RoseBlood

Her

For once, my mind is blank, and all that I can hear outside and in my head is dead silence. I just stand there staring, my lips parted slightly, watching Clarissa's unblinking eyes and her blood spilt over the floor.

The rose. The letter. They're taunting me.

A pair of heavy footsteps join us, and Charlie gasps from behind us, his voice breaking the quietness and opening the floodgates to my thoughts.

"Oh, dear god," Charlie breathes shakily, and Brunsley's next to him, peering at the mess that was Clarissa Newman. "I- they're on their way... d-don't touch anything..."

You missed them again.

It wasn't Clarissa.

Clarissa's dead, and you could have stopped it.

Could have asked her what it was on the phone, but there's no asking now.

She's dead.

She's dead.

She's dead.

"Holly, you're shaking," Brunsley says gently, putting an arm around my shoulder in an attempt to steer me away from the scene. "Emerson, step back, please."

"They left you another letter," Emerson mutters, and I manage to sweep my eyes up from the body to glance at his expression. He looks surprised and bewildered, breaking past his neutral looks, obviously as sickened as I am.

"They're taunting me," I breathe, my voice ridiculously calm, the complete opposite tone to the chaos going on inside me. "Emerson, don't you get it? None of the guests killed my parents. Everyone's still at the funeral. Which means that it's going to be almost impossible to figure out who the RoseBlood Killer is now."

Emerson blinks, taking in my words. He opens his mouth to speak, but then closes it again. He knows I'm right.

The sounds of police cars pulling up outside Clarissa's house comes next, along with an ambulance, but there's not much they can do. Brunsley tells Emerson that he'll send updates and information about the new murder, along with the shots of the killer's letter and rose, before forensics and uniformed men are all crowding the house, repeating history. There's not much point in us staying. And somehow, I've got to go back to the funeral, like nothing ever happened.

"What do I tell Paul and Lorraine?" I ask Brunsley in an almost whisper, as he sees us to the car. "They've known Clarissa for years. They'll be devastated."

"I'll inform them," Brunsley responds. "Don't worry about that, Holly. It would be best to stick around for the rest of the funeral service, but... well, it's up to you. What are your thoughts?"

I lean against the brick wall of Clarissa's house, trying to gain some sort of grounding. I have hundreds of thoughts, but only one of them is clear.

"I could go back," I say, staring out at the street littered with cars and curious faces looking out of windows from the houses around us. "It doesn't matter. None of the guests is the killer. Everyone was at the funeral. Which means..." My voice trails off hopelessly, and I shake my head. "Let's just go."

"We will solve this case, Holly," Brunsley tells me far too confidently. "I assure you. Things may be more difficult to narrow down now, but-"

"What's there to narrow down? No one who came to my party killed my parents, the same as they didn't kill Clarissa, because they were all at the funeral. Who else is there?"

"It has to be someone," Emerson says. "We'll go over everything when we get back to the house."

I only manage to stay at the rest of the funeral for another half hour, the day where I'm supposed to have a great excuse to be quieter and mourn my parents' death twisting into a cruel joke. It's all happening too fast. First them, now her... then me.

You've got to do something. What are you missing?!

Emerson goes to tell his siblings, still waiting in the car, aware by now of the fact that most of the police hanging around Falmer Court have zoomed off to Clarissa's. I watch their expression from nearby; Elias doesn't say a thing for the rest of the day, his jaw clenching and eyes glaring at nothing, Edith's eyes wide and tearful.

Edith tries to be as warm and friendly as possible to all the guests when it comes to deciding to let Emerson take over watching the cameras from the car, while me, Elias and Mia sit by ourselves at a back table at the wake, all lost in our thoughts. I had to tell Mia, since I didn't think she was the killer even when I had no solid proof, and now we do, she sits beside me, nibbling her lip with a frown and blinking heavily, none of us fully processing what's happened.

More and more people make an effort to try and talk to me, and it's exhausting, repeating the same phrases over and over, trying to see if they knew any friend of Mum or Dad's who couldn't make it today or wasn't seen at the party. It leads me nowhere, and when people finally begin making their way home and giving me gentle hugs before they do, I don't know whether to feel relieved or sick. Mia makes me promise I'll text her and tells me she'll keep thinking about anything that could be important before she leaves for Oxford.

"We've got to go over everything, haven't we?" Edith asks us in the car, Elias staring straight ahead, Emerson glancing at her. "Right from the beginning? I mean, we know all the facts, we just need to link it to someone."

And who might that be?

"Our first suspect was her. Clarissa," Emerson speaks. "She knew something she shouldn't have, something that could give it all away, and so she was silenced. Even though she's not the main target in this case, she was in the way, and her death is a perfect way to try and scare Holly before they try to kill her too."

"I'm not scared," I tell him sharply, looking out the window and the roads of Falmer we're leaving behind us once again, driving back into Horsham. "I want this case solved, now."

"So do I," Edith agrees.

"So do I," Emerson echoes, "and it will be. This is all a fresh case, and it hasn't gone cold like before. I won't let the murderer slip through our fingers, not again. You won't die, Holly. And if that were to happen, they'd definitely disappear afterwards, and that'd be that. But the deaths that already happened, and her death, they need to be brought to justice."

Her. Clarissa Newman. She wasn't a killer, was she?

She could have helped the true RoseBlood killer in some way in murdering my parents, since she seemed to know my dad. Then she got horrified by what she'd done, and was killed so she wouldn't ruin the chain of events?

No.

Clarissa spoke to a woman in the Co-op. A woman who knew Bobby Cassia. A woman who slipped into my party, maybe watched the funeral from afar, just far enough not to get noticed, after Clarissa met her demise. She told Clarissa that Bobby would never act as he did again, and Clarissa caught on when she told me some of it before. She decided that she had to tell me. She had to.

Clarissa's naturally nervous, so if she feared that she was close to a killer, she'd ultimately clam up as she did, only feeling comfortable enough to speak to me if I was there with her in a safe, controlled environment, coaxing the information out of her. But I didn't get the chance. The killer was suspicious, maybe heard the call she made to me yesterday. They could make this work. Just another way to build up the terror and pain in me, tearing me apart, before they did that themself.

You thought it was her...

There's nothing left to think.