8. Chapter Eight
Chapter Eight
Once Murphy was in the secret room, the bookcase/door closed behind him, he demanded of his sister, “What the hell was that? Why didn’t you tell him to his face we were going to talk shit about him?”
“I’m sorry, but I came down here to see if anything had come up from Mims’s search and what I found…God, Connor, it’s horrible.”
Tally rarely called him by his given name, always using Murphy like everyone else did. His anger quelling instantly, he whispered, “That bad?”
“Mims, sweetheart, can you show him? I don’t think I can look at it again.”
“Sure, Mama,” he said, then hurried into the computer room and Murphy heard him gasping loudly. “What the fuck?”
He rushed into the room with Mims and sat in the metal chair while staring at the screen. “What is this?”
“I found his father’s name and searched it while I was doing one on Cosmo.”
The screen was filled with the front page of a newspaper, and the picture on that front page was a small boy with a tear-streaked face under the headline, Boy Walks into Home to Find Mother and Siblings Dead .
“Is that…?”
“The family’s only surviving child, eight, walked into his home Saturday morning to find his mother and siblings dead in the living room of the family’s home. Early reports are that the mother, Elizabeth MacManus, 32, mother of five, may have poisoned her children while the surviving child and his father, Jonah MacManus, were out running an errand,” Mims read.
Tally could be heard quietly sobbing in the next room, and Murphy was just about to join her. “Well, no wonder why he wants nothing to do with family.”
“Huh?”
“My friend let me know that. It’s why he ran from or was kicked out of all the foster homes he was sent to.”
“Why wasn’t he with his dad?” Mims asked, obviously missing his own father.
“That’s what you do, honey. Find out, but…a lot of questions were just answered for me. Now, it’s up to a vote whether he stays or goes.”
“We’re not kicking him out because of this,” Mims hollered. “That’s not fair! Don’t you think he’s been through enough?”
Murphy understood that sentiment, especially coming from Mims, who’d lost his real family because of his sexuality. He missed them every day. “Mims, we have to be a family here. It’s as important as any part of this.”
“Why? Because we steal shit together?”
“No! Because if someone doesn’t see us all as family, if we’re not close to them, and if they don’t trust us and care for us, how easy would it be for them to give us up to the cops or our enemies?”
Mims deflated visibly, his shoulder slumping as he nodded. “I guess you’re right. You know my vote.”
“Taken. But Mims, I have to disclose this.”
“Then disclose it to him first.”
Murphy sighed again. “He doesn’t even know about our other business. I can’t tell him why we were looking into him.”
Mims started typing so fast that his fingers were a blur. “I hate this part of it.”
“I know. I do, too.” Then Murphy thought of something and asked, “Why didn’t this come up immediately?”
“You saw it. It didn’t have Liam’s name in the paper. They do that to keep the kid’s identity protected. It had to be the dad.”
“Still, it took this long?”
Mims did his lightning typing and Murphy watched as Mims’s head cocked to one side, and his lip was being gnawed on. “This is weird,” he finally said.
“What?”
“That search brought up exactly this. That one article. You’d think that this would be the news over weeks back then! Even with the war and all that, this is big!”
Murphy agreed. “The same thing, well, almost, happened to a woman in the nineties, I believe, and it was all over the television, newspapers, everything. Maybe this was so close to that it wasn’t shocking enough. Poison instead of drowning isn’t as exciting,” he said with all the disdain he could. “Sensationalism sells.”
Tally was back with them, sniffling. “Or the church. They’re Roman Catholic Irish, I’d bet.”
Mims was staring at her like she was crazy. “Why would the church care?”
“The other woman that did something similar to this, she was religious and their religion, like Catholics, didn’t believe in birth control. They think having a lot of kids brings them closer to God.”
“That’s insane!”
“It is,” Tally agreed. “To some churches, women are on the earth solely for procreation. The Catholics were totally against birth control for centuries, but it’s only been a few decades when they’ve allowed it.”
“The church,” Murphy spat. His thoughts on religion was well known. “You don’t know that’s why, though, Tally.”
“The story is as old as the world. Women combat bad marriages by killing the things the husband loves most. His children. Other women are in such bad marriages they have mental breaks. Then, of course, there are those who are just evil. We may never know why Cosmo’s mother did this. But we know he needs us, probably more than any of you boys.”
Murphy felt like he was being backed into a corner. “Dammit, Tally, need and being smart are two different things! He’ll find out about us eventually, even if we keep him on and not bring him in, and then what?”
“You’ll speak to Eazy and the boys, Murphy. Then decide what to do from there, like you said. I get no vote, of course, except for maybe the conscience of the group.”
“I’m with Mama.”
Her voice softening even more, she soothed, “Mims, I appreciate that, but none of this is Murphy’s fault. We can’t gang up against him. His worry isn’t just for him and his own husband and children, but for you all, too. Like he said, you’re all family.”
Tears streamed down Mims’s cheeks as he nodded to her. “Okay. I’ll remember that.”
Murphy said, “Listen, before we do anything, and tell anyone else, Mims, you keep looking. Hack into those records.”
“I’m already on that. They’ve got an impressive firewall now, but it’s only taking time. If I didn’t have to work tonight, I could probably get it faster.”
“You’re working. This isn’t so time sensitive that we need the information now.”
The tears dried as a cheeky grin spread across his cute face. “Thought I’d give it a shot.”
“So, like Hippy, you have other plans tonight. You guys have all week!”
“Not true! Three days a week, we work.”
“Poor baby!”
“Enough,” Tally said. “Murphy, you know how hard these boys work. Stop being an ass.”
Mims glowed as Tally stuck up for him. He couldn’t win against those faces. “Whatever. You’re working tonight.”
“Then expect all the information tomorrow.”
Growling, he left the basement room, heading up the stairs. As he went, he lost his annoyance and smiled. Mims had been like a beaten puppy when he first arrived at the pub. He was morose because every member of his family had turned their backs on him.
He was still a mess, going after older, and mostly married, men. They’d all tried to get through to him, but he was a stubborn thing. But all the guys loved him dearly.
To see him defending Cosmo, to see him worrying over the new guy, and then see him turn on his cheeky side was so much better than when he’d first arrived.
After crawling into bed and cuddling up with his sleeping husband, he fell almost immediately to sleep.
When he woke, he stumbled down the stairs to see Eazy in the kitchen, cutting up bell peppers while Little Mick kneeled on the stool, watching closely. “Where’s Katie?”
“With Tally. They went to buy dessert since I wasn’t planning to make any tonight,” Eazy said, laughing. “How did it go last night?”
“Great for the bar…not so great otherwise. I need to talk to you…alone.”
“Micky, get lost,” Eazy said, laughing at their son’s shocked face after he said it.
“Daddy!”
“I’m just kidding, son. But can you go play in your room, just for a little while, so your daddies can do some adult talking?”
“Sure,” he said, then climbed down off the stool and took off, full speed, to the stairs.
“Do not run up those stairs, young man,” Eazy called after him.
All they heard in response were giggles.
“He’s spending too much time with Mick. Both are stubborn as hell.”
The peppers were taking a beating as Eazy took out his frustration on them.
Murphy got behind him and kissed his neck, watching the way the knife slowed, and Eazy’s muscles lost their tension. “Stop trying to butter me up.”
“Why? I like you slippery.”
“Jesus, Murphy, you’re a perv. What happened? You know he’ll be back.”
Murphy knew that. Little Mick never spent over ten minutes in his room alone, being that he had to have human companionship at all times.
He sat across from Eazy on a stool and explained what Mims had uncovered. “We don’t know why he didn’t stay with the father, or how long he did, if he did, but there we are.”
“There was no mention of him in any other papers?”
“One. One headline, then nothing. Like someone wanted to keep it quiet. I can’t say as I blame them, but why would the papers not report more about it? Not why she did it, if anyone knew, whatever. It’s sick, Eazy. How could any parent…?”
“I don’t even want to think about it. Looking at our two, it boggles my mind, but of course, that is likely it. The mind, playing some horrible trick on her,” Eazy said as he added the peppers to the cast iron on the stove and got to work whipping the eggs.
“Well, of course. How could anyone do that unless they were sick or evil?”
“They couldn’t.”
After he stirred the dish, he set it in the oven and turned back to Murphy. “Maybe we should talk to him about it.”
“We’d chase him off, and you know it. I wasn’t even going to tell you,” he said as he threaded his fingers together, clutching them hard on the wood block counter. “Baby, it’s insane that we’re even thinking of keeping him. This explains why he didn’t stay in the foster homes, and let’s face it, that’s what we’d be.”
“I suppose you’re right, but…”
Eazy had light eyes that fluttered slowly and a gentle smile whenever he cared about someone, and those attributes were two of the many reasons Murphy had fallen for the man. “Between you and Tally, we’d adopt every orphaned adult in the city.”
“Not all of them. Just six. We don’t have rooms for more.”
“ Now you’re being practical.”
Eazy laughed quietly and reached for his hand. “Baby, we helped Mims, and we had the same worries for him. Now, he’s loyal, we trust him, and he’s part of this family. Please, take a breath. If it turns out he can’t be trusted, we’ll send him to another job.”
“Okay. You’re right. Of course, you are.”
Eazy’s sweetness was only dwarfed by his fierce protectiveness. “If he stays, we’ll prove to him he never has to worry again about his family leaving him. Or anyone hurting him.”
As his baby’s words poured over him, Murphy felt his own resolve take hold. That face, in those strange hazel eyes that Cosmo had, he saw the hurt life had dealt him and his own parental instincts came into play.
Later that day, before the guys readied for the evening, Mims came into the kitchen, white as a ghost. “I got in,” he announced, and both Katy and Little Mick were all ears, not to mention Big Mick.
“Got into what? No good?” Mick asked, then laughed at his own joke.
“Dad…”
After watching his father shrug and continue to eat the homemade pot pie Eazy had made that evening, Murphy took Mims into the living room. “What’s going on?”
“I got into the DHS archives. That…man, his dad, threw up his hands after Liam started getting into trouble, and he gave up his parental rights. He gave away his kid!”
Mims’s eyes were welling with tears, and he’d obviously already been crying. His face was red with the streaking of already cast tears. “Damn.”
“We can’t do that to him, Murphy.”
“I know. I know. I think, this next week, I’ll have the talk with him. We’ll go from there.”
“Are you gonna tell the others about this?”
Murphy wondered the same. He feared they’d all insist on keeping him at the pub, even if he wanted nothing to do with their other line of work. “Let me think about that. I may…I may want to speak to Cosmo first.”
“I won’t say anything. Murph?”
“Yeah?”
“If he…if he went through all that, how is he even…okay?”
“He’s not, Mims. Not by a longshot, but he’s strong, and has likely had to be strong for a long time. Now, go wash your face and get ready. If you aren’t there, the guys will wonder why.”
“Okay. Remember, Hippy’s leaving early.”
“I know.”
Eazy was by his side.
“Did you hear?”
Eazy nodded. “This week. I agree.”
“Good. Okay, now I just need to figure out how the fuck to do it.”