Creation began on 10-27-08

Creation completed on 12-20-08

May

Bliss

A/N: Putting together the pieces to the puzzle is hard, but this detective had to do it to find out what had caused this to happen.

"Don't touch anything," said the guy to the police as he looked over at the scene of the death. "You may tamper with the evidence."

"What evidence? The girl's dead," the officer told him, pointing at the girl as she was lying on her bed with a…doll made of missing body parts. "This should be rolled out as suicide."

"We don't know for sure," the detective uttered again. "Wait for the forensic people to get here. Photograph everything in here. I wanna know what caused this girl to go this way."

Sixteen years of detective studies and finally graduating at the top of his class, Richard Irons had been handed this recent case in order to figure out why it had happened. The case: A woman had been found dead in her apartment with several instruments that were reported missing from a veterinary clinic and various limbs that were found to be from five victims, and what used to be a cat, stitched together into a homemade doll. She had been identified as May Dove Kennedy, a veterinary aid at the animal hospital. He'd been tasked to seek the truth to why this woman was dead.

"No signs of forced entry," he told himself as he looked at the girl's remains. What drove you to this?

Being an outsider himself, Richard never seemed to fit in with people unless it was during investigations like the one he was taking on. But it wasn't for any medical or genetic abnormality that had made him an outcast. As a child, he had been increasingly aware that whenever he tried to understand something within an environment where something terrible had happened, he would always feel things he shouldn't have felt, sensed things that had already happened, and saw things from a different perspective. Labeled a self-claimed freak, he looked into this ability he had and tried to control and harness it, believing that, if it couldn't be removed, it could at least be suppressed and allow him to lead a quasi-normal life. Researching and discovering it to be an advanced form of psychometry, the ability to perceive events that may have or haven't happened yet from touching inanimate objects and, at a smaller level, people whenever he tried to focus hard enough on them, he used it to solve a few of his cases in his earlier years as a detective.

His mother had always pressured him to be a detective because she thought that was his calling. If he could use his ability to solve a crime, he could become a legend in his own right. So, out of respect for her, he went to detective school to study.

The forensic people had shown up to collect the…bodies and ship them to the morgue as they did with the others found. Richard was left by himself in the apartment, afterward, just how he liked his cases to begin for the truth. Three women: Polly, missing her neck, a woman named Ambrosia, with her legs taken. And an as-yet unidentified woman without her ears. Two men: Adam, stabbed in the stomach and his hands severed off, and an as-yet unidentified man stabbed in his hands and head without his arms. He knew that May had murdered these people, but the problem to why she did so was eluding him completely.

Something must've sparked a bad string of thoughts in your mind, he thought as he looked down at the recently-taken photograph of the death scene: May, laying next to the macabre doll, one of her own eyes taken from her head and near her mouth, and the doll, Amy (due to the letters on its head), with one of her arms on her face, leaving a smile on her face, causing Richard to wonder how something like that happened if there was nobody else around when the scene was discovered.

"I guess the best place to start at is…the very people that knew her to begin with," he told himself.

"Hello?" Richard knocked on the door of an apartment house in the city. "Is there a Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy here?"

"Who is it?" A female voice responded on the other side.

"I'm Detective Richard Irons. I need to ask you some questions about your daughter, ma'am."

The door opened and an elderly-looking woman stepped out, probably in her 70s by now.

"Is there something wrong with May?" She asked him.

"Ma'am, your…your daughter was found dead in her apartment a few days ago," he answered, now seeing her cry. "I'm trying to find out what could've had anything to do with her dying."

She let him in and sat in the living room.

"Coffee, sir?" She asked.

"Yes, please, ma'am." He accepted the cup from her hands. "Um…one of the questions just concerns her past, so if there's anything you know about that, it may help with solving the case to how she died."

"Okay," she responded, unsure how to answer any question he might throw at him.

"Did… Did May know anybody that might've held a grudge against her?" He asked.

"Like… A friend?"

"Yes."

"May…didn't have any friends. That was my biggest fault when I was raising her."

Setting his cup down, he gave her his full attention.

"My daughter had a lazy eye condition in her right eye. I made her wear an eye patch to her first day of school, but I had her cover it with her hair so that other kids wouldn't see the imperfection. I guess she couldn't stand keeping half her face hidden and showed it. When her birthday came up, I gave her a doll with some words my mother had told me about. "If you can't find a friend, make one," I told her."

If you can't find a friend, make one, he thought as the words repeated themselves in his head. A lazy eye and no friends.

"I still blame myself for what I had done to her," she continued, now crying. "I drove her to being a slight perfectionist because of her eye."

Richard made sure his mental notes were well-written: May had a lazy eye, no friends, was found dead next to a doll made from the parts of other people, and now all of this.

"I think I know how to solve this now," he uttered.

"Excuse me?" She had asked him.

"Your daughter's death. I think I know what happened now," he explained, getting up. "I have to go back to her apartment and check the other places that a few other people were found dead. I shall contact you when I have acquired all the evidence to close this case. Thank you for the coffee. Have a nice day."

He excused himself and walked out the house.

Deciding to go over to Polly's home first, Richard used his abilities to gaze into what the house saw, seeing some things that were unpleasant, but got to where the murders had gone on: May had shown up, wearing a self-made costume (so he assumed it was Halloween night), and Polly, waiting for the other girl to show up, let her in. A while later, May, now manifesting traits of a killer with no morals that hides beyond carefully-planned moves and innocence, took out a pair of scalpels and brought them to Polly's neck. Polly had thought May to be just playing with her by being unusual, but didn't expect that she would actually slit her throat, killing her, and then taking her neck by cutting it off her head and body with a larger surgical tool. Then, some time later that night, the other girl, Ambrosia, showed up and met with May again. May had asked her to give her a spin to show off her legs, and she did so, but was then stabbed in the head by her, after which, she had her legs taken in the same fashion.

Next, he walked down the street to the next house (Adam's) that was a murder site, all the while using his abilities to reveal that May had taken this route, her hands dirtied with blood. So dirtied, they were almost like gloves. Almost. She had knocked on the door, Adam answered it, not really expecting her to show up again after breaking up with her (his abilities made him assume that May tried to have a romantic relationship with him, but nothing panned out well for her), and a girl (the other girl that was discovered to be dead) that was with him, invited her in.

"Adam sat here," he went, looking at the small table and chairs, "while May sat here. Adam had been drinking much of the night, near a complete hangover. May asks for him to touch her face with his hands. She wants them to herself, ignoring much of the rest of him, but he doesn't bend. The other girl sits on his laps and makes him touch her face. May and her argue a bit over them, until Adam wants her to leave, but asks him to touch her face before leaving. He gives in and approaches her, his hand out to touch, but she grabs him and reveals a scalpel, stabbing the girl in her neck, and then stabs Adam in the stomach, killing them both."

Coming to one, possible conclusion was that a very, very dark idea spawned in May's mind. As he returned to her apartment, where she had sewn the body parts together after cleaning them off of the bloodstains (an extreme perfectionist) and naming the doll, using her own name in an anagram, Amy. His abilities showed to him that she was happy that she (since "Amy" is a female name, he assumed Amy had to be a female doll) had the parts of people she viewed with perfect parts, and that she had a friend of her own that she could hold. But the scene of the death wasn't very pleasing when he discovered that May realized that she couldn't really see her as she had no eyes. No real ones. May became sad, miserable, and sat at her mirror, looking at her right eye whilst holding a pair of scissors.

"Oh, no," Richard shuddered, realizing that the worst had happen here, but his abilities went and picked up an earlier scene that happened, putting the rest of the one he was still viewing on hold: This scene showed her smoking a cigarette while looking down at the guy whose arms she had cut off, and her then saying, in a completely calm-yet-somewhat-cold manner, "I need more parts." "She killed them…out of loneliness and despair. Wanting only the perfect friend…with all the perfect parts she was obsessed with."

Returning to the original scene he was cut off on, he saw the horror: May had gouged her lazy right eye out of her head, screaming and crying in pain from the process in an attempt to make Amy see her. She laid against the doll, placing her eye on it, and dying from the blood loss and what she had perceived as her own failure at making the perfect friend, unable to do anything more than just hold her as the eye fell off and near her mouth. Seconds later, May, with her remaining eye, saw the right hand of Amy rise up and caress her face, causing her to smile as she laid there dying. The doll had come to life, if only for a moment, to bring the girl happiness, even when Death was near her.

Even when she had done terrible things, this was what she really wanted in the end, he thought, looking at the empty bed that had the bodies there before they were taken. "May was no killer, even when she had murdered. She was just a lonely girl that wanted a friend."

After revealing to the rest of the police what had really happened, the case had been closed and listed as a murder-suicide. May Dove Kennedy had, due to her childhood memories of her mother's words of making a friend if a friend couldn't be found, killed five people and cut off the parts she wanted to make a friend for herself, and then killed herself by accident in her attempt to give the friend true sight. The victims of her reign had been cremated while she and her friend, through Richard's reasoning with the people, were buried in a cemetery. "Nobody, not even an outcast, deserves to be alone," he had told them.

That…was six years ago. Six years since he had solved the case, and six years since he had discovered a girl that suffered, not from an eye condition, but from the severity of loneliness. He hoped that she had gone to some better place with her friend, where they couldn't be separated, harmed or shamed by any form of disgrace that plagued people of the present.

Only a pair of roses decorated the two graves in front of the detective. The graves of May and Amy. Ever since the case had been closed, he came to the graves as often as he could.

"Some movie makers are thinking of making a movie based off you," he told May's tombstone. "How silly is that? A movie, based off so much pain. Maybe it'll be good…if they can give it a good ending."

Rearranging the bouquets before leaving, he bid farewell to the graves and left to do his job again. He stopped walking when his powers picked up something that they normally didn't pick up: He turned around, looked over at some other graves, and saw a little girl running…with another girl that looked like a miniature version of the Amy doll that had been buried alongside May, and guessed it was the girls letting him glimpse them before they left again.

"Now, I'm turning into that John Edward guy," he told himself as he walked out of the cemetery. "Only I can see the souls of the deceased…and the purity within."

The End