Midnight Angel [Jenlisa FF]

~'~'~ Chapter 9 ~'~'~

Sleep. That was what Lisa should have been doing. But as had happened a lot lately, the elusive dreamland could not be found. She'd been in this town, what, a week, two weeks? And it seemed like she slept less and less each day. It wasn't as though she didn't want to sleep. It was just that whenever she tried, visions of a smiling blonde girl invaded her mind along with the words Jin, Jisoo, and Jackson had spoken to her.

To say she wasn't disturbed by it all would be a lie. The situation itself was horrifying. There was also the part, though, where she'd somehow managed to get dragged into it all. Well, maybe dragged wasn't the right word. She hadn't exactly put up much of a resistance. Still, that didn't tell her why she hadn't just forgotten about it as she had been ordered to do in the coffee shop, and why she couldn't stop thinking about the blonde girl named Jennie.

Lisa told herself she was only getting involved to help right a wrong, that she was doing what any morally correct person would do. But were those the sole reasons? She could lie to herself and say yes, but that wasn't the truth. It was Jennie, the young woman she'd never even met, that had her enraptured.

Sure, Jennie was beautiful on the outside, but something told her she was just as much so on the inside. She had to have immeasurable inner strength to have survived what she did after the rape. Could she somehow still be alive? And if she was, what had happened that night in her family's house? That was the million-dollar question, she supposed.

Regardless, Lisa couldn't do anything about it tonight, and she certainly wouldn't be able to do anything at all if she didn't start getting some sleep. With that in mind, Lisa shifted onto her side, hoping that sleep would finally come.

~'~'~

Her watch showed that it was barely seven-thirty in the morning when Lisa dragged herself into the magazine's office building. She'd gotten no more than three hours of sleep the night before. Too much on her mind. So, when she'd awoken at the crack of Dawn, she'd simply rolled out of bed instead of trying to get another hour's sleep. Plus, she had things she wanted to do.

The building was practically empty this early, which suited Lisa just fine. She didn't want anyone questioning what she was doing. Not that they would have any reason to really. She was a photographer, and she had every right to use the magazine's dark room for an hour or two. Even so, it would be best that no one questioned her, or asked why she was at work an hour and a half before she normally arrived.

With sure steps, she walked down the hall toward the darkroom. In her pocket, her fingers were running over the negatives of the film she'd had developed the day before. Time would tell what she would find once she blew three of the shots up to larger sizes and cropped them down on the single figure that walked the beach late at night.

~'~'~

An hour and a half later, Lisa stood in the darkroom holding one of the shots that she'd worked on enlarging. On the photo in her hands stood a petite blonde woman, her gaze staring out over the sea. The details were fuzzy, and the face only showed a side view, but Lisa had little doubt. The woman, the mysterious figure who walked the beach, was Jennie.

But what did that mean? If the figure was really Jennie, had she photographed a ghost? Or was Jennie really still alive? Each choice was baffling, to say the least. Idly, Lisa wondered if her being a ghost would have made things much simpler, because if she were actually alive, it left so many questions that needed some very serious answers.

How was she still alive? Had she killed her family? Where was she living? Why did she walk the beach at night? And what the hell did Mr. Kim know about all this?

Lisa slipped the three photos she'd worked on into a folder and left the darkroom. She needed to call Jisoo and set up a meeting with her and the others. As she walked toward her office, she firmly pushed aside the voice inside her head that told her she was in way over her head.