ALL THAT GLITTERS...

13.

“Hello, Lisa? Are you even listening?”

Ben dramatically waved his hands in front of my face, snapping me back to the present moment.

“I'm sorry, just got a bit distracted there. What were you saying?”

Ben went on to rave about something I didn’t quite get, my mind was preoccupied with last night’s findings. After the call with the Children Of Hope Orphanage, I looked up every other orphanage in Jacksontown, writing them emails inquiring if my mother had been one of the children adopted from their institution. Their responses had me restless the entire night, not one of them were familiar with my mother or Lauren’s parents and it had me asking a whole lot of different questions.

Was my mother even an orphan?

Were she and Lorraine even legal sisters?

What if everything was just a lie? I didn’t want to think that, I didn’t see any reason for them to lie.

“What’s going on with you today? You’re more distracted than usual, is everything okay?”

“It’s nothing.” I plastered a fake smile and tried to change the subject.

“It better not be your new friends pestering you.” Here we go again, we could never have a conversation without him mentioning Selene and her family.

“Not again, I refuse to do with you again.” I rolled my eyes at him, his obsession with the Blackwells was starting to annoy me.

“You’re not listening to me, they’re shady, you can’t trust them.”  

“I have no reason to think that, you can’t just throw baseless accusations, Ben, you would get in trouble.”

 I hated the situation he kept putting me in, Selene was my friend just as he was and I couldn’t go around throwing dirt on her family name, at least not without any evidence that they were doing anything illegal.
Ben’s narrowed in my direction, frustration was clearly written all over his face. He grabbed his phone that was sitting on the table in front of him, quickly typing in something before passing it to me.

On the screen was an aerial image of a place.
Not just any place, a place I recognized by the millions of trees on each side of a pathway and a huge estate with a mansion.
The Blackwell manor.

“What am I looking at?” I lifted my eyes to Ben who was watching me.

“This.” He moved over to where I was sitting and zoomed in on what looked like warehouses, a whole bunch of them. The image wasn’t that clear but you could clearly see large buildings, I didn’t get what was so alarming about this, Selene had mentioned that they owned a factory on their land.

I gave Ben a questioning look in which he rolled his eyes and returned to his seat.

“Don’t you see that?”

“I do but how is that shady?” I was confused.

“Because who needs that many warehouses and factories in one place? I mean they farm apples right, you don’t store apples for a long time, they are perishable. And they use the goods train to transport their produce three times a week meaning there isn’t much that is ever left that they would need to have that many buildings.”

I understood where he was coming from but those were just speculations, he had nothing solid.

“But this doesn’t prove anything other than they are probably doing something other than farming but you can’t be sure if it’s illegal or not.”
I was right and Ben knew it and that shut him up for a sec before she said the most outrageous thing.

“Maybe this is where you come in, you’re friends with one of them, maybe when you go for a sleepover you can investigate.”

His words were not what shocked me but the fact that he looked hopeful was the most ridiculous thing. I did a mini breathing session to avoid snapping at him whilst thinking of a subtle way to tell him he was crazy.

“Firstly, Selene is my friend, I could never betray her trust like that. Secondly, if there was illegal activity going on, do you really think they would not catch me? And do you think I would get out of there alive?”

I was being dramatic, that much I knew but I wasn’t too sure about Mrs Blackwell, her aura felt cunning and dangerous, the type to be absolutely merciless.

“You’re right, I’m sorry I didn’t think that through.” He hung his head down a bit. I knew he meant no harm but just a bit of an imagination.

We sat for a while without saying anything till it was time for me to go home in which Ben offered to drop me off as usual.

“Are you coming to the games on Saturday?” He asked just before we turned down my street. The university had been buzzing with excitement over an athletic tournament that we were hosting against a rival team from another town.

“No. I will be out of town.” I wasn’t going to give him the details of my whereabouts because I didn’t even know where we were going for the ball, I had tried to turn down Selene and her mother but they weren’t having it.

They had even sent my aunt a message asking for permission for me to have a sleepover at their place, what my aunt didn’t know was that we wouldn’t be anywhere near Sunnyside creek for the whole weekend.

“What a shame.” His face dropped and I felt a little bad.

“Maybe when I’m back you can help me find a car, I can’t keep having you and Lorraine drive me around all the time.” His face lightened up at that and I blew a sigh of relief. So far I have had two friends, both of them from opposite worlds and nothing was more tiring than trying to keep them both happy at the same time.

As we got closer to Lorraine’s house I noticed a shiny black Mercedes parked in the driveway, a car I recognised quite well with the tinted windows and the shiniest rims on the planet.

“Whose car is that?” I found it a bit odd that all these people had these conspiracies about the Blackwells but knew nothing much about them, not even the cars they drove around in.

“A friend of my aunt from out of town.”

The lie came out before I could even stop it. Ben didn’t need to know certain things and weirdly I felt the need to keep my acquaintance with Seth Blackwell to myself for the time being.

“What a beautiful car, you don’t see those around very much.” He said more to himself than to me.

“Drop me off here!” I nearly shouted to stop him from entering the compound, he always made it a habit to come in and greet Lorraine but that wouldn’t do today, not with a Blackwell in that house.

“You sure? I wanted to pop in on your aunt.”

“Not today, she is not feeling, maybe another time.” Ben eyed me suspiciously before nodding and letting me out.

“Have fun out of town.” He yelled but I was already speed walking to our door with one question in mind.

What the hell was Seth Blackwell doing here?
 

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 thought?