|r o s e|
🌹

Teo has been collecting all this evidence for four years, ever since this madness started. He kept everything pinned to this wall in his garage, everything having its specific place. He kept at least two cameras on him at all times to take pictures of evidence. Evidence of what; he didn't really know. No matter what it was, though, it was pinned to the wall and covered with a tarp. Apparently his parents were always gone for work, so they never asked too many questions or made him tear it down.

I stand in front of the mess inside of Teo's garage.

Every article. Every picture. Torn apart.

"So what do we do now?" I ask.

"What do we do now?" Teo repeats, fisting his hair up in anxious tufts on his head, "We find this psycho and bring him down." He paces back and forth in the garage as the sun starts to set outside. Warm hues enter the room and bring a certain calmness with them, despite the problem we've been dealing with.

"Teo, we're both just sixteen; how are we supposed to 'bring down' this killer? Shouldn't we just report his threat to the police?" I say, posing the only realistic option we had.

"He made this personal by killing my sister and threatening us. How did he even know what we were doing?" he growls, the last part muttered under his breath.

"Maybe it's time to stop," I say cautiously, like I'm speaking to a wild animal. Teo turns to me with a stony expression.

"We can't stop! Rose, this killer just threatened us. I have to do something." He spins back to study the chaos on the floor of his garage where all the evidence we've collected sits in a haphazard heap.

I groan, "Fine. What all do we know so far?"

"We know it isn't Jet because we were with him while this happened. It has to be someone that knows about us investigating the crimes...maybe it's those cops we saw on the cliff? The ones that took one of my cameras?" Teo guesses, but I can tell by the distressed look on his face that he doesn't even believe it himself.

"I highly doubt that."

"Well, guilty until proven innocent and all that."

I send him an annoyed glare and he returns it with an innocent shrug.

🌙

I emerge through the front door to my family's temporary home, dragging my feet as I go. Andrew looks up from the TV for a second to send me a confused glance before focusing back on his show. I slump into the couch beside him.

"It's been a long day," I sigh, relaxing against the cushions.

Andrew snorts beside. "Tell me about it."

I crane my neck to stare at him incredulously. He thought he had a rough day? Teo and I were investigating a seemingly impossible murder case, we have no idea who it could be, all the evidence we had collected (no matter that half of it was useless) was trashed, and on top of it all the killer left us a threat. There is no way Andrew had a day worse than mine; especially since he skipped the family trip to the museum to hang out with Aspen. "While you were off making heart eyes at Aspen, who's got a boyfriend by the way, I've been—"

"Shut up," Andrew snaps, his body suddenly rigid and his jaw clenched. I cock my head to the side and let my eyes rake over him, noticing the bags under his eyes and the blood stain on his white shirt.

My eyes nearly bug out of my head. "What happened to you? Whose blood is that?"

Andrew just sends me a sharp glare and stands up. He doesn't look back as he stomps away.

🌙

I'm suddenly awaken in the middle of the night by a deafening crash coming from the living room. I jump up in my bed, clutching the bedsheets to my chest as I watch the silhouette of my dad's heavy footsteps from under my door head for the source of the noise. My heart beats wildly in my chest in pure fear. Another loud crash sounds from the living room, followed by my dad shouting to my mother, "Call the police, Angela!"

My heart stops. The only coherent thought my brain can come up with is: "What the . . . ?"

"Rose," Andrew whispers as my door creaks open. I watch, still unmoving, as he comes in and sits down at the edge of my bed.

"What . . . ?" I murmur, pursing my lips together after I realize I'm not going to make any sense if I say anything more. My brain goes into overdrive as I over analyze the situation; add that to the grogginess of literally just waking up and you've got absolutely nothing.

"Someone broke in, but once he saw Dad with my baseball bat he bolted," my brother explains. His disheveled hair and the wrinkled pajamas hanging on his sleepy form sitting on my bed remind me of when we used to have sleepovers in each other's rooms back in Alaska when we were younger.

"I want to go back home," I blurt without thinking. Andrew nods and scoots closer to me, wrapping an arm around my shoulders and hugging me into him. He must've known that I was about to break. I don't know how, call it  big brothers' intuition, but he did. For the first time since arriving at Mångata, Florida, I cried.

The weight of the murders Teo and I are looking into crashes over me like a wave, pulling me under and leaving salty tears trailing down my face.