Dead By Now : A Murder Mystery [COMPLETED]

Chapter Twelve: ...dead already.

I

Do you remember the painting I'd mentioned earlier, of two women staring at the setting sun? Ophelia had painted it herself. Can you guess who the two women in the painting were?

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I promised you more on my suicide in the beginning, it's time I talked about it, I guess.

If you had met me only a month before I killed myself, you wouldn't have believed that a guy like me would ever kill himself.

I was probably the happiest I had ever been. For the first time in forever, I had started to believe maybe there was hope.

But someone has very aptly said, I guess, "After laughter comes tears."

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Even though we did not exist outside of The Wilson Clinic's four walls, the moments we spent together inside those walls were the reason why I was so happy. When I was with Neil everything seemed possible. I wish I could have spent some more time with him.

There are only two people I really ever miss, my mom and Neil. They still don't know why I killed myself. It is sad.

II

I was in our basement one day, what I was doing there is not important really but what is, is what I found there.

I heard a man shouting and I knew right away it wasn't my father. I would recognize his shouts from a mile away for I was used to hearing them almost every day.

It was a faint and distant voice and I couldn't quite figure out where it was coming from. It was not the first time, either, that I had heard a strange voice like that coming from the basement, and this time I was not going to ignore it again.

Well now that I think of it, I should have ignored it, for it was this faint murmur that led me to her.

After searching for a few minutes, for the source of the murmur, I came across a wooden box, and in it, was tucked away the painting.

It only makes sense though, that I found it first, I lived in our house more than Madelyn ever did.

III

When I first met Ophelia she looked... well, unstable, she just cried most of the time. And after she had seen me she had started to believe that she had gone mad for, like, real. I took a few days myself to get familiar with the idea, to be honest.

Ophelia didn't talk much at first but gradually and eventually she told me what she was so upset about. And I felt really bad for her, too. I also learned that the man I had heard shouting was her husband.

I won't bore you with unnecessary details. "How bad do you want to save your mother," I had asked her.

I knew a little something about being helpless myself. Well, I wasn't married to a guy like Elwood, obviously, but I had been under the shadow of one like him all my life. My father. I had an opportunity to do something for Ophelia that I could never do for myself.

I had a plan to help her. She didn't agree at first but I knew she would come around, and after a lot of thinking, she eventually did, for you see she did not really have any other option.

IV

I had this weird habit of googling everything that was brought into our house, so obviously I also googled the pesticide I had bought for the bedbugs. The very first result showed how 31 people had died, in Pakistan, when they accidentally ate food spiked with chlorfenapyr. The second time I googled it I came across something even more interesting. It wasn't even discovered until 1988. Now I was not a poison expert, but it made me think that they wouldn't even know what killed him.