A Shade of Vampire 27: A Web of Lies Read Online Free PDF Page A

scan the image results first. I figured that would be the quickest way to recognize the right person—assuming that she bore any kind of resemblance to Atticus or Lawrence. But in the images section, there were no actual photos of people… except of one young woman without the surname—just a “Georgina Susanna”—who was, ahem , a model.
    The rest of the image hits were scans of various documents that involved the full name. I began to look at each one closely. There were newspaper cuttings about a Georgina Susanna Conway who’d driven to her death off the side of a mountain one snowy night near Edinburgh thirteen years ago. She had been twenty-nine years old, leaving behind a five-year-old son, who remained unnamed, and her husband of seven years, also left unnamed due to matters of “privacy”.
    I sank back in my chair, letting the implications of this information sink in. The math fit. Lawrence had been sure that he was eighteen years old now. That meant that Georgina Susanna Conway was Lawrence’s mother. Not his aunt or grandmother, as Shayla had been quick to presume.
    Atticus’s wife.
    Which meant that Atticus had been lying about his wife dying of cancer. What kind of man would lie about something like that? And why? Why would he lie to us? What was the actual point?
    Uneasiness filled me. We had just let Lawrence go with him. What if he had been lying about other things, too? That he was Lawrence’s father, at least I was certain of. But strangely, that didn’t make me much more comfortable about the situation.
    I reached into the drawer of my desk instinctively for my notebook, only to remember that it was still packed in my suitcase. Opening the bag, I pulled it out. As my eyes fell on its pink polka-dot cover, I felt a sharp twinge in my chest. I recalled the night it’d been in Lawrence’s hands.
    Swallowing hard, I sat back down and picked up the pen before turning to a blank page.
    “Georgina Susanna Conway,” I wrote in all-caps at the top. “Died thirteen years ago, near Edinburgh, Scotland. Twenty-nine years old. Lawrence was five at the time. Atticus’s age, unknown.”
    I rubbed my right temple.
    What does all this mean? Does it even mean anything at all? Maybe Atticus had some reason to lie to us about his wife. Perhaps he’d thought that he would garner sympathy from us if he told us that his wife had recently died and that she had been the reason behind Lawrence volunteering for the IBSI in the first place…
    My train of thought shifted direction. Now that I knew Atticus was a liar, I began to question every single thing about the interaction we’d had with him. He’d said that Lawrence had volunteered in order to earn money for his mother’s treatment. Now that I knew that was false, what had driven Lawrence to volunteer in the first place? And had it even been voluntary?
    I shuddered. I didn’t like where my thoughts were going. But it was too late to stop wondering now. Doubts assailed me as I glanced down at my notebook again, my eyes running over the name of Lawrence’s late mother.
    Turning to my laptop, I scoured the web for any mention of a “Lawrence Conway” or an “Atticus Conway”. I typed in all possible keyword combinations I could think of, linking them to Chicago and even the IBSI. All I found was a handful of Lawrence Conways and one Atticus Conway who weren’t linked to the IBSI or Chicago; none of them fit the description. None of them were who I was looking for.
    It seemed that the only straw I had to cling to was Lawrence’s mother. Which meant that I had to try to find out more about her. As much as I possibly could.
    Why had she been buried in that graveyard next to the IBSI’s Clyderly base? She must’ve had some connection with the organization. Perhaps she had been a hunter herself, even though Atticus had denied a formal connection between his family and the IBSI.
    I finished scanning all of the newspaper cuttings. Most of them were from local