A cool wind was blowing from the ocean as Jennifer sat on the beach reading a murder mystery. Normally she didn’t like those but Sarah had recommended it to her and she thought she’d give it a try. She liked it and she had no clue who the murder was, at least not yet.
It was a nice and quiet late Saturday afternoon in April, the sun was shining but the sky was getting clouded. She loved the sound of the waves crashing and the smell of the sea.
Jonathan was lying next to her on the blanket. He had been reading, too, but he seemed to have fallen asleep.
She watched him for a few minutes. After everything that had happened it was no wonder he was tired. She decided to let him sleep as long as he didn’t start snoring.
As she turned her head to look at the waves she saw some kind of weird reflection in the sand close to the water.
Whatever it was it wasn’t there before so could it have been washed ashore by the waves? She got curious and decided to investigate. It was probably nothing exciting… but what if it was?
The object was easy to reach, she just had to avoid some light waves.
It was an old bottle. But it wasn’t empty, something was visible through the glass.
Jennifer took the bottle back to where they had put the blanket and sat back down which did not go unnoticed by Jonathan who woke up the same second.
“What is that?”, he asked with a tired voice and sat up.
Jennifer smiled at him. “It looks like a message in a bottle. I found it right over there.” She pointed to where she picked it up.
The roll of paper looked very old and faded, she hoped whatever was written on it was still readable.
“Can you open it?”
“I think so. What do you think it is? A treasure map? Maybe a love letter from a man who was lost at sea to the woman he loved?”
“Or to the man he loved.”, Jonathan added. “Hey, you never know.”
“Let’s find out.”
Jennifer removed the cork and tried to get the roll of paper out through the bottle neck, very carefully as not to damage the paper.
She slowly unrolled the paper and noticed that it was 3 sheets of handwritten text. The writing was very small, it looked like whoever wrote this wanted to fit in as much as possible yet it was still readable.
“Look, there is a date. January 24th, 1843. This is pretty cool.” She started to skim over the text to see what it was all about. It didn’t make a lot of sense to her, they wrote about darkness and light, the past and the future. It almost sounded like a science fiction novel.
When she got to the second page she read something that wasn’t possible.
“Honey, you should take a look at this.”
“What is it?”, he asked as he looked at the sheet of paper in her hand. She pointed to the last line on the page where two names were written in capital letters. Jennifer Ryan and Jonathan MacLean…
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