I didn’t know his original name and just remembered that when grandma first brought him home, she called him Leo.
Leo’s appearance shattered the peace in the yard. He was both rebellious and violent. He would just wreak havoc in the yard at first, but then he started locking in the cellar in private and pushed me into the pond.
These incidents weren’t exactly life-threatening and I would only get bruises, so no matter how outrageous he was, grandma would always forgive him.
This life lasted till the year I took the university entrance examination. The factory was under investigation for excessive pollution. If the factory’s processing area was blown up, it would mean that the factory’s sewage system wouldn’t able to function for a long time and the health of the residents living in the area would be impaired, so the investor wanted to bribe Director Lee a hefty amount on money so that he would just leave the city, but Director Lee fought back and hyped the whole thing up.
The investor ended up being arrested by the police and was also guilty of embezzling. At that time, the investor’s wife was about to be promoted in City P, so to protect herself, she filed for divorce and submitted a lot of evidences of the investor’s illegal deeds and the laundering of money.
The investor was sentenced and was seized all of his illegal assets. The investor who lost both of his money and reputation committed suicide in the prison.
After this I learned that Leo’s father was this investor and his mother passed died of lung cancer one year after he was taken to the yard.
The already dismal Leo became even more cranky after the accident. He rarely spoke in normal times, so after losing all the money, the kids in the alley started bullying him and calling his father an evil person.
These kids had never left the county and only followed their parents’ words, so Leo was even more alone and didn’t talk to people.
He stared turning his attention to the cats and dogs in the alley. He would sometimes kill them himself or would throw the dismembered animals into those kids’ home or even poisoned them. He would pile the dead bodies in the alley and waited for them to stink to the point that no one could live in the alley.
After the factory was abandoned, some of the residents in the alley moved away and Director Lee was rewarded some money for reporting to the police. He meant to take his family members to somewhere else , but on the night that he was about to move away, his whole family was sent to the hospital for food poisoning and the once discarded factory processing machine was demolished.
Nobody really cared the already abandoned factory, but Director Lee’s whole family died after being treated in the hospital for three days and the only daughter who survived was diagnosed of dementia.
The death of Director Lee’s whole family didn’t draw much attention in this small county, but I knew that they didn’t die because of food poisoning. He was killed by getting the needles pricked into his head by Leo. So did his wife.
Diana survived because Leo noticed me for I was there to visit Diana after the examination and witnessed the whole scene. Diana didn’t die, but for a lone time, she would get crazy every time she saw Leo.
I wasn’t much better. Seeing two people dying right in front of me at the age of about twenty years old, i didn’t recover form the incident after a couple of weeks of suffering from high fever.
Me and Diana had never right up this matter again. As naive teenagers, it had never occurred to us to call the police. And from that day forward, me and Diana had been living under Leo’s tyranny.
Then grandpa suffered got lung cancer and I sold the yard to pool the money and brought grandma to the Newton Town to get medical treatment while taking the school.
Diana didn’t go to the university and can only earn a living in Newton Town since she had neither family members nor friends back at home.
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