Inner Harbor Read Free

School didn’t bother him any. He breezed his way through when he decided to go.
    No drugs. Stella said that in a cool voice that made Phillip reevaluate her as he put on his most angelic expression and said a polite No, ma’am. He had no doubt that when he wanted a hit, he’d be able to find a source, even in some bumfuck town on the Bay.
    Then Stella leaned over the bed, her eyes shrewd, her mouth smiling thinly.
    You have a face that belongs on a Renaissance painting. But that doesn’t make you less of a thief, a hoodlum, and a liar. We’ll help you if you want to be helped. But don’t treat us like imbeciles.
    And Ray laughed his big, booming laugh. He squeezed Stella’s shoulder and Phillip’s at the same time. It would be, Phillip remembered he’d said, a rare treat to watch the two of them butt heads for the next little while.
    They came back several times over the next two weeks. Phillip talked with them and with the social worker, who’d been much easier to con than the Quinns.
    In the end they took him home from the hospital, to the pretty white house by the water. He met their sons, assessed the situation. When he learned that the other boys, Cameron and Ethan, had been taken in much as he had been, he was certain they were all lunatics.
    He figured on biding his time. For a doctor and a college professor they hadn’t collected an abundance of easily stolen or fenced valuables. But he scoped out what there was.
    Instead of stealing from them, he fell in love with them. He took their name and spent the next ten years in the house by the water.
    Then Stella had died, and part of his world dropped away. She had become the mother he’d never believed existed. Steady, strong, loving, and shrewd. He grieved for her, that first true loss of his life. He buried part of that grief in work, pushing his way through college, toward a goal of success and a sheen of sophistication—and an entry-level position at Innovations.
    He didn’t intend to remain on the bottom rung for long.
    Taking the position at Innovations in Baltimore was a small personal triumph. He was going back to the city of his misery, but he was going back as a man of taste. No one seeing the man in the tailored suit would suspect that he’d once been a petty thief, a sometime drug dealer, and an occasional prostitute.
    Everything he’d gained over the last seventeen years could be traced back to that moment when Ray and Stella Quinn had walked into his hospital room.
    Then Ray had died suddenly, leaving shadows that had yet to be washed with the light. The man Phillip had loved as completely as a son could love a father had lost his life on a quiet stretch of road in the middle of the day when his car had met a telephone pole at high speed.
    There was another hospital room. This time it was the Mighty Quinn lying broken in the bed with machines gasping. Phillip, along with his brothers, had made a promise to watch out for and to keep the last of Ray Quinn’s strays, another lost boy.
    But this boy had secrets, and he looked at you with Ray’s eyes.
    The talk around the waterfront and the neighborhoods of the little town of St. Christopher’s on Maryland’s Eastern Shore hinted of adultery, of suicide, of scandal. In the six months since the whispers had started, Phillip felt that he and his brothers had gotten no closer to finding the truth. Who was Seth DeLauter and what had he been to Raymond Quinn?
    Another stray? Another half-grown boy drowning in a vicious sea of neglect and violence who so desperately needed a lifeline? Or was he more? A Quinn by blood as well as by circumstance?
    All Phillip could be sure of was that ten-year-old Seth was his brother as much as Cam and Ethan were his brothers. Each of them had been snatched out of a nightmare and given a chance to change their lives.
    With Seth, Ray and Stella weren’t there to keep that choice open.
    There was a part of