Love, Art, and Murder – Mystery Romance

I was still confused, but I kept a neutral mask on my face so he wouldn’t backtrack or try to get out of telling me.

“How many people are involved in this installation?”

“At least thirty.”

“What is it about?”

“I wasn’t a hundred percent sure at the time, not until you and I talked in the limo and I came up with sacrifice. But when we all discussed this installation we pictured a place out in the open, surrounded by nature. We wanted it to be interactive, but involve video footage.” Hex touched one of the numbers in the trees. “Brenda taught me all about cameras, how to work them, where to place them for better lighting, how to create extra emotion. She was an amazing teacher. Toward the end I thought she would’ve opted out of sacrificing herself, but she did it with no hesitation.”

Fear bubbled in my chest. “So these five women who died actually committed suicide?”

“In a way. We agreed to make it as painless as possible. There would be no guns, knives, or anything to suggest violence. We needed the focus to be on the art of death, the beauty of it.”

I cringed. “The beauty of it?”

“Yes. In all of my works I explore death, and in many of my friends’ works too, whether poetry, calligraphy, water colors, video art, etc. We’re all portraying the concept of death and the enchanting wonder of it.”

“Why?” My voice came out as a whisper. My legs wobbled as if I’d just picked up a box full of heavy weights and tried to hold it for hours.

“Artists always create to answer a question, even if they don’t know they are doing it. Death is the most mysterious question in life. Why not explore it?”

I raked my shivering fingers through my hair. “Okay. Let me get this straight. You created this huge elaborate video art installation around the castle to explore death?”

“Yes. And we wanted to make it interactive on many layers. As the deaths are happening each night, we’re videotaping the human reaction to it all. We’re even studying how nature reacts to death. Is there a change with a tree when a woman dies under it? Do more leaves fall? Does the earth rot? Or is it all a continuation of life? So far, I believe nature has subtle reactions to the loss of life. I swear to God the trees seemed to lean toward Brenda when she passed away. The whole moment was eerie.”

“You were there?”

“We all were the first night. She was scared to die alone. She took the sleeping pills. Laid in the garden in the one area where my brother’s security cameras didn’t monitor, but where all of our video cameras were positioned. Brenda didn’t want us to talk or make any sound. She just asked us to stand around her in a circle and looked down at her face; just give her the image of the only people who loved her, smiling down at her as she died. And that’s what we did. Under the moonlight and hidden in the shadows, we watched her die.”

Oh my god.

I rested my hand on my chest. My heartbeat pounded beneath my breasts.

“She’d been trying to kill herself for years, but never had the heart to go through with it. Like some of the others, she just wanted to end life, get it over with and see the other side. We talked about what could be there waiting for us. I mentioned Grandma’s gods being on the other side. Some spoke about their beliefs of life after death. Others spoke of colorless worlds where you could fill in color and paint all day, never getting tired or needing to eat. Brenda didn’t care about any of that. She just wanted to see her twin sister, a girl who had died when she was a kid. Brenda kept saying she felt like half of her being had been cut out, never to be replaced. She claimed to walk around the earth as an empty shell of a woman.”

“So she was killing herself to see her sister again?”

“Yes.”

Patricia’s scarred wrist flashed in my head. She’d said that her group of friends called her healed wrists life lines. At the time I’d found it odd that people would nickname such a tragic thing, but now I understood why. This bunch was not only crazy, they were all suicidal in some way.

As if hearing my thoughts, Hex lifted the figurine of Patricia. “Patricia slit her wrists after the first time her mentor had sex with her. She was ten. No one believed he’d done it. Her parents, being psychologists, chalked it up to all types of mental illnesses, but the truth. He remained her mentor and continued to touch her inappropriately. By the time she turned of age, she was in love with him. It killed her inside. She was simply using death as an escape.” Hex set the figurine back in the box.