Lilah stood beside George upon entering Marie’s bedroom for the second time. She looked up at the detective wondering what his plan was. The teenager’s bedroom didn’t seem to be any place of interest, so she didn’t understand what they were doing back in the room. It seemed to Lilah that the mother was the person they needed to talk to. She acted the most suspicious.
“Feel free to look around anywhere you want.” Adam sighed lazily gazing around the room.
Lilah cocked an eyebrow. What a strange thing to say. If her parent told strangers to look anywhere around her bedroom, she wouldn’t be too happy.
“I mean, as far as I know Marie has nothing to hide. If she does… Well, then we’d like to know what it is, right?” Adam turned to George for some reassurance, who nodded his head in return.
“This is why we’re here.”
After a moment of awkward silence, Adam let out another deep sigh as soon as his cell phone buzzed again. He rolled his eyes checking the ID and held up an index finger.
“I have to take this… I’m really sorry.” He backed out of the room.
George shooed him away. “We’ll be in here.”
As soon as Adam was out if sight, Lilah looked up at George with relief in her eyes. “I thought he was never going to leave.”
George walked deeper into the bedroom casting a glance at Lilah over his shoulder. “What do you mean by that?”
“We can’t snoop around while Marie’s father is watching. That would just be weird.” Lilah stood in the middle of the room taking in her surroundings. “Well, it’s weird anyway.”
George opened up Marie’s closet. “We didn’t get a chance to look around earlier. We had intentions to, but we got side-tracked with the bank account.”
“Yeah, what’s going on with that, anyway?” Lilah sat down on Marie’s bed. Despite how weird this seemed, she made herself at home. “How do you think Marie pulled all of this off?”
“I don’t care how she did it, Lilah. She did it, that’s it. What I care about is why.” George pushed aside some of Marie’s clothes hanging up revealing some extra storage shelves in the wall. “Ah, here we go.”
Lilah stood up from the bed and walked to the closet. “What’s in there?”
George picked up a scrapbook and handed it to Lilah. “Look through that, would you? We might get some new insight on Marie.”
“Maybe pictures of her boyfriend will be in here.” Lilah opened it up thumbing through the thick pages.
Sure enough, there were plenty of pictures of Marie and Jack. They were kissing, hugging, holding hands, making goofy faces at the camera. Lilah sighed flipping through one page after another. Finally she got to a page where Marie was hanging around a group of girls who, Lilah assumed, to be Marie’s girl friends. Lilah kept flipping through the pages waiting for a picture of Marie and her parents, but it was all just her friends and boyfriend.
“Find anything?” George asked. He stepped out of the closet and walked over to Marie’s dresser. He opened the top drawer and rummaged through some of the junk she had in there.
“Nope,” Lilah groaned. She flipped to the last page of the scrapbook and a photo fell to the ground. She bent down to pick it up and stared at the old photo. The edges were worn, the coloring was off, and the picture itself wasn’t any bigger than a wallet-size. “Wait…”
George turned around and stared at Lilah with a blank expression. “What is it?”
“There’s an old photo here… A baby, Marie’s mother, and some guy.” Lilah held the picture out to George who walked over and took it in his own hands.
“Huh.” He flipped the picture over and read the back of it. “June 2002. So, Marie would have been about a year old, if not younger.”
“You think the baby is Marie?” Lilah asked.
George shrugged. “I don’t see who else it could be. And that’s clearly her mother.”
“She hasn’t aged a bit.” Lilah observed.
“No, she has not.”
“She’s a vampire.”
“Stop,”
Lilah giggled.
“Who’s a vampire?”
Lilah and George turned around to see a very confused Adam standing in the doorway. George held out the picture to him ignoring the question.
“We found this scrapbook in the back of Marie’s closet. Do you know the people in this photo?” George asked.
Adam inspected the picture through squinted eyes. “Well, that’s Marie as a baby and my wife. I don’t know who the man is though.”
“The photo was taken in June 2002.” George stated.
“That’s the month Marie turned a year old.” Adam stared at the picture looking hurt and confused. He finally sighed handing the picture back to George. “Let me get my wife.”
This was supposed to be the last part, but it turned out longer than expected. So the final part will be posted next week! I hope you’ve enjoyed the story so far.