Page 65 of Quiet Confessions: Part Two

“Where are you going?” I ask him, and he waggles his eyebrows at me.

“To take a shower,” he says, then grabs Pay’s hand and drags her to the bedroom.

Rooke chuckles and grabs some more bacon as we listen to Pay laugh and then moan. I groan and drink my coffee, ignoring my rock hard cock.

* * *

We get to the creepy mansion and Patience hesitates to climb out of the car. Rooke takes her hand. “We can go inside and get his suit and the photo album. You don’t have to do it, baby,” he tells her and she sighs.

“No, I’ll do it. I just haven’t been here in a long time. I know he wasn’t the best man, but he was good and kind to me when I was little.” Her voice gets a little choked up and she clears her throat before opening the car door. “I wish that I knew what changed.”

I think that Richard’s demands on his sweet little granddaughter changed once she grew up, but Patience didn’t. No one should push the disgusting societal agenda that he did on her. I don’t like to think badly of the dead, but I’m glad Richard James is gone.

Walking into the James’ patriarch’s home is creepy. This house is huge and dark, filled with expensive paintings created by dead artists that I don’t know. My skin is crawling and I can’t wait to leave.

“In and out, baby girl,” Rooke reminds her. “Let’s go to his room and get his suit. All together, this place is fucking disturbing.”

“Tell me about it,” I mutter.

“I used to love it,” Patience whispers as we go up the stairs. I’m waiting for a ghost to start screaming. I’m not allowed to watch any more scary movies. Ever. “I would curl up with a book and hide in the library reading for hours. It was my way of getting away from all of the testosterone for a bit.”

There’s a teasing lilt to her voice, and I chuckle despite myself. “We were smelly boys,” I remind her. “Cal and I were obsessed with you.”

“You two and Ki were my world until Dad died,” she says. “I’m glad you are again.”

My hand finds hers as we walk into Richard’s bedroom. He has a huge four post bed in the room that takes up most of it. Shivering, I open the closet so we can get out of here quickly. Turning on the light, I step into the huge closet that has tons of austere suits all lined up in neat rows.

“Blue, gray, or black?” I ask, looking around. There are shoe boxes that are perfectly lined up at the top of the closet, as well as shoes on the ground. Why both?

“Black, but there’s a Valentino suit that he loved,” Patience murmurs as she walks into the closet. Moving to the right side of the area, she begins to look.

Richard James definitely wasn’t hurting for money. The price of the clothing here would feed a small town for a year. Reaching over my head, I pull down a shoebox. It’s lighter than I’d expect shoes to be. My curiosity is piqued and I need a distraction from this creepy house.

“What have you got there?” Rooke murmurs, looking over my shoulder.

“I’m following a hunch. Who knows when we’ll be able to get in here alone again,” I mumble, opening the box. There’s receipts and photos in the box and Rooke pulls some out.

The photos are dated a little over ten years ago, and they’re surveillance photos of my mom and Pay’s dad. What the hell…

I go through them all as Rooke checks the receipts. “These are receipts for a private investigator,” he mutters. “Richard was having someone checked out.”

Pay drifts back over to us with a suit and expensive watch in her hands. “Who was he having investigated?” she asks.

“Our mom and your dad,” I answer her.

“I mean, it just makes sense that if my dad was looking into my grandfather that he would be doing the same, right? Dad was always so loyal to the company. It would have had to have been a really big reason for him to question anything…”

Intrigued, I take photos of everything with my phone and upload them all to the cloud. “Let’s see what else there is,” I suggest. Putting everything back where we found it, we go through each box.

It appears that Richard was a hoarder. There are receipts, photos, little notebooks, and cassette tapes of recorded conversations in these boxes.

“Fuck, is it wrong if we just take it all?” I complain.

“No one else has been in here or would know this is here. Put it all into tote bags and we’ll go through them together,” Patience says. She looks a little pale, and I don’t blame her. Richard was into some bad shit.

Blackmail, pimping and escorts, controlling interest of illegal businesses. I’m sure this doesn’t even scratch the surface of his own Mafia connections. I’m suddenly even happier that the old man’s plane crashed.

Packing up all the shit into tote bags, we leave the house, closing it up as if we were never there.

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