City on Fire (Danny Ryan, #1)(24)

“Pat, Sheila,” he says. But his eyes are like, You got anything to say? He orders a Walker Black for himself and a glass of white wine for Pam, waits while Bobby the bartender pours the drinks and then he walks back to his table with this fuck-you smile on his face. He sets the glass of wine in front of Pam, sits back down, and then looks around the room to see if anyone wants to challenge him.

No one does.

Which, Danny knows, isn’t going to work for Liam.

So Liam stands up, taps on his glass for attention, and announces, “I just want everyone here to know that Pam and I went to Las Vegas and got married. So, everyone—raise a glass to Mr. and Mrs. Liam Murphy.”

“Jesus,” Danny murmurs.

“Amazing,” says Cassie.

Terri shakes her head.

Bobby walks out from behind the bar and scoots into the back room.

“Now the shit’s going to hit,” Jimmy Mac observes.

“Truly.”

The door to the back room opens and John Murphy comes out, Pat right behind him.

“Showtime,” Cassie says.

Danny’s waiting for Murphy to ask his son to step into the back for a private word, and then for Liam to come back and take Pam out of there, but that’s not what happens. What happens is Murphy leans over, kisses Pam on the cheek, and says, “Welcome to the family.”

“Jesus shit,” Cassie says.

Pat comes over and sits next to Danny.

“Pat, what the hell?” Danny asks.

Pat shrugs.

Old Man Murphy reaches over and takes Pam’s hand.

“This is going to end badly,” Cassie says.

Danny thinks it’s one of her cynical jokes but then turns and sees that her eyes aren’t laughing, they’re serious.

Serious and sad.

Like she sees something the rest of them don’t.





Eleven


Pam Murphy (née Davies) never thought she’d honeymoon in a run-down house in the country. Then again, she never thought she’d marry an Irish guy from Providence, Rhode Island.

Greenwich, Connecticut, is only 150 miles from Providence, but it might as well be on the other side of the world. A leafy, old-money, high-WASP bedroom community of New York, Greenwich couldn’t be more different from blue-collar, Irish-Italian Providence, and Pam couldn’t have had an upbringing more different from her husband Liam Murphy’s.

Her father was a stockbroker, not a gangster. He took the train into the city every weekday morning, was home for 6:30 cocktails and 7:15 dinner every night. Her mother was a Connecticut matron, a genuine beauty often described by admiring friends as “swanlike” who spent her days on charitable committees, gardening clubs, Daughters of the American Revolution activities, and vodka tonics.

Pam’s big brothers, Bradley and Patton, lettered in lacrosse and hockey at their private boarding schools, carefully made gentlemen’s B’s and nothing higher, sailed Long Island Sound, and were protective of their little sister.

Not that she required much protection, not from boys, anyway.

She wasn’t an especially pretty child. Going into middle school, the kindest description of her was “plain.” If her mother was, indeed, a swan, Pam was the ugly duckling, and she felt her mother’s poorly hidden disappointment keenly.

Pam resisted all efforts to pretty her up—the makeup, the dresses, the dance lessons to improve her grace and posture—preferring to stay in her room and read. After Montessori elementary school, she was shipped off to Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, whose alumnae included—in addition to her mother—Barbara Hutton, Gloria Vanderbilt, and Jackie Kennedy Onassis.

She certainly wasn’t the richest girl there, nor the poorest, but somewhere in the lower middle. The cruelty of that age gifted her with acne and the inevitable comparisons to a pizza. The sadism of schoolgirls knows no bounds—they attacked her for her complexion, her awkwardness, her lack of interest in boys. Word was joyfully passed that she was a lesbian, that she harbored secret crushes on several of the prettier girls, who had, of course, summarily spurned her.

“If I was going to the Y,” one of her alleged targets said, sticking her tongue between her index and middle fingers, “I’d go to a much prettier Y.”

Her freshman year, she fled home almost every weekend, holed up in her room, variously crying, reading her books, and dreading Sunday nights, when her parents would drive her back to Farmington, lecturing all the while on the importance of making friends and participating in the social life of the school.

Pam didn’t tell them about the taunts.

She was too ashamed.

Pam thought about running away from school, running away from home, killing herself.

Something happened between Pam’s sophomore and junior years.

She blossomed.

The family had a summer home in Watch Hill, Rhode Island, twenty-five minutes but still a world away from Goshen, and Pam got up one morning ready for another day of hiding beneath a sun bonnet at the beach club.

It would be an exaggeration to say that it happened overnight, but it seemed to have happened overnight. Looking into the mirror to scrub her face, she saw skin that was almost clear, as if some compassionate goddess had come during the night and stripped her of her shame.

The summer seemed to do the rest. Over the next few weeks, the sun turned her skin a clear tan, baked her body into fine marble, bleached her “mousy” hair to a golden blond, her eyes an oceanic blue.