Everyone Dies in Youngstown: A Gripping Suspense Thriller by James Dain

Author:James Dain [Dain, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Brown & King
Published: 2022-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter fourteen

Pleased to Meet You, Mom

Back in his apartment to get ready for the funeral home, MJ couldn’t shake the cold anger he felt at Cassie, at Appel--and at himself, for fucking everything up.

MJ knew Cassie could be hard and unforgiving once she had made her mind up--a quality she had earned as a runaway on the streets of Manila. Her father was unknown, her mother a prostitute, and Cassie had told MJ of her decision to leave the concrete hut where she had grown up when one of her mother’s johns had drunkenly tried to rape her.

She ran and kept on running, living on the streets, sorting through garbage looking for food. Once, to quell hunger pains, she ate stuffing from a discarded sofa; another time she scraped the remains of a jar of petroleum jelly.

The jelly, she said, was the worst.

She was 7 when rescued by a kindly shopkeeper, who saw her looking into the window of his restaurant and invited her in for a bowl of soup. When Cassie wouldn’t say who her parents were or where she lived, the stranger took her to the police station and the police delivered her to a Catholic orphanage--thereby, she said, saving her life.

From the nuns she got her sense of right and wrong, and the strength that had kept her alive was gradually channeled into a stubborn desire to excel in school. At first she thought the nuns were kind, but found the house matrons less so--they beat her entire dorm when a sick girl vomited on a newly cleaned floor. As Cassie grew older, she began to understand that the house matrons took orders from the nuns, who looked the other way when their charges were abused. This hypocritical behavior--and the nuns’ kowtowing to the wealthy American visitors who occasionally adopted from the orphanage--disgusted Cassie and she lost her faith in the Catholic Church. She began to misbehave, talking back to the sisters and refusing chores. One by one her friends were adopted while Cassie remained, increasingly depressed and unhappy.

Fortunately, one particular nun, Sister Tala, her science teacher, took a special interest in her. Through friends in her order, she arranged a scholarship for Cassie at the Sacred Heart School of Nursing School in far-off America. Cassie jumped at the chance.

Given her early years on the streets, MJ could understand why Cassie was wary of people who dealt drugs, although the situation in Youngstown was far different from that of Manila. What he couldn’t figure out was why she would decide to marry Appel when she so clearly was still in love with him. She couldn’t allow herself to love him, she had said. But love was a feeling and a desire you had, not something you could decide to have. The nuns might have saved her from starvation, but they had screwed up her mind somehow with the same sort of Catholic bullshit that his mother got from the priests in the parish. In Cassie’s mind, MJ was “bad,” some sort of sinner.

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