The silence that rained down upon felt even louder and noisier than chaos. A wave of shock rushed through everybody, not because of the revelation of the case being a murder as much as the identity of the culprit himself. An eerie quietness traversed through the theater.
The son of Dai Yaling. The same son who shed genuine and mournful tears for his mother. The same son who almost attacked Ma Zhilan to avenge justice for his mother.
The same son now stood as the murderer.
Yin Chin let out an audible gasp, nudging her niece hard. The horror was evident in her gaze and so was her burning question. Dai Meihui stared at her husband, bewildered by the turn of events.
Jia allowed the truth to settle in the air for a moment before she said, "Miss. Huang had observed a sliver of light reflecting off the glass of his watch. Generally, it is unlikely for the glass of a wristwatch to produce any significant reflections because of the ambient light in theaters. Even if there is some sparkle, it would be likely too faint to be noticed. But…"
Jia climbed the steps back again and sat on Dai Fengge's seat this time. The lights in the theater then dimmed and upon her signal, a scene from the same movie of that day was beginning to load.
"You must not be able to see me now but wait for a moment, and keep your eyes focused in my direction."
The movie was playing somewhere from past the middle part. After a minute or so, the sound of a loud bomb blast screeched throughout the theater and for a few moments, a ray of bright light enveloped the theater.
"S-something really is shining…!" Wang Lei exclaimed before the momentary sparkle was lost in the darkness once again.
The dim and yellow theater lights were switched back on and as it did, everybody then noticed the watch on her wrist which was around the same size as Dai Fengge's. She hung her hand at a particular side angle towards Dai Yaling's seat.
"It is the same spot where I just saw the shine a second ago," Ma Zhilan confirmed what everybody else had witnessed too.
Ma Wenyan said, "Yeah it's just like what Mom said. But why is your hand like that?"
Jia explained as she stepped down. "Because that's what Mr. Dai's position was as he was clamping his mother's mouth tightly shut with his hand. The light from the blast and fire scene cast a momentary strong brightness that made his watch shine when he was holding onto Mrs. Dai's mouth. And because Miss. Huang saw it from afar, it gave her an impression of a star twinkling in the dark."
Dai Fengge trembled, his gaze fixed at the floor and neither admitting, nor denying her theory.
"He wasn't checking her condition otherwise he would have already raised the alarm during the movie itself that she wasn't well. So the only thing he was doing was stopping her from making any noise. Because of which, Mrs. Dai suffered hyperventilation. She wasn't able to breathe in an already asthmatic condition and eventually, she passed away."
Ma Yanyu's eyes were still brimming with puzzlement and questions. "But how…? This is impossible. Wasn't Yin Xiaoling right beside him? And his son too? Wouldn't they have noticed him trying to kill his mother?"
Ma Wenyan scratched his chin as he chimed in. "And from what I remember, Mom told me that Dai Fengge wasn't even in his seat when she was suffering. So how can he be absent but still kill her?"
Jia stood before Dai Fengge, her eyes determined to unveil the truth that was obscured within the darkness of these walls. "Because Mrs. Dai didn't die by his hands the first time."
"First time?" His brows knitted with the oddity of her statement. "You are saying as if there was a second time. A person cannot die twice."
"Indeed. A person cannot die twice but the attempts to take their life can be more than once."
"You mean to say…that he failed the first time and then succeeded the second time?"
A flicker of sadness traced her irises. "Not he. She."
Her intense gaze lingered at Dai Fengge for a moment before she looked towards his left and met the pair of eyes who had already surveyed the truth in them. "Miss. Ma Zhilan. You were the first one to attempt to take Mrs. Dai's life, weren't you?"
"That's nonsense!" the high pitch of Ma Wenyan's flabbergasted voice reverberated across the place. "How could Mom be involved in all this? We don't even know the Dai family! This doesn't make any sense."
The confusion and shock across his wife's eyes mirrored the anxiety that her husband was experiencing.
"It does. I will tell you everything one by one. But first. Miss. Ma. Can you climb up till the last row for me?"
The composure on Ma Zhilan's face never once faltered as she simply nodded to Jia's request. She placed her stick forward and began climbing the steps, albeit slowly and patiently. After a point, her expression contorted with pain and discomfort as she exhaled short, uneasy breaths."
"Please stop, Miss Ma."
She did so and turned towards her.
Jia questioned. "You injured your knee sometime back, didn't you?"
"Yes."
"It must hurt to walk."
"Sometimes."
Jia stared into her levelheaded gaze and asked, "If it does, then why did you book a seat at the last row?"
She said nothing.
"Considering the pain, nobody would want to needlessly tire themselves out and wish to aggravate their injury. The theater wasn't booked to its maximum capacity. There were plenty of available seats in the middle and the first rows. Then why did you take the trouble of going all the way back and torturing yourself?"
She remained silent.
"It's because you didn't want anybody at the back to be the witness of what you were planning to do. So even if it was hurting, you had to bear with it."
A pensive edginess hung in the still air as everybody held their tense breaths.
Huojin helped Ma Zhilan slowly climb down the stairs. Jia met Ma Wenyan's eyes which were naturally filled with tons of questions to which he couldn't seem to decipher the answer. She took a step ahead to answer them.
"I was at a block just an hour ago where I noticed a couple hanging out. The man lovingly held his girlfriend's face and for a moment, my eyes blinked because of a flash of light reflected from his watch. When he held her face like that, it got me thinking. It reminded me of Miss. Huang's testimony that she had seen something similar and exactly at the place of the incident."
"Mom doesn't wear a watch," he emphasized.
"She doesn't. But when Mr. Dai came into my radar as the culprit, I couldn't understand the timeline of her death at all. From the initial reports, Mrs. Dai got struck with an asthma attack AFTER Dai Fengge had left to talk to Mrs. Dai Meihui. Miss. Wu had felt a bump on the back of her seat soon after. She turned to ask and Mrs. Dai conveyed that she was fine.
But if she was having an attack, she couldn't be fine. Yet Miss. Wu heard a woman's voice saying so. Which means that somebody else posing as Mrs. Dai voiced out the false message because they didn't want Miss. Wu's attention to linger any longer. It wasn't Miss. Yin because Miss. Wu had seen her next to Mr. Dai's seat. One seat away is far anyway and Miss. Wu would have seen had she been unusually leaning towards Mrs. Dai. That leaves us with only Miss. Ma."