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They say everyone who looks into their family history will find a secret sooner or later and they were right for when 12-year-old Cora looked into her family’s past she found something that she should have never uncovered.
***
“Cora get up,” said Luna Malberry (Cora’s mother).
“I’m coming, I’m coming,” said 12-year-old Cora Malberry, who looks nothing like her mother. Her mother has straight, dark hair that comes down just a little past her shoulders, she has green eyes that you swear could look right through you, and she was only 5 ft 4 inches tall. Cora of course got her dad's unruly, curly, blonde hair that came down to her shoulders and that she despised with a passion so fierce you would swear that the hair would jump of her head and tell her good-bye and scurry away like a frightened dog, she also had her dad's eyes (blue). For being just 12 she was a tall, lanky, young girl who hated her height for she was taller than most boys in her grade (7th)
Cora hopped out of bed and raced for the stairs that were just 12 paces from her doorway. She rounded the corner going to fast and ran over her baby brother who was toddling toward her room.
It was happening in slow motion her brother falling to the ground, her flipping over herself and falling down the stairs hard enough to feel something crack that shouldn’t have. Then, all the sudden there was a blood-curdling scream, where had that come from? and then she realized that horrible, ear-splitting cry had come out of her. She sat on the floor rocking back and forth shrieking like a hooligan for she had broken her leg on the stairs. It was like superwomen one minute Luna was in the kitchen cooking the next she was at the foot of the stairs trying to figure out who was shrieking the loudest her son or her daughter and then Luna realized that they had to hurry as fast as they could to the hospital for Cora had really broken her leg.
***
Two days later Cora is in her bedroom on her laptop as bored as can be when she thinks why don’t I go up to the attic and see what I can find to do. Cora got up, grabbed the crutches standing beside the bed and hobbled to the foot of the attic ladder. She climbed up the ladder very slowly due to her gimpy leg that would not corporate with anything that she wanted to do. When she got to the top of the ladder she started to poke around in the boxes that where the closest to her. What she found made her gasp, she found photos of her dad as a little boy. She started laughing, she had never seen her dad when he was little. She stood there for what seemed like an hour trying to catch her breathe from laughing so hard. She then finished hobbling up the ladder and looked around in the boxes and she found a newspaper from the late 1970’s. She started to read and found out that there had been a murder in the sweet town of Little Ben and that no one was ever caught for the crime. She then thought who would want to murder someone anyhow that’s just plain stupid. When she continued reading she realized that it was her grandparents that had been murdered. She had always wondered why no one talked about them. The farther down she read the more shocked she became for her father had been the key suspect in the murder, but there was never enough evidence to prove it. She thought to herself well you know what I’m going to solve this murder and put the person who did it behind bars even if it is my sweet, old dad.
***
Cora was in her room investigating what the police had already found and it was this: Cora’s grandparents were murdered in their own home with a AMT Hardballer .45 ACP (Automatic Colt Pistol), they hadn’t found the gun and there were no fingerprints at the scene of the crime. So, basically they had no evidence to back the claim that they were even murdered besides the fact that each had been shot 20 times by the killer. What sane person would shot themselves 20 times? wondered Cora. So, she had already ruled out that it was suicide. The only people that were in the house at the time the murder took place was her grandparents whose names were Anne and Frank Malberry, and her dad Theodore S. Malberry. So, that left the only evidence of Theodore S. Malberry being the only person in the house at the time of the murder. How could it have been my sweet dad?, thought Cora.
***
The next day as Cora was getting ready for school she thought, Why don’t I stop at the police station on my way back from school so that I can get more information on the murder.
Later that day Cora was at the police station asking the detectives Mark Little and Benjamin Tall (Cora thought that their last names should have been switched for Mark Little was 6 ft 5 ½ in. and Benjamin Tall was only 4 ft 3 ½ in.) about the murderers of her grandparents when she noticed a shadow above her head, when she looked up she saw this: her dad staring at her with a look of multiple emotions on his face shock, anger, embarrassment, and disappointment. He grabbed her by the front of her shirt and told her that she was never to come here again and the if he caught her here he was going to ground her for a year with no cell phone, no friends, no t.v. and basically anything that she had in her life was not allowed to be used for a WHOLE YEAR!!!