The last of his restlessness faded away, and he was in a better frame of mind when he arrived at the hospital. The men’s ward was a long room with twelve beds on each wall, divided by a wide aisle. Metal chairs separated each bed, and there was no privacy. Ailments ranged from broken bones and blood disorders to a case of shingles.
Liam was the only stabbing victim. His liver had been badly sliced, requiring some internal stitches, plus thirty stitches on his abdomen to patch him back up. The loss of blood made him weak, and the nurses had been bringing him glasses of beef juice mixed with bone marrow to restore his blood.
Liam looked ashen and ghastly as Patrick pulled up a chair and sat. “How are you feeling?”
“Like a dead man,” Liam said weakly, and his gaze flicked to Patrick’s splinted hand. “You?”
“I’ve been better,” he admitted. “It looks like we’re both going to survive.”
If possible, Liam wilted even further against the sheets as his eyes drifted closed. “Yeah,” he finally said. “Thanks for what you did. I’m grateful.”
Liam’s tone was weak and despondent, and Patrick didn’t have any words of comfort because they both understood the implications of what had happened last night. Someone wanted Liam dead, and last night’s attack was probably just the beginning.
Over the coming days, the police investigation into the attack failed to make progress, even though they had the abandoned knife used to attack Liam. It was a hunting knife with a carving of deer antlers on the handle, but no one in Pittsburgh recognized the make of the knife or where it might have been purchased.
A man named Lenny Phelps was the only assailant who’d been captured alive, and he cracked under questioning. He said the ringleader of the group was the redheaded man who got away. Phelps claimed he and his dead friend had been hired only an hour before the attack and had been promised a thousand dollars to carry out the deed. The only other thing Phelps knew about the ringleader was that he’d been hired by someone in New York City, because the three of them were supposed to go to Manhattan to collect payment after the deed was done. Unless they could catch that redheaded man, they had no way of knowing who ordered the attack or if they would try again.
That meant Liam had to be guarded around the clock. The chairs on either side of his bed were constantly filled. Janet sat in one, and brawny men from the steelworks rotated shifts in the other. At first the hospital tried to enforce visiting hours, but someone from the local union paid a visit to the hospital administrator to make him think better of it.
The following week in Pittsburgh could have been torture as Patrick felt his new clients in New York dwindle away, but it turned out to be a blessing. After his two-hour shift at Liam’s bedside each morning, Patrick headed straight back to the church.
Father Murry, the man who heard Patrick’s confession, was building a school on the back of the property and always needed free labor. Patrick worked alongside other volunteers to mix concrete and lay bricks. On the days it was too rainy to build, Patrick helped Father Murry set up a system to keep his school accounts separate from the church ledger. After all, Patrick had gone to law school with the intention of managing church real estate and investments. It felt good to sink back into church work again.
In the evenings, he dined with Father Murry. He confided everything to the old priest, including his guilt for having taken a college education and three years of seminary training, then failing to follow through into the priesthood.
“Do you regret leaving?” the old priest asked.
Patrick shook his head. “I want to marry. I want to be a husband and a father so badly it keeps me awake at night. When I finally sleep, I dream of a family. They are nameless and faceless . . . but the desire to love and be loved is strong. No, I don’t regret leaving.”
“Is there a woman in particular?”
Gwen Kellerman seemed perfect. Each time they were together on the fire escape, it felt like he’d met the perfect match for his soul, but a marriage meant more than two people. It meant the joining of families and communities, and in that area, he didn’t know if they could survive the firestorm.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “There’s a woman I care for, but she’s far above me.”
“The ground is always level at the foot of the cross,” Father Murry said, but Patrick merely grunted. He could accept that they were all equal in the eyes of God, but it was the eyes of the world that worried him.
“I owe her for an expensive medical procedure, and not being able to pay eats at me. A man should pay his debts.”
Father Murry gestured to the half-finished school outside the rectory. “I’m taking from you. You’ve been donating your labor to the school and haven’t asked for a dime in compensation.”
“That’s different.”
“Indeed it is. When you figure out the perfect way to balance the scale of debts and obligations, I hope you’ll let me know. And, Patrick, a word of friendly advice: don’t let your pride blind you to the blessings God has dropped in your path.”
Nine days after the assault, Patrick helped Liam walk out of the hospital and into a carriage to take him home. So far, he hadn’t told Gwen anything about the attack. He didn’t want to alarm her until he could be sure about Liam’s parentage, and that meant it was time to pin Janet down about the truth.
The journey exhausted Liam, who sat on the sofa in the home where he grew up. Pillows kept him propped in place, and Frank the dog lay sprawled on the floor, useless for anything but comfort. Liam was too weak to argue, so Patrick did the questioning.
“Who do you think has a motive to kill Liam?” he asked.
“It was probably some sort of labor dispute,” Janet said, her knitting needles flying like mad, but she wouldn’t meet his eyes.
Patrick scoffed. “The ringleader came from New York, and whoever ordered the hit has deep pockets. The odds are good they will come after Liam again, and we need to know why.”
“I don’t know why!” Janet said, her needles clicking faster. Patrick had been questioning her for an hour, and she was getting more and more agitated.
“Please tell the truth, Ma,” Liam said. “I’ll love you no matter what.”
Janet’s face crumpled, her eyes squeezing shut and her lower lip wobbling, but her knitting didn’t slow. Janet Malone knew the truth. She either gave birth to Liam or took him in as a three-year-old, and Patrick sensed she wasn’t telling him the truth. He tried a different angle.
“How old was Liam when you first saw him?” he asked.
The needles finally stopped, and her hands dropped to her lap. Her head was low, and she didn’t look at him.
“I don’t know,” she whispered. “He was sick. Dying.”
Liam stiffened, his expression tense and alert. His mother kept talking.
“I was terrified,” she said. “Mick was on the run, and he gave the boy to my husband, swearing us both to secrecy. We knew who he was, but my husband said it felt good to have a little revenge on the Blackstones, and I was never much for standing up to Crocket Malone.”
The tension drained out of Liam, and he sagged, staring into the distance. His expression was impossible to read. Anger? Relief? It seemed to frighten Janet, and she rushed to continue her story.