The Weeping Lore (Witte & Co. Investigations Book 1) Read Free

families piling into Kerry Patch every day, even lumber was becoming a sign of stability—many of the immigrants made do with lean-tos and shanties.
    Over this clutch of hovels rose the spires of St. Patrick and St. Michael the Archangel and St. Bridget of Erin. They stood like needles ready to pierce the scruffy gray clouds, ready to bind earth and heaven. Cian was fairly sure that heaven would need a bit more binding, though, than whatever cheap thread those churches could work up. Even God didn’t want to be too close to Kerry Patch.
    Being a mick himself, born and bred in St. Louis, Cian was a part of Kerry Patch. Knowing which streets to take, which boys to make a joke with, which girls to steer clear of—those things helped keep him out of trouble. For the most part. Someone who wandered into the Patch by mistake, or came looking for trouble, would be lucky to get out with his life.
    As though conjured by the thought, a pair of teenage boys emerged to stand at the mouth of an alley, watching Cian. One of the boys was smoking. The other had a knife he was twirling, in spite of the cold. Cian locked eyes with them, waited for them to make a move. It was morning, it was light out, but it was also Kerry Patch.
    Deterred, perhaps, by Cian’s size, or by the glower on his face that was mostly due to a hangover, or maybe simply by the wild hair Molly Doyle had called a haystack, the two boys turned away, watching for another, easier mark to pass.
    Cian felt a flicker of something. Disappointment.
    It would have felt good to break something.
    He kept on his way. Somewhere in the world, there was probably someone who liked St. Louis. It was, by any report, one of the great cities in the world, and one of the largest in the United States. But Cian, although born and bred in the Patch, had no taste for it. In summer, the air was wet and hot and heavy, and the smoke so bad that day turned to night. In winter, ice and snow pummeled the streets, murdering the homeless by the score—although there were plenty more where they came from. The smoke didn’t abate, and there were days when it filled the streets like fog and clung to the layers of snow in a sooty cape.
    Today promised to be a day much like any other. The sky was bright blue, the sun a copper disc, and the wind from the northwest cut through Cian’s coat and shirt and skin. He hurried south. There were places a man could get work in St. Louis. Even a man like Cian. So he went to David Fitzgerald, who had a dry goods store on the edge of Kerry Patch. Already the corner outside the store was crowded with men, and a few women, looking for David Fitzgerald’s most valuable stock: jobs. The men gave Cian dirty looks. Some of the men knew him, and some of the looks were justified. The rest were simply the looks of men who feared competition. The women, on the other hand, ignored him. Cian preferred it that way. One of them—a girl who couldn’t have been more than sixteen—wore a dress so thin that it couldn’t have done anything to stop the cold. She coughed into the corner of her arm as Cian passed. Her hands were bare, red and chapped from the cold.
    When she looked up, her dark eyes reminded Cian of Corinne.
    Cian stepped into the store and pushed Corinne and the dark haired girl to the back of his mind. He passed the bins of flour and the sacks of sugar, passed the jugs of molasses and oil and a thousand other things. David sat behind the counter, a short man with his hair clipped above the ears and eyes that had seen too much of Kerry Patch. He looked up, saw Cian, and said, “Nothing today, Cian.”
    “Lot of folks outside waiting, David.”
    “I told them the same thing.”
    “Nothing? Not even for me?”
    David snorted.
    Cian turned back to leave the store, but stopped when he saw the girl again. A slender little thing, like a twig wrapped up in a sheet of cotton. Corinne hadn’t been thin like that. She’d had all the right curves, all the right lines,