Helena (eBook)

Letícia Melo (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
244 Seiten
Lofty Dreams Publications (Verlag)
978-0-00-095647-7 (ISBN)

Infos

When seventeen-year-old Iris Blackwood witnesses her reclusive neighbor's gruesome death, she thinks she's seen a suicide. She's wrong.

Helena Ashford's body beneath the old oak tree is just the beginning of a psychological thriller that will shatter everything Iris thought she knew about her small town. The mysterious package Helena left behind contains cryptic instructions and three sealed envelopes-each addressed to classmates who react with barely concealed terror.

Dark secrets. Deadly conspiracies. A town built on lies.

As Iris and her reluctant allies-Cameron, Zoe, and Blake-follow Helena's posthumous clues, they uncover a conspiracy thriller spanning decades. Municipal fires, missing fathers, and covered-up murders reveal a shadow network controlling their community. But Helena didn't just document the corruption-she orchestrated her own death to expose it.

Young adult thriller meets psychological suspense in this gripping tale where teenage protagonists face impossible choices. Every adult is suspect. Every friend could be an enemy. Every revelation brings them closer to the truth-and closer to death.

The deeper they dig, the more dangerous their world becomes. Murder mystery elements blend with small town secrets as the teens discover they're not fighting local corruption-they're battling a vast network that views them as expendable test subjects.

Helena died to give them a chance. Now they must decide if her sacrifice was worth their lives.

Textauszug

Discovery

The scream that woke me wasn’t human.

At least, that’s what I told myself as I sat up in bed, heart slamming against my ribs like it was trying to escape. The sound had ripped through the night air and straight into my bones, leaving me shaking in my pajamas at 2:17 AM according to my alarm clock.

I pressed my ear to the wall that separated my bedroom from Helena Ashford’s house next door. Nothing. Just the hum of the air conditioner and my own ragged breathing.

Maybe I’d dreamed it. Maybe the stress of starting junior year at a new school was finally getting to me, making me hear things that weren’t there. God knew I’d been having enough nightmares since we moved to Millbrook six months ago.

Then it came again.

This time I knew it was real, and I knew it was coming from outside. A woman’s voice, broken and desperate, calling out words I couldn’t understand. The kind of sound that made your stomach drop and your skin crawl because some part of your brain recognized it as the noise people make when their world ends.

I stumbled to my window and pushed the curtains aside.

Mrs. Ashford stood in her front yard in her hospital scrubs, her hands pressed to her mouth like she was trying to hold her soul inside her body. The streetlight caught the tears streaming down her face, making them look like silver scars.

That’s when I saw Helena.

She hung from the massive oak tree that grew between our properties, her body suspended from a thick rope tied to one of the lower branches. The wrought iron fence that surrounded her family’s garden sat directly beneath her, its decorative spears pointing up like black teeth.

One of those spears had punched through her chest.

Blood dripped from Helena’s fingertips onto the rose bushes below, each drop making a soft patting sound that somehow cut through everything else. Her long dark hair hung in front of her face, but I could see enough to know she wasn’t breathing.

Helena Ashford was dead.

My legs gave out. I hit the floor hard, my knees cracking against the hardwood, but I couldn’t feel the pain. All I could feel was the cold spreading through my chest as my brain tried to process what I’d just seen.

Helena was seventeen years old. She sat two seats behind me in AP History. She always carried the same worn leather backpack and ate lunch alone under the big elm tree by the science building. She was quiet but not shy, smart but not stuck-up, pretty in the way that didn’t need makeup or fancy clothes.

And now she was dead.

Mrs. Ashford’s screams got louder, more broken. I forced myself back to the window and watched her collapse to her knees on the wet grass, her body folding in on itself like a flower closing for the night.

I should call 911. I should wake up my parents. I should do something other than crouch here like a coward while my neighbor fell apart in her front yard.

But I couldn’t move. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t do anything except stare at Helena’s body and wonder how someone could be there one day and gone the next, just like that, no warning, no chance to say goodbye or fix whatever had gone wrong.

Light spilled from the house behind Mrs. Ashford as the front door opened. Mr. Ashford appeared, still in his work clothes even though it was past two in the morning. He took one look at his wife, then followed her gaze up to the tree.

The sound he made when he saw Helena wasn’t a scream. It was worse. It was the sound of a man’s heart breaking in real time, raw and desperate and completely without hope.

He ran to his wife and pulled her against his chest, both of them sobbing now, their voices mixing together in a harmony of grief that made my stomach turn. I wanted to look away, to give them privacy in their worst moment, but I couldn’t. It was like watching a car accident—horrible but impossible to ignore.

That’s when I noticed the lights coming on in houses across the street. Other neighbors finally waking up, finally deciding to investigate the noise. Better late than never, I guess.

Mrs. Patterson from three houses down appeared first, wearing a ratty bathrobe and fuzzy slippers. She took one look at the scene and immediately pulled out her phone. Smart woman. At least someone was thinking clearly.

More people started trickling out of their houses, forming a loose circle around the Ashfords but keeping their distance. Everyone seemed to understand that this was sacred ground now, marked by tragedy and blood.

The sirens started about five minutes later. First the ambulance, then the police, then the fire truck because apparently that’s what happens when someone dies—every emergency vehicle in town shows up to make sure the person is really, truly gone.

I watched the paramedics work, their movements quick and professional as they tried to figure out how to get Helena down without making things worse. It took three men and a ladder to cut her loose, and when they lowered her to the ground, I finally saw her face.

Her eyes were closed, but not peacefully. Her skin was gray-white, the color of old paper, and there was blood at the corner of her mouth. She looked smaller than she had in life, like death had somehow shrunk her down to nothing.

They covered her with a yellow sheet before loading her into the ambulance, but not before I saw the hole in her chest where the fence spike had gone through. It was perfectly round, like someone had used a hole punch on a person.

The ambulance drove away without its sirens on. No point in rushing when your passenger is already dead.

The police stayed longer, taking pictures and measurements and asking questions that nobody seemed able to answer. I watched Officer Martinez—I recognized him from the school safety assemblies—talking to Mr. and Mrs. Ashford, his notebook out, his expression gentle but focused.

I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I could guess. When did you last see her? Was she depressed? Had she mentioned wanting to hurt herself? All the standard questions they probably asked when teenagers died in ways that didn’t make sense.

But Helena hadn’t been depressed. I was sure of that. She’d been angry, yeah, and frustrated with the world, but not hopeless. Not the kind of angry that turns inward and destroys itself. The kind that burns outward, looking for something to fix or fight or change.

Girls like Helena didn’t kill themselves. They killed the things that were killing them.

So what had happened here? What had driven her to tie a rope around her neck and jump from that tree in the middle of the night, when her parents were asleep and the world was quiet?

And why did it feel like someone was watching me think about it?

I turned away from the window and caught my reflection in the mirror across the room. I looked like hell—pale, hollow-eyed, my dark hair sticking up in twelve different directions. But that wasn’t what bothered me. It was the expression on my face, the look of someone who’d seen too much and understood too little.

I’d been in Millbrook for six months, and I’d learned exactly two things about this place: everyone had secrets, and everyone pretended they didn’t. The adults smiled too much and talked too little about anything that mattered. The kids at school formed tight groups that had been together since kindergarten, suspicious of outsiders and protective of whatever they were hiding.

Helena had been different. She’d been the only person who looked at Millbrook the same way I did—like a place where something was fundamentally wrong, even if you couldn’t put your finger on what it was.

And now she was dead.

I sat on my bed and stared at my hands, trying to make sense of what I’d witnessed. Suicide was supposed to be a private thing, wasn’t it? Something people did when they were alone and desperate and couldn’t see any other way out. But Helena had done it in her front yard, where anyone could see, where her parents would find her first thing in the morning.

That felt less like giving up and more like making a statement.

But what kind of statement? And to who?

A soft knock on my bedroom door made me jump. “Iris?” My mom’s voice, thick with sleep. “Are you okay, sweetheart? I heard sirens.”

“I’m fine,” I called back, surprised by how normal my voice sounded. “Just a lot of noise outside. I think something happened to the neighbors.”

A pause. Then: “Do you want to talk about it?”

“No. I’m okay. Really.”

Another pause, longer this time. My parents had learned not to push too hard since the move. They knew I was struggling with the transition, with leaving my friends in Phoenix and starting over in a place where everyone looked at me like I was some kind of exotic animal.

“Okay,” Mom said finally. “But if you change your mind, you know where to find us.”

Her footsteps faded down the hallway, leaving me alone with my thoughts and the lingering smell of something metallic that might have been blood or might have been my imagination.

I walked back to the window. The police were still there, their flashlights cutting through the darkness as they searched the ground around the tree for evidence. Whatever they were looking for, they didn’t seem to be finding it.

The crowd of neighbors had mostly dispersed, probably going back to their warm beds and their safe lives, ready to pretend tomorrow that they hadn’t watched a girl die tonight. That was the Millbrook way—see nothing, hear nothing, forget everything that might make you...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 1.7.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Kinder- / Jugendbuch
• ISBN-10: 0-00-095647-3 / 0000956473
• ISBN-13: 978-0-00-095647-7 / 9780000956477