around and eventually found a rusty iron wire wrapped around an iron railing in the corridor. He crouched down, bent the wire multiple tis, and ultimately managed to snap off a small piece.
And it was with this small piece of rusty wire that Song Yan, after only a few tries, managed to unlock the dorm room.
After making sure no one was around, the three of them swiftly entered the room and imdiately closed the door.
The room inside was dark, without sunlight, and very damp, until Yang Xiao flipped on a switch on the wall behind the door.
As the light turned on, the scene before them instantly captured all three’s attention. In the middle of the modest-sized dorm room hung a clothesline with a beige suit jacket and a pair of trousers.
For a mont, Yang Xiao was taken aback, as though the ghost in a suit that had once appeared in his apartnt had co back.
The suit was still damp, and there were so wet spots on the floor. Clearly, the figure in the suit Nie Hexiang had seen last night was Teacher Xu in disguise. Her intent to play the ghost was precisely to drive away the film crew.
"What’s this situation? Could it be that the male teacher and this Teacher Xu had a close relationship, and after the male teacher died, how did his suit end up here?"
Due to frequent exposure to brain-numbing romantic films, upon seeing the suit, Yu Mi was already concocting a tragic and mysterious story of a forbidden love filled with sorrow and unrequited passion.
In her mind, the deceased male teacher might have been in a mutual affection with Teacher Xu in their youth, but were reported by a female student who secretly loved the male teacher or perhaps the female teacher.
Anyway, the matter was eventually exposed, throwing the male teacher into a whirlpool of public opinion. To avoid implicating his beloved female student, the male teacher chose to end his own life, putting a regrettable full stop to a budding love story.
And the female student, to morialize her past lover, secretly kept this suit, deciding to confront the also exaggerated film adaptation of the male teacher’s story.
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