"Pretty girls like you get lost in these woods all the time, Alexa."
On the night of Sebastián's annual Beginning of Summer Bash, amiable and adventurous Melody Tryniski went missing. What might have appeared as a juvenile escapade - a casual incide...
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FROM: ME
TO: YOU
The letter stands there on the kitchen countertop, all innocent beside Melody's painting. Every time I try to grab it, my hands shake uncontrollably. My body knows the danger of opening another letter, how I'm one step closer to the truth; one step closer to the killer. The sight of her neat handwriting gliding among the white envelope, blotchy ink smeared across the thin paper as if she passed her hand on it to check if it was dry, makes a cold shiver run down my spine. Her loopy swirls trigger memories of a happier time - scrawls with secrets on torn pieces of paper passed around us, the riverbank flowing along its path on the background and the warm powdery scent of wood engulfing us.
Then, the scraps of paper flying away like birds searching for a destination. I often wonder about their whereabouts. Maybe they're deep within the riverbank's body, forever mysteries, or in someone's possession, dark thoughts in their hands that will remain forever nameless. It doesn't matter now.
The painting is of another blue mass, a brown half-triangle on the edge of one of its corners. There's a lot of detail in the different shades of blue that form a whole, a blurry aspect to it that makes me think of the sky on a cold, rainy evening. It doesn't make sense, but as Sebastián so kindly puts it, Melody didn't make sense herself. Nothing relating to her made sense, now that I think about it - not her sudden disappearance or why she wrote these letters or how she died.
She's an enigma.
I sigh through my nose, my shoulders slumping as the air leaves my lungs. The round clock on the wall ticks every time its hand moves to a different number, reminding me that I've been here for an entire hour. After I dropped Sebastián off at his house and he gave me her painting, I've been scared to open the damn letter.
I turn my head to the side to look through the kitchen window, where far beyond the sky is a dark mass that wears a half-moon as a jewel. His truck is parked on our driveway, red and rusty and old. He was too high to have the car, blubbering nonsense during the whole ride and tripping on his own feet when we arrived, so I took it home with me for the night. It's ironic, really. Seb has the money to have two houses, a main one and another for the summer, but his parents make him work for his things. They help him too, of course, but it's strange how they don't notice that he spends most of his money on weed.
My eyes dart to the clock, tick tock, tick tock. My pulse quickens, it's there on the vein throbbing in my neck. I can feel the surge of adrenaline running in my blood, my body shaking with fear the closer my hands reach for the envelope. Without another thought, I grab it and take out the letter. It's like the other two, a single page written from front to back, scribbled sentences that taint the piece of paper with the ink of truth.
