Her grandfather had told her, before his disappearance, that Morris was running with a very tough crowd and he thought the boy was using drugs. He didn’t want Clancey and Tad exposed to his friends, who sometimes showed up at the house when Clancey was at work. He’d been going out in the afternoons, after work, to talk to people about the gang Morris was getting mixed up with. He found a man who said he knew that Morris was using, and he also knew who was supplying the drugs. Her grandfather said that he was going to meet the man the next day after work and get the names from him.

Her grandfather didn’t come home from work the next day. They searched, but they didn’t find him. Clancey had bawled when they finally realized he was never coming back. So had Tad. Morris had been stiff lipped and silent, like his father. Clancey was suspicious of both of them. Neither had liked her grandfather. She was certain that Morris, at least, had some idea what had happened to the old man.

The charges against Morris were serious, because, in addition to beating up Clancey and Tad with a weapon, Morris had attacked the police officer who tried to handcuff him, yelling that it wasn’t his fault, that they were framing him. Assault on a police officer was another felony, added to the two he was already being indicted for. Morris only had a public defender who, though eager, had little experience of trying cases. Ben was anguished that he couldn’t afford a classy lawyer to help his son beat the rap.

A year after his arrest, because the court system moved slowly, Morris was found guilty of second-degree assault and battery, and assault on Clancey and Tad, and assault on a police officer, and resisting arrest. He was sentenced to six years in prison after Clancey reluctantly took the witness stand and told the jury what Morris had done to her little brother and herself. There were photos of both of them, taken after the incident, which helped prove the case.

The trial had almost killed Ben, who was a maintenance man for a local corporation and didn’t make much money. He couldn’t afford to even go and see his son, sent to a penal facility hundreds of miles away. It made him even more bitter.

Ben had died soon after Morris went to prison, when Clancey was nineteen, in a freak accident, after he’d gone to some apartments nearby to talk to a man who had some information about the thugs that Morris had been running with. He told Clancey that Morris had been on drugs when he hit her, and that he was going to find out who had been supplying him. If he couldn’t get his son out of prison, he was going to make the people who gave Morris the drugs pay for it.