“Come on,” I said to the child. “There’s plenty for the two of us. I, for one, am famished with hunger.”

She shook her head and sat down in an armchair. It was hard to eat with her staring at me. At last I had an idea. Didn’t most children like to draw? I knew I did when I was young. I got up and fetched some paper and a pen from the desk and handed them to her. She took them without a word and went over to a wee table beside the window, sat down and began to draw.

My appetite disappeared. I pushed away the tray and sipped a cup of tea. The clock chimed ten. I sighed. What was I going to do with this child for another four hours?

I decided to take a long, sudsy bath. Who knew when I’d get the chance to have another one? I locked and bolted the door in case the child took the notion to escape. I didn’t want to face Kearney if I lost her. I took my time in the bath. After I dried myself off I fixed my hair, put on some makeup and sprayed myself with the scent I’d bought at Neiman-Marcus. How long ago that seemed.

When I went back into the living room the wee one was still drawing pictures. I crept over to look at them. When I picked one up my heart almost stopped. The picture was of a ranch, with the stick figure of a girl, and scrawled beside it was the name Delia.

“Holy Mother of God,” I said aloud.

I looked at the child, remembering the posters I had seen in Shotgun City. “Is your name Lily O’Hanlon?”

She nodded at me without a word.

Delia

Delia

I’d been sitting daydreaming about my night with Aidan when Mayflower showed up without warning, as was her habit, and announced she was taking me to lunch. She had something important to tell me, she said.

Once we were seated outside the café across the street—the one where I had lost Lily—she looked around to make sure no one was listening and started to talk.

“I heard tell there’s some highfalutin’ woman in town trying to buy leases for a company nobody ’round here ever heard of. From what I hear, she’s good at seducing men into signing up with her. All silk and flounces and sweet talk. I’d say this isn’t her first rodeo.”

“Is she hurting Aidan and Hans’s business?”

“She sure is,” said Mayflower, “although she’s going after other folks’ leases as well.”

My temper rose. How dare somebody set out to deliberately destroy Aidan?

“D’you know her name?”

“No, not yet,” said Mayflower.

“Her name is Nora Sweeney,” said a voice behind me.

I swung around. There stood Aidan.