| |
Present day
––––––––
Back at home, Rose sat on her full-sized bed, still holding the note in her hand. She had dug through her backpack to find the first note she discovered in her locker yesterday.
“Are you going to show them to me?” Spencer popped the tab on a can of soda and joined her on the bed.
“Yes, but I don’t know what they say.” Rose met his eyes carefully. “The first one was in my locker yesterday.”
Spencer raised an eyebrow. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“I—I don’t know,” she stuttered. “I guess I forgot.”
“Rose, I’m your best friend. If you can’t talk to me about receiving weird notes and having a stalker, then who else do you have?”
Sighing, Rose unfurled the crumpled note in her hand. “You’re right. I really did forget about it, though.”
She straightened out the note on her bed as best she could and read the slanted handwriting:
Rose,
I admire your strength and beauty. You aren’t like the other girls at school. You’re so much better than them.
Your Secret Admirer
––––––––
“Hmm, romantic or creepy?” Spencer mused, staring at the note.
“A secret admirer?” Rose crinkled her nose. “That’s not what I was expecting.”
Spencer started laughing. “Would you rather have an actual stalker?”
“Well, no, but leaving handwritten notes for someone is so old-fashioned. Why wouldn’t they follow me on social media or ask for my phone number to text me?”
Spencer’s eyes drifted to the ceiling like he was deep in thought. “Maybe they do follow you on social media. It must be someone who knows you if they knew which locker was yours. They must go to our school.”
“Good point.” Rose unfolded the second note and laid it out next to the first one.
“Wait, the handwriting is different in this one,” Spencer said as soon as she set it down. He picked both notes up to compare them. “I don’t think they were written by the same person.”
“I think you’re right. So, I have two secret admirers?” Her eyes widened.
“Uh, not quite. Read the second note.”
––––––––
My dearest Rose,
You thought you would get away with it, but I know your secret about the night your sister went missing. I’m going to make sure you pay for what you did, you little liar.
The Midnight Flower
––––––––
Spencer snorted. “The Midnight Flower? What do they think this is, a Marvel movie?”
Rose joined his laughter. “Right? What a lame superhero name.”
“What are you going to do?” Spencer asked, his joyful tone vanishing. “Should we tell your parents? This is serious.”
“No, I don’t want to bother them with something so dumb. It’s only a note. I don’t know who this person is . . . who either of them are . . . if they’re two different people. It’s summer anyway, and the secret admirer note was left in my locker. I doubt they’ll do anything else this summer. It’s not like they know where I live.”
“Yeah, but the second note was in your bag at the beach, right?”
“That doesn’t mean they put it in there while we were at the beach,” Rose protested.
“What other outings have you brought that tote bag on recently?” Spencer asked.
Rose scrunched her eyebrows together, thinking. “I brought it to Kasey’s pool party yesterday.”
Spencer jumped off the bed, holding the second note in his hand. “That’s it! It had to be someone at the party, then. There were at least a dozen people there from school . . . including two of your exes.”
Rose shook her head. “I don’t know. It could have been someone at the beach. We weren’t watching our stuff while we were in the water. Anyone could have stopped by and slipped the note into my bag.”
A shiver passed over her body as she pondered the possibilities. The thought of a stalker reaching into her bag to leave a creepy note was terrifying. During any of the times when they could have put it in her bag, she was close by. They could have hurt her or done something terrible.
Rose rubbed her arms, trying futilely not to think about her missing sister, who was mentioned in the second note. What could this possibly have to do with Lily?
Spencer turned to her with a stoic expression on his face, voicing her exact thoughts out loud as only a best friend could. “The real issue is we never told anyone the truth about what happened that night. Who knows our secret?”
Rose kept quiet, not wanting to admit to her best friend that she had told someone else. But it couldn’t have been them. Could it?