Sins of Our Fathers

Ten years ago, Earl, the father of Norma, then 16, bludgeoned Pastor Jeremiah Binns to death in Pennsylvania farm country. Pastor Binns, the father of Duane, Earl’s foster son at the time, then 14, was at the farm on one of his infrequent visits. Earl was executed at the Merienville State prison. In the present, Duane, now 24, and living and working as an apprentice carpenter in Lancaster, Pennsylvania is determined to make sense of why Earl committed the murder. In Duane’s unravelling of the family mystery, Duane suspects that Norma, now 26, an alluring but an opportunist living on the ragged edge of life in Lancaster, played a central role in the events leading to his father’s death. He confirms his suspicions about Norma’s involvement and needs to confront her with the evidence of her complicity. In the meantime, Norma is in possession of a key to a strongbox holding millions of dollars skimmed by Marvin, a local mobster’s ‘accountant’ and a former john who died of a heart attack during Norma’s last encounter with him. The key had been pinned to Marvin’s wallet. While she frantically searches for the strongbox, she loses the key to Duane by chance. Duane is innocently unaware of its significance. A dirty local Detective Lieutenant who, for his own but not altogether dirty reasons, is beholden to the local mobster is, under the guise of holding Norma to account for the theft of Marvin’s things after his death, angling to retrieve the stolen millions for the local mobster. Suddenly, all of the principals, the local mobster, the Lieutenant and Duane have their sights on Norma, but for different reasons: the local mobster because he senses that the Lieutenant’s loyalties have now shifted to splitting the dirty money with Norma; the Lieutenant because he needs to restore the dirty money to the local mobster on whom he relies financially for keeping his paraplegic boy, Jake, in an expensive care home; and Duane because he needs to pull together the last piece of the murder puzzle. Norma feels the presence of those tracking her, the noose tightening. Also tracking her is the FBI: she is the lynchpin to its investigation of the local mobster, Marvin’s manifest, and the Lieutenant’s suspicious, involvement with the local mobster. In the collision of competing interests, all the principals are put in desperate and dire straits. The resolution to the heist of the dirty money, from Norma’s and the local mobster’s perspectives turn on the aphorism: ‘all that glitters is not gold’, the Lieutenant’s perspective on the redemption afforded by his admirable dedication to Jake and Duane’s perspective on resolving the murder once and for all. Aided by flashbacks to the farm 10 years before, Duane learns that young Norma, in a frenzy born of a guilt-ridden rejection of her by the pastor in the pastor’s bed in the middle of the night, had struck the first blow to the head of Pastor Binns with a piece of firewood. A blow that Earl, just then coming onto the scene, and filled with an uncompromising religious rectitude, followed up with the killing blows.