Granny Fang's crying stopped abruptly. "This... this..."
"But I never met Madam Ma. By the time my husband and I met, Madam Ma had already..." Liu Ruyu did not finish her sentence.
"Indeed. When Jin Dagen took you into his household, my sister had already been in the netherworld for eight years."
Ma Xianggui glared at Liu Ruyu with venom, his voice hoarse. "So what? You know very well in your heart why Jin Dagen took you as his second wife! My sister suffered through all those bitter years with Jin Dagen, and she died a wretched death. By what right do you, a vile woman, get to enjoy the wealth that should have been hers?"
Liu Ruyu turned ashen and collapsed into her chair.
"You poisoned the pendant you gave to Madam Liu," Li Lianhua said, "yet the first one to die was Jin Fulu."
Ma Xianggui stammered for a moment, a look of profound grief on his face. "I clearly handed the pendant to this vile woman! Who could have known that the one to die would be my poor nephew? How can we be sure this wicked woman didn't see through my intentions and use my plot to kill my nephew instead?"
"I did no such thing!" Liu Ruyu shrieked. "I had no idea you put poison in the pendant! I was only afraid my husband would misunderstand, so I buried the pendant in the back courtyard!"
"Could it be that Jin Fulu was poisoned because he saw you burying the pendant?"
Qian Mingyue chimed in, "Even so, it makes no sense. Even if he saw you burying it and dug it out in secret, why wasn't there any disturbance? Why would he hide it away privately?"
"Granny Fang, pray tell, what was the relationship usually like between Madam Liu and the Young Master?" Li Lianhua asked.
Granny Fang glanced at Liu Ruyu. "The Young Master and Madam were not on good terms. They rarely interacted in daily life."
"My guess is what happened was this," Li Lianhua said. "Jin Fulu happened to catch Madam Liu going to the back courtyard in the middle of the night to bury the pendant. Out of curiosity, after Madam Liu left, he dug the pendant up. As for why he kept it close to his person, he probably saw the matchmaking charm hidden inside and mistakenly thought Madam Liu was having an illicit affair with an outsider."
"Just as Madam Liu said, Jin Fortress Master was away from Jin Family Fortress during those days. So Jin Fulu kept the pendant close, simply waiting for the Fortress Master to return so he could use it as evidence to accuse Madam Liu."
"That actually makes sense." Qian Mingyue nodded, then frowned as he looked at Ma Xianggui. "There is one more thing this official cannot fathom: why on earth did you put a matchmaking charm inside the pendant?"
Ma Xianggui's narrow eyes showed a trace of bewilderment. "What matchmaking charm? I merely grabbed a random strip of paper from a temple to wrap the poison in."
Qian Mingyue was almost driven to laughter of exasperation. Such a stupid, flaw-ridden murder plot had actually, by some bizarre twist of fate, killed Jin Fulu...
"Wait, then how was Jin Dagen poisoned?" Qian Mingyue remembered clearly that Jin Dagen had shown the exact same symptoms of poisoning as Jin Fulu.
Li Lianhua pondered for a moment, then slowly walked over to Jin Dagen's coffin. "Losing a son in middle age must bring immense grief. A hollow gold filigree pendant containing a matchmaking charm—suppose Jin Dagen accidentally found this pendant tucked against the chest of the deceased Jin Fulu. What do you think he would have done?"
"If I were Jin Dagen, I would have assumed my son had someone special in his heart," Bai Buyu said leisurely.
"Precisely," Li Lianhua sighed. "Jin Dagen had only this one son, who died before he could start a family. Right there against his chest upon his death was a gold pendant that at first glance looked like a gift from a woman. Given the influence of Jin Family Fortress in Baixia Town, Jin Dagen would certainly want to find out which woman Jin Fulu had set his heart on. That's why, upon discovering the pendant, he first kept it for himself."
Granny Fang slapped her thigh. "No wonder the Master suddenly came to ask me a few days ago whether the Young Master had any young woman in mind, and even entrusted me to inquire about the rules for ghost marriages."
"What on earth was Jin Dagen trying to do?" Bai Buyu frowned. "Good thing he died. Otherwise, wouldn't he have cost another innocent young woman her life?"
"Ahem, ahem." Qian Mingyue deliberately coughed twice, wearing an expression that defied description. "Miss Bai, watch your tongue."
Bai Buyu rolled her eyes. Neither of these two Jin Family Fortress father and son were decent men, and this fellow surnamed Ma was no better. If not for those accidental twists of fate, the ones who died would have been truly innocent people.
Ma Xianggui was escorted back to the yamen by Qian Mingyue, while Liu Ruyu, having stayed awake all night and suffered a severe shock, was supported back to her room to rest by her maidservants and older women.
Within the span of an hour, the great hall of the Jin estate was completely emptied out. Only Li Lianhua and Bai Buyu remained seated in the guest chairs, drinking fragrant tea and cracking melon seeds before the corpses of Jin Dagen and Jin Fulu.
"You old fox," Bai Buyu muttered, cracking melon seeds while watching Li Lianhua sip his tea with utter serenity.
"How on earth did you guess that Ma Xianggui was the fake Daoist priest Liu Ruyu ran into?"
"It wasn't all that difficult," Li Lianhua said, smoothing his robes. "Tell me, where would you find a stable hand who neither cleans the stables nor walks the horses, and can't even feed a horse properly, yet endlessly pries into the private affairs of the master's household?"
"You've seen those two scrawny horses of ours; he hasn't fed them properly in two days." At this mention, Li Lianhua looked heartbroken and shook his head. "If I hadn't casually fed them a couple of handfuls of forage ourselves, those two skinny nags would have been starved to death long before we ever left Jin Family Fortress."
"This Jin Family Fortress is truly a cursed place." Bai Buyu curled her lip. As she passed Jin Fulu's corpse, she casually scattered a handful of medicinal powder to dispel the stench of death—heaven knows when she had concocted it. "That blockhead has dragged Ma Xianggui back. Shouldn't these father and son be laid to rest tomorrow?"
Li Lianhua sipped his tea slowly without answering, fixing his gaze thoughtfully on the green tea leaves drifting lazily in his cup.