mind and her creative spirit have been pretty well depleted these last few years. She needs to eat, build up her physical strength.”
“You think I don’t know that? You saying Coop didn’t think that through? A hospital would take what’s left of her poor little veins to analyze her blood. Besides, she doesn’t have insurance. I feed her like an abandoned baby kitten: with an eyedropper. She gets broth, she gets herbs, you saw her: color is better and she’s resting.” She glared at me, defiant.
“Coop told us how she ran away every time the busybodies put her into care against her wishes. She knows she’s safe with Cassie.” That was Alsop. “She’s better off here, as long as you don’t bring shooters onto the land.”
“Why were they shooting at you?” Cassie asked.
“I don’t know. And I don’t know who ‘they’ are—do you?”
They shook their heads, but Alsop said, “Why are you here, really? Why are you looking for Coop.”
“Coop and Lydia have some kind of connection. He was the one person she would see in the weeks she spent at her mother’s house after the shooting; he followed her from there to Chicago. He tried to look after her when she moved onto the streets.”
“Coop told us that much,” Cassie said grudgingly.
“Two men were murdered near where she was camping out. Did he talk about that?”
“He said the police wanted to frame him for the murders,” Cassie said. “I won’t let that happen.”
“Coop had been going to community meetings where the two men were speaking. He’d gotten angry with them—he seems to lose his temper pretty easily and he started threatening them, or at least threatening the younger one.”
“So you are here to locate him for the police,” Alsop said, disgusted.
“It would be helpful if you let me finish, because you actually don’t know what I’m going to say. This is a story with a lot of parts that don’t hang together well, and information would be a lot more useful than a fight.”
I waited a moment. Alsop’s eyes glittered with anger, but he shut his lips, tightly, a gesture akin to a sneer.
I told them about Murray’s story, which had driven Lydia into flight. Unlike everyone else I’d met in Kansas, Alsop and Cassie hadn’t seen the online reports—they stayed off the grid as much as possible, I gathered. I described the hole in the ground where Lydia had hidden, and where I’d found the gavel that might have killed Leo.
“See? That’s why she needs to be here, with me, not in some hospital!” Cassie cried.
I gave a tired smile. “You’re probably right. Anyway, after Lydia disappeared, one of the biggest media companies in the country, maybe in the world, Global Entertainment, tried to hire me to find her. Even though I turned down the commission, they were pretty obsessed with locating her, so much that they offered a suitcase full of money to film me searching for her. I turned that down, too, but it made me concerned about her safety.
“She was so fragile that I didn’t think she could survive long in the outdoors. I hoped Coop could talk her into getting care, but his reaction to me was always belligerent. And then came the night about a week ago when he left Bear outside my apartment building and disappeared. I don’t know how he got here.”
Cassie nodded slowly, weighing what I’d said. “This has always been Coop’s safe place. He showed up here the summer he was seventeen, when I was first working to build the prairie. He was a runaway, a rural runaway. You don’t hear much about kids like him, but they can be dreadfully isolated by the farm, especially if the parents lay too much work on them and don’t let them hang out with kids their own age.”
She frowned into her mug. “His story was a bit like that poor boy who did the shootings—”
“Not.” Alsop interrupted her. “Arthur Morton was not a ‘poor boy.’ He was a deranged redneck who hated people of color, Jews, immigrants, anyone outside his immediate white boy experience. He destroyed lives. Coop lost his temper a thousand, maybe a hundred thousand times, but you can’t see him climbing into a cave in Horsethief Canyon to open fire on a concert.”
Cassie smiled sadly. “You know I don’t disagree with any of that, Franklin, but it was the same rural poverty, the same inability to hold on to a piece of land, all the things that no