“Like he told us about his mom, or his dad, or that he was living in this piece of shit alone?”
Noah sigh. “Fair point.”
“Come on,” I tell them. “Why don’t we get out of here. Nothing good is going to come from hanging out here. We’re just going to get torn up the more we see.”
“Yeah,” Tully sighs, snatching the photo back from Noah and folding it up before sliding it into the back pocket of her jeans. “Let’s go.”
Tully starts making her way towards the front door and I follow behind when Noah pulls at my hand. “Wait,” he says. I look back to find a strange hesitation in his eye, making me wonder if he’s confused or unsure about something.
“There’s one room you didn’t look in,” he reminds me, indicating towards the last door down the hallway. “That would have been your mom’s room.” I look over his shoulder, taking in the door in question with mixed feelings. “Did you want to have a look?” he questions with a slight shrug. “You don’t have to, but I just thought that you might be able to get a little insight into her life before she went away.”
“I…I don’t know,” I say.
“It’s cool,” he says. “We can come back another time if you want to have a look.” Noah starts pulling on my hand, but I find myself rooted to the ground, still staring at the door. He looks back at me, clearly seeing the indecision over what to do before he steps up behind me. “Do you want me to go with you?”
I find myself slowly nodding my head and Noah steps around me, drawing me down the hallway behind him. He stops at Gina’s door and the nerves start pulsing through me. What if I don’t like what we find?
Noah grabs the handle and begins opening the door and I guess it’s too late to back out. He swings the door open and steps inside the room with me following behind.
My mouth pops open as I take it all in. The room is an absolute mess. It’s nothing like the rest of the house which looks like it’s been abandoned. This room is the complete opposite. It’s filled with shit, only it looks more like someone has come tearing through here searching for something.
Clothes are thrown across the room and boxes of papers have been pulled out of the closet. The bed has been ripped apart and the mattress sliced down the middle. It’s a mess. A complete mess, and it’s clear that this was the kind of shit Rivers didn’t want to deal with as he had closed the door. Out of sight, out of mind.
“Holy shit,” Tully says stepping into the room behind me. “Someone was clearly looking for something.”
“No shit,” Noah says, walking across the room and kicking the flipped over bedside table out of his way only the drawer slips out and crashes to the ground, adding to the mess.
I make my way around, looking over the kind of clothes Gina would wear, the kind of perfumes she had on her shelf, and what books she had in the top of her closet. I do my best to get a good idea of the kind of woman she is which is when it hits me, she’s just like me. Similar clothes, similar taste in books and perfumes. Hell, the torn up bedspread is even similar to the one I have at home.
Tully grabs a few of the papers off the floor before scanning over them. “This is all stuff about her prostitution ring,” Tully comments with a strange curiosity. “I would have thought the cops would have taken all this shit.”
I walk over to her and take the paper from her hand before scanning over it myself. “I think the bigger question is, what the hell was the person looking for if it wasn’t to get this stuff?”
“Check this out,” Noah says slowly, making me turn around to take him in crouched down by the broken bedside table. “This drawer has a false bottom.”
“Huh?” I question, stepping around the mess to get a better look only to find Noah currently pulling out what appears to be a folder of important documents.
“I guess I know what they were looking for,” he murmurs, opening it straight up and having a good look.
The first document is Rivers’ birth certificate and Tully instantly pulls it from Noah’s fingers and scans over it, so he gets busy pulling out the next thing to find a marriage certificate between Gina and Anton that has me gaping like a fool. “They were married?” I shriek. “I thought he hated her.”
“Maybe he does,” Noah comments. “It’s not like it’s hard. I hate the fucking bitch too.”
“What else is in there?”
He shrugs and passes me the marriage certificate to free up his hands so he can pull out another certificate and a bunch of papers. It’s another birth certificate and something clenches in my gut. Gina had two kids so it would make sense for that to be mine.