The Crime as Seen

The so-called murder or suicide in the house, if not murders and suicides, are mysteries.

Firstly, the deaths that're said to have happened here. One said that the night before he heard a car dragging into the neighborhood, stopped for some time, and drove away. Another woman claimed she saw a foreign shadow through the blocked curtain of the house (it seemed that she was their neighbor, and from her bedroom she could observe her neighbor, while the neighbors could not observe back).

Another man remarked that he heard shrieks and cries, but someone pointed out that the man heard the sounds every day.

No one thought something went awry until a friend of the family came to visit them two days later. Standing there for half an hour with no reply from the family, the friend thought the family had an accident. She asked around the neighborhood to see whether they saw them in the past days, and getting no helpful information, she called the police.

The policemen came to investigate almost immediately, with efficiency way higher than before. They broke into the house, kicked open the doors, and saw blood stains all over the place.

Nothing could be analyzed from these bloodstains. These confusing blood pools could be signs of dragging, wrestling, or stabbing. They could be anything, as if they were spilled as a plot of the family.

And somehow, there was no DNA in the blood.

But it was blood. Not ketchup or some props for dramatic effect.

The technology of completely extracting DNA from blood was unimaginable by the time. Absurd. Every cell has a strand of DNA, to be least confidently speaking. And if a government or some organization manages to crack into this secret of life…

Where shall genetic diseases go? This is a both technically and ethically disputing case.

It was or instant classified into secret files, and became a shock among the authorities.

Since then the case came to a dead end. A usual crime has an investigation length of twenty years. As the level of the crime was not raised, the police department claimed the case and its files invalid. Like the stairs, the old papers recording the case became covered with dust, but deliberately this time—so are the forever mysteries of the family's disappearance.

Curiosity remained. For the neighborhood this house remained as much as a haunted house, and the neighboring woman even ordered a carpenter to seal the window designed with such an angle.

"I can see it," the woman said, "I can see the damn place. I don't want to see ghosts someday."

Details about the crime had spread out wildly in the neighborhood, and among some of the closer blocks. Because the father of the family was a charitable being, or probably because the serene region forgot the surprises of an unnatural death: some decided to help the kin; and a charity stood out to acknowledge the doings of the man and his spouse, but all they did were to send a man to tell the kin the house was promised to be donated to charity, and deliver a certificate.

That certificate? Vanished. While the deaths themselves sank under the surface, about beneficiary to the house continued on the historic timeline.

The brothers were not satisfied with the man's decision to donate the house, and tried to appeal and request the charity to return the house to their hands, but charity was not going to spit out the house.

That was twenty-five years ago.