“ What no one ever talks about is how dangerous hope can be. Call it forgiveness with teeth “
✚ AGE & DOB: Twenty-five & April 2nd, 1994
✚ OCCUPATION: Investigative Journalist
✚ AFFILIATION: Unaffiliated
Her mother had insisted upon the name; were they to adopt, it would be to honor a long-dead patriarch who would never even know of the little girl in the orphanage. Her mother had not wanted her in the first place; after all, she already had a perfect porcelain princess, an un-shattered teacup into which to pour all her sugar and spice. When she had conceded, she had hoped for a boy — and when her dear husband had come home with a girl, and a fierce conviction that taking her was the right thing, the only thing, to do, she had merely looked down upon the bundle with icy indifference and had insisted that the name remain the same.
Wesley’s first memory was of this icy glare, for her mother — named Winifred, of all things — was a cold and haughty woman, but only where her adopted daughter was concerned. To all others, she was the quintessential southern gentlelady, with lilting dialect and a penchant for sweet tea and molasses cakes. Her older sister, the beloved, the cherished, was named Honey, but acted more like a poison; though Rhodes, Georgia was no stranger to poison. It was a town weaned on the stuff, made of all old southern grudges and ages-old blood feuds. Wes was born into it and raised from it just the same; it was only appropriate that she would seek out poison wherever it sprung.
The Adler and the Wyatt families sat on opposite sides of the river, and it was on each side of the river that they ruled. No matter how un-favored Wes was, she was always warned never to cross the river, never to venture further than the gazebo in the park, and never to lose herself amongst the weeping willows. She was raised on stories of cruelty at the hands of the Wyatt patriarch — and yet she never quite believed them, at first. But she learned to, all too quickly, when one of her father’s men appeared on their white-painted porch in the dead of night, bloodied and raving about the Wyatts, their thievery, and a baseball bat. Honey had been ushered away, encouraged to hide her face and tend to her hymnal, but Wes — ever inquisitive, ever fascinated by the horror — stuck her face between the rails on the stairs and watched. Her father was a kind man, a studious man, and never the sort who she would imagine to willingly tangle in such business. And yet he took the man upon his shoulder, ushered him into his study, and tended to his wounds.
Her father was different. He always had been. He looked at Wesley as if he knew the secrets of the universe, and as if he would never tell. He liked her, and so she liked him. For him, she donned her Sunday best, put her hair in plaits, and did not ask questions — though it ate away at her adolescent tongue each and every day she did so. She took after her father: inquisitive, sharp, unabashed, scholarly. She was well aware that he was the one who had saved her — no one else could hold that honor.
His altruism, however, did not extend to the girls at St. Lucia’s all-girls preparatory school. They knew everything and everyone, and made no secret of the fact that they believed Wesley to not belong amongst them. She went through all the motions they did; she sang from her hymnal, memorized Bible verses, wore frilly dresses on Sundays. But she was different. Disquietude bloomed like a flower ill-planted in the wrong soil, suffocating her in a greenhouse of her family’s design. Every day, it grew more and more obvious that her mother had wished for a different child, and for a time Wesley tried to be that for them, trimming her weeds and her ivy, and planting her roots where the young ladies of Rhodes were meant to plant them. But she was always honeysuckle on a vine — obtrusive — whereas they were fragrant magnolias, all in a mass upon the town.
All throughout school, throughout her hardening, time was marked by the passage of underhanded deals and violence between the Adler and the Wyatt families. The whole town’s history was marked by this feud, and all who lived in the county seemed inclined to take sides. Wesley, however, cared little for taking sides and staking claims. She always seemed to have her hands dirty, sticking her nose in the nearest source of gossip and trouble. Young Wesley knew more than she was meant to — but she tended to her secrets like little pets, holding them close, keeping them safe. She wrote it all down, turning a little girl’s diary into a compilation of a story that simply kept unfolding.
A story that occasionally took a turn when she dared sidle into her father’s study and inquire about her ‘real family’.
“We are your real family, Wesley Evangeline,” he’d say, “and don’t you forget it.”
And she couldn’t argue. Of all of them, she’d take her father, and call him such.
Wesley and Honey graduated in the same class, though Wesley received only one gift from her father. Her mother, on the other hand, was far too busy planning a party for Honey and her high school sweetheart in town to be bothered with her other child’s celebrations, and so she left it to the patriarch of the house, the one who had insisted upon her in the first place. He gave her a blank journal and a fountain pen, one he claimed had been passed down from Adler boy to Adler boy, from one to the next. She’d laughed at this, grateful and ever so pleased, for her father understood. While Honey was gifted frivolous things, her father understood. And so her notebook of secrets was shoved beneath her bed and forgotten about, the crisp journal and old pen taking their place as she packed her bags for university.
Honey married her high school sweetheart and became the most prominent member of the church; Wesley was invited to the wedding, but the invitation ever so conveniently reached her dorm in Boston mere days beforehand. It was a deliberate move, an exclusionary one, and Wesley could only scrape enough money together to send Honey a card and some flowers. She was far too consumed by the imminence of her own life to care much for an invitation that was never meant to be; Wesley knew that her father would have wanted her to stay, to not be sucked back into Rhodes, for he wrote her periodically, telling her of everything but that which she could read about in the newspapers.
She had found her own calling away from it, falling into the world head-first and landing at a run. A job photographing a local theater, and writing reviews to boot, turned to a back-breaking writing job at a small paper — a paper which learned quickly that good stories came from letting Wesley do whatsoever she pleased. A scrappy young thing, Wesley was hardly concerned with ethics, her methods bordering on illegal in most instances. Her fervor and unwavering truth was divisive amongst her readers; some found her abrasive, and others found her refreshing. The passage of time, for she had thrown herself into her work wholeheartedly, was marked by letters from her father. She wrote back with the fountain pen, and signed with looping script; he had always done the same.
And she wondered if here, in the throes of mystery and investigation, she could find the answers to her own mystery.
The first time she returned to Rhodes in years was at her sister’s behest once more. She looked lovely in her coffin, though they’d not done her curls the way she had liked them in school. Of course, there was no way for Wesley to know what she did or didn’t like now — she’d not spoken to Honey Adler — no, Cartwright now — in years. But she returned at the first word of her sister’s passing, and upon hearing the circumstances of her death, she turned her rental car right about and parked outside the bar on the outskirts of town. She had refused to stay at home, instead renting a room at a motel in order to avoid her mother, who had become a cruel husk in the wake of Honey’s death. Her father checked in on her, but ultimately left her to seek Honey’s absolution at the bottom of a bottle, shutting himself in his study.
Wesley arrived home on the day of the funeral to find her father’s associates collected in his study, with the door shut. Honey had been found dead on Wyatt property, they said — and the police was willing to do very little about it. Wesley had learned early on to put little stock in the police; but it became abundantly clear that here they resided in the pocket of the Wyatt patriarch. The cause of her death remained unknown to her; it was brutal, they’d said, and she did not want to know much more.
The week following Honey’s funeral was a blur; Wesley, whether she meant to be or not, found herself drunk by noon each day, storming about with her journal and pen, acting as if this would be as easy a solve as the mysteries she fell into back home. None in Rhodes took to her sleuthing well, avoiding her even in the grocery store aisles. The Adlers and the Wyatts had become marked, for something even more sinister than Wesley’s drunken vendettas hung over the town, though they could not place their fingers on it. It came in the form of a fire on the seventh day, the Wyatt property going up in flame in the dead of night. At the very same time, her father disappeared; while the town flew into a godly panic, watching as the Wyatt family burned along with their storied mansion, their crop fields, their barns — from which the animals all fled — he packed a small suitcase and disappeared into the night, leaving Winifred alone and afraid.
All but one of the Wyatt family died in the fire, but Wesley cared little for them. The blame had all been placed upon her father, the weight of the ages-old feud laden all at once upon his shoulders. He was a convenient scapegoat; even Wesley knew not why he had fled. She ravaged his study, believing that he would leave her clues as to where he had gone, where she should meet him, what he had done — anything. But there was very little.
But there was, amidst it all, Chicago.
Though Wesley had, at first, come to Chicago to search for her father, she has found herself entrenched in a war much more brutal than the one she had been born into. She could only assume that her father had his fingers in the mix somewhere amidst it all, and after over a year of living in the big city, she has lost sight of her original intent. The scandal, the danger, the sense of paradise lost amongst the Faction and the Kovali is what she feels she was born for, born to expose. It is this kind of feud that kills sisters and sends fathers away; she was meant to bleed it all to the bones and show their true faces. She has lost sight of her search for her father, and she can no longer feel sorry for it. Perhaps this was what he meant her to do; were she more focused, were she not blinded by the fervor, she might consider it. It has become somewhat of an obsession; she was so very unappreciated until now, but the people of Chicago eat her truth like candy. It has gone to her head, somewhat; her methods are not entirely by the book, and she is as foolhardy and daredevil as they come. But she is a strong woman in a man’s world, and she holds herself as if bearing armor and weapons in droves. Any sense of self-preservation left when her father did. But she is here, she is exposing them all, and she will bring truth to a city built upon a graveyard of lies. She’s a hero now, flying close to the sun — but all heroes fall eventually.
Though Wesley had, at first, come to Chicago to search for her father, she has found herself entrenched in a war much more brutal than the one she had been born into. She could only assume that her father had his fingers in the mix somewhere amidst it all, and after over a year of living in the big city, she has lost sight of her original intent. The scandal, the danger, the sense of paradise lost amongst the Faction and the Kovali is what she feels she was born for, born to expose. It is this kind of feud that kills sisters and sends fathers away; she was meant to bleed it all to the bones and show their true faces. She has lost sight of her search for her father, and she can no longer feel sorry for it. Perhaps this was what he meant her to do; were she more focused, were she not blinded by the fervor, she might consider it.
And if it was what was meant for her, what she had been born to become, she fulfilled Icarus’s too-hot and too-fast destiny with pen-sword brandished and a blaze upon her soul. Who was she to ignore the bold and bare face of truth as it appeared to her then? A trail of smoke from a gun freshly hot, a body of undeniable proof, a name and face attached to the horrors of the war that soiled Chicago’s streets - Wesley was to be the harbinger of divine justice, and she was harsh and unforgiving with her words. Writing the story about the Sacrificed child – though they had years upon Wesley in both lifetimes and in experience – was an easy decision, though she made a concerted point to omit the fact that the tip, the tipping point, had been administered to her, placed upon her doorstep for her to find. She cared nothing for the Kovali, nothing for what her conscience might ask of her after taking an anonymous hint with no source. But it had made her a hero – or so they all said, in the papers and on the streets – and this changed her, pulled her up to the sun and down into the gutter (in Hades, willingly, wantingly) in equal measure. This was a turning point; no longer was she the nameless reporter, sloshing through the gutters to find glimmers of truth. She was the harbinger of the inevitable – and it was intoxicating.
Her intentions were good, of course; she is not malicious, nor is she hateful. But she hates what they stand for, and she would hate herself for ignoring the signs plopped ever so fruitfully into her lap. This is her job, after all. To put nails in coffins; it’s only justice.
It has become somewhat of an obsession; she was so very unappreciated until now, but the people of Chicago eat her truth like candy. It has gone to her head, somewhat; her methods are not entirely by the book, and she is as foolhardy and daredevil as they come. But she is a strong woman in a man’s world, and she holds herself as if bearing armor and weapons in droves. Any sense of self-preservation left when her father did. But she is here, she is exposing them all, and she will bring truth to a city built upon a graveyard of lies. She’s a hero now, flying close to the sun — but all heroes fall eventually. And what goes around will surely come around again.
(+): Pioneering + Quick-Witted + Caring
(-): Impatient - Quick-Tempered - Tactless
