The kid looked half-dead. His skin was pasty white and covered in sweat. His eyes stared off into space like they didn’t see anything anymore. He was wheezing, and it sounded like death had already settled in his lungs. The men spoke in Italian, and I couldn’t understand a word they said, but I knew that boy was in trouble. I also knew he was the Blackstone boy because he had those pale green eyes like all the reward notices wrote about. I risked my life by stepping forward and offering to fetch a doctor for the lad. It took the men by surprise. One of them dropped the kid, and another came at me swinging. I ducked, but someone clobbered me from behind, and it was lights out after that. When I came back around, I’d been hauled out into the alley like yesterday’s trash and left to die in the cold. The men and the kid were gone. That was the last I saw of the Blackstone boy.

A crushing weight of sadness settled on Gwen’s chest, and the book slipped from her fingers. Her grandfather was right. The passage in the boiler room felt real. It had been brutally cold the week her brother was taken. Maybe his kidnappers intended to return him, but when he sickened, it became too risky. They let her brother die rather than fetch a doctor.

Her father would have liked to have known this. For years her parents had held out hope that a miracle might happen. They used to look into the faces of children playing in the parks. They lit candles in churches. The mystery of William’s disappearance left them forever wondering what had happened to their son.

Now at least Gwen knew. The cowards dared not come forward with his body, and he had probably been buried in a pauper’s grave.

“There’s not much else new in the book,” Frederick said. “Malone claims he didn’t report what he saw in the boiler room because he feared the Italians and if he squealed, they’d know it was him. They framed him, but even after he was arrested, Mick kept quiet for fear the Italians would go after his wife in revenge. So he kept his silence and put his faith in God during his trial.”

The mental image of her brother, wheezing, pale, and dying in a grubby boiler room, gave Gwen a new mission. She didn’t merely want this memoir stopped, she intended to solve the mystery of what had happened to her brother.

And she was going to use Patrick O’Neill to make that happen.

7

Like every Saturday, Patrick served lunch at the Salvation Army soup kitchen, then cleaned up afterward. He was scouring the bottom of a stew kettle when a thick-necked man approached.

“Mrs. Kellerman would like to see you,” he growled.