Wedding Dress

Chapter 11: Curiosity Kills

Maria slammed the diary shut.

She knew that she should have put it away, that she shouldn't have reopened the most private of private things. But she had and now her mind was plagued with the words that Kyoko had written in the diary, words from an entry dated not too many months ago. To think that Kyoko had to face such dreams so long after the death of Ren made Maria wonder how much Kyoko must have truly suffered. Was the dream worth what she had to wake up to in the morning? The empty bed, the silence. It made her shudder, the thoughts were so depressing. This whole day was depressing. Kyoko was dead.

Unable to sit still any longer, Maria set the diary back in the drawer and began to pace the small study. Where was her grandfather? They should be arriving soon, shouldn't they? Maria looked out the window to see if there was any sign of the expected visitors, but all she could see were the fading outlines of the foliage. She had lost track of time, but it seemed as though not enough time had passed for her grandfather to be there. Maria sighed, and looked around at the small study again. Kyoko's study. Kyoko's study that she would never use again because she sat on the porch below, lifeless in the chair.

Maria suddenly felt claustrophobic in the room, and decided to go turn on some of the lights in the house to make it feel… less lonely. She passed by the locked door, and wondered again what lay beyond it. Perhaps there was a key in the study? Maria looked at the door again, and just couldn't find the motivation to fight off the curiosity. It was probably just storage of some kind, stuff that Kyoko didn't need on a regular basis and felt should be locked for safe keeping? Yes, that must be it. But still, Maria returned to the study again and began looking through the drawers. Unlike the door, all of the drawers easily opened to reveal their contents, although most of it was uninteresting to Maria.

She was almost ready to give up on her search for the key when Maria's eye caught sight of the diary she had left on top of the desk. What if Kyoko had kept the key in there? Surely people had done such things before? Looking over her shoulder as a child would do when trying to steal a cookie from the kitchen, Maria quickly held up the diary and began to fan through the pages, hoping that a key would magically fall out from between them. However, Maria was not rewarded with a key, but rather a single piece of paper that gracefully fell to the floor, landing face down. Picking the paper up, Maria turned it over to discover it was a photo, one that she had never seen before. She stared at it, shocked.

Had voices below not reached Maria's ears, she probably would have stood there for hours. But the sounds of her grandfather and the others coming up the walk brought Maria out of her trance and she quickly shoved the photo back in the diary, closed it up, and returned it to the drawer in the desk. She had a strong feeling that she had just seen something that she shouldn't have seen, and she didn't want the others to know… unless they already knew.

"Maria!" Lory called out as he reached the door of Kyoko's home. The door was still locked and there appeared only to be a single light on in the house, upstairs. Lory called out his granddaughter's name a second time and knocked slightly harder on the door hoping to get a response.

"Yes grandfather?" Maria answered, her face flushed from being caught off guard upstairs and having rushed down.

"Ah, there you are. I thought maybe you'd left. All the lights are out." Lory said, satisfied that his beckoning had received its answer.

"Where's Kyoko?" Kanae cut in before the conversation could go any further.

Maria opened the door wider to let in the three friends, obviously weary from there spur of the moment trip and anxious to see Kyoko. "She's on the back porch," Maria began, the emotion from the day again returning to her, "I… I put a blanket on her because she seemed cold."

"Of course she's cold, she's dead!" Kanae snapped. And then Kyoko's best friend did something she normally didn't, and apologized. "I'm sorry Maria, it's just… it's just too soon for me… for all of us."

Maria nodded solemnly and led the way to Kyoko.

I'll apologize now for anyone that wanted the whole thing to be a dream, but like some of you said, some stories should stay sad. I was worried that the previous chapter would be confusing, and it was, but it turned out not to be such a bad thing. I originally wrote it in third person like most of the story, but decided to change it because technically it was a diary entry, and I don't know about all of you, but I don't write in third person in my diary. So there you have it.

Oh, and sunnygcat, I hope this twist makes the last chapter a little better for you.

Please review!

-Tohru12 ^_^