Tears Falling on Blank Pages

Prologue

Sitting by a window, carefully placed on a satin pillow is where I find her diary, her story to tell the world. I turn back to look as the scene played out behind me. Police and doctors discreetly going about their business - checking this, examining that - in the small bedroom. I look back out the window and watch the trees swaying in the icy June wind and the mist climbing over the mountains, as though a big wave is washing over it, ready to destroy anything in its path. Something so dangerous yet seeming so innocent to the human eye. Tears of despair bring me back to reality as I turn around to look at the bed. Her face is so peaceful although clouded with the darkness of mystery. She is as white as the soft pearl necklace around her neck as she lies against the deep red, bloodstained sheet seeping from the wound where the dagger had imbedded itself in her heart. A violent, yet romantic death.

My eyes shift from the tragic scene set out before me to the soft, weather battered diary in my hands. I gently tugged at the ribbon delicately wrapped around it. I opened it and ran my fingers a long the smooth, snowy white pages, it took me a while to realize what I was actually seeing. The page was blank. I flipped through some more pages, they all had dates, dates lasting the past six years of her life, but all the pages were blank. I was beginning to lose faith until I came to the first inscription, first of January 2010. I quickly glanced at the first line: “Some things are never meant to happen … “ Quickly I closed it and ran.

I ran past the bloodstained bed, the snow-white body, the Policemen and the doctors, past the wall of family photos, past the faces of the calamitous parents, past the expensively tiled kitchen, the velvet couch, out the double-storey, dark oak doors, down the marble steps, around the circular driveway and into my old beat-up car outside the two wrought-iron gates and sped away. The same action that I had done six years before.

Tears veiling my sight as I drove past the mayor’s house, the houses of the architects and the families with old money who all shared the similarity of living in huge houses overlooking Robberg Beach. I drove across town to my inferior, ramshackle house at the end of my street. I parked the car in the dirt improvised driveway and ran up the old stone steps into my house and into my office which doubled as my bedroom. Out of pure fright, I laid the diary on my old desk and sat before it in my dad’s old leather, office chair. I leant forward and opened the diary and skipped to the last page. A letter fell out, a mere, innocent trifle in this story. It read:
Mommy, Daddy … things have happened in my short life which I cannot explain, I do things which are of no consequence, yet still I am expected to live as though I am a painted face, an ornament. I chose to stay as the smiling face in the family portrait above the fireplace, but Eva left, because she knows that we are not smiling in our hearts. You have hurt me and up until now my life was empty. Just blank pages, but over the past few days so many mysteries have occurred, so many things to experience, which I went out and did. But this has caused me to inflict danger on you all. So I tried to stand up to it, but now my life will end. This is not a suicide note, I am saying goodbye, because I know something is going to happen to me tonight. There are people out there who shouldn’t be in our world … people who shouldn’t be alive. Daddy, your friend P


The page leads off with a line from her last letter. She didn’t kill  herself … she was murdered. This realization and so many different thoughts hit me like a wave of cold water being flung at my face. An ice cold chill ran up my spine as I realized that there was more to this girl that what appeared at first sight.



Carmen, Carmen Whister, which was the name given to the cold, white corpse. She was a girl of only 16 years old. She was also my little sister. Her and our parents lived here in Plettenberg Bay in Whale Rock, I lived with them too until I left. We fell under the “Old Money” category in my mind. Our Grandfather came over to South Africa after WW2 as a young soldier fresh out of war and made his money in the gold mines. It was a lot of money and because I disassociated myself from their family, I was disinherited so Carmen became the sole heir to the Whister fortune. But that couldn’t be the reason for her death. But if that wasn’t it then what was?

I glanced back to the diary under the lamp on my desk, it used to be a new, leather journal, but now it held the key to the mystery of my sister’s death. I bent over and opened it to the first inscription: 1 January 2010 and began to read …