Dark Sins Read online

  "You don't know if it's the truth." She turns and glares at me, and I've never seen such anger and disappointment in her eyes.

  "I called you about this because I thought that you would understand. I thought that, as an investigator and a journalist, you'd want to get to the bottom of this. But you just want to hide it. You just want to pretend that this never happened."

  She holds the envelope in her hand, stretched out in front of me.

  "I'm not saying that. I want to get to the truth, but I have my doubts. Am I not allowed to air my doubts?"

  "Get out," she snaps, and I'm completely taken aback.

  She's never talked to me like this before.

  I stare at her, and when she repeats it for the second time, I grab my bag and my coat and start to walk out.

  "Mrs. Archer.” Dante approaches her to try to make peace. “Jacqueline didn't mean-"

  "What do you think she meant? I know exactly what she meant," Mom says. “I want her to know how serious I am about this, and figuring out what really happened.”

  Dante takes a step away.

  "I'm sorry that we met under these circumstances.” She approaches him. “I really do appreciate you paying for my treatment, and for saving my life. I hope that we can have dinner sometime, and I can thank you properly. Just not now."

  "Yes, I'd like that.” Dante nods and follows me out.

  2

  Jacqueline

  We drive away from my mom's house and I am incensed. I sit in the passenger seat of Dante's BMW and I wonder what the hell just happened on this fine morning.

  "How could she do that? How could she think that I don't care what happened to my brother?" I say out loud.

  It's a rhetorical question that doesn't need an answer and luckily Dante doesn't bother.

  "She knows how much I loved him. She knows how close we always were. Of course, I want to find out what really happened, if something other than an accident happened, but I also don't want to get my hopes up. Things like this happen all the time. She doesn't know because she doesn't read a lot of newspapers and she doesn't follow true crime, but it's much more common than you would think. People see that someone is missing and they reach out to the family, just to be part of something. Sometimes, they're confused. Sometimes, they actually think that they saw this missing person; they just want to be part of a bigger picture."

  "But Michael isn't missing," Dante says.

  "Yes, I know that. He's been killed. I saw the accident. I saw the car and how messed up it was. He died in that car."

  "I think your mom is just trying to hold on to hope."

  "Of course she knows that he's dead. We all know that, we have the confirmation from the medical examiner, but I can't believe that she thinks I don't want to investigate."

  "She's just very hurt. She’s going through a lot right now. It's her son," Dante says.

  I glare at him.

  "I'm not trying to take her side," he adds.

  "Look, I know perfectly well where she's coming from. She wants to have some explanation for why it happened. Right now, it's like he just died for no reason. I mean, it was snowy and icy and the road conditions were terrible, but there’re hundreds of thousands of deaths like that in America every winter; it's just bad luck. You run into something. You are in the wrong place at the wrong time. It happens all the time."

  "What do you think deep in your heart? What do you think happened?" Dante asks as he pulls up to a red light.

  I stare into the light and notice how it gets a little less red in the middle, more of a pinkish color. "I don't know, but I also have no idea whether that letter is something that we can believe."

  "You seem so resistant to it though," Dante adds when the light turns green. "I mean, don't you want to find out?"

  "Of course I do. I'm just really angry that someone would do this. Someone would just make this up, but I have to know who.

  Who would want to hurt us so much?"

  He stares at me and then turns his eyes back to the road. I realize, of course, that I sound like someone who knows that it's an accident and someone unwilling to believe anything else about his death.

  It's not that I'm not; of course he could have been murdered, but what is the likelihood of that?

  Why would someone murder my brother?

  He had a normal job, went to work every day, didn't have any major problems with anyone.

  Of course, I don't know everything about him.

  He could have had secrets, God knows I've kept enough. From the outside, no one would believe that I am the type of girl who went to a club like The Redemption and no one would think that Dante and I could have met there and actually had a real connection.

  Appearances are deceiving, we all know that.

  But I'm so certain that I know who my brother was and I have no idea why someone would murder him.

  "You know, this could have been an accident," Dante says.

  We get to Long Island before I realize that he's driving us back to his house in the Hamptons. We haven't talked about this, but I don't fight it. I don't really want to go back and see my mom today.

  "Yeah, I know it could've been an accident, that's what I'm trying to say," I add.

  "No, I don't mean it like that. It could have been an accident that he was killed."

  I stare at him, not fully comprehending.

  "I'm not sure exactly if I'm reading too much into the letter," Dante says, "but what if someone hit him with their car, but it was an accident? What if they left the scene? It doesn't have to be this planned first degree murder charge kind of situation, but it would still be murder. It would still be not just him alone getting into this situation, but there's no way to know unless you find out who wrote the letter."

  I swallow hard and nod slightly.

  I hadn't considered that.

  Of course! What if this person told someone that he ran into someone and killed him?

  If someone had told me that, I'd probably feel incredibly guilty. And maybe even be forced to write a letter like this to alleviate some of the guilt.

  I don't say any of this out loud, but in my own mind, I continue to spin further and further out of control.

  There are so many possibilities now. As much as I don’t want the letter to be true, or to even go further into uncovering it, now I feel like I almost have to.

  Mom is right, I do have to figure out what happened. I do have to get to the bottom of this.

  If someone did hit him and someone did leave him out there to die, or at least didn't report it, or maybe worse, was under the influence of drugs or alcohol, Michael deserves for me to find out the truth.

  We pull up next to Marguerite and Lincoln's house in the Hamptons and get out of the car.

  "I hope it's okay that I drove back here. I wasn't sure where to go, and we were so entrenched in our conversation ..." Dante starts to say, but I just put my finger over his mouth.

  "It's fine. This is great. I want to see Allison again and we have that dinner invitation."

  "So you want to go?" His eyes light up. "You want to stay another night here?"

  "Yeah, I think I want to.” I nod. "I want to process all of this and figure out what happened and what I can do."

  He leans over and gives me a warm hug. "It's going to be okay," he whispers into my ear, "I'll help you."

  3

  Dante

  On the drive over, my heart is racing. My palms are sweaty.

  Darkness envelops me, and yet I have to maintain this facade, this happy outlook as if everything is fine and nothing is bothering me.

  But the truth is that the appearance of the letter has put my whole life on hold. I know very well that the contents of it are true.

  Jacqueline doesn't.

  She thinks that it might be a scammer or someone who's just wasting their time, but I know that her brother was murdered.

  It is just one of the many secrets I'm keeping that I have no right to keep but I can't
stop.

  If I tell her now, if she were to find out, she would never forgive me.

  No, I’d lose her for sure, and that's why I have to keep this a secret.

  I drive back to Lincoln's house in the Hamptons.

  I'm only partially relieved by the fact that she got into an argument with her mother and was basically told to leave. On one hand, I could pursue the lie.

  I can convince her that what she believes is true, that there are lots of crappy people out there who will make up a story like that just for fun, for nothing, but another part of me wants her to know the truth.

  So, I split the difference.

  I suggest something happened that's in this netherworld between the two. I don't know how far she can go to figure out who sent the letter.

  If the person has buried their tracks right, she won't be able to find out a thing. But still, I can't help but mention the fact that it might have been an accident or a possible hit-and-run.

  I've already said too much, and I have to think about myself in this situation as well.

  I had nothing to do with Michael's death directly, and I had nothing to do with sending that letter.

  We get to the Hamptons and the sun is high in the sky. The streets are getting crowded with tourists and locals going about the lazy days of summer.

  Jacqueline rants almost the whole drive back, and when we finally pull up and I park the car, I try to calm her down a little bit, put her at ease.

  I feel like the biggest scumbag for doing this, not telling her immediately what I know, but the problem is that I don't really know much. If she were to know what I know, then she wouldn't want to be with me anymore.

  We walk up to the front door, and just as I'm about to ring the doorbell, Marguerite opens it with a large beach bag slung over her shoulder. Lincoln is arguing with her, insisting that he doesn't want to go to the beach and has a lot of work to do, but she's not taking no for an answer.

  "You're going to join us, right?" Marguerite asks, pointing in our faces.

  Her tan face is hidden by the broad, wide-brimmed hat and her bathing suit is covered by a diaphanous coverup. Despite the pregnancy or perhaps because of it, I've never seen her glow as much as she has the last couple of days. She still has her issues with my mother, but they've been avoiding each other, and this time with Jacqueline has really made a difference.

  Marguerite pulls Jacqueline aside to show her a book that she's been reading. Seizing the opportunity, Lincoln drags me into the living room.

  I think that it might be about keeping my mouth shut about what happened between him and Allison, but he has something else on his mind entirely.

  "Have you given any more thought to what we discussed earlier?" he asks, grabbing a lemonade from the fridge and opening it.

  He's dressed in his swimming trunks with a loose-fitting island shirt. His laptop and phone and all of his work stuff are tucked neatly away in his satchel laying on the counter.

  "I'm thinking about it," I say, walking over to the fridge and getting another bottle of lemonade, wanting to point out to him that he should have offered to grab me one, but his mind is elsewhere.

  "I have a job coming up. You're perfect for it."

  "Look, I told you that I'm out of the business."

  "Yes, you said that," he says in his smirky kind of way.

  A few days out here in the sun have made him a few shades darker, but luckily he didn't burn his delicate skin, which I remember he always suffered with when we were kids. Easy to burn, easy to tan used to be his motto.

  "You think you're going to come up with $350,000 some other way in a month?"

  I clench my jaw.

  I was hoping that Mom would give me some leeway on the loan, I say silently to myself. That way I could pay off the other guys first and maybe pay her later.

  "She'll never let it go," Lincoln says, reading my mind. "She gave you a month. That means she expects it in three weeks, and you know it. She's going to go to the cops otherwise."

  I swallow hard.

  "That would be the worst thing that could happen. Look, I know you're worried about getting caught. Don't be. This is a simple job. I have all the details planned out. No research necessary on your part. You'd be getting this money for doing practically nothing."

  "Except for the thing itself," I point out.

  "You’ve done a lot worse for a lot less."

  "I know. And that's why I'm no longer in this line of work."

  We're dancing around a subject that I don't need or want to entertain, but I don't think I have a choice.

  The thing is that Lincoln does work hard at his hedge fund and he does put in a lot of hours, but he also has a gambling addiction that very few people know about, including Marguerite.

  She thinks that all the money comes in from work. What she doesn't know is that in the last year alone, he lost close to a million dollars in the casino over a few hands of cards.

  He's had this addiction for a long time, and many people in finance and our line of work suffer from very similar maladies.

  Whether it's gambling, or women, or drugs, or all three, there's always something out there to think about. Inevitably, the debts catch up to you.

  You owe a few grand here and there.

  You owe twenty to someone else, and then when you start making the big bucks at work, you start thinking, maybe I can double that money by putting it all on red at the roulette table.

  That kind of thinking affects people who have ten bucks, those who have ten grand, and those with ten million. It doesn't matter; if you think like that, you think like that.

  And that's why for many years, we had another more stable job. That's why we did other things to pay the bills, things that aren't entirely legal. Actually, completely illegal, but they always paid a lot more than even our work could.

  A year ago, I got out of it. I went cold turkey.

  I stopped gambling, and I started traveling.

  If I flew to enough places, if I found enough clients, if I stayed busy all the time, then I wouldn't have time to think about that other world.

  Then I wouldn't think about gambling, and then I wouldn't need to do that other job in order to pay all of those debts.

  "I told you I was out of the business."

  "And I told you that I have this job," Lincoln says, taking a step closer to me.

  He's so close that I can smell the early morning vodka orange juice on his breath.

  "This is a one-time offer. You have a week. I can send you all the details if you say yes, but afterward, I won't be able to help you."

  I inhale slowly and then exhale just as slowly. Our eyes are focused on each other.

  "You don't have any other options, Dante. You can borrow the money from Cedar, I guess. How long is it going to take you to pay off $350,000? That's a lifetime of money unless you do something to supercharge your income. And there's only one thing you're good at."

  "I'm good at a lot of things," I say quickly.

  "That may be true, but you are very, very good at this, and you don't want to lose it."

  I swallow hard.

  Marguerite calls his name and he walks away from me.

  “I'm serious," he adds, walking to the threshold just as Jacqueline squeezes past. "Think about it."

  The pressure starts to feel never-ending. This is what it was like when I was gambling.

  I haven't been next to a card game in over a year, and not a day goes by that I don't think about the stale smell of cigarettes, the ugly, unreadable faces, tired eyes, pasty skin, and all of the money in the world that I could win.

  Gambling was my way to cope with life since I was a kid. I went to my first poker game when I was thirteen and I won $1,000. It was my money. It was all mine. It wasn't borrowed from Mom. I made it off my winnings and my smarts, and I couldn't believe that I made so much.

  I continued to gamble throughout college.

  I'd win a lot, lose some. I was obsessed with mak
ing it work. I knew that I'd have to win, that all professional poker players lost a certain amount of money as a given. It's like a return on investment and I became a company. I paid taxes on everything. After college, I got a job in finance and I thought that if I stayed busy enough, I wouldn't have to play. But you'd be surprised how much the possibility of winning what you make in a month is alluring to someone with my personality.

  After a little while, it wasn't even about the money. The money was nothing but a number that represented a win or loss and by how much.

  Growing up, I was a pawn in my parents’ divorce; my father filed for custody claims and alimony, my mother filed counter claims, the numerous court proceedings, all of that crap. I hated money with every fiber of my being, and yet I wanted more of it in my bank account, and I wanted it all to belong to me.

  Lincoln was the more irresponsible of the two of us. His swings of how much he made and how much he lost were notorious. Everyone who was anyone in our circle of friends and acquaintances thought of him as a God.

  At one point, he lost half a million dollars, and the thing is that in the illegal poker games in those dark casino spots where the regulars go, losing half a million was almost the same as winning half million.

  How do you get back from that?

  What do you do?

  But we had certain skills, Lincoln and I. We had secrets that we knew how to keep, and gambling was not even one of them.

  What Lincoln wants me to do to give me the $350,000 would put me back into a life that I worked very hard to escape.

  Yes, I wouldn't gamble again, but I don't even have enough of a bankroll to get started.

  You can expect to win ten to twenty percent if you're good game after game, and so I need a certain amount to try to win $350,000. But he's not going to front that.

  Besides, I have worked so hard to stop, to start my life again, to not do that, and I'm not willing to give it up.

  The thing that he's offering, the one-time proposal, if he's willing to pay that much, the job must be huge with a high risk of getting caught.