I froze as I looked back at him. Being the dumb-ass that I was I lifted my arm and waved at him but he looked at something else from his window.

He glanced back at the window I stood in and shook his head as he lifted his shirt over his head.

Who undresses in front of a window?

I put my hands over my eyes out of respect for him. But then I remembered...he wouldn't know anyway, right? Though morally, looking at a man who was undressing without his consent is wrong.

You're already past that.

That was true. My days of having to do good deeds in hopes for salvation were long gone. With that in mind, I dropped my hands and looked back to his window.

To my disappointment, he was no longer there. I let out a sad sigh as I pushed myself away from the window and looked around my small room.

It was probably time that I truly started focusing on why I was here in the first place.

You are dead. Figure out who did it.

I thought back to the memory of the hooded man and racked my brain. I had to have known who it was, just some sort of clue, an inkling maybe.

I walked to the picture-filled wall in my room and began looking at them carefully.

There were multiple pictures of a happy family and a happy me but what was real? I couldn't truly be the happy girl that was presented in these pictures if my family's first instinct was to take me to a psychiatrist.

And where were the pictures of this boyfriend I had? Well, Death said we did break up so maybe I took them down.

I sat at the foot of my bed and looked at the wall of memories before me. I could remember none of it so the wall was useless to me.

I knew I was too stupid to be a detective.

I glanced around the room and to my left above my white study table was a bulletin board with a calendar. I walked towards it and saw the month it was left on was July. I unpinned the rest of the pages in the calendar and they all fell until it began with January.

Each day in January was crossed off with the same neat red X. I flipped to the next month and saw the same thing. On every single day, there was a big red X but it stopped after July 6th it stopped.

It seemed so out of character for me. Although I didn't remember my regular habits, my room told me plenty about myself. I was organized, neat, precise... I wasn't the type to just snap out of a ritual I did every day for half of a year.

My breath caught when I realized what that had to have meant.

July 6th had to be the day I died.

I was here to find clues but it hurt a lot more than I thought it would. My life stopped on a day as mundane and ordinary as the 6th of July. Of course, dying on Christmas would've been bad as well but it hurt.

Perhaps I shouldn't be mad at the date though. We're all born on a regular day we don't choose as well, yet we make it special. With yearly celebrations and happy birthdays, normal days become the epitome of our lives.

So maybe it will be that way with the day of my death.

Yeah, probably not. For all I knew, I could've been kidnapped and died another day. They probably didn't even bother to check this stupid calendar.

Unwanted tears rolled down my cheeks and I bit my lip to keep from breaking down. I walked back to the board and picked up a pin to hang up the calendar the same way I found it.

I stood back to see if the calendar was symmetrical but got distracted by an arrangement of thumbtacks on the top left corner of the board.

In a crooked mess, the bunch of pins in the board spelled out 'WALL.'.

I shook my head at the word and sighed. I must've been a pretty weird girl to just put that there. There was nothing else surrounding the words. Just the one word, all caps: WALL.

The only odd thing about the arranged word was that they were all yellow pins except the red one used for the period in the end. It was weird and stuck out like a sore thumb, but it was possible I just ran out of yellow pins.

That thought was quickly tarnished when I looked down at the neat desk and saw different assortments of erasers and pins. Yellow along with a variety of other colors were still present...so why did I use red?

I looked at the compartment where the red tacks would've been placed but I found it pretty much empty except one.

My brows furrowed at that. How did I use almost 30 yellow pins and one red, yet have less red?

After a few moments, I began to think about how stupid it seemed for me to be thinking about pins when I had a murder to solve. I left the board and sat back at my bed, crossing my legs.

I hugged myself as I looked around my room when my eyes once again fell on the wall of pictures. I gasped as I realized where the red pins were, they were on the wall holding up pictures. But the strange thing was, not every picture was held up by a pin.

The red pins showed up every so often in a strange pattern but I couldn't quite figure it out. I ran to my desk and pulled out a paper and pen.

With pen and paper in hand, I stood in front of the pictures and drew on the paper small red circles where the tacks were.

When I finished I held up the notebook. It was an odd cluster of dots that seemed completely uncoordinated.

Sighing in defeat, I tossed the notebook back onto the bed and threw myself into the rolling chair in front of the table. I had spent 10 minutes doing absolutely nothing.

I rummaged through the books on my table and saw nothing but puzzles. A book of Sudoku, Crossword, Word Search, and finally a Connect the Dots picture book.

They were all in mint condition as if they hadn't been touched except the Connect the Dots booklet. I went through each page to see them all completed but halfway through the book, there was a page folded.

I tilted my head as I unfolded the page and saw in big red letters: WALL.

Today of all days my brain seemed to stop functioning and I sat in the chair for another ten minutes just looking through the book.

Coming up with nothing, I closed the book and set it down in front of me.

I read the title about ten more times until I sat up in my seat.

Aaliyah, you smart bitch.

I rushed to where I had thrown the notebook and picked it up with the pen.

Connect The Dots

And I did just that. I traced each red dot in the same direction that they had appeared on the wall.

One by one a letter started becoming visible.
After I was done I looked down at the notebook and saw that I had pieced together a name.

P A T R I C K