DWP - covered with snow: prompt

High in the mountains, covered with snow, they found Aleena. There was no mistaking the high cheek bones, the thick long lashes, the luscious lips and the mole on her right chin, just below the lower lip, as tiny as one of the beads of the pearl strand she wore around her neck the day she went missing. The most beautiful girl in the village, the smartest girl in class, her future held so much promise. And she was in love, with André, her handsome friend and future husband. Their plan was she would go to the capital and study to become a teacher, and she would come back to the village, she and André would build a school and she would teach the little children, perhaps including her and André’s own.

Aleena’s disappearance was a mystery to everyone. So unlikely for a conscientious girl with grand ambitions, they said. Some thought she ran away with another man. Wasn’t there a strange man from the next town around that time who had once seen Aleena and he could not take his eyes off her, and she couldn't take her eyes off him, too? The police said he killed Aleena, he said so in his written statement, which he later recanted because he cannot tell them where her body was. Still he stayed in prison for many years before he was released, old and diseased.

André grieved for a long time but eventually left the village. Now, he, too, was an old man.

Thirty-five years ago, Aleena vanished just like that, a girl of eighteen looking ahead to a wonderful life that everyone in the village had wished for her. And as suddenly as she vanished, now unexpectedly they found her body. She looked like she was asleep, a smile frozen in her lips. Because time had frozen her perfectly, even the dagger buried in her heart, the one with the hand-carved handle. The one with André’s name on it.