The Cantaloupe Thief Read Free Page A

slicing kick-started a slide into staleness.
    She pulled into Liam’s parking lot with five minutes to spare. She saw his eight-year-old SUV, apparently a requirement for dads of soccer players. Liam was carpool dad times two, with his children Charlie and Chan finishing their senior year at Grambling High East.
    Branigan smiled at the names, as she did every time she thought of Liam’s striking offspring. Liam and his wife Liz had no intention of naming their children after the fictional Chinese detective. They named the girl Charlotte after Liam’s great-grandmother, the boy Chandler after a family name they discovered in Liz’s ancestral tree. Leave it to seventh-graders to get Charlie and Chan out of that. So that’s who they’d been since middle school. Charlie and Chan, the Delaney twins. That’s what most people thought anyway.
    But a few family friends knew they weren’t twins at all, but first cousins. Liz was twenty-four and pregnant with Charlie when Liam’s teenage sister, well on her way to becoming a heroin addict, turned up pregnant. Shauna Delaney refused to name the father, and threatened to have an abortion. Liam’s parents begged her to reconsider, promising they would care for their grandchild. But it was Liz who finally persuaded the fragile young girl. She and Liam offered to raise the baby as a sibling to their own. Shauna, who worshiped her older brother, consented. Hours after the birth, she relinquished the baby and disappeared from the hospital. Liam’s family hadn’t seen her since.
    Since Chan was just six months younger than Charlie, they were in the same grade at school, and most people assumed they were twins. Liam and Liz certainly treated them the same, and so did Liam’s grateful parents. It was not until Chan turned a gangly twelve and began to develop the long muscular legs that would serve him so well running a soccer defense that Branigan had the first inkling of who his father might be. For she had known his father when he was twelve.
    The homeless shelter showed signs of Liam’s five years on the job. It was a Big Box, a sprawling, high-ceilinged, one-level former grocery store. The city had been delighted to get the food store twenty years earlier. But after seven years and profits much lower than its suburban stores, the chain abruptly pulled out, leaving an empty shell and city council members appalled that their predecessors hadn’t ensured an exit penalty.
    For six years, the building sat empty, an eyesore and graffiti magnet. Well, empty if you didn’t count its homeless residents who broke in and built fires and left trash piles heavy on whiskey bottles and malt liquor cans. All told, it was a mess that defied the mayor’s efforts to attract developers to its promising location six blocks west of Main Street.
    A suburban church interested in inner-city ministry ultimately sought it out as a satellite campus. Such a use wasn’t the city’s first choice, but council members figured it was better than an empty storefront. Unfortunately, the newcomers understood little about the lives of the homeless and mentally ill and addicted who lived in proximity to the satellite campus. They went through three pastors in quick succession.
    Liam was the fourth, a former Rambler reporter and seminary grad, his only experience a single stint as youth minister. He took the struggling mission church as a last-ditch effort by the mother church; the missions committee made it clear they were leaning toward closing it within eighteen months.
    As Liam told the story, he didn’t know enough to understand what would and wouldn’t work. He began by looking at the property as a homeowner, wanting to create a more visually welcoming space by breaking up its monotonous asphalt and concrete. He recruited students from his and Branigan’s alma mater, Grambling High East, to perform student service hours; they dug up dead