Chapter Two
Lilith Richards jerked and gave out a little scream when someone laid their hand on her shoulder. She looked in a panic and released a gigantic sigh of relief when she saw her friend and co-worker standing beside her.
“Sally, you scared the shit out of me,” she said, and quickly covered her mouth with both hands as she looked around and saw she was still in a special room in the library. Her place of employment.
“Yeah, that scream gave it away.” Sally smirked. “I just wanted to let you know you have five minutes before you have to clock in.”
“Thanks,” Lilith quickly finished taking her notes, and shut down the microfilm machine she had been using, and put everything back in its place. She stuffed her notes in her bag, and together they walked to the back in order for Lilith to clock in, and Sally clocked out for her lunch.
“What did you find?” Sally pointed to Lilith’s bag. “Any good ghost hunts to go on this year?”
“Yes, I think so at least. There’s an old penitentiary down in West Virginia. It’s said to be haunted, and it’s the only state run prison that housed men, women, and even children at the same time. I’ll finish my research before I apply for my annual vacation.”
Sally shook her head in wonder. “With all these books at our disposal, you always pick out the paranormal and base your vacation on that. I don’t know how you do it, I get scared at the local haunted houses during the Halloween season.”
“You know that stuff is all fake, right?”
“Well, yeah, but it’s still scary as hell. What’s the difference between what the locals do, and what you do?”
“We’ll have to get into that later,” Lilith said with a grin.
“I’m not putting you off, maybe we can go out for a drink after work tonight and I’ll tell you my theory, or better yet, if you’re not doing anything Saturday night, come over to my place and we can have pizza and wine, since neither of us work on Sunday. ”
“That I can do, you order the pizza, I’ll bring the wine,” Sally said with a laugh. “Seven?”
“Let’s make it six, if you don’t mind.”
“Not at all.” They went in different directions, and Lilith spend the rest of her shift helping customers wanting a certain book, and the next two days, she helped teens with a research project they had to do.
Thankfully, the local school had given her the heads up with what they were looking for, and Lilith admired how the teachers thought to encourage the students to research the old fashioned way, and not plugging questions into AI generated crap sites that wouldn’t give them the proper and most of the time, correct answer.
At five thirty Saturday night, Lilith’s doorbell rang, and as she hurried to answer it, she laughed as she saw Sally standing there in leggings, an oversized sweater, her blonde hair in a messy bun, holding a bag from the local liquor store.
“Come in,” Lilith said on a laugh as she opened the door and invited her friend inside. After she closed the door behind them, she laughed when Sally kicked off her shoes, then pulled out a pair of slippers from another bag, slipped her feet inside, and had a total body shiver.
“I should have worn a coat, the temperature dropped from leaving my house to coming here.”
“It is still the middle of March.”
“I know. I thought spring was finally here.”
“Officially, but you know it doesn’t usually warm up until the middle of April. Come into the kitchen. I didn’t know what type of pizza you wanted, so I didn’t order it yet.”
“Anything as long as it comes loaded.” Sally grinned as she followed Lilith and began pulling out several bottles of wine. “I didn’t know if you wanted red or white. I’m not a lush, and I know you aren’t either, but I thought whatever we don’t use tonight, we can have for future gatherings.”
“I like that idea, what do you mean loaded?”
“I love extra cheese, pepperoni, sausage, green peppers, onions, and mushrooms on a pizza.”
“That sounds heavenly. Thick or thin crust?”
“Medium?” Sally asked with a wrinkled nose. “I don’t want the crust so thick that all I’m eating is carbs, but then again, I don’t want it so thin that all the toppings fall off.”
“Let’s see.” She picked up her phone and accessed the app, and together they placed the order, and looked at each other with a grin when they were able to get everything they wanted.
“Forty minutes,” Lilith said as she went to the cupboard and withdrew two wine glasses.
Instead of taking them to the counter with the wine, she went to the sink and washed them.
She looked over her shoulder at her friend with a laugh.
“It’s been over a year since I used these glasses, I’m just washing the dust off. ”
“I understand,” Sally giggled as she grabbed some paper towels to dry them. “The same thing happens in my house. As I said, I’m not a lush, and I hate drinking alone. I hardly ever have a drink when I’m home alone.”
“Yeah, me too,” Lilith said as she dried her glass, and decided to try one of the red wines while Sally poured herself a glass of white.
They made their way to the living room, and caught up on their week.
By the time they finished, the pizza had arrived, and Lilith went to get the plates and napkins she’d set out earlier.
Armed with pizza and wine, they settled back in their chairs.
“Spill,” Sally said around her first bite of pizza, and moaned at the taste. “Why do you like going to these haunted places so much?”
“Honestly? I have no clue.” She took a bite of her own pizza and stared off into space as she got her thoughts together. “First, I don’t know if it has anything to do with my name, or not.”
“What does ‘Lilith’ have to do with anything?”
“Are you religious?”
“Not really, I know someone is watching my every step, and when my times comes, they’ll open their ledger to my name and tell me if I was good or not. Other than that, not really.” Sally shrugged as she continued to eat.
“Same here, but Lilith was Adam’s first wife.
According to the bible, anyway. If you look up the meaning of Lilith, it means ‘night demon’.
I think that’s why I go by Lily most of the time.
I went to middle school when a new family moved into the neighborhood, and when they found out my name was Lilith, they tried to run me and my family out of town on the rails because they said I was evil.
They did everything in their power to get my family discredited on everything we did.
Dad’s job, Mom’s, my older brother’s football scholarship.
” She sipped her wine and looked at Sally with a grin.
“I think that’s where my love of research came in. ”
“I know this is getting off topic, but what happened?”
“Because these guys were so relentless in trying to get us to leave town, I started doing some research on that family. It took several weeks, but by the time I was done with them, it was a mess, and the entire county was out for blood. Not mine, nor my family’s, these new people’s.”
“Oh my god, what happened?”
“Do you want the long version, or the nutshell?”
“Nutshell, please.”
“Okay, it turned out the ‘father’, and I use that word loosely, of the family was a cult leader. All his children, there were eight of them, had been kidnapped from their homes at an early age and brought into the family to worship the ground he walked on. When the girls, they were all girls, turned fourteen, he married them, and had sex with them. I did my research, and was able to get some DNA from the girls in my class. I didn’t know what to do with it, but once I couldn’t go any further in my research, I went to the local police station.
I asked to talk to the person in charge.
I think they only humored me until I started producing kidnapped open police case file numbers, and I had paid for an age enhancement program.
It turned out that seven of the girls kidnapped looked like the current girls living in the home.
They took the DNA of one of the samples I took, and a few weeks later, they called me in and asked me how I got it.
I told them I got it from the silverware at the school.
As soon as they were done with it, I used a napkin to put that and the spoon in a plastic bag.
It turned out the kidnapped girl’s DNA was in the system, you know, in case they found a dead body and needed it for comparison.
” She shrugged as she grabbed another slice of pizza and settled back in her seat.
“Anyway, it turned out I was right, and it did take some time, but they were finally able to get the DNA back from all the samples I took. All were formerly kidnapped victims. Oh, and what I didn’t know at the time was that this family had started taking boys and instead of having sex with them himself, he had other members of his cult, pedophiles that liked little boys, do the deed with them.
From the time they moved to my town, and started harassing me and my family because of the meaning of my name, and the arrests were made, it was a year. ”
“Why so long if they had all the information?”
“They wanted to build a big case against them, and they, the authorities, wanted to see how far this asshole would go. They got him dead to rights when the neighbors called the police on a domestic disturbance. It turned out that the newest kidnapped victim had only been ten when he tried to have sex with her. She started screaming and yelling, then all the others did the same. The neighbors said it sounded like someone was being murdered. I heard the 9-1-1 tape, you could hear the screaming in the background. They got a team together, and raided the place. By the time they got everything sorted out, CPS was there, and again, it took a few weeks, but they were able to get the stories from the children. The ‘father’ and ‘uncles’, there were no adult women in the home, were arrested and weren’t granted bail. ”