Double Life: Mystery

The room was dark. The lights from the street made the furniture angles to be pronounced whereas the rest was submerged in darkness. It was a cold night; the wind blew making the thin white transparent curtains move as if they were silently trying to warn the inhabitant of the house that someone had trespassed, dark eyes narrowed as this thought passed through the trespasser’ mind.  Silent steps carried the girl through the wooden floor and down to the first floor.

Nichole walked into the living ample living room with wooden furniture. There was an old lady sleeping on a rocking chair close to a window. The woman was wearing white, all of her was white: her pale wrinkled skin as well as her hair. Her eyelids were seemed almost translucent.

Nichole reached to touch one of her cheeks without really understanding why she had to do it; the lady seemed like a nice grandma. Pictures of children were hanging on the wall next to the stairs, probably her children and grandchildren.

“I knew you’d come” the old lady said before Nichole could touch her cheek. It startled Nichole but she didn´t move. They both stared at each other for a moment, Nichole with a blank expression and the woman with the expression of someone that knows what´s coming.

“You’ve grown a lot” the old lady said closing her eyes. Nichole felt compelled to ask her what she meant, she had never seen that lady in her life but she knew better than to talk to her victims, she’d been trained not to unless it was necessary. Knowing them, even just a little made her job harder and it could make it impossible, she´d learned that in the first year of her life as a killer. She didn´t need any more pain because every time she took a life something inside her died besides the experience of the pain she was inflicting to her victims.

“You look so much like your mother” the old lady said closing her eyes. This was like a blow to her stomach. She wondered if the woman had met her mother. She felt the urge to ask. “I knew I was next” the woman opened her eyes and the intensity of her gaze was the one of a younger woman not of the old grandma with gray hair. Nichole tilted her head just a little, the old lady half smiled and batted her eyelashes, she looked so different with those gestures, they made Nichole remember Natasha.

“You don´t know who I am, do you?” the old lady said above a whisper. “Who is using you now, Nicky?” the old lady smiled taking her hand to Nichole’s that was still a few inches away of the silver haired woman “Say hello to Karl for me. I know I deserve this, but you, Nicky, don´t deserve it… however, and tell this to Karl, I don´t regret having done what I did” the woman guided Nichole´s hand to her cheek.

“Why are you calling me Nicky?” Nichole couldn´t help but ask, she´d thought the woman was senile when she started to talk, but she was calling her name and she clearly knew her father, she knew his new name. The woman didn´t answer, her heart had started to beat faster and faster, her breathing was hard and so was Nichole´s except that she was used to that feeling by now, no, you could never get use to the feeling of dying over and over again but human beings are capable of adaption, Nichole had done so, she´d blocked it with the years. “Isn´t that the short name for Nichole?” the old lady said losing her grip on the girl’s hand.

“How do you know Karl?” Nichole inquired. The gray haired woman seemed amused at that question, almost as if she was in no pain, but she was. “Poor, Nicky, you don´t know a thing, do you? ... You should ask your father that” the woman closed her eyes and her head hung to a side. Nichole´s heart went back to her normal beating as she observed the old woman who looked as if she was just sleeping.

Like a jolt of electricity the gray haired woman´s words made echo in Nichole´s mind. This woman had met her and her father, moreover, she´d met her mother and she knew what she did… how? And why had her father wanted to make her go. Was he aware of her knowing of her secret? That´d make sense, it´d be a threat to one of his assets, but if it was so, he wouldn´t have sent her personally, he wouldn´t have wanted her to have questions… it had to be something else.  What had she done for him to hate her?  She knew, however, that she couldn´t ask her father, she´d tried a couple of times when she was little, he´d only given her an ice-cold glare and a twisted mouth.  No one really told her why she did what she did but she was there to do it and she couldn´t stop. She´d killed her mother, she was a bad person, and she had to kill bad people to atone for it, but this woman, what could´ve she done? And the bartender? He’d seen nice enough and too young to have a list of sins to be a bad person. What was happening? She wondered.

The girl walked inside the house, looking for anything that could tell her how she´d known about her and why she hadn´t run away from her. She wanted to know why it was the woman herself to guide her hand to her skin, she´d known about her secret. She searched throughout the house but there was nothing that could indicate she´d known her or Karl until she went back to the room from where she´d entered, on a corner on top of a small table there was a picture, the same picture that she´d seen in the house of another one of her victims, it was the picture of an unfocused baby and hands holding it with her mother´s signature on a corner as well as a “thank you” handwritten above it.  Nichole went to the table and opened the drawer, there was a black book, she took it and realized it was a journal; it was probably of the woman that had died that night. Nichole took it and put it on her small backpack and searched for more but there was none, however on the patio there was a large trashcan with ashes and burnt paper that was probably the rest of the journals.