Read Mercy Street for Free Online Page B

priest—both lean, dark-haired, and good-looking. She’d read that they were the same age—had she read something about them having been born on the same day?—but Robert looked older. Could be due to the stress he’d been under for the past fifteen months.
    She returned to the results page and clicked on the link to the next article. WHERE IS ELIZABETH MAGELLAN? the headline asked, and below it, in smaller type, WHERE IS BABY IAN?
    Mallory studied the accompanying pictures of Beth Magellan, from a college yearbook photo to one taken just days before she disappeared. In the first, she was shown taking part in a charity run hosted by her sorority. In the other, she stood shoulder-to-shoulder with her husband, and while Mallory assumed that Beth Magellan had been wearing high-heeled shoes to the charity bash where they’d been photographed, she was clearly a tall woman. Tall and very pretty, with long dark hair that cascaded over trim shoulders and was clipped high on one side with what Mallory thought looked like a diamond-encrusted clip. A sapphire necklace that circled her neck surely had been chosen to match the designer gown of the same color. She clung to the arm of her husband and wore a very wide smile.
    Well, duh.
Mallory snorted.
Young and gorgeous and married to one of the wealthiest men in the country. What’s not to smile about?
    Stylishly dressed, stylishly coiffed. Stylishly young.
    Mallory followed the article to the next page, where she found pictures of Ian Magellan’s chubby-cheeked face. The baby had been darling, there was no question of that, she thought, then chided herself for thinking of the child in the past tense. He could very well be alive. Robert Magellan still held to that possibility, if his cousin was to be believed.
    She read online for another hour or so, then used Magellan Express to locate articles on the playground shooting. The story was familiar: four kids from Our Lady of Angels High—James Tilton, Adam Stevens, Ryan Corcoran, and Courtney Bauer—had arranged to meet at the playground around ten on Friday night, the twenty-fifth of April. The four had been close friends since kindergarten and spent a good deal of time together outside school. On that particular night, they’d gotten together to commiserate with Courtney over her rejection by Penn State, her first-choice college. According to her mother, while Courtney had applied knowing it was her “stretch” school, she had been very upset by the rejection. She’d called Ryan as soon as she’d opened the letter, Mrs. Bauer told reporters, and they made arrangements to meet the others later that night, after Courtney dropped her younger sister and two of her friends off at a community center dance.
    “It was all she talked about in the car,” Courtney’s fifteen-year-old sister, Misty, told police. “She’d been accepted at a couple of other schools, but she decided late that she wanted to go to Penn State and I guess by then they’d filled all their places. At least, that was what Courtney was saying. She was really mad at herself for not applying earlier.”
    There were interviews with the families of both of the murdered boys, and Mallory read every one of them trying to get to know the victims. Adam had been accepted at Rowan University in New Jersey, where he’d play saxophone in the band. He’d auditioned several times, and had been holding his breath until his acceptance arrived. James—Jamey—was going to Pitt on a full scholarship and hoped to write for the university newspaper, as he’d done at Our Lady of Angels. His dream was to one day write for one of the big newspapers—
The Washington Post,
the
LA
or
New York Times, The Boston Globe.
    Ryan had been offered a full ride to Temple in Philadelphia to study film.
    “He is going to be a famous producer,” his grandmother, Mary Corcoran, was quoted as having said. “He likes making documentaries that examine social issues. He submitted a film about