Within an instant, all three men were at my side looking at the same sight that I had hoped to never again see in my lifetime.
There, lying face-down in the soft, dark dirt of the garden, was David with a suicide note tucked perfectly between the fingers of his right hand.
No, no, no….
I couldn’t do this again, not again.
Michael bent down and put his fingers to David’s neck. He didn’t need to say anything, though. I already knew that David was dead. He pulled the piece of paper out from David’s hand and read it.
Sorry.
The single word was all that was written on the paper. It was happening again...
“He didn’t kill himself,” I said as I started to cry.
Adam wrapped an arm around me and held me as I watched Rob help Michael gently turn David’s body over on the ground. The knife that David had held in his hand, the one that he had set down in the garden when I first decided to offer him a chance, was protruding out of his chest and the dirt was stained by his spilled blood.
Then, Michael looked up at Adam and then spoke the words I already knew to be true. “Lisette is right, he didn’t kill himself.”
“How do you know?” Adam asked.
Michael stood and sighed. “I can just tell. Look at the way the knife is positioned. He would have had to have been holding it upside-down.”
I knelt down beside David’s body on the ground and wondered what the chances were of having two family members lost to fake suicides. I bet the odds stacked against that happening were astronomical. I held his cold hand for a moment and closed my eyes. He had just been starting to live the life he was supposed to have.
But when I opened my eyes again, something caught my eye.
There was a hair stuck in the blood that was sticking to the handle of the knife. I reached my fingers to it and pulled as a long, golden-blonde hair lifted off. I held the hair tightly between my pressed fingers in the air in front of my face. It had to be at least two feet long.
And none of us had hair like that.
We buried David’s body on the side of the mountain, and I laid some of the flowers from the garden on top of his grave. It was strange to me that I didn’t cry more and for longer, but then I realized that I had cried so much already in my life that it was likely there were no tears left to shed. Instead, I was angry at the way David’s chance to be better in his life was cut short and angry that all of my work of forgiveness and resilience had been for nothing.
“Who could have done this?” Adam asked as we sat around together. “I mean I know there were plenty of enemies that David had, but who could have found him here and done this without us even knowing?”
“Do you think that whoever killed David is still here in the mountains with us?” Rob asked.
He reached for his gun that was lying on the table and tucked it into the waist of his pants.
“I don’t know,” Michael said with a shrug. “Possibly.”
A shrug. As if this were a natural phenomenon for us.
It would have made me sick if I already didn’t live my life with a sickened stomach at all times.
“No,” I said with a fair amount of certainty in my voice. “But, I think I know who this belongs to.”
I remembered the bloodied blonde hair that I had found and remembered seeing that same kind of hair before. The beautiful girl from the Lineage Winter Gala masquerade party had that hair. The girl that had been on David’s arm for the entire night.
Then, I knew what we had to do. “We need to go back to Lineage.”
“What?” Michael looked shocked. “You can’t be serious. Go back? To the place that we spent years trying to escape from?”
I looked up at him. “We were trying to escape from my father, and from David, and from the past… none of that is there now. Now it’s just a school.”
“You don’t know that for sure,” Michael said.
He was stressed, and I heard the high level of tension in his voice.
“Even so,” Adam said. “What in the world would make you want to go back there?”
“I think that’s where David’s killer is,” I said.
“All the more reason not to go back,” Rob said. “Look, I know that you were really starting to care about David and what you did for him was nothing short of miraculous. I agree that his death shouldn’t have happened and that it deserves to be avenged and figured out. But didn’t we already decide that we weren’t about vengeance anymore?’
“Yeah, we did,” I said as I looked at the long strand of hair that I had put in an empty glass jar. “But I think I might have just changed my mind.”
It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in finding peace anymore, or that I had forgotten how horrible and hard the years at Lineage had been. I hadn’t. All of those experiences were cruelly and permanently burned into my memory. But the path kept shifting each time like moving sand beneath my feet. I tried the way of peacefully moving on and letting go, and destruction found us here anyway. Maybe the root of the problem wasn’t any of the things I had tried before. Maybe it wasn’t something as blatant as drug-trafficking or as difficult as past traumas.
Maybe it was something entirely different.
Something wrapped in a pretty, blonde package.
Not long after, I found myself and the guys heading back to Lineage again to figure out what was going on. And none of the guys were happy with me to be making the journey back.
“Ugh,” Adam said as he looked out the window at the Lineage campus coming into view. “I didn’t think in a million years that I would ever be back here.”
“Yeah I have to admit,” Rob said. “I didn’t spend that much time on these school grounds, but even I’m not happy to be back.”
