Chapter 759: Chapter 759: Basement_1
Purple Summers got into the cab, fell silent for a long while, then gave the name of a place.
Upon hearing this, the driver hesitated, “Young lady, that place is in the outskirts, quite far…”
He was reluctant to take the job; driving up the mountain at night was dangerous, and returning to the city with an empty car wouldn’t earn him much.
Without a word, Purple Summers placed a stack of banknotes on the passenger seat.
It was enough to cover the driver’s income for an entire day.
The driver stopped talking and drove straight to the destination.
As the car left the urban area, the street views gradually dimmed, and finally there were no street lights. The glaring headlights lit up the pitch-black road ahead, which seemed to have no end—as if entering into absolute darkness, the throat of a night demon ready to devour everything, welcoming a fate of being chewed up and digested.
About an hour later, the car arrived at the foot of the mountain. The mountain road was flat and neat but lacked streetlights, so the driver carefully drove along the winding mountain road at a slow pace.
The cold wind swept through, creating eerie sounds through the mountains and forests, chilling to the bone.
The driver, a bit nervous, unconsciously tried to start a conversation with the passenger behind him, “Young lady, it must be quite scary at night living up in the mountains, right?”
Purple Summers, as if she didn’t hear, remained silent in the back seat, her expression calm, like the still surface of an ancient pond.
Her gloomy demeanor instead made the driver more anxious, feeling as if he had not a person in his car but a resentful ghost.
The driver dropped off Purple Summers at the location and quickly turned around to head back, disappearing into the night shortly after.
Purple Summers observed the mansion in front of her, then after a moment, her gaze slowly moved to the ginkgo tree outside the villa.
The tree had almost shed all its leaves and looked rather bare, but Purple Summers stood outside and watched it for a long time.
She took out a key, unlocked the villa’s main gate, and then turned on the lights. The house immediately became as bright as day.
Purple Summers didn’t linger, heading straight for the basement.
The room in the basement was still locked. Purple Summers took a gun out of her bag and without hesitation shot at the lock three times—
Sparks flew, and the sound of the gunfire was deafening, with the smell of gunpowder spreading immediately through the air.
She approached the door with an expressionless face, pushed slightly, and the lock fell off. The door opened.
Purple Summers felt along the wall in the darkness until she found a switch and pressed it.
A moment of brightness made her squint reflexively, and when her vision adjusted, she saw her own pictures covering an entire wall!
In the photos, Suzanne Saunders was about fourteen or fifteen, dressed in a neat school uniform, her face youthful, yet her demeanor prematurely mature. She stood out among a group of students; that was during her high school years.
There were photos of her doing morning exercises, sitting in the classroom, and wearing shorts and a t-shirt, participating in the school sports meet.
These pictures chronicled every detail of her high school life, taken from concealed angles, and were presumably all taken secretly.
She couldn’t help but remember, during that time she always felt paranoid, feeling like she was being followed every day, yet she never had concrete evidence, and it had eventually blown over.
At the time, she thought she was just being overly sensitive. It was only now that she realized someone had indeed been stalking her.
There was a two- to three-year gap in the photos; not a single shot from her college years, probably because Alexander Summers had gone to France during that time.
She moved along the wall, looking at each photo, seeing herself enter the research institute, and even saw herself dating Nathaniel Summers, under the moon and amid flowers, discussing marriage… The later photos must have been taken by a professional, as she had not noticed being photographed at all.
Apart from her own pictures, Purple Summers found some other things in the basement.
—A large amount of materials on supernatural books and research, ghost stories, and investigative journalism.
There was also a thick stack of documents, like resumes seen by an examiner, complete with photographs, names, ages, and special skills.
Among these resumes, she saw the name May Francis.