Noah narrows his eyes on the paper. “Are you fucking kidding me? This has been sitting outside our home for the past four months and we didn’t fucking know?”
“What can I say? All the answers we’ve ever needed with Rivers have always been right under our fucking noses. Why should this be any different?”
“True,” he murmurs.
“Would you two stop your fucking yapping?” Tully demands, crawling out of the broken car and ripping off the rubber gloves. “Let’s go. I need to check this place out.”
I look to Noah with a raised brow. “What do you think?”
“I’m in,” he says.
“You realize Rivers would probably kill you if he ever found out you broke into his home and snooped around,” I look to Tully. “That goes for you too.”
“I don’t care,” she says shaking her head. “We have to check this out. I feel like this is the final piece of the Rivers’ puzzle and we have to figure it out. Who knows? It could just be some random address that he’s written down for the sake of completing the form.”
Noah shakes his head. “If that were the case, he would have put our address.”
Damn it. They’re both right.
“It would mean breaking and entering,” I warn them.
“I doubt Rivers is going to have us charged,” Tully mutters. “So, what’s it going to be? Are you guys coming with me or am I doing this alone?”
Shit. When she puts it like that, I have no choice but to go. I can’t let her get into a potentially dangerous situation and not tag along for moral support.
“Let’s go.”
With that, Noah and I lock up Rivers’ car as Tully paces around, getting lost inside her thoughts, completely unable to control her emotions. Feeling gross and stinky from being inside that car, I dart into Tully’s room and slip on a new shirt before forcing her to do the same and within moments, she’s dragging me out to Noah’s car and pushing me through the door with the piece of paper firmly between her fingers.
Tully searches the address on her phone and Noah takes off in the direction of the elementary school. As he gets closer, she starts directing him and I can’t help but hear the emotion in her voice. She’s scared of what’s she’s going to find, and to be honest, so am I. Noah hasn’t really said much since finding the address and all that does is tell me that he’s probably thinking the same thing.
My heart is desperately hoping that he just made up some random address to fill out the form while my gut is telling me that this is the place he’s been living.
We pull up outside a rundown house and look at it with caution. Just one massive gust of wind could knock this thing down. It looks as though it was once looked after, but no one has cared for it in a very long time. “Are you sure this is it?” I murmur into the quiet Camaro.
“Yep,” Tully says, placing the paper down on the dash and reaching for her handle. “Let’s check it out.”
We file out of the car and make our way towards the front door when we pass the mailbox. My eyes scan over it and I can’t help but notice the faded writing: ‘G. Rivers.’ This was my mom’s house before she got busted.
“We got the right place,” I tell them, pointing out the mailbox. “Gina lived here.”
Tully looks over the mailbox with a grim expression. “Didn’t Gina tell you that Rivers went to live with his dad when she was put away?”
“Sort of. She said that she assumed he did, but just because that’s what she thought, doesn’t mean that’s what happened. I mean, this is Rivers we’re talking about. I seriously doubt he wanted to live with Anton and deal with all the bullshit that would go on there, and I seriously doubt Anton wanted a kid around.”
“What are you saying?” Tully questions as Noah tries the front door to find it locked.
Noah lets out a sigh. “She’s saying that Rivers most likely has lived here by himself since he was a kid, fending for himself.”
Tully sucks in a devastated breath and looks completely broken, but that doesn’t stop the urgency within her to get inside his house. She moves across to the window before giving it a wiggle and then trying the next.
“I’ll try around back,” Noah says, hurrying around the side of the house and launching himself over the fence before any of the neighbors start looking at us suspiciously.
A moment later, we hear a door opening and then footsteps through the house before the front door is pulled open by Noah. “Come on,” he says. “You’ve got to see this shit.”
We make our way into the house and the first thing I notice is the smell. The carpets are damp and it’s clear that there are more than a few leaks coming from the old roof. It looks completely abandoned. There’s dust on every surface, the chairs from the dining table have been placed upside down and are resting on top of the table. Windows are cracked and there’s hardly any furniture. Either someone moved out of here in a hurry or the place was ransacked and all the shit was stolen. I’d even consider this to be an alright home before it became so clearly neglected.