Page 8 of Delilah
All I can think about as I walk back to the hotel where Justin, Travis and I are staying during our trip is what could be inside this envelope, and it doesn’t even cross my mind that I’ve been out all night with a dead cell phone until I walk into the hotel lobby to see Travis speaking with a police officer.
When he sees me, it’s not relief that washes over his face, butanger.
“Caroline!” he shouts, and I know he’s furious with me.
“Do you have any idea how worried I’ve been about you? Where the hell have you been all night? Why didn’t you call me?”
“I tried!” I defend myself. “The text messages I sent wouldn’t go through and then my phone died…”
“Where were you?” he demands, placing his hands on his hips. I almost laugh, because this is the first time I’ve ever seen him act like a concerned parent rather than an uncle that got stuck with the unfortunate task of raising a twice-orphaned child.
When I don’t answer, Travis’ eyes glance down at the stack of frames nestled in my arms. “What are those?”
I turn away protectively. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Caroline!” he shouts louder this time, drawing the attention of the officer watching the interaction from the other side of the room. Travis manages to grab one of the frames and tugs it from my arms, and when he does, the rest of them, along with the envelope, fall to the floor.
He takes one look at the picture in the frame, and I know he’s never been more furious than in this moment right now.
“Did you go to that house?” he asks in a devastated and betrayed whisper. I don’t say anything as I squat to pick up the frames. Two of them now have broken glass right where I’m standing in the picture.
If that isn’t irony, I don’t know what is.
“Caroline Young, did you go to that house?”
“Don’t call me that!” I shout back. “That isn’t my name.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Let’s take a trip down memory lane, shall we? Who raised you for the past seventeen years?Me.Not ChristianfuckingReeves. You want to know what Christian Reeves did?”
“Stop,” I plead through gritted teeth as tears spring into my eyes.
“He got our entire family killed, Caroline. That’s what he did. He was a serial killer that brought that shit into my family’s life and it got them all killed! And he was too much of a coward to face what he had done, so he took the easy way out and shot himself in the head with you rightfuckingbehind him. He didn’t care about anyone, least of all you. What kind of father abandons his own kid like that?”
“What kind of father murders his wife and his daughter to make a point?” I spit back, fueled by grief and anger and filled with lethal venom.
Travis has always been in denial about Elliot killing Bethany. But I’ve read the same police report he did. The fingerprints around her neck matched Elliott’s, not Christian’s.
“Don’t go there. You didn’t know my father like I knew him.”
“And you didn’t know mine!” I screech, so loud and aggressively that the officer on the other side of the room comes to grab my arm and pull me back a few feet. “He loved me and he loved my mom more than you will ever understand. Andyourdad is the one who took that away from me. Everything was perfect untilhim.”
I finish my sentence through gritted teeth, barely holding it together. Huffing out an angry breath, I gather the frames and envelope into my arms and go straight to the elevator, to our hotel room, and slam the door. I use the extra lock so that evenwith a key, Travis won’t be able to get in. He’s the last person I want to be near right now.
I slide down the heavy door and slump to the ground, pulling my knees up to my chest as I sob. Wiping my face with my dusty jacket, I pick up the envelope and open the brads, pulling out the thick stack of papers inside.
The top few pages are legal papers. My original birth certificate, the court documents from my adoption, a copy of the deed to the estate, and a copy of my father’s will, leaving everything first to my mother and then to me.
As if the FBI left any of it to salvage.
I wipe my face again and keep flipping through the papers until I get to a stack that’s binder-clipped together. I let the papers loose.
In the top left corner, there’s a bank logo. I can’t read most of the papers, because they’re in a foreign language I don’t recognize, but numbers are numbers.
Underneath my full name, there’s an account number, a routing number, an interest rate, and on the last line, an initial deposit amount with so many zeros I have to count them three times to make sure I’m not hallucinating.
The date on the top of the page is from the same month I was adopted, which means those zeros have been gaining interest for seventeen years, untouched. I flip the page to continue to read, and a bank card is attached with a small glue dot. I rip off the heavy golden card and flip it over to see my name embossed on the back.
I plug my phone into the charger so I can turn it on and call the number on the back to see if the account is even still active. Thankfully, the phone tree has an option for English.
