“I’ve always liked bulldogs. Frank is my third.”
Willy Blackstone had an English bulldog. They were an expensive breed and useless for hunting, guarding, or anything except lumbering a few paces and collapsing for a nap. Willy Blackstone had been out with his bulldog when Mick tempted him over the backyard fence. Liam’s affinity for bulldogs couldn’t prove anything, but it was an interesting detail.
Patrick was eager to get started, and Liam brought the mysterious box hidden beneath his mother’s bed into the main room. It was a battered old shipping box, tattered on the edges and carrying a musty smell. Inside was an explosion of papers and documents.
It was soon apparent why Liam hadn’t been able to make much sense of them. Most were legal forms from Crocket Malone’s various arrests and court appearances, but there were family papers too. Liam had two older brothers, both of whom had died within a week of being born, and the box contained plenty of evidence for both boys. There were birth certificates from a hospital and baptismal certificates from the church. The local union had paid a stipend for the birth of both boys. The baptism certificates were clipped together with a Saint Philomena prayer card, the patron saint for infants and newborns.
“Were you ever baptized?” Patrick asked.
Liam looked momentarily taken aback. “Probably. My mother always made me go to church.”
“There’s no certificate of baptism for you, but both your brothers were baptized.”
“That’s because they were blue babies and a priest showed up the day they were born to get the job done. Not me. According to Mom, I had lungs that could shake the rafters, and they didn’t need to drag a priest out of bed for a rush job.”
Patrick continued sorting the papers. The largest stack was lawsuits filed by Crocket Malone suing neighbors, his employers, and even the local newspaper that wrote articles critical of his labor union. The second-largest stack was Crocket’s arrests. Patrick held up a legal filing for when Crocket was charged with smashing windows at a mill.
“How come your dad got arrested so much?”
Liam snorted. “Because Crocket Malone liked busting heads and causing trouble.” He nodded to the document with a grin. “I was with him that day. It was kind of fun, until a swarm of cops showed up and beat us both into a bloody pulp, but we probably deserved it.”
Patrick looked at the date on the paper. “You must have only been a kid.”
“I was fifteen, and the mill was owned by Andrew Carnegie. My dad said that Andrew Carnegie was the devil and all Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse rolled up into one person, and he deserved whatever trouble we gave him. Besides, if I didn’t help, my dad would have busted my head in.”
Patrick asked the question that had been plaguing him for days. “There was a $100,000 reward for the return of the Blackstone child. Did your dad hate the Blackstones enough to forgo a reward that big just to seek revenge?”
A muscle bunched in Liam’s jaw, and his eyes were dark as he considered the question. “Yeah. He hated them that much.”
A vicious man might take twisted satisfaction in raising the kidnapped child of his enemy in the world created by the Blackstones’ avarice. According to Liam, Crocket took him out of school in the eighth grade and put him to work as a stove-tender, shoveling coal into an open furnace. Liam went to union meetings, where he learned to hate the owners of the steel mills. While normal parents read their children bedtime stories, Crocket showed Liam autopsy photographs of people killed in factory accidents. Someone who would do that to a child might gladly turn away from the reward to carry out his perverse revenge.
They spent two hours examining every piece of paper in the box but found nothing documenting Liam’s life before the age of five. It was frustrating, because the lack of evidence couldn’t prove anything.
But at six o’clock Janet Malone returned home, and then the real battle for proof began.
Liam’s mother was a tiny, birdlike woman with calloused hands, a narrow face, and faded auburn hair rolled into a bun. Liam took the lead in the uncomfortable interrogation. The grilling went on for over an hour, and Janet never budged from her insistence that she was Liam’s natural mother.
“I want the truth,” Liam said, pacing the worn rug before his mother, who sat stonily at the kitchen table with an untouched cup of tea before her. “Why did you baptize Michael and Connor, but not me? Why isn’t there a birth certificate for me?”
“Maybe because I had just delivered a ten-pound baby and didn’t have the strength to pop out of bed and run all over town collecting paperwork,” Janet retorted.
Patrick’s initial instinct had been to protect Janet from Liam’s aggressive tone, but she was a tough, scrappy woman who proved capable of defending herself.
“You took pictures of the other babies, but not me,” Liam said. “Why not?”
“Because the doctor said Connor wouldn’t survive the week, and Michael had already died when we got his picture made,” Janet defended. “There was no fear of you dying. You squalled loud enough to wake the neighbors.”
“I was six years old before you got around to having my picture made,” Liam said. “Why so long?”
Janet folded her arms across her chest. “You don’t know anything about how demanding a baby can be. If you would get married like any decent son your age, you’d have a passel of your own and wouldn’t wonder why I didn’t have the time to take you to a photographer’s studio. Why don’t you settle down with Nora Cunningham? Her ma told me that girl is getting tired of waiting for you.”
“I’m not going to marry Nora Cunningham,” Liam growled.
“Why not? The only chance I have for grandchildren is standing here being stubborn and disrespectful. You need to settle down and start having babies of your own. Then I could—”
A loud banging on the front door interrupted Janet.
“Anyone home?” a man’s voice called from outside. “I need help. Please! I need help.”
Liam seemed eager for the distraction and bounded to the front door in three steps. “I’m not marrying Nora, and that’s the end of it,” he tossed over his shoulder, then yanked the door open.
A wiry man who looked ill and panicked stood on the front stoop. A couple of other men clustered behind him, but Patrick stared at the man in front, who had wiry red hair and the longest nose he’d ever seen.
“Are you Liam Malone?” the redheaded man asked.
“I am. What do you need?”
A knife flashed before plunging straight into Liam’s abdomen. Liam yelled and doubled over, grabbing at the knife before it could plunge again. The other men shoved through the front door, one hefting a sledgehammer above Liam’s head.
Janet screamed, and Patrick vaulted forward to wrench the sledgehammer away, then used it to clobber the invader, who dropped to the ground.
Liam and the redheaded man rolled on the floor. Blood was everywhere, and the knife was raised for another plunge, but Liam held his attacker by the wrist. Before Patrick could help, someone punched him in the head, and he went down.
Pain nearly blinded him, but he’d taken punches before. He sprang up. He couldn’t see straight but unleashed a fierce round of blows at the blurry form of his attacker. Janet’s screams mingled with agonized yells from Liam wrestling for control of the knife.