“Not too much, now,” Mariano cautions. “The nurse is calling your house, and then she’ll bring in some broth. Joyce and your brothers were here all day, but I convinced them to let me take the night shift.”
All day? “How long have I been asleep?”
“Over twenty-four hours. The doctor gave you some pretty strong stuff.” Mariano’s fingertips brush back my hair. “You were so brave, Piper. I’m so sorry for how long it took me to get to you.”
“How did you find me in the first place? You seemed to magically appear. I thought I might be dreaming you.”
“I was at your house when your friend Johnny Walker called. He found your locket, recognized the picture of Lydia, and called.” Mariano’s smile is wry. “He’d kept your number all these weeks. You make an impression.”
“But how did he find it?”
“Alana—or Maeve, actually—lives above his lunchroom.” Mariano’s voice softens. “She was there that day. Do you remember? The waitress who dropped the mugs.”
Yes. I see the moment clearly for the first time. Alana in her Johnny’s Lunchroom outfit. Her long frame crouched over the ceramics she shattered when Johnny said Lydia’s name. The sorrow in her eyes when she said she was sorry about my friend.
“You wouldn’t expect it of him, but Johnny was near tears tonight after we found you. He said he thinks he even saw Alana take Lydia up to her apartment. Said she was carrying her up, unconscious. Alana claimed she was her niece from Kansas, who didn’t know how to handle Chicago booze. I guess he was pretty ossified himself that night. Didn’t put it all together until he found your locket in the stairwell, called your house, and learned Alana had taken you.”
“But why were you at my house? How did you even know?”
“I hear our sleeping beauty is awake,” sings a nurse as she bustles into the room. She carries a tray to the bedside, and smiles down at me. “You’ve given us all quite a scare. Your friend has been asking if you’re awake every time I go in there.”
“My friend?”
“Emma Crane,” Mariano says. “She woke up from surgery this afternoon.”
I didn’t know I had the energy for it, but for the first time in my life, I burst into tears of joy.
“It was the most surreal experience I’ve ever had.” Emma’s cheeks are flushed as she recounts the details of that afternoon. “I must have been out cold for a bit, because when I woke up, you were gone.”
I shudder involuntarily, and my body rewards me with a spike of pain in my two cracked ribs. Mariano frowns at me in the overly concerned way I’ve become accustomed to these last few days in the hospital, and I do my best to put on a smile.
It must be convincing enough, because Mariano turns back to Emma. “Fainting probably saved your life.”
“Probably. Alana was clearly not in her right mind.”
Leave it to Emma Crane to describe a woman wielding a gun in such delicate terms.
“From our understanding, Maeve hasn’t been in her right mind for some time.” Mariano pulls his notebook from his breast pocket and flips it open. “She’s one of thirteen children born to a farmer out in Liberal, Kansas. Her father was a drinker, and her mother had a reputation around town. Maeve and her older sister escaped to Kansas City in their late teens to teach. Maeve met Alan Burk, the oldest son of small-time mobster Jim Burk, and they married pretty quickly.
“They had only been married a few months when Alan died during a delivery. The family blamed their employee, Jacob Dunn, who we knew as Matthew, for his death. Jacob knew enough to get out of town and to keep a low profile. From what we’ve been able to piece together so far—Maeve’s older sister has been very helpful—Maeve went a little crazy after losing Alan. She lost the baby she was carrying, and fixated on revenge. She’s spent this last year trying to find Matthew and make him pay.”
A silence falls over the room, and Mariano tucks his notebook back into his pocket.
Pain pokes at my side, and I shift my weight. “And Lydia and Emma just got caught in the crossfire.”
“You too, Piper,” Emma says. “She did quite a bit of damage to you too.”
“She didn’t shoot me.”
“Well, she didn’t drag my face along the gravel and haul me off in her car.”
My fingers brush the thick bandage covering most of my right cheek. “Anyway. You were telling a story. You had just woken up from being shot.”
“Oh, right. In retrospect, it seems like I should have been thinking about the pain, but I really wasn’t. It was like I hadn’t discovered it yet, or something.” Emma chuckles, and then flinches and repositions herself in her wheelchair. “I figured it out when I tried to get up and go to the telephone, though. I’m just glad she decided to shoot me in your father’s office, where the telephone was ten feet away, because even that took forever.”
“Very considerate of her,” Mariano says drily.
“I called Jeremiah, who thought you and I were playing a prank on him. I swear, I thought I’d never convince him to come over.”