THE THIRTEENTH DAY - BOOK 1

Flower shop

It was a little after 10:00pm when Cassie finally got to her house, after what had been a very stressful yet productive day with Brady. She sat on her bed and finally had time to look at her phone, she saw that she had a few missed calls and a few text messages, but to her disappointment none of them were from Tyler. She heaved a sigh and returned a call from Phoebe. 

"Hey, Phoebes," she sniffed.

"Aww babe, don't tell me you're still crying," Phoebe cooed.

"He hasn't tried to call yet and I'm so worried," she sniffled.

"You've gotta stop crying, you have that Kim K ugly cry face when you cry, and it ain't a good sight,'' Phoebe said.

"I do have an ugly cry," she laughed weakly.

"Go eat some chocolate, take a nice bath in one of your bath bombs and watch some disturbing YouTube videos. That'll cheer you up," she said "Now, get off my phone I gotta go copy Matt's homework, love you," she said.

Cassie laughed "good luck plagiarizing, love you too," she said before cutting the call. She shoved her phone into her pocket and sat on her bed with her laptop, while she worked on her English essay.

When it was midnight and Tyler still hadn't reached out, Cassie's sadness turned to anger. She felt that he was being stubborn and unreasonable, therefore she decided she would do the same, although she knew it would be hard because she had fallen deeply in love with him. He was handsome in a way that was too dangerous and she was obsessed with him. 

She was done with her assignment by 1:00am and she decided to scroll through her social media before she went to sleep. She logged on to Instagram and the first thing she noticed was that Tyler had posted a new photo, smiling with Matt and Tucker, they were shirtless on the beach and he tucked a volleyball ball under his armpit. Anger welled up in her to see that he had spent his day enjoying himself, smiling, while she had spent hers hating herself and crying. In order to distract herself and find some joy, she decided to research the case a bit more.

She typed in the words 'burned rose' into the search bar, she scrolled through hundreds of  articles but she could not find any significance of a burned rose which made her believe that its significance was personal to the killer and his first victim, whoever that may have been. She looked up flower shops in Freetown and wrote down the names and addresses of all the ones she could find. She would suggest to Brady that they visit all of them to see if they had any information that would help them move forward with the case.

                                                                                                    *

After school was over the next day, Cassie met up with Brady at a café. As they decided the day before, they were going to visit Carla's cousin, he seemed like the only one who wasn't supposed to throw a party on the thirteenth and they found that suspicious, they thought it could be a great lead. After that, they would visit the flower shops to see if they can get any germane information from the workers.

"Are you ready for today?" Brady asked while wiping off icing from his donut off his finger, with a napkin.

"I can't believe you still ask me that question Braids, by now you should already know that I'm always ready for anything." she said excitedly and got up, urging him to do the same.

"Braids?" He said raising his right eyebrow.

"We kinda work together, I believe an embarrassing nickname is appropriate at this point," she laughed.

 They both walked out of the café and got into Brady's car which was parked right in front of the building.  Brady placed his coffee in the cup holder and strapped his seat belt.