Alice reclined in a tall oak tree on the edge of her family's property. Her father, God rest his soul, passed away the month before. Alice had taken his death hard, slipping into a near catatonic state. She had to be fed through a tube in a hospital for a week and would respond to no one.

She gradually came back to her wits, but not fully. "She's distant. Uninvolved. Depressive." Her mother described her as when she took her daughter to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist decided it would be better to have her take leave of her classes for the rest of the school year so she could recover herself and not be a danger to others.

Alice was glad to be rid of Mrs. Harthouse's Girl's Academy for the year. It was such a bore to learn to sew dresses, cook, and learn her arithmetic. She didn't miss a good deal unfortunately, school would have gotten out in a few weeks anyway. It was June, the flowers bloomed early that year.

So here Alice sat in her old oak tree, her back resting against the main trunk and her torso supported in the cavity between where the trunk and a stout old limb came out. Alice sat upon a branch just below that and right behind her right shoulder was a hollow where some creature, perhaps a squirrel, had once nested.

In the hollow Alice put a collection of daisys she had plucked from her mother's garden. Chains were being woven from them. Alice had fashioned herself a crown to grace her blonde hair and she was putting the finishing touches on a bracelet to go with it.

"Alice!" Cried her mother from the herb garden that came off the old cottage's kitchen with the lovely old dutch door. "Alice you get in here right this minute! I heard about what you did to poor Ms. Leane!"

Alice chuckled. Poor Ms. Leane. Leane, a girl of about equal height as Alice but no where near as pretty, was a sour girl of expression who lived in a cottage about 4 miles down the road. Leane had approached Alice yesterday in the flower fields and tried to tell her that her father had been insane.

Alice, enraged, had punched her square in the nose. A distinct crunch-like noise was heard muffled by her fist. Blood streamed down the girl's nose and her eyes widened in shock. Alice's knuckles had even cracked from the impact. An inhuman shriek tore from the girl's lips and she turned tail and ran away back in the general direction of where she came.

The girl deserved it. Alice smoothed over a wrinkle in her light blue victorian dress. Her father was not insane. He was not! He was a genius, no one else in the world was smart enough to recognize it, Alice thought.

They thought him insane because when his best friend came to visit while his wife was out, her father, Charles Kingsley, had taken a fountain pen and gouged it into his friend's eye. He then took a letter opened off his desk and stabbed him repeatedly in the throat.

Her father was found dead on the floor weeping blood. A note in his suit vest pocket said "God may not forgive me, but I regret nothing besides leaving Alice behind."

Cause of his death was unknown. He simply...died. It couldn't have been of old age, he was only in his early 40's.

You may wonder who it was who found Charles Kingsley on the floor. It was his daughter, Alice Kingsley. At the sight of her father and his friend she did not cry and she did not scream. She simply sat in the corner trying to fold in the corners of her being and make herself invisable. Make herself dissapear.

When the scene was stumbled upon by her mother Helen, the authorities were called. It was only then that Alice started screaming. She was pulled away by an officer and brought to her aunt Imogen's house for the night to calm down while arrangements and investigations were made.

The conclusion on the case was that Charles Kingsley had murdered his friend Thomas Baldwinn for reasons unknown. Cause of Charles' death unknown.

For the next two weeks Alice curled up in her father's study on the floor where his body had lay and she slept there. Surrounded by the bookcases full of volumes of encyclopedias and lore she had dreams of a place where she could meet her father. But she awoke knowing the truth, she could only meet him in death.