Divine Vices

by Parkin, Melissa

  “Oh yeah? Not me.” He grinned. “No, I want to be sad. If I’m lucky, maybe I can even be lonely. And unfulfilled.”

  I gave him a glare.

  “Of course you want to be happy. That’s not an answer. We all strive to be happy. The difference is how each of us goes about trying to achieve it. What I’m asking is, what would make you happy?”

  “I honestly don’t know.”

  “I do.”

  “Really?”

  “...For myself anyway.” He cast me a mischievous grin as he swung out of his side of the booth and planted himself right beside me. “I want to see you happy.”

  “And what makes you think I’m not?”

  “I have a sixth sense about these things.”

  “Well, apparently you’re in need of a tune-up, because you’d be wrong in that assessment.”

  “Or maybe it’s because you really haven’t been happy in so long, you don’t remember what it’s like so you can’t know anymore.”

  “If you had said that to me eight months ago, I just may have agreed.”

  He nuzzled up closer frolicsomely. “And what is it, my dear, that revived your spirits?”

  “Ian.”

  Jack’s attempts at keeping straight-faced didn’t hold long when an inescapable smirk struck across his cheeks. “I’m sorry, but I think I’m gonna need a little insight to understand this one.”

  “Why is it that men like you find it so hard to understand that women actually appreciate guys that are nice?”

  “On the contrary, love. We understand women even better than the nice ones do.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “Well, you’d be wrong then. How else do you think a roguish troublemaker such as myself stays in business concerning the opposite sex?”

  “Good looks, loose women, and low morals, I suspect.”

  “Matter of opinion,” he replied beamingly. “But since you have declared yourself to be an expert in the subject, please do educate me, tutor.”

  “Well, as you should know, Ian was actually the first person I met when I came to town.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, it was the day of my grandmother’s funeral.”

  “That’s a happy anecdote,” Jack sighed.

  I gave him a light kick with the side of my boot. “It is, actually. After what happened to my mom and my sister, I kind of fell out of touch with my friends back in the city. And with my grandmother sick, my dad was constantly taking trips up here to take care of her. I’d join him on weekends and hang around her house or go hiking in the woods, but I never really ventured off into town. On the day of my grandmother’s service, with all her friends and so many strangers coming up and telling me how lovely of a person she was and how much they’d miss her, I was so overwhelmed that I needed to get out of there as quickly as possible.

  “After wandering through some of the hills and down the back roads, I eventually came to the mall. As fate and good fortune would have it, I wound up going into Gate House Records where I met Ian. And for the first time in months, someone treated me like a regular human being, instead of...”

  “A neglected puppy?” Jack interjected.

  I chuckled. “Yeah.”

  “I know the feeling all too well. Everybody looking at you with the same pitiful, sympathetic stare, constantly asking ‘are you alright?’ Not to mention the classic, ‘if you need anything- Dot. Dot. Dot.’”

  “Exactly. After that, I went into Gate House as much as I could, talking with Ian about music and movies and games and whatever else we could think of, and it felt so good to just feel normal again.”

  “When did you tell him about what happened?”

  “I didn’t. I was thinking about how I would, but he beat me to it. As it turned out, his boss, Jerry, was actually a friend of my dad’s, and Ian had known all along. Yet, he somehow managed to do what not even my own dad could.”

  “And what was that?”

  “Give me comfort, without treating me like I was also made of porcelain. He knew all too well what it was like.”

  “To feel like an outsider? I never would have guessed.”

  “No,” I said, shoving him softly. “To lose people. His dad had walked out on him and his mom when he was still a baby, and his mom’s been in and out of remission for cancer for the past ten years. He knew better than anyone just how scary and heartbreaking it could be. So to say his experience in these affairs, along with his being nonjudgmental of all my peculiarities, has made him irreplaceable to me. His friendship is what makes me happy.”

  “Is it just a friendship?”

  “Why? Are you threatened?” I smirked.

  “Terrified.”

  I leaned in to push him again, but he caught my arm and pulled me in closer.

  “I’m serious. He has that one thing I may never have.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “Your trust.” His typically indecipherable gaze read surprisingly true. “That’s one of the downsides to the Bad Boy label. Any woman can entertain the notion of being with a guy like me, but few rarely ever commit, and even fewer are actually steadfast. We’re not the ones to be trusted. My kind is regarded as that amazing one-night stand verses someone like Callaghan who is considered to be the nice guy that women want to take home to meet their mothers, or in your case, father.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” I cracked. “My dad’s not exactly the biggest fan of Ian’s. Surprisingly though, he seems to like you.”

  “Really?” He stroked his chin pleasingly. “Well, that’s a very, very good sign.”

  I gasped mockingly. “You’ve been after my dad this whole time, haven’t you? Ugh, I should have known! You’re too good-looking to be straight,” I quipped.

  He playfully pushed me over as I recovered from my laughing fit. “No, silly,” said Jack, roughing his fingers through my hair. “It’s actually a better sign to get the stamp of approval from the father than the mother if you’re still trying to woo the woman in question.”

  “And why’s that?” I inquired beamingly as I fixed my mane.

  “Because if the mom likes the guy and says that he’s ‘so adorable,’ that seems to be a turnoff to girls like you because it means that the guy is too tame. But if the father is anything like yours and says that he likes the guy, then there’s suddenly a cool factor playing out in his favor. I mean, let’s face it, someone like your dad doesn’t want to see his daughter with a guy who’s ‘adorable’ but can’t take care of himself, and more importantly her.”

  “That actually makes sense, in a Jack sort of way.”

  “Thank you. I do my best.”

  “Hey, Jack,” called out a voice behind me.

  I turned to see a scruffy guy in a black and white racing jacket approaching our table. His hair was light brown, and the sides were shaved close to the scalp but the top was a bit longer, slicked back pompadour style. By his look, including his slightly cultivated five o’clock shadow, I would have guessed he was probably in his early twenties.

  “Hey, man,” said Jack, standing up and giving him the stereotypical ‘guy-hug’ that insisted that one must pat the other person’s back to not make the embrace look too intimate.

  “Who’s this?” asked the stranger, looking at me.

  “Cal, this is Cassie. Cassie, Cal.”

  “Pleasure,” he said, shaking my hand.

  “You too,” I replied.

  “Just thought I'd let you know that we’ve got a few new troops for Tuesday,” said Cal, redirecting his attention to Jack. “Which also reminds me, you got plans next Wednesday?”

  “Yeah, I’m actually going to a friend of a friend’s party. You guys got a game?”

  “Something a bit more lucrative,” said Cal, smilingly.

  “Sorry, gotta count me out.”

  “Alright, your loss. See you Tuesday.”

  “See ya’.

  “Planning on knocking over a liquor store?” I cracked
after Cal headed over to the other side of the restaurant, parking a seat at the bar.

  “Wouldn’t you like to know,” said Jack, grinningly.

  Chapter 12

  Echo

  With Gwen’s insistency to meet her, I had Jack drop me off at her house following our session. When I came up to her room, there were mounds of papers pinned to the corkboard she had on her wall above her desk. She was in the midst of her investigation, but against Ian’s wishes, she found herself restless with the dead end her human interest piece had taken and interested fully in the new local cult killer.

  “The police released the identity of the girl who was murdered in Lancaster this morning,” said Gwen, pulling out a massive heap of pages and folders from a box. “Okay, there has to be something linking these two girls together. It’s our job now to find out what.”

  “No, I’m pretty sure that’s up to the authorities, and where did you get all this?”

  “They’re not exactly proving to be much help here, and I’m just gonna skip over that last bit,” she said, tossing me a portion of the stack. “Now, start your sleuthing.”

  I cracked open the file and spent the next ten minutes browsing everything over. “Fine, two seemingly unrelated cases. The first, a normal fifteen-year-old student. The second, a normal twenty-one-year-old bartender. Neither lived close to the other. Neither knew the other.” I flipped through some of the printouts of their social media pages. “And they didn’t have even the slightest similarities in tastes. Everything from guys to music says these two are polar opposites. Meyer, even if this is one case, which the police have yet to prove since Veronica is still just missing, it doesn’t mean that the perp has to necessarily have a pattern. He could very well be attacking at random. The larger the striking zone, the larger the cesspool of suspects the police have to sort through.”

  “True, but the cult theme has me thinking there has to be some kind of connection. Predators of this sort are more likely to be calculating. He already proved to be cunning enough to erase any possible evidence from the crime scene. And don’t forget that he did this in a relatively open sight, where foot traffic is fairly active during the early morning for runners and such. Doing this out in the open showed us just how arrogant this guy really is. You honestly think that he’s concerning himself with widening his territory out of fear of suspicion? Doubtful. There’s something about these girls that caused him to target them.”

  I studied over the information, and despite my reluctance to say it out loud, I had to at least admit it to myself that she had a point. “Alright, what about their fathers? It says here that they both lived only with their mothers.”

  Gwen sorted through some of the documents in front of her before settling on an article. “Veronica’s birth certificate doesn’t have him listed, and I’m gonna guess that Annalisa’s walked out on her when she was still little.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  She handed me a newspaper printout. “Because even before she turned one, her mother filed a motion to have her daughter’s last name changed from her father’s to her own. They were never married. As some standards require, the courts put the notice in the paper. Annalisa Cossack became Annalisa Leighton.”

  I dropped the article. “What did you just say?”

  “What?”

  “What are the parents’ names?”

  “Hilary Leighton and Charles Cossack.”

  “Charlie?!”

  Gwen peered over her monitor, seeing my jaw practically on the floor. “Wait a minute, you know him?”

  “That’s my uncle.”

  “I thought your dad didn’t have any siblings.”

  “No, he’s from my mother’s side.”

  “Her family was from around here? I didn’t know that.”

  “Yeah, the Cossacks lived in New Haven until a year or so after my mom graduated from high school before they moved to the Hamptons. I didn’t know Charlie came back here, let alone that he had a daughter... but I know someone who did.”

  “That being?”

  “My dad. He used to be close with Charlie. My uncle is the only one on that side of the family that’s actually tolerable.”

  “Well, obviously he must have known about Annalisa, so why didn’t he ever tell you about her? I mean, that’s your cousin for crying out loud. Or was.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You think your uncle had something to do with this?”

  “Charlie? No way. He’s about as carefree as they come. And he’s always been a bit impulsive, and not exactly the most diligent either. Even if he could commit the act, which I seriously doubt, there’s still no way he’d get away with it. He’s not that clever.”

  “Leaving us with what?”

  “Keep looking over everything. See if you can find anything about Veronica’s father,” I said, rising from my chair and snatching the keys to the Saturn. “I’ll be back.”

  “Where’re you going?”

  “To talk to my dad.”

  “Dad? You in here?” I shouted over the hammering racket of construction as I entered the bar.

  “He’s out back,” replied one of the workers.

  “Thanks.”

  I trekked my way through the tarp engulfed shop to the back entrance, seeing my dad in the employee parking lot sitting on the hood of his Buick with a cigarette in his mouth.

  “Thought you quit,” I called out as I came down the steps.

  I had obviously caught him off guard, because he looked as guilty as a kid with his hand in the cookie jar.

  “Gees, Cass,” he sighed. “You scared me. What’re you doing here? I thought you were working with Meyer.”

  “I was. And in a strange way, I still am,” I said, pulling out the article and handing it over. “Any thoughts?”

  He took a deep inhale and held his breath as he read over the portion I had the courtesy of highlighting.

  “Care to tell me something?”

  He flicked the cigarette to the ground and grinded it under his boot heel, discharging the smoke from his lungs with deflation.

  “I don’t blame you for not telling me about Annalisa after the matter of fact, but that still doesn’t explain why I never even heard about her until now,” I said, parking a seat beside him.

  “She’s one of the many dirty little secrets that the Cossacks buried away years ago, and it was forcedly agreed upon us all that no one was going to reach out to her, especially Charlie, but also meddlesome little me,” he said, his gaze now shamefully focused on the asphalt.

  “Wait, what? Why would he go back? I thought Charlie walked out on her and the mom.”

  “If only it were that simple,” groaned my dad. “You know how Charlie is. A maverick. Free Spirit. In other words, your grandparents’ worst nightmare. He met Hilary Leighton at a party back in his college days, and instantly fell head over heels for her. So when he found out she was pregnant, he threw all caution to the wind and proposed to her, quite happily. Unfortunately, Hilary came from a family with a less than reputable upbringing, and the Cossacks wouldn’t have her mudding the waters of their name. They already shunned your mother for marrying me, and they’d be damned to let that happen again.”

  “Come again? They shunned mom?”

  He let out a weak chuckle. “She practically fell on her face from how fast they ripped the rug out from under her feet. It wasn’t until she started making her way up the corporate ladder on her own that they felt she was worth readmitting into the family fold.”

  “And she still wanted to be close to them? I’d tell them to stick it where the sun doesn’t shine if they did that to me.”

  “Yeah, well, that was the only family she had, so she did the best she could with it. And as you can see, she forgave them. Charlie, unfortunately, wasn’t so lucky to escape their clutches.”

  I knew it would be a hard pill to swallow, but I had to ask. “What did they do?”

  “Charlie was almost finished wit
h school, and his mother convinced both him and Hilary that they should postpone their plans to get married until after he was finished. Hilary gave birth to Annalisa and Charlie gave her his surname. He also had a job already waiting for him at a prominent corporation following graduation. He seemed to have all his ducks in a row. Then your grandparents unleashed their wrath on him.

  “They pulled their strings and told Charlie that if he married Hilary, the job offer would be off the table and that they’d also be saddling him with the debt from his last year of schooling. I’m also not sure what they dug up on Hilary’s father, but when they threatened to release their findings to the police, that proved to be the last straw. Charlie was ordered to not have contact with Hilary or his daughter, and for their cooperation, the Cossacks agreed to pay support to Hilary on a monthly basis to ensure Annalisa would be taken care of.”

  “And now the poor guy has remained a terminal bachelor with an increased drinking problem,” I said. “Nice to see they have their son’s best interest at heart.”

  My dad handed the article back to me. “You should have seen the uproar when your grandparents found out that the courts would be publishing Annalisa’s change of surname in the paper. They were angry enough that Charlie gave her his name in the first place, but this had them foaming at the mouth. I'm really sorry you had to find out about her this way, kiddo.”

  "I know."

  Chapter 13

  Sweet Dreams

  Another system of storms was rolling through the area, and the skies were grisly dark as I fell onto my mattress in exhaustion upon entering my bedroom. My dad was still working at the bar, so there was nothing but the low rumble of thunder to keep me company. For the past couple weeks I had been struggling to get more than a few hours of sleep at night. My mind was in a constant upheaval, boomeranging back and forth between the stresses of school to the peculiar nightmares that seemed to plague the inside of my eyelids every time I entered the REM cycle. And considering that I had a whole new batch of problems brewing their way into my subconscious, I figured trying to get some decent shuteye even if found only in a brief nap might improve my cognitive function and help me at actually getting some research done later.