“Sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you,” he said. “Shane Kearney told me you were both over here. I thought I’d join you.”

I wanted to tell him it wasn’t his sudden appearance that startled me; it was the mention of Nora’s name. My heart had missed a beat, and a sick feeling had come over me. Had I heard him correctly?

“What did you say her name was?”

“Nora Sweeney.”

“How do you know?”

“I met her out at the oil field. She was with an unsavory character named Grissom. He said they were friends, but I saw her arguing with him as they walked away.”

I hardly heard what he was saying. My head spun so alarmingly, I thought I might faint. Surely this woman couldn’t be my sister. Nora was dead. I had seen her drown. I heard Aidan and Mayflower’s voices as if through a fog.

“Whoever she is, she’s been trying to buy up our leases, particularly the ones that will expire at the end of the month.” Aidan breathed a deep sigh. “If she succeeds, this could be the last straw. She could ruin us.”

“We ain’t gonna let that happen,” said Mayflower. “We need to find out who she’s working for. I’d wager Shane Kearney knows. He seems to know everything goes on in this town.”

Ignoring the urgency in Aidan’s voice, I went back to Nora Sweeney.

“What did she look like? Did she say where she was from?”

Aidan looked at me. “What?”

“Nora Sweeney. What did she look like?”

‘Pretty, dark hair, slender, about your age. She had an Irish brogue and said she was from County Cork. I asked if she knew you; she said she didn’t, and that Sweeney was a common name.”

I tried to think. Nora was buxom, not slender. And this woman was from Cork. Besides, Nora would never traipse around muddy oil fields talking to poor farmers. And if she was really in Texas, she wouldn’t be staying at Kearney’s hotel. She’d be staying in Dallas at a fine hotel like the Adolphus. My panic began to ease. It had to be someone else entirely. But as I tried to convince myself, my own words came back to me. In New York hadn’t I told the Boyles that Sweeney was a common name in order to throw them off the scent? Could that have been what this Nora Sweeney was doing as well? The thought lingered in my head.

I turned my attention to Mayflower and Aidan.

“We can’t just sit here and allow this hussy to ruin us,” Mayflower said.

Aidan put his head in his hands. “To tell you the truth, I don’t much care anymore. It’s Lily I’m worried about and the business be damned.”