Page 57 of Sour Lollipops and Sweet Nightmares
All chicks were hoarders. They just kept it contained to their purse. Digging through their packrat sack was like playing a game of What will I find today. Their entire life was in that bag. I knew a chick once who had a bike lock in her purse, but no bike. She had no idea where she got it, or why it was in there, but she wouldn’t get rid of it. And she was offended that I would suggest such a thing.
So, Georgia’s purse should’ve offered some insight into her.
It did not.
Not only did none of this shit make any sense, but there were only twelve items. A necklace with a tiger’s eye pendant, a case for her glasses, with cleaner and a small cloth, a pair of yellow flip flops, two rocks, a granola bar, a white Bible, a small bottle of aspirin, hand sanitizer, and a notebook.
Reaching out, Ravi snatched one of the rocks off the bed. “Why the fuck does she have these?”
“A better question is where the fuck is her wallet?”
He tipped his finger my way. “That’s a good point.”
“It’s weird, right?”
“A little,” he agreed while inspecting the grey stone in his hand.
A wallet held your ID, money, credit cards, all the important shit. People tended to carry that around with them, but not Georgia Pyne. No, she’d rather take fucking rocks with her. They weren’t even good rocks. They were small and grey with little flecks of something else in them. Maybe she planned on throwing them at someone’s head? That was about the only use I could see for them.
“The girl is kind of weird, though. Do you know she spent three hours last night watching a documentary on Pompeii. Who does that?”
My brow lifted. “How do you know what she was doing?”
“I got bored, so I figured I’d peek in her window, and see what she was doing.”
Peek in her window? “What did you do, stand outside her window for hours?”
“Yeah.” He gave me a slight shrug. “It was a good documentary.”
“You do realize that we can get in that house anytime we want, right?”
Craven House and the six others came equipped with security, alarms, and remote locks that we had full access to. I’d been unlocking her door for the past three days just to fuck with her.
Ravi looked right at me and said, “What’s your point?” As if I had just said the stupidest thing in the world.
I waved him off. If Ravi wanted to stand outside like a psycho stalker, that was his prerogative. I had other things to do, like deciphering Georgia’s notebook.
Grabbing the book, I flipped open the pink cover and stared down at the numbers written on the page.
Ravi tipped his chin to peek down at the page, “You figure out what that means?”
“No.” I could tell she was keeping track of something. I just didn’t know what.
“Maybe she’s counting calories,” Ravi suggested. “Girls do that kind of thing.”
“Not Georgia Pyne.” She wasn’t the type to count her calories.
“You don’t know that.”
Yes, I did. I spent the past three days doing a deep dive into not only Georgia, but her entire family. I knew how much money her mom had in her bank account, where they buried her grandmother, what vaccinations they’d had, and how many times she’d been to the doctors’. I knew everything there was to know about Georgia Pyne, and guess what I found?
Nothing.
Not a goddamn thing.
And that was the interesting part. My father said she didn’t have aSalembloodline, but that she did have a bloodline. What kind of bloodline, I had no fucking idea. But whatever it was, it didn’t come from her mother’s side, which was where my problem came in.
Georgia’s father was a complete mystery. I had no idea who he was, although I had a sneaking suspicion that my father knew. Where there was no father’s name on Georgia’s birth certificate, there were plenty of pictures of her mother with men on her mother’s social media, but nothing from around the time of Georgia’s conception. That was odd in and of itself. What kind of prom queen doesn’t post pictures of prom?
