Free Mercy Street by Mariah Stewart Page A

flip side of poverty was crime, and over the past few years Conroy had had more than its fair share of both.
    “If you know the town, you know how important it is for some of these families to send a child to college. Ryan would have been our first too. Temple University. Big-time for us, you know? They wanted him to come out for football. One of the assistant coaches came here to watch him play last fall, called the house a couple of times, too.” Her eyes flashed angrily, and she clenched her fists. “This is Ryan’s golden opportunity to go places no one in his family has gone, understand? Smart, handsome, athletic, talented—the sky’s the limit for a kid like him.” Mary shook her head adamantly. “No way would he have thrown away his future for a thousand dollars. No way…”
    “I’ve thought the same thing, Mary,” Mallory said thoughtfully. “There just doesn’t seem to be a motive for either Courtney or Ryan to have been the shooter.”
    “That’s what I’m telling you. Just like I told that detective they sent over to talk to me, but all he was interested in was where did I think Ryan would go if he was running for his life.”
    “
Is
there a place he’d go? To hide? A relative? A friend or a friend of the family?” Mallory asked.
    “No one that I can think of, and I have tried. I haven’t much family. My only sister died five years ago. My husband died in 1987. My daughter…” Mary’s eyes clouded with pain. “I lost my only child shortly after that.”
    “I’m sorry, I’m confused,” Mallory said. “I thought your daughter was Ryan’s mother.”
    “She was. When I say ‘lost,’ I mean lost to me. Before her father died, Kathleen was hard to handle. After his death, she became impossible to control.”
    “How did he die?”
    “Car accident. He was working the night shift at the paper mill and was driving home in a storm. A tree uprooted and fell just as he was passing under it. He died a few days later.”
    “I’m so sorry,” Mallory said.
    Mary shrugged. “It had to have been God’s will. Otherwise, the tree would have fallen on someone else, you know?”
    “A lot of kids have problems after losing a parent,” Mallory told her. “Kathleen had problems since the day she was born. She wasn’t an easy baby, never liked to be held much. The terrible twos? Doesn’t even begin to tell the story. Fussed all the time, cried, threw tantrums to get what she wanted. As soon as she learned to talk, she was talking back. She was always very strong-willed and contrary.” Mary blew out a long breath, her eyes sad. “The truth is, she wasn’t a particularly likable child. Some kids just aren’t.”
    “That’s true, Mary,” Father Burch agreed. “Some children are more of a challenge than others.”
    “Well, I’m afraid I wasn’t always up to that challenge, that’s the God’s truth. I never knew how to handle her on the best of days, but after John died, things more or less fell apart. I fell apart,” she told them, “and Kathleen, well, she just fell. Unfortunately, with her father gone, there was no one there to catch her. She caught up with a bad crowd, moved out of the house on her sixteenth birthday, and I didn’t see her again for almost two years.”
    “That must have been very hard on you,” Mallory said.
    “It was harder after she came back.” Mary smiled ruefully. “She had Ryan when she was seventeen. Stopped at the house with him when he was just a couple of months old. She never even told me who his father was. Well, of course, I wanted her to stay, told her I’d send her back to school to finish up, I’d take care of the baby. For a while, she might have even thought about it. But one morning I woke up and they were both gone. Last I heard of her until the detectives from Philadelphia rang my doorbell one day to tell me they’d found her dead of an overdose and not to worry about my grandson because he was in foster care but the baby’s father