Dead By Now : A Murder Mystery [COMPLETED]

Chapter Five: Why

I

It took the girls less time to develop a friendship than it took Madelyn to get Ophelia to believe that she was indeed married to a woman. They spent the next few weeks mostly just talking about their lives until one day, when they couldn't anymore, because Ophelia had, once again, disappeared without a word.

Every morning Madelyn would wake up next to Ophelia. It had become kind of a schedule for both of them. Ophelia was always up before Madelyn and the first thing Madelyn saw every morning was the smiling face of Ophelia. One morning, however, Ophelia's smiling face wasn't there to greet Madelyn when she opened her eyes. There was nothing on the other side, really, everything was black. Ophelia had hidden the frame in a drawer before she had left. Madelyn waited for Ophelia to come back the whole day but she didn't.

It was after the second day of waiting that Madelyn started getting really worried but before her thoughts could start getting any darker, Ophelia returned. And much like Madelyn had anticipated, she came back with bad news.

This bad news, however, was not related to the thing Madelyn was worried about. She had assumed Ophelia's sudden disappearance had something to do with the ongoing murder investigation of her husband, but it was actually, as Madelyn would later learn, about something that Ophelia had not discussed with her yet.

II

"It's about my mother. She's sick, very sick," said Ophelia, in a low voice. The moment Madelyn put the dots together and realized what Ophelia's mother had, she knew what she had to do.

Ophelia had received a message that her mother's condition had worsened. She tried to tell Madelyn that she'll be gone for a few days but Madelyn wasn't there, so she put the frame in a drawer and left without wasting much time.

Ophelia did not need to explicitly state the name of the disease in order for Madelyn to understand what it was, because she had witnessed it up close. Our father was getting treated for the same illness. They did not have a cure for tuberculosis back in Ophelia's time. Back then it was not considered anything less than a death sentence but it is very much treatable now.

The same illness had killed her father a few years after her marriage to Elwood. When her mother first started showing symptoms Elwood accompanied Ophelia to visit her. It did not take him long, however, to recognize what her symptoms meant. There was nothing out of the ordinary about Ophelia not sleeping with her husband the night he was killed. They hadn't been sleeping together ever since Elwood had realized that she could, perhaps, somehow infect him with the same disease her parents had.

Madelyn first took one of Ophelia's hands in hers and tightly squeezed her fingers. Staring into her eyes with a hopeful smile, she finally told her. Told her that she could save her mother. That there was a way. That tuberculosis has a cure now.

Ophelia's reaction was a lot more intense than Madelyn had anticipated. Her tears almost made Madelyn cry too.

There was, however, a lot to consider before Madelyn could move forward with her plan to treat Ophelia's mother. She knew the names of the antibiotics her father was taking.

And to obtain the medicines, she could ask Neil to arrange them for her. She wasn't that close to Neil anymore so, well it was not going to be easy, naturally. Neil worked at Kori's clinic with me. We were pretty close. It is nice to talk about him. I like remembering him.

But the problem was that Madelyn was not a doctor. She did not know if the meds would be a hundred percent safe for Ophelia's mother. She did not know if her body would be able to handle the medication. Moving forward with the plan was a great risk but there was this one thing Ophelia had told her that had convinced Madelyn that they had no other option but to try to do something to help her mother. "I would rather have my mother die trying to save her than to helplessly see her die a merciless death," Ophelia had told Madelyn.

Without wasting a second more, Madelyn dialed Neil's number on her mobile phone right away to ask him to meet her tomorrow. "There's something very important I need to talk to you about," she told him.

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