Little Girl Lost

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  He ignores it and the cockroach and looks for a glass. They’re all in the sink, dirty. He dumps the Jack into a Yankee Stadium freebie cup emblazoned with Don Mattingly’s number, tosses the bottle into the garbage, and takes a room-temperature sip. He still hasn’t gotten around to buying ice cube trays, though if he had, he’d probably have forgotten to fill them.

  Perry Wayland’s fridge has an automatic ice maker. He has a sparkling row of Baccarat rocks glasses and a bar stocked with the finest single malt Scotch money can buy—Barnes had read the labels in awe.

  I still don’t blame you for walking out of there, man. Sometimes you have got to just save yourself. I hope Miss White is more deserving and appreciative than your wife is.

  He pictures Wayland floating on a yacht in a sun-splashed sea, shirtless, maybe even tanned, his horse tattoo slick with Bain de Soleil. He tosses his wedding ring overboard to sink like an untethered anchor. It must be nice to have extracted himself from the four demanding females in his life.

  Barnes takes a long sip of whiskey, relishing the heated descent to his gut. It boomerangs to his head, swaddling edgy thoughts in a haze.

  Is Kirstin lying awake right now, wondering if she misjudged her husband? Wondering about his market crash prediction and the mysterious old friend who’s been calling him at the office? At least Stef didn’t mention Deep Throat to her. If he had, Barnes figures, she’d be wishing that her husband had indeed dove off a bridge.

  He’s meeting Stef at seven to head over to the tow pound.

  Seven . . .

  Damn, that’s early. Better get a head start.

  He takes out the Maxwell House coffee can, thinking about Wash. One . . . two . . . three sloppy scoops, scattering black grit over the counter, including the lawyer’s letter.

  “This isn’t about paper. It’s about people.”

  Barnes considers that as he sets up the coffeemaker for tomorrow morning and finishes his cigarette.

  Maybe Wash was right. Maybe he should try talking to Delia, instead of negotiating with some money-hungry attorney . . .

  If he decides to deal with it at all.

  If he ignores the whole damned thing, it might just go away, like the cockroach that disappeared into some dark crevice.

  Don’t be weak, Stockton.

  Sorry, Wash. I tried to do the right thing, but it’s not like I know where she is.

  No? Isn’t that what you do for a living? Find people?

  Well, it’s not like he can just call Delia. He doesn’t have her number. According to her lawyer, she doesn’t live there anymore, and how does a homeless person afford a lawyer, anyway?

  Don’t be weak . . .

  If Delia were a missing person, where would he begin?

  With what he does know about her, which is . . .

  Not where she lives. Not even where she works, if it’s true that she lost her job after becoming pregnant. But he knows where she worked back in March.

  He plunks down his glass, picks up the phone, and dials 555-1212.

  “Directory assistance, how may I help you?”

  “Yeah, Charley O’s in Manhattan, please.”

  “Which one?”

  He pauses, thinking back to that night. “Is there one on Eighth Avenue in the west forties?”

  There is. He scribbles down the number, and then dials it. The female voice that answers is harried, music and chatter blasting in the background.

  “I’m looking for Delia,” he says. “Is she there?”

  “Delia who?”

  “She’s a waitress there.”

  “Delia Montague? She’s not here anymore, sorry. Goodb—”

  “Wait, do you know where I can reach her? I need to talk to her. Life and death.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  The baby. Wash. Life. Death.

  “Is this Bobby?”

  “Yeah.” Sure. Why not.

  “It’s about time you came back around. Jesus.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Staying with Alma out in Bed-Stuy last I heard.”

  “Got the number?”

  “Hang on. I got a lot of customers here.” She drops the phone with a clatter.

  Barnes paces as far as the phone cord will let him go. At least three, maybe five minutes go by before the woman returns.

  “Don’t you go telling her I gave you the number. I don’t know if she wants to hear from you after everything, you know what I’m sayin’?”

  I don’t even know who you are.

  “Don’t worry. I won’t tell her.”

  Barnes writes down the number, hangs up, and looks at it. The area code is that new one, 718 for Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island. Bed-Stuy—Bedford Stuyvesant—is in Brooklyn.

  He dials. A woman snatches up the phone on the first ring, sounding breathless.

  “Hello?”

  “Delia?”

  “Doctor Herndon?”

  He hesitates, hearing a high-pitched moan in the background. “No, it’s . . .”

  “Then I can’t tie up the line! We’re waiting for the doctor to call back. Breathe, Dee. Just breathe,” she calls, then asks, “Who is this?”

  “Wrong number,” Barnes says, and hangs up.

  “Do the right thing,” Wash says in his head, not even wheezing.

  If Barnes doesn’t, Wash will go to his grave thinking he’s weak.

  Are you?

  No. Gloss was weak.

  And Gloss is gone.

  Amelia puts everything back into the closet the way she found it—all except the little blue dress from Best & Co.

  She sits on the edge of the bed clasping the delicate fabric against her mouth and nose, breathing it in search of her long-lost mother’s scent. She smells only her not-mother: Bettina’s Shower to Shower lingering in the air, or maybe just in Amelia’s memory.

  She can see Bettina packing away this dress like an heirloom, and for what? Had she been saving it, like the ring, for a special occasion? Maybe she meant for Amelia’s own daughter to wear in the far-off future. Had she intended to tell the truth one day, when Amelia was grown and gone from this house?

  All she really cares about is what happened before Calvin heard her forlorn cries in the empty church—and whether that is, indeed, a true story.

  This fancy store-bought dress is her first clue.

  “Just an itty-bitty baby, lying there like Moses in a basket . . .”

  Basket?

  Heart pounding, she hurries back to the closet, drags out the stepladder, and climbs up on it so hastily that it teeters beneath her.

  Familiar with the biblical tale of newborn Moses floating along in the tall reeds, she hadn’t considered that Calvin might be referring to a real basket. But a literal interpretation of his comment might explain the empty one Bettina had painstakingly preserved in dry cleaner’s plastic.

  Before, Amelia had tossed it aside without even looking at it. Now she takes it down, unwraps it, and studies it.

  This isn’t cheap dime-store wicker like the one that holds the mail in the living room.

  It’s made of tightly coiled straw bands in patterned shades of brown and cream. The style is unusual, and yet this isn’t the first time she’s seen it. The basket is strikingly similar to one she saw . . .

  Was it today? Where?

  She closes her eyes and thinks back, searching her weary, cluttered brain. At school, maybe? She hasn’t been anywhere else. School, the subway, and—

  The answer comes to her, and her jaw drops.

  Marceline LeBlanc was carrying an almost identical basket when she rode away on the bus.

  Chapter Eleven

  Earlier, from the porch roof outside Emily’s open bedroom window, Red had seen the girl lying on her bed, feet propped on the wall, one hand twirling the long cord of her pink princess phone like a jump rope. She was having a long telephone conversation with someone—a boyfriend, it became apparent. Red heard most of it
, despite the pattering rain and music coming from the tape deck.

  “No, I mean it. You can’t come over tonight . . . She’s downstairs, but . . . No, I know she won’t see you, but I need some space . . . No, not because of her, she’s . . . All right, yeah. It is. It’s because of my mom, and she . . . Yeah, she did, for a month this time, but—oh, please. Where am I supposed to go?” A pause, and she chuckled softly. “Yeah, it would be nice, but this isn’t some old Beach Boys song, Liam. This is my life, and I’m stuck here for now . . . No. No! Come on, you know . . . Because if she catches you here this time, she’ll . . .”

  The conversation dragged on. Red stayed flattened against the wall outside the window, trying to stay dry beneath the narrow third-floor ledge overhead.

  “Wait, are you breaking up with me? No, it’s not the same thing. A break is—okay, fine! Fine! Fine!”

  Emily slammed the phone down with a sob. When Red dared to peek again, she was close enough to touch, holding a lit match to the tip of a cigarette. No wonder the window had been open on a cool, rainy night.

  Red leapt back into the shadows, heart racing.

  “Liam?” she called softly into the night. “I told you not to come over!”

  “I had to see you.” The rain must have muffled any vocal unfamiliarity in the whisper, because Emily sighed and opened the window all the way.

  Heart pounding, Red climbed through and found her with her back turned, arms folded in resignation. One push, and she tumbled onto the bed. One slash with the blade, and her giggle was lost in a gurgle of blood. She wasn’t even cold before Tara walked into the room.

  Five, maybe ten minutes after slitting her throat, Red was cruising south on Interstate 93. Now the Rhode Island State Line is in the rearview mirror. It would be fun to return to the Sandy Oyster and share the good news with White: “Two down.”

  “Already?” White will say, violet eyes wide with appreciation and admiration. “Just like that?”

  “Just like that.” The comment should be accompanied by a casual gesture, like clap-brushing one palm against the other to emphasize how easy it was.

  “That’s amazing,” White will say. “Six more to go, and—”

  And only five accounted for.

  Anyway, there will be no ferry at this hour, and even if there was, Black is there. By now, he might have gone into the bathroom and figured out that something’s missing.

  The wipers make a scraping sound on the dry windshield. The rain has stopped at last, replaced with fog that creeps over the landscape and into Red’s brain.

  Coffee. Coffee would help.

  At a Connecticut McDonald’s teeming with truckers, Red dumps the tainted slicker and gloves into a parking lot garbage can and uses the restroom before going to the counter. The line is long, the place short staffed. It takes almost ten minutes to get to the register.

  Red orders a Happy Meal, a couple of Egg McMuffins, hash browns, and two cups of coffee, and adds, “Family road trip.” So very clever.

  “Mmm,” says the girl behind the counter, counting out change.

  “Yeah, they’re waiting in the car. Starving.”

  The cashier doesn’t acknowledge that, but a trucker waiting for his order asks, “You heading northbound or southbound?”

  “South.”

  “That’s good. There’s an accident on the northbound side by New Haven. Car hit a deer. Took me a half hour to get through there. Watch out for them. I’ve had two run out in front of me in the last hour.”

  “Thanks for the tip, buddy.” Red grabs the white paper bag and all but runs out the door.

  The parking lot is quiet. No witnesses to note that there is no starving family waiting in the car.

  But that was close. Nothing like teetering on the fine line between deflecting suspicion and overengaging.

  Under cover of the dense mist shrouding a dark, wooded stretch of highway, Red hurtles the food one piece at a time out the passenger’s side window, unwrapped for scavengers who will eliminate the evidence. The wrappers are tossed a few miles later, along with the Happy Meal box and toy. The bag stays, a handy carryall.

  And the coffee, to wash down another pill.

  Welcome to Westchester County, New York.

  Seeing the green sign, Red remembers something.

  Christina Myers’s son lives around here with his adoptive family. Having spent some time last month learning his routine, Red knows where to find him at this hour—and he isn’t tucked in bed behind locked doors.

  Amelia turns her college backpack upside down, dumps the contents onto the floor, and peers inside. It might be able to hold a toothbrush, pair of jeans, and maybe a sweater. She supposes she can leave everything else behind, but then she’d have to come back.

  She returns to the bedroom and finds the suitcase she spotted earlier in the closet. It’s unexpectedly heavy. Opening it, she sees that it’s still filled with the clothes Bettina had packed on the day she was admitted, as if she expected to be up and about, wearing something other than a hospital gown. When the bag came home without its owner, Calvin must have shoved it right into the closet.

  Amelia eyes the folded stack of clothing inside. No time to put it all away now. She pulls out a plastic drawer from the cheap unit that serves as her own dresser, tosses her clothing onto the floor, and replaces it with Bettina’s from the suitcase. She crams it all in, wadded into the corners, heedless of wrinkles. It’s not as if anyone is ever going to wear these things—certainly not until the church lady comes around for next summer’s clothing drive.

  Who cares? I’ll be long gone.

  Though there’s no telling where she’ll be by then, she’s made up her mind where tomorrow will find her.

  She rewraps the basket in dry cleaner’s plastic, then attempts to put it into the empty suitcase. A hair too wide, the basket might fit if she forced it, but if it’s what she thinks it is, she’s not willing to risk denting it. She returns it to the high closet shelf.

  But she does place the little blue dress into the suitcase before filling it with her own undergarments, jeans, leggings, and sweaters. She adds toiletries, then eyes the textbooks, notebooks, pencils, and pens scattered across the floor, thinking about the paper she’s supposed to be writing and the studying she should be doing.

  After a moment’s hesitation, she packs everything into the book bag again, save a pen and a mostly empty notebook. She takes them to the kitchen, tears out a page, and writes a quick note.

  Went to visit a friend.

  She pauses. Does he realize she no longer has friends? Maybe he’ll assume it’s Marceline. Let him. He won’t know she’s gone.

  She closes the note with his own parting words, the ones she hadn’t been certain he meant. Maybe she doesn’t, either.

  I’ll be back.

  She puts the note on the counter, pocketing the twenty-dollar bill he’d left there for groceries. She just hopes it’s enough to get her to Ithaca, New York.

  She lugs the heavy suitcase to the door, thinking of Marceline LeBlanc, with her weighty satchel and that unusual basket so similar to the one in the closet.

  Maybe the coincidence means nothing—or at least, has nothing to do with Amelia’s past. Maybe Miss LeBlanc and Bettina bought the baskets in the same local store, or from the same street vendor. Maybe she jumped to conclusions, thinking she was found in a basket.

  Calvin might answer that question, if she were willing to stick around and ask it.

  She is not.

  She turns and takes a last look around, feeling around in her soul for nostalgia, or regret, or something, anything, that might make her want to stay here.

  She hears her father’s voice, the day of the funeral, as he sat at the kitchen table with his face buried in his hands.

  “I don’t want to talk about this anymore, Amelia.”

  “Well, I do. Don’t I count?”

  “Now is not the time. I just lost your mother. I’m not—”

  “So did
I! Again. I’ve lost two mothers. I want the truth! You owe me the truth!”

  “I told you the truth.”

  “You didn’t tell me anything.”

  “You know everything I know. That’s all there is.”

  “But—”

  He slammed his hands on the table and rose to glare at her. “I don’t want to hear about this ever again! Ever!”

  Her gaze falls on the note she left for him on the counter. She snatches it up, crumples it, and buries it in the trash can.

  Then she walks out the door, and this time, she doesn’t look back.

  Barnes takes three subways and a gypsy cab to reach the hospital in Queens, just over the border from Brooklyn, not far from JFK Airport and Stef’s neighborhood, Howard Beach. The eastern sky above the flat roof is tinged pink.

  Typical Saturday, predawn—three ambulances are parked in front of the ER doors, lights flashing, medical personnel scrambling to help victims of what was probably a car accident in one case, and a street fight in another.

  He makes his way past the commotion to the main entrance, hoping it won’t be locked. This area is crawling with troublemakers and protestors these days, some of them violent. And hospital security has been a hot-button topic following a rash of newborn abductions, including an unsolved one he investigated on a Harlem maternity ward in August, and a doctor recently gunned down at nearby Kings County Hospital.

  But Barnes is able to walk right in, past the vacant front desk, and follow signs to a bank of elevators. He pauses to scan the wall directory.

  “Excuse me! Where do you think you’re going?”

  He turns to see a uniformed security guard coming out of the men’s room down the hall, still pulling up his fly. Nice.

  “Labor and Delivery.”

  “You can’t just go strolling in there, kid.”

  Kid? Who does this guy think he is, Stef? He even looks like him—white, middle-aged, flaccid and florid.

  “Come on, move it. Get out ʼa here.”

  Barnes reaches into his pocket.

  “Hands in the air, now!” the guard barks.