J. Gonzalez - They

“No. Only his.”

“You’re saying my husband told you that he thought that his parents were members of a satanic cult and that they abused him?” Brandy still looked like she was having a hard time accepting this.

Vince nodded. “Yes indeed.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“Were they?”

Vince noted her serious tone, her unblinking approach. He laughed. “You’re kidding, right?”

“No, I’m not,” Brandy said. “My husband obviously believed it. Why shouldn’t I?”

“Because it isn’t true,” Vince said. His tone and demeanor became more serious, less playful. “I’ve gotten to know Gladys Black and her husband in the past few years due to the intersecting of our professional lives. She’s a lovely woman. Very driven, professional. She was saddened to learn of Frank’s passing. We’ve talked a lot about Frank in the past few years and she shared some details of his childhood with me. He was a very disturbed child.”

“If you’re going to—”

“Let me finish,” Vince said, over-riding her protests. He stood tall and firm near the big plate glass windows that overlooked Newport Beach. “Your husband was obsessed with his theory. It was obvious to me he’d gone through a rough time, but Gladys tells me that Frank was seriously disturbed at a young age. He had disciplinary problems as early as the second grade. He began using drugs at a very early age, began drinking, began getting in trouble with the police. Gladys did everything she could to control him, but she couldn’t. She finally sent him to her former sister-in-law’s place in Texas. They had a hard time with him too, and he eventually left their home and wound up in Los Angeles. I’m sure he told you the rest? The years of selling and using drugs, being involved in petty crimes?”

Tears pooled in Brandy’s eyes. “You’re painting the impression that he was some kind of scumbag. He wasn’t anything like that!”

“I agree, he redeemed himself later,” Vince said. “I have to commend him for that. I think his relationship with you really helped as well. Unfortunately, his past demons were strong. He could never completely escape from them. In the end, they consumed him.”

“The police said Frank was talking to a guy named David Connelly,” Brandy said, wiping the tears from her cheeks. “They found the phone records on Frank’s cell phone. They haven’t been able to locate him. It’s like he just disappeared. Did he ever mention that name to you?”

Vince shook his head. David Connelly was the pseudonym Mike Peterson had adopted and opened his alternate identity under. With Carol Peterson’s help, they’d dismantled all traces of David Connelly when the three of them had been in Pennsylvania. “No, he didn’t. Why?”

“Are you sure? Because the phone records the police retrieved were made in the week the two of you were parading all over Southern California.”

“Frank made a few phone calls, but I never asked who he was talking to and he never told me.”

“So you’re telling me that Frank was crazy? That he had paranoid delusions?” When Brandy turned back to him, Vince saw that tears were pooling in her eyes.

Vince’s features softened. “I’m afraid so. I’m so sorry.”

Brandy nodded and turned around. She reached into her purse and extracted a tissue. She dabbed her eyes. Her voice was shaky, yet remained strong, vigilant. “I’ve been trying to talk to you about this for… the last four, five years now. Why wouldn’t you speak to me?”

“I didn’t want to hurt you,” Vince murmured softly. “I didn’t want you to… think less of your husband. I was… hoping you would simply… ac-cept what happened, accept the evidence the police found at the crime scene and just go on.”

Brandy nodded, her shoulders quaking with the intensity of her quiet sobbing. Vince let her stand there and sob; he could tell she needed to cry, that she needed to get it out. It was probably hard for her to comprehend that her husband had never truly changed his low-life ways, that he’d never received psychological counseling, that he’d allowed his problems to simmer and fester for years until he began making shit up until he began to believe his mother had been a deranged Satanist.

“I’m sorry,” Brandy said, her back still turned to him. “I’m sorry I’ve wasted your time like this and bugged you…”

“It’s okay,” Vince said. He stepped toward her and touched her shoulder gently.

She turned around, her eyes red. She wouldn’t look up at him. She looked too embarrassed. “Did Frank ever tell you about his real father?” Brandy said, sniffing.”

“No,” Vince said, curious. “He didn’t. What about him?”

Brandy wiped her eyes. “He told me his father was driven insane by his mother. He said one of the reasons he was contacting you was… to find out what happened to his father. And that… he thought that by doing that, he could help you too.”

“Help me?”

“Like I said, he never told me specifics. I just… kind of put two and two together.”

“I see,” Vince said. Playing dumb with this woman was proving to be beneficial. Until now, they had no idea what Frank had told her about his childhood. “His natural father suffered from similar delusions, then?”

“I don’t know what really happened to Frank’s dad. He only told me bits and pieces over the years. At first, he wouldn’t tell me anything about his parents. Every time I asked, he would clam up. The most he would say was that his father left the family when he was three and that his mom and stepfather were abusive toward him. Before he… well, before he sent the kids and me back east, he revealed a little more. He told me his father saw his mother do some really awful things and was driven insane by it. That’s the reason his father left. I… I never believed it, tried to get him to tell me more specifics, but he clammed up, said he’d already told me too much.”

“Uh huh,” Vince said, nodding for her to go on.

“I speculated that perhaps the real story behind it was that his father simply disappeared. Maybe he had his own drug and alcohol problems. I reached out to Frank’s Aunt, and she admitted to us that Frank’s dad turned up twenty years or so later, basically a homeless drunk. She wouldn’t tell me much else. I can… a conspiracy theorist would say that the reason he’d become an alcoholic was because he’d been driven to drink by the horrible things he’d seen. But I don’t buy that.”

“You don’t?” Vince looked at her, his gaze gentle, caring.

“No. I can’t believe that.” Brandy had gained her composure. She clutched her small purse in her hands, facing Vince as they stood by the large plate-glass windows. “If mental illness is hereditary… and I believe it is… I have to think that Frank had developed this theory himself. His Aunt won’t tell me what drove his father to drink, and I think she was a bit embarrassed to talk about it. I can see why now.”

“Why’s that?” Vince asked.

“Isn’t obvious? Like father, like son.”

Vince patted her shoulder again, lending some semblance of support to the still-grieving woman. “Again, I’m sorry.”

Brandy sighed. “It’s just… trying to wrap my head around this… why Frank would do this… has driven me crazy.”

“I can’t even imagine what you’ve had to go through,” Frank said.

“Did you know that the police in Pennsylvania got in touch with me?”

“No, I didn’t. What for?” Vince was aware of the criminal investigation over the gun battle in the parking lot of the Family Cupboard Restaurant in Lititz, Pennsylvania. A similarity in Frank’s appearance and the description of one of the gunmen wanted in the Pennsylvania shooting was made. The three men who’d ambushed them were connected to an apocalyptic Christian cult based out of Missouri—a group that had since been destroyed by The Children of the Night shortly after Vince’s re-baptism into the Dark Father’s fold, although he wasn’t going to tell Brandy that.