“Honestly, look at the state of this car. I don’t think it matters if we broke it or not. Besides, it’ll be years by the time Rivers gets around to fixing this thing, and I have a feeling that when he does, he’ll probably just scrap this one and buy a new one.”
“True,” she murmurs. “Then why the hell are we bothering to clean this shit up?”
“Call it a sign of good faith.”
Tully rolls her eyes and I get back to work. I pop open the center console and grab a stack of papers and put them down on my lap so I can search the area beneath it before confirming it’s clear of all off seafood. “I didn’t put any in there,” Tully murmurs, looking up from beneath the foot pedals, once again with her ass up in the air.
“Oh,” I say, grabbing the papers to shove them back in when my eyes quickly scan over them. I stop what I’m doing and focus on the papers a little closer. “There’s an address on here,” I gasp, dropping the rest of the papers down and spreading out the important one on my lap.
“What?” she grunts, her head flying up from the floor of the car. “What do you mean ‘an address?’”
“Look here,” I say, pointing out the section on the form in front of me. “It asks for a residential address and he actually filled it out.”
“What the hell?” she whispers, snatching the paper off my lap and looking at it a little closer. “Hey, Noah,” Tully yells out. “Get your ass over here.”
“Ahhh, no thanks,” he murmurs from the porch.
“Get your fucking ass over here now before I tell dad you were the one who put that baseball bat through the TV when we were nine.”
“For fuck’s sake,” he grumbles, pushing himself up from the top step and making his way across the grass painfully slow. He shoves his head through the open door and cringes as the smell still floats around the car. “What do you want?” he demands, glaring at his sister in one of those ‘I hate you but I secretly love you because you’re my sister’ ways.
She doesn’t bother snapping back at him like she usually would. “Here,” she says, practically slamming the paper right into his face. “Where is this place? The address?”
Noah pulls back and takes the paper from her hands. “What is this?” he questions, looking over it in confusion.
“Just answer the fucking question. Do you know that address or what? Is that Anton’s place?”
Noah shakes his head. “No, his place is over the other side of the train line,” Noah explains before indicating to the paper before him. “This is somewhere behind the elementary school.”
“Well, what are you waiting for? Let’s go.”
“Where to?” Noah questions, still a little confused. “What is this place?”
“It’s a copy of some form Rivers filled out for the Marines,” I explain, stealing it back once again and double checking that I’m saying the right thing as it’s coming out. “He listed that address as his residential address. This is his home. The place where he goes each night after he slips out of your place.”
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 consi
der this to be an alright home before it became so clearly neglected.
Noah tries to turn on the lights but quickly realizes there’s no electricity and I wonder just how long it’s been turned off for. The further I get around the home, I try to picture my mom living here. She would have walked these very floors, making herself dinner and cooking for Rivers. I wonder if they had a good life before all that shit went down. Who knows? Maybe she was even a good mother to him at one point.
I shake the thought from my head and focus on what’s in front of me. There’s a coffee mug in the kitchen sink, a bar of soap in the shower, and a basket of laundry sitting on top of the washing machine– all signs that someone has been living here recently.
I make my way down the hallway with Tully right behind me and stop to look at her when I get to a closed door that’s clearly a bedroom. “Are you ready for this?”
She shrugs her shoulders. “It’s either now or never, right?”
“Right.” I push my way into the room and look around in wonder. It’s not at all what I expected. It’s a tidy room that was clearly put together for a little boy and while the rest of the house is completely bare, this room is filled with belongings.
The closet is complete with all of Rivers’ clothes, the bed has been made with military perfection, there’s a desk with school books, and even an old worn out couch in the corner, but what gets me the most is the picture that sits in a silver photo frame on the bedside table of Tully and Rivers smiling towards the camera, telling me exactly what I need to know- Rivers has been living here all alone with no furniture in the house, no electricity, and no groceries packed high in the shelf.
What kind of life have we been allowing him to live?
Tully walks over to the photo frame and scoops it up before running her thumb over the picture of Rivers. “We failed him,” she murmurs. “We should have known about this and done something to fix it. Who knows how long he’s been living like this?”
I nod, unable to get any words out when I get the sense that she needs to be alone. “I’ll just be out there,” I tell her, pointing back towards the door.
Tully nods and as I close the door behind me, I get a glimpse of her sitting down on his bed, the tears once again completely taking over as she continues scanning his room, searching for anything to help her feel closer to the one person she can’t have.
I walk out to find Noah sitting up on the kitchen counter. “Is she alright?” he questions, nodding down the hallway towards Rivers’ bedroom.
“I don’t know. I think she’s more hurt than anything. Wondering why he felt he couldn’t talk to her about this.”
He nods before looking around the empty kitchen, taking in the blank, lifeless walls and water stains on the ceiling. “It couldn’t have been easy living like this.”
“Nope,” I say. “No wonder he spent so many nights at your place even if it was on the couch.”
“It all makes sense now.”
Rivers bedroom door is ripped open before Tully comes tearing down with something in her hand. “Look at this,” she says with a slight roar, making my brows pull down in concern.
Noah hops down from the counter and takes the slip of paper from Tully’s hand which is when I realize it’s actually a photo, only it’s not framed special like the one of the two of them. This photo looks old and has torn edges and coffee rings from being used as a coaster.
Noah’s brows dip down as he studies the picture. It’s clearly Rivers from a few years ago but his arm is thrown over the shoulder of a girl. “Is that…?”
“Yeah, Lacey,” Tully says.
“Wait. Lacey? As in Lily’s best friend Lacey?”
“Yep,” Tully snaps as accusations begin clouding her mind. “How the hell does Rivers know Lacey and why didn’t he tell us about her?”
I shake my head, unable to piece the puzzle together. There’s literally no connection between the two of them. This doesn’t make any sense.
Tully starts pacing as the tears from earlier continue to fill her eyes. “Hey,” Noah says, grabbing hold of his sister and pulling her into his chest. “We’ll figure it out. I have Lacey’s number somewhere at home. It’s as simple as giving her a call and figuring it out. It’ll be fine. It’s probably nothing.”
“You don’t keep a picture of a girl if it’s probably nothing,” she snaps back at him.
“Chill,” he tells her. “This picture is years old. He’s just a kid here. I’m sure if she was someone important to him, he would have told us about her.”
"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.
I take it and the bundle of papers from him and start scanning over the certificate. My name is at the top, only I stop short. “It says Henley Meadow Rivers,” I gasp, making both Tully and Noah stop what they’re doing and look over my shoulder, though I guess that would make sense. Gina might not have known my father’s surname at the time of filing the paperwork so went with her own.
I guess seeing it written that way was a little alarming and I guess, seeing as though it's on the birth certificate, that’s officially my name. I don’t know how I feel about that.
I continue down, reading all the information that I thought I knew about myself. Which hospital I was born at, my birth weight. Hell, I even double check the date just to make sure dad had had it right all this time.
I‘m about to comment about how cool it is to finally have this document in my hand when I find myself stopping short once again. Someone else’s details are written where my fathers should be.
Undeniable: Haven Falls (Book 5) Page 20