Part 3
The young man eyed Declan warily, and then began to turn away.
"Wait a minute!" Declan exclaimed, causing the man to stop. "I just want to talk to Shep, that's all. Can you at least point him out to me."
"What if he don't want to talk?" the man asked. "Or what if you don't?" The last was said with an air of suspicion and a narrowing of eyes.
"Hey! I'm not here to cause trouble, mister. I just want to talk to the guy who saw the angel," Declan protested.
The young man shrugged. "It's no skin off my nose what you're about man," he said, pointing to a mass of blankets hiding between two garbage cans.
Declan approached hesitantly. "Shep?" he said, kneeling beside the blankets. "Are you Shep?" he asked.
A face appeared beyond the blankets. It was bruised and swollen, and there was blood drying on a recent wound.
"Who wants to know?" a scratchy voice asked.
~*~*~*~
"You should have seen him, Peg," Declan said when he met up with Peggy at the Romanstown library. They were now flipping through the newspaper archives in search of any references to the homeless on Wash-out Lane. "He was beaten up pretty bad."
"Did he say how it happened?" Peggy asked, as she flipped through a three-year old microfiche reel.
"No, he wouldn't tell me anything about it." Declan leaned over Peggy's shoulder to get a better view of the screen in front of her. "What's this?" he said, pointing.
Peggy read: Mayor Pulls Plug on Shelter, Disappoints Wife
"'In a bold move, Mayor Whitfield decided to pull funding from the proposed homeless shelter on Maple Avenue.'" Declan read over her shoulder. He read further into the article. "It says here that the mayor's own wife was supposed to head up the shelter. Maybe we should be talking to her."
They found a few more articles in their search-one was an editorial calling for the forced removal of the homeless in Wash-out Lane, and the other-from a recent edition-described the brutal beating of one of the homeless men following the angel sighting.
"So that's what happened to him" Peggy murmured as she read the account of the attack.
"But why?" Declan asked.
Peggy shook her head in an I-don't-know fashion. "It says here that the motive for the attack was unclear. It could have been a coincidence."
~*~*~*~
"It wasn't a coincidence," Marcus Sheppard said matter-of-factly. "They knew what they were doing when they jumped me."
Declan threw Peggy a see-what-did-I-tell-you glance. "They? More than one person attacked you?"
'The article said it was most likely a mugging gone bad," Peggy added.
"Ha! They believe the newspapers?" a drunk from the corner interrupted.
"Don't believe everything you read, missy," his drinking buddy supplied. "Tell 'em, Shep."
"Tell us what, exactly," asked Declan.
"You might say that article you read was about half right," Shep told them. "And also about half fairy tales." He sat up a little straighter and waved his hand around him at the people congregated in the alley. "They didn't even send in a reporter to cover the angels like all the national television and newspaper people did. Don't really care about what happens out here, so long as we're quiet."
"What do you mean?" asked Declan, although he was beginning to understand the homeless man.
"Romanstown is a beautiful place, isn't it missy?" Shep asked Peggy, seeming at first to ignore Declan's question. When Peggy nodded, he said, "It always was, too. Nice place to raise a family. Fact is, I suspect there are some folks who don't want us here, cuz we spoil all that beauty, if you take my meaning. That young Mrs. Whitfield is just about the only one who ever really showed any interest in what happened to us."
~*~*~*~