Chapter 4: Reconciliation
The Chen family's old grain shed was exactly where Mother said it would be, a leaning structure of warped timber and straw thatch behind their main plot, half-swallowed by overgrown millet that nobody had bothered to clear. The door hung on one leather hinge. I pushed it open and the smell hit me before the light did.
Perfect.
Three years was a long time for physical evidence. Rain, rot, insects — any of those things could've erased what I needed. But the shed's roof, despite its sorry appearance, had mostly held. The thatch sagged in the center but hadn't collapsed, which meant the interior stayed dry enough to preserve what mattered.
I stepped inside and let my eyes adjust.
The grain bins were still here. Four of them, clay-lined wood, each large enough to hold a season's worth of millet or sorghum for a single household. Three stood empty with their lids removed. The fourth still had its lid on, sealed with a strip of cloth that had gone grey with age.
I checked the empty ones first. Along the base of the second bin, scratched into the clay lining, I found what I was looking for... gnaw marks. Dozens of them were concentrated at the seam where the clay met the wooden frame. Rats had chewed through the sealant to reach the grain inside, and the marks were deep enough that this hadn't been one animal on one night. This was a colony working the same entry point over weeks.
I crouched lower and saw droppings along the baseboard. A scattering of them were near the gnaw marks, a trail leading toward the far wall where a gap between two planks was wide enough to fit my thumb through. I checked the third bin and found the same pattern.
So the rats came in through the far wall, hit bins two and three, ate their fill over what was probably several weeks, and left the evidence everywhere. Anyone who actually looked would've seen this in five minutes.
Which meant Zhao Ping hadn't looked. He'd heard about the missing grain, made an accusation that fit his existing suspicion of Chen, and the village had accepted it because Zhao Ping was the closest thing they had to an authority figure.