Page 93 of Stolen Kisses
I shook my head. “I’m not going anywhere Dante.”
Another gentle kiss was planted on my forehead.
Flynn was with the guys. I wanted him to come with us, but he insisted on staying and watching some show on the Cartoon Network. There was a marathon going on.
Thinking that it would give me a good break, Dante encouraged me to come out for the day and basically spend it with him.
He took my hand leading me up the stairs and into the bedroom where I’d had very fond memories.
I was so happy to have had Christina to share my childhood with.
We walked in and my heart broke when my gaze landed on the little dolls in the corner on top of the toybox we’d played in. I never had any dolls so Christina shared hers with me.
The memories propelled me to them, straight to the two little dolls who sat together drinking tea in the same position us two little girls had left them in. The dolls, one with blonde hair and the other with black hair—they were us.
I didn’t touch them and I was glad Dante’s mom hadn’t either. I wanted them to remain exactly like that. Shrined away in this room, a symbol of the friendship I had.
Dante came up to me and glanced down at them.
“You guys played with those dolls forever.” He stated.
“Yeah. I never had any toys. Not even a teddy bear. Vera wouldn’t buy me that kind of stuff. Nothing. I never even really knew what toys were, because she just kept me locked away in the house. Christina shared her toys with me and I think we were probably on the last month of being twelve when we just sort of stopped.”
“Sort of?” Dante smirked.
“We loved dressing the dolls in different clothes. Fantabulous ball gowns no one we knew would be wearing to all sorts of grand balls and events.”
Both dolls wore dresses the type that were period wear dresses, but looked more like ballgowns.
“I get it.”
“Let’s do this Dante. I shouldn’t think back too much. It makes me relive the past and I wished I could have done more. You’re her brother and you did what you could, but I was the person she confided in. Though I think something about me made her stop doing that.” I shook my head feeling ashamed. If I wasn’t right then I would have known who the killer was already. I wouldn’t have to think about it at all. She had dirt on someone.
Elliot didn’t strike me as the kind of person who would allow dirt on him to just slip like that and be exposed. So then maybe it wasn’t him. I didn’t know though. I really didn’t know and she had this whole secret relationship that she had never told me about.
“Maria, I’ve learned that sometimes people have secrets and it doesn’t matter who they have around them to confide in. It doesn’t change anything. They never tell the person what they were going through. I think that’s what happened here.” He nodded and gave me a little smile. “Let’s do this and go home.”
We started with the plastic boxes that were stacked in the corner. Everything had been placed in them. Just placed to one side to keep the place neat and not looking like some storage facility.
One box after another we went through and found a lot of unrelated items. Random stuff here and there like trinkets, books, gadgets, and gismos.
Just stuff.
It was night fall by the time we finished looking through it all. We had found nothing. Dante looked frustrated and pissed off.
His mother came down to the sitting room when we were gathering our things to go. There were a few notebooks and diaries Dante thought he would take for looking through later.
Gina smiled when she saw us. She was carrying a medium sized box I remembered Christina calling her treasure box. It did actually look like it was exactly that too, except it was pink. She’d had that in our room back at my old place.
“I just remembered this. I’d taken it first.” She said. “I think she’d want you to have this Maria. It’s got all her keepsakes. Concert tickets and anything she felt was valuable.”
She handed me the box.
“Thank you.” I told her, surprised that the box was kind of heavy. “I’ll take it home and go through it.” It would probably be the last thing to look through. \
“Did you find anything?” She asked Dante looking hopeful.
He shook his head. “Nothing that jumped out to me. I got her diaries. Maybe there’s something there.”
