Code of Silence

Chapter Two

P.O.V Nicole

At the end of the school day, I walked to my home.  It was in the middle of the woods, where no one would find me or bother me for any reason.  Just how I liked it.

By the time I got home, the sun was setting behind the mountains, and left a blend of gold, and orange colors on the stringy clouds.

Twisting the knob, and flinging my front door open, I threw my back pack in the old abandoned shed, and turned on a mini, battery-powered lamp that was on a nightstand by my blankets I use for a pathetic excuse of a bed.  The mini lamp was the only form of lighting in the place. 

When the light turned on, all of the walls lit up reviewing all of the posters, and evidence to prove that Adrienne didn’t commit suicide.

In one enlarged poster of her body when the police took snap shots, there had been some kind of trauma to her arms and wrists to prove that she was struggling against something.  Whoever murdered her had left mini circular bruises the shape of finger prints on her arms and wrists.  At the tip of one bruise, there was a slight indentation of where someone’s nail had pressed into her skin.  The direction of the nail mark signified that someone had picked her up.  Her killers could’ve picked her up for two reasons.  They could’ve carried her to her room or lifted her up to the rope on her ceiling. 

Her parents figured her death was a suicide, because she left suicide notes in her front jean pocket when she was hung.  Each note supposedly went out to every one of her friends.  She wrote one to me, and I hung it on the wall.  There was something peculiar about her note, and I just couldn’t lay my finger on it. 

I walked over to the note and re-read over it. 

“Nicole,

I want you to know that I love you dearly.  Our friendship was like gold.  You are such an amazing friend and person, and I’m sorry everyone that you come across treats you like you’re a monster.  I know the truth of what happened years ago.  You never have to feel like that was your fault.  Soon, all of your pain will be killed and you will live happy and free.  I’m sorry that things have to be this way now, but you’re smart, and I know you’ll figure it out.  You’ll figure out why I killed myself.  By the way, don’t stop being your natural, Lively, and Grateful self.  One day the world will see your true, amazing colors.  Thank you for being a part of my life, I will never forget you.”

The line that caught me every time was, “Soon, all of your pain will be killed and you will live happy and free.”  I didn’t know why, and at first I thought I was overlooking the note.    Maybe it was because the word, “killed,” had such a negative connotation and it didn’t fit with the words she would usually say.  Another way Adrienne, being in her normal self, would’ve wrote this was, “I hope that all of your pain will go away one day, and you will be able to live happy and free.”

The lamp on the mini nightstand was faintly lighting up the letter, so I grabbed the lamp on my desk and held it up to the note.  Very faintly under the two L’s in the word “Killed”, there was a dot.  A heavy dot that was indented into the paper by the pen she was writing with.  There was a possibility that she was talking about she was killed, but the word killed could’ve meant anything. 

Carefully, I moved the lamp over the rest of the paper to find any other dots.  Next to the very first I in the letter, in the a of the word was, between the B and Y, and under the words Lively and Grateful, there were dots.  The words together make, “I was killed by Lively, Grateful.” 

 Lively and Grateful?  At the time, I had no idea what she meant by that.  I took a moment to realize that she capitalized the first letters in the words.  Maybe the people who killed her had nicknames?

In my night stand, I pulled out a notebook and a pencil and wrote the clue down.  It went underneath the clue with the finger prints.  That was all of the investigating I did that day, because I had other homework to attend to.  

I sat down on the sheets and dragged my backpack near me to begin.  Once I finished all of my homework, I shoved all of my text books and papers back into my backpack, and fell back onto the sheets.  My eyes eventually fell heavy, and I dosed off into sleep.

Unfortunately, once I shut my eye lids, the images and everything I saw on the day my parents were murdered came flooding back to me.  After the scene of my walking down stairs and seeing them lying motionless on the ground,  my eyes shot open, and I found myself in tears. 

Why did every person I got close to end up dying?