The Butcher's Daughter

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  Barnes had met Rob Owens, founder and CEO of Rucker Park Records, in the waiting room of a Brooklyn maternity ward in 1987. That night, Rob’s wife, Paulette, delivered their firstborn son, Kurtis, and a woman named Delia Montague delivered the child Barnes had fathered in a one-night stand.

  Last summer, after his own ancestral story was featured on an episode of The Roots and Branches Project, Rob had told Barnes about Amelia. “This woman is an investigative genealogist who specializes in reuniting long-lost family members. You should hire her to find your daughter.”

  “I’ve made a living for thirty years now finding missing people.”

  “Well, you haven’t found her.”

  “Who says I want to? Or that she wants to be found?”

  That was before their autumn trip to Cuba, where Barnes had a shocking encounter he’d never shared with a soul, including Rob. He’d flown home and hired Amelia to help him find the daughter he hasn’t seen since she was born in October 1987.

  His DNA test results aren’t even back—yet Amelia has something to tell him, at this hour on a holiday?

  A skinny young waiter sets a plate and a wineglass in front of her and asks Barnes, “Need a menu, or know what you want?”

  “No menu. I’ll just have the same thing she’s having, so, uh . . .”

  “Cabernet and cheese fries,” she says.

  Oh, yes. A woman like Amelia could have gotten a man like Barnes into all sorts of trouble under different circumstances.

  “Cabernet and cheese fries. Perfect. Thanks.”

  The waiter walks away. Amelia tilts the stemmed glass and swirls the maroon liquid before taking a thoughtful sip, as if they’re at a Napa vineyard. The lady has class.

  “How is it?”

  “Not bad, for diner cab.” She sets down the glass and looks up at him. “Stock—”

  “Just call me Barnes. Nobody but my mother calls me Stockton.”

  Not anymore.

  “All right. Barnes . . .” She rests her hands on the table and leans forward. “Delia’s old roommate, Alma Harrison, is dead.”

  Hardly the bombshell he’d expected. “I’m sorry to hear that, but—”

  “Alma’s daughter was murdered, too.”

  “Murdered?”

  “Yes. Turns out I knew her—the daughter. She was a client. She came to me in September, and she had my gold baby ring, only she didn’t use her real name, and—”

  “What?”

  “She used an alias. I didn’t realize she was Alma’s—”

  “No, I mean . . . she had what?”

  “My baby ring,” she says slowly.

  “Did it have a blue initial C and two tiny sapphires?”

  Her gasp answers his question.

  “There’s something I need to tell you,” he says, and takes a deep breath.

  Concealed just beyond the light spilling from the diner’s plate glass window, she watches the couple in the back booth. They’re in profile, facing each other. The conversation is serious. She can guess what it’s about, having seen surveillance screenshots of their earlier text exchange.

  Can you please meet me today?

  Did you find her?

  I need to update you in person.

  Ok, on a case now but I can meet you tonight.

  Keeping an eye on the couple, she smokes an American cigarette—unfiltered, yet bland compared to pungent Cuban tobacco. She’d given up the habit years ago. This is merely a prop to ensure that passersby won’t give her a second glance. These days, smokers perch solo and in groups outside restaurants and bars all over the city, relegated by law to the sidewalks.

  That isn’t the only thing that’s changed about New York since she’d left in 1987. In the limo from the airport, she’d caught her first glimpse of the altered Manhattan skyline, aglow in late afternoon winter sunshine. New skyscrapers have sprung up everywhere, the tallest of all on the downtown site now conspicuously missing two promontories.

  “Excuse me . . .”

  Startled by a voice behind her, she whirls to see an emaciated stranger dressed in rags, blond hair matted around a face that was probably once handsome. He throws up his filthy hands. “Hey, don’t worry. I was just going to ask for a smoke.”

  She exhales a stream through her nostrils, regarding him for a moment before taking the pack out of her bag. She removes a single cigarette.

  “Thanks,” he says. “Been trying to score a smoke for an hour, you know? People look right through me like I’m not even—”

  He breaks off as she puts the cigarette into her own mouth.

  “Yeah, never mind,” he mutters, and turns away.

  She grabs his arm.

  He spins. “What the hell, lady?”

  She holds out the pack of cigarettes, along with a couple of hundred-dollar bills from her pocket.

  “You remind me of someone I haven’t seen in a while.”

  Blue eyes wide, he says, “Bless you. You’re an angel.”

  She smiles, lighting the new cigarette with the old. Most people would call her the exact opposite . . . with good reason.

  “What in the world is going on, Barnes?” Amelia asks. “How do you know about my ring?”

  “I found one just like it, and I gave it to Delia for Charisse.”

  “Where?”

  “At the hospital, when I was visiting a good friend who was—”

  “Which hospital?”

  “Morningside Memorial. March 7, 1987.”

  That’s precisely where and when Amelia had lost hers . . . the night her mother was dying. Died.

  Death records are easy enough to find, if you know where to look. A detective would know where to look. So would a con artist conspiring to get the hefty reward Amelia had offered on the Lost and Foundlings website for information about her biological parents.

  The ad mentioned the ring she’d been wearing when Calvin found her in 1968—but not that she’d later lost it.

  “My friend Wash was a father to me after I lost mine,” Barnes goes on. “When I went to the hospital that night, I thought he had pneumonia, or bronchitis. He wouldn’t tell me what was wrong, but then, when I saw him . . . I knew. He was dying. The ring I found had a C on it, and my father was Charles. Maybe I thought it was a sign from him that Wash was going to be okay.”

  Amelia’s reward notice hadn’t specified which letter was engraved on her own ring. She’d shared that information with only three people. Jessie hadn’t told. Aaron wouldn’t tell. Silas Moss—long confined to a nursing home, his brilliant mind corroded by dementia—can’t tell.

  Her thoughts spin back to the Brandy Harrison connection.

  In September, she’d come to Amelia posing as Lily Tucker, a fellow foundling searching for her roots. She showed Amelia a tiny signet ring she said she’d been wearing when she’d been abandoned in a Connecticut shopping mall in 1990. It was identical to the one Amelia had on when Calvin found her in 1968.

  Amelia never got a chance to ask her about it. Lily was a no-show for her next appointment, and unresponsive when Amelia tried to reschedule with her. That isn’t unusual in this business. She warns new clients that not all cases end in happy family reunions, and that they shouldn’t embark on a search unless they’re braced for possible heartbreak. Many people step back to digest that information and pop up months later ready to proceed with finding their lost loved ones. She’d hoped Lily Tucker would be one of them.

  Now it turns out she wasn’t Lily Tucker, and she’s been murdered, along with her mother.

  “Look, Amelia, I was planning on turning the ring in to the hospital’s lost and found, but I was upset about Wash that night, and I forgot about it. Lousy, I know.” Barnes slumps back in his seat as if crushed beneath three decades of guilt.

  But he didn’t steal the ring. People find, and keep, far more significant things without a hint of remorse. Calvin Crenshaw had scooped up a baby from the church pew like a dropped handkerchief or loose change—assuming what he
’d told Amelia was even true.

  “That night, right after I left the hospital, I met Delia. It was just a one-night stand,” Barnes adds, as if Amelia’s opinion of his promiscuity matters. “She got pregnant. I moved. By the time she tracked me down, the baby was about to be born. When I found out what Delia had named her, I couldn’t believe it. Charisse. She didn’t know my father was Charles. Listen, I’m a detective, and I’m not supposed to believe in coincidences, but . . .”

  “Life is full of them, and I’ve seen bigger.”

  “So have I, Amelia. So have I.”

  “Like your finding my ring?”

  “I obviously didn’t know it was your ring, so—”

  “Then why not mention it from the start? I request full disclosure from my clients, and if that was the one thing you gave your daughter, then it’s important.”

  “It isn’t.”

  “No detail is too trivial when I’m searching for someone’s—”

  “I don’t mean it’s not important. I mean it’s not the only thing I gave Delia for Charisse. Look, I—”

  “Here you go.” The waiter sets Cabernet and cheese fries in front of Barnes and glances at Amelia’s food, untouched, cheese goo congealing. “Everything okay here?”

  Barnes waves him away. “Everything’s fine.”

  The waiter moves on to clear an adjoining table. A few booths away, a middle-aged woman is finishing a sandwich. The place is otherwise empty.

  Barnes resumes his account in a low voice. “My daughter was born prematurely. When I saw her, tiny and fragile and helpless, I wanted nothing but the best for her. In my mind, that meant that I would not—could not—be a part of her life.”

  He’d told Amelia all of this when they’d met—that he wasn’t cut out to be a family man, and certainly not the kind of father his little girl deserved. That if he tried, there’d come a day when she’d need him and he wouldn’t be there—because of the job, or because he couldn’t get along with her mother, or any number of reasons fathers break their children’s hearts. He’d decided she was better off without him, and he’d walked away.

  Amelia may not have agreed with his logic, but she accepted his story. She’s heard it hundreds, thousands of times.

  “I knew I’d do everything in my power to protect that little girl. I couldn’t be there with her, but I figured my dad could. That’s why I left the ring. But guardian angels can’t cover expensive medical care, and neither could her mother and I. Delia was divorced. Unemployed and homeless. I was broke. I was also young and stupid, and I did a stupid thing.”

  He avoids her gaze, stamping wet interlocking rings on his paper place mat with his water glass as he goes on. “Ever hear of Perry Wayland?”

  “Sounds familiar.”

  “He was a hedge fund millionaire—or billionaire, if you believed the tabloids. He disappeared in October ’87, a few days after the stock market crash. His Mercedes was found on the GW Bridge—staged suicide. And . . . this doesn’t go any further, okay? Strictly confidential.”

  “Got it.”

  “My partner Stef and I tracked Wayland to . . . it doesn’t matter where. I didn’t see him myself, but Stef did. Wayland said he’d run off with his mistress, and he bribed Stef to look the other way. Stef knew my daughter was fighting for her life in the ICU. He handed me a wad of cash.” Barnes looks Amelia in the eye. “I didn’t hand it back. I gave it to Delia, and the ring, too, and then I walked away. Wayland left the country with his mistress, and I never told a soul.”

  Ah, no wonder. He isn’t just harboring guilt about the ring. All these years, he’s been hiding something much bigger . . . if his story is true.

  “You told me you looked for Charisse, a few years after she was born. And you met Alma.”

  He nods. “I went out to where they’d been living, in the Marcy Projects. Alma was still there, and she had a little daughter of her own.”

  “Brandy Harrison. So that’s how she got the ring.”

  “Probably. Alma said Delia had taken off with Charisse, and she hadn’t heard from her. I hoped they’d found a better place. The projects were dangerous back then.”

  “And dangerous now. I mean . . . they were murdered.”

  “Yeah.”

  He looks around for eavesdroppers. The waiter has disappeared. The middle-aged female customer is in earshot, but appears to be lost in her own thoughts.

  Barnes leans forward, voice dropping to a whisper. “A few months ago, when I was on vacation in Cuba with Rob and Kurtis, I ran into Perry Wayland. I guess he thought I’d come looking for him—like after all these years, his case mattered to the NYPD. Anyway, he made some threats, and . . .” He heaves a deep breath. “That’s why I hired you to find my daughter. Wayland said he already had.”

  “And you think he got to Alma and Delia?”

  “I don’t know what to think. But there’s one more thing. Do you remember—”

  He breaks off, pulls his phone from his pocket, and holds up a forefinger, indicating he has to take the call. “Yeah, Barnes here . . . yeah . . . yeah, I’m on my way.”

  He hangs up, stands up, throws some cash on the table, and pulls on his coat. “Sorry. I’ve got to go. It’s the job.”

  “But you said there was one more thing.”

  “Yeah, not important.”

  She frowns, watching him walk away as the waiter approaches.

  “Can I get you anything else?”

  “Just the check, please. And I’ll take hers as well.” Amelia points to the woman, who reminds her of Bettina Crenshaw, with world-weary posture and tired brown eyes.

  “Should I tell her you—”

  “No, I’d rather be anonymous. Someone once did the same thing for me.”

  Nineteen years old, she’d just stepped off a bus in Ithaca, determined to meet the famed Cornell University molecular biology professor Silas Moss. He’d been on television the night before, talking about his pioneering autosomal DNA research project.

  She’d walked into Moosewood Restaurant, ordered a meal she couldn’t afford, and the waitress told her an anonymous stranger had paid her bill.

  “Someday,” she’d told an incredulous Amelia, “when you come across someone who looks like they need a friend, or a favor, you’ll do the same for them.”

  She’s since done just that, more times than she can count.

  But she’s not so certain her own benefactor that day at Moosewood had been a stranger.

  She could have sworn she’d glimpsed a Harlem neighbor in Ithaca—and not just any neighbor. Like Bettina, the enigmatic Marceline LeBlanc was from somewhere down south.

  After Bettina’s death, Marceline had come to pay her respects and befriended Amelia. All that summer and into the fall, she’d been almost . . .

  A guardian angel.

  Like Barnes had wanted for his daughter. Only Marceline had been very much alive, and she was no angel, with a sharp tongue and sharper eyes. Bettina, and Calvin, too, had always warned Amelia to stay away from her—because they were devout Baptists, and she was rumored to practice voodoo? Or because they were afraid she’d tell Amelia something they didn’t want her to know?

  Marceline said she’d seen Calvin leave Park Baptist with a bundle—Amelia—on that predawn Mother’s Day in 1968. But had she also seen whoever left the baby?

  Amelia never had a chance to pry it out of her. She left New York for good, headed back home, down south, she said.

  Looking back, Amelia understands that Marceline’s departure had felt like something of an abandonment. If she hadn’t left, Amelia might never have found her way to Ithaca.

  Surely, it had been wishful thinking that Marceline had followed her upstate and yes, paid for her lunch. Surely, she hadn’t really been there.

  But if she had . . . why?

  Smoking her last cigarette in the cold night air, the woman leans closer to the diner window to block the reflected glare. She’d forgotten that New York nights are never truly dark
.

  She misses the balmy black Cuban sky glittering with stars. Here, they’re dimmed by streetlights and floodlights, blocked by skyscrapers.

  Every time she looks at the new skyline, she expects to see the twin towers. She’d been thirteen hundred miles away in Baracoa, Cuba, when terrorists destroyed them. Monitoring the media hysteria, she believed Judgment Day was nigh, as foretold by her father, via Revelations.

  “Alas, alas, that great city, wherein were made rich all that had ships in the sea by reason of her costliness! for in one hour is she made desolate.”

  The September 11 attacks had been a false alarm. Not the first, nor the last, nor the most notable in her own life.

  In October 1987, the Black Monday stock market crash instigated her escape from New York; this past October 2016, Hurricane Matthew triggered her return. Neither catastrophe brought biblical Armageddon, but both are monumental bookends in her personal history, marking the end of the world as she knew it.

  And in both incidents, the man in the diner had played a pivotal role.

  Shifting her position, she notices that his dining companion is now alone at the table.

  She whirls just in time to see him step through the glass door onto the sidewalk, flipping up the collar on his woolen coat. He turns in her direction, looking right at her, but doesn’t see her.

  Focused on the traffic stopped just beyond the red light on Broadway, he steps to the curb and raises an arm to hail a taxi. The light changes, a yellow cab pulls up, and he’s gone.

  He’s sneaky like that, Stockton Barnes. She’ll have to keep a closer eye on him.

  She exhales a stream of smoke and returns her gaze to the woman in the diner.

  Anyone who’s ever lived in New York City knows that it can be an extraordinarily small world. She supposes it was inevitable that Amelia Crenshaw Haines and Stockton Barnes would eventually cross paths. If a missing persons detective wants to find the daughter he’d abandoned in infancy, he’s going to turn to an investigative genealogist. Amelia is one of the country’s most high-profile experts. And they have a mutual acquaintance, Rob Owens.

  The Hudson River unfurls a bitter wind. The cigarette has burned to a nub. Isaiah’s prophecy rings in her head as she takes a long last drag.