The Butcher's Daughter

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  “Mimi, I know this Barnes guy is all that—”

  “I never said—”

  “I heard what you were saying between the words.”

  Amelia sighs. Yes, Barnes is handsome and cool, rugged yet refined—so okay, maybe he is all that—but it’s beside the point.

  “Your perspective is thrown off because he’s sweet-talking you. You need to be careful.”

  “Jessie, if you think any man can sweet-talk me after what I’ve been through, you’re crazy. I’m nowhere near ready to date yet.”

  “Uh, Mimi? I meant be careful because I’m not sure he’s on the up-and-up about your ring. But if—”

  “I know what you meant. I was joking! Obviously!”

  “Obviously.”

  Amelia imagines Jessie’s wry smile.

  “And he is on the up-and-up about the ring,” she adds.

  “I hope so, because I was telling Billy about this, and he did some sniffing around, and the good news is that Barnes really is an NYPD missing persons detective.”

  “Of course he is.” Though Amelia, too, had done some searching online last night, just to be certain. “What’s the bad news?”

  “It doesn’t mean he wasn’t working with Lily Tucker, or whoever she is, to scam you. There are plenty of dirty cops around.”

  “Barnes isn’t one of them.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  “I’m always right.”

  “That’s my line. So listen, Billy also googled a description of your ring. You know what pops up first? That ad you placed looking for your parents, with a twenty-five-thousand-dollar reward. I bet Brandy tried to look up the ring’s value because she needed money, stumbled across your ad, and realized it was worth a lot more than any pawnshop would give her. So she came to you posing as a client.”

  “But why the little girl who was abandoned in Connecticut in 1990?”

  “Because she knew being a foundling would strike a chord with you, just like it did between you and me. Instant bond. Instant trust.”

  “No, I know, but why that particular foundling?”

  “Probably random.”

  “I don’t think so. Hang on. I’m going to send you something.” She lowers her phone, finds two photos she snapped, and texts them to Jessie’s phone. As she explains her hunch, her friend gasps.

  “If you’re right, Mimi, then you need to report this.”

  “I will,” she assures her friend.

  But not until she’s told Stockton Barnes.

  Gypsy rolls over in bed and opens her eyes.

  The suite’s bedroom is cast in shadow now. A fat pigeon waddles on the sill outside the window. Beyond, storm clouds hang low along the geometric skyline.

  Why had she been so homesick for New York City when she’d first arrived in Cuba thirty years ago? It’s nothing but gray—buildings, weather, the damned bird, even the modern suite’s décor.

  She’d give anything to be back in Baracoa, where architecture, wildlife, and natural landscape are drenched in vibrant color.

  A fingertip trails along her shoulder like a spider, and she flinches.

  “Good morning.”

  She turns her head. His face is inches from hers.

  “It’s afternoon.”

  He glances at his watch. He’d pretended to love it, because it was a gift from her. It’s a Breitling. Old-school, to replace his smart watch. Distractions are dangerous.

  “So? We don’t have to be anyplace.” He yawns, stretches for the remote on the nightstand, and turns on the television.

  Donald Trump, the president elect, is standing at a podium, talking.

  “He’s the devil.”

  Gypsy sighs. “No, he isn’t.”

  “Trust me. I’ve met him.”

  “So have I.” And I’ve met the devil, too, and he wasn’t Donald Trump.

  She points at the TV. “He’s King Cyrus. Winning the election was a preordained miracle. Biblical prophecy told us that God would anoint him to subdue nations, and—I’ve already explained this to you. Signs are everywhere. Only the chosen ones recognize them.”

  “Quoting your father again?”

  “My father has nothing to do with this. You’ve read Isaiah 45.” She gestures at the television. “He’s the forty-fifth president. A sign. Judgment Day is coming. But we don’t need to hear Cyrus rant. Turn it off.”

  “I’ll just turn the channel.”

  “I said turn it off.” She snatches the remote from him, aims, and the screen goes black.

  “Hey!” He reaches for it, and she throws it across the room. Grinning as if it’s a game, he reaches for her instead.

  She evades him, sitting up and pulling on her robe. “You already had your pleasure, my friend. Time for business.”

  “I’d say we both had our pleasure.”

  “Well, you know what they say. All play and no work makes Jack a dull—”

  “I’m not Jack, and that’s not what they say. It’s all work and no play.”

  “That’s not what I say. And you should know by now that what I say, goes.”

  He sits up, stoops to snatch his black tee shirt from the floor, and yanks it over his head, then catches her staring at him. He goes still, uncertainty in his eyes, the shirt cowled around his neck.

  “Sometimes I wonder just how committed you are,” she says.

  “To you? One hundred percent! You know that I—”

  “To me, and to our destiny. We’ve got important work to do, and I wonder if you—”

  “I’m with you, baby. All the way. You know that.”

  She knots the robe around her waist and walks to the window. From here, she can see the Park Avenue penthouse where Perry once lived with his wife and daughters. There are potted trees on the little terrace now, a valiant, verdant patch in the bleak cityscape.

  Mary, Mary, quite contrary . . .

  Gypsy hasn’t thought of her in years—the little old lady who’d lived in a small house across from her Bronx high school. Her name might have been Mary, or maybe it was just what everyone called her. Mary, Mary—out there rain or shine, tending her doormat-sized flower patch. Chrysanthemums grew there in the fall, and crocuses in the spring . . .

  Gypsy winces, pushing away the memory of a boy who’d once said her eyes were the same shade.

  “I need you to find someone,” she says, her back still to the man in the bed.

  “Someone else?”

  “Yes. Her name is Margaret Costello.”

  “Isn’t she—”

  “Yes. She is.”

  “But that was a long time ago. I thought we were—”

  “If you’re not willing, I’m perfectly capable of doing it myself.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “I’m sure about everything I do.” She turns to regard him through narrowed eyes, irked to see his phone in his hand.

  He’s always checking the damned thing, even in mid conversation. She’s told him how she feels about that, and he’s reminded her that technology is crucial to their plan.

  He’s right, of course. From surveillance software to online records, everything they need is quite literally at their fingertips. It’s quite remarkable.

  Yet much has been sacrificed.

  She thinks of all those years in Cuba. Of Perry’s eyes, Perry’s whole being, focused only on Gypsy. Not just Perry—an army of followers.

  She walks over to the full-length mirror. She takes off the robe, letting it pool at her feet. She reaches for a brush on the vanity and runs it in languid strokes through her long hair.

  “Oh, man, baby. What are you trying to do to me?” The man reflected behind her in the bed is now fixated on Gypsy, as he should be.

  She looks damned magnificent, not just for her years. In this light, there’s no hint of the faint fine lines around her full mouth and violet eyes. Her body is firm and trim, long legged and sun bronzed without tan lines. A small horse is inked above her left breast.

 
Every time she sees it, she thinks of Oran’s favorite scripture. John 8:44.

  “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do.”

  But she has no interest in leading disciples to an eternal reward. There can be just one true prophet in paradise.

  And there will be, as long as Margaret Costello and her child are found, and eliminated.

  There was a time when a stroll down Barnes’s Washington Heights block felt like Russian roulette. Now there’s a community garden adjacent to his building, and a new jungle gym in the courtyard.

  As he climbs four flights of stairs to his apartment, he passes a father and son who live on the top floor. They’re hand in hand, the child bundled up, bouncing down one step at a time, and whining.

  “Because I said so,” the man is saying, with a weary headshake and smile for Barnes.

  He thinks of his own dad. After a grueling double shift, Charles Barnes would detour on the way home to conceal a copper coin on the slide, swings, or teeter-totter. Then, instead of collapsing into bed, he’d rouse Barnes from his and they’d sneak out into the night to play “Penny on the Playground.”

  “You’re getting colder!” he’d call as Barnes ran around trying to find the coin. “Ooooh, now you’re warm. Warmer! Son, you are burning hot!”

  Not in this moment. Stepping over the threshold, Barnes shivers out of his cashmere overcoat and wool suit jacket. Throughout December, his apartment had been so overheated he’d had the windows wide-open on ten-degree nights. A maintenance man had tinkered with the vents. Ever since, the place has felt like a meat locker, but he keeps forgetting to call the super about it.

  He locks the dead bolt and puts his badge, keys, wallet, and leather gloves on an adjacent table beside ten days’ worth of unopened mail. Mostly bills, catalogs, and junk mail. But there are larger envelopes, too, some red or green. Every January, when he opens the final batch of holiday cards from friends and family, he resolves to send out his own next December. It never happens.

  Sitting on the couch to untie his shoes, he eyes the photo cards he’d opened early in December and displayed on a shelf. Some feature smiling kids and babies, others entire families. His friend Rob’s card is, as always, the largest and most spectacular of all. He and his wife, Paulette, and their five kids are posed in front of their brick mansion beside a decorated towering pine that rivals the one in Rockefeller Plaza.

  The house is as picture-perfect inside as it is out. The family, beyond the facade . . . not so much. Rob swears his rock-solid marriage isn’t faltering, but he and Paulette are increasingly at odds about the kids. Their oldest son is pushing thirty, unemployed, and perpetually at odds with his father. Their middle daughter is on academic probation, and their youngest had her driver’s license suspended for speeding a few weeks after she got it.

  Whenever Rob updates Barnes on the household conflict, Barnes usually feels like he dodged a bullet when he opted out of marriage and fatherhood. Still, even troubled families love each other.

  Don’t you go feeling sorry for your lonely self, Stockton. You want someone to love, you go find someone to love.

  Wash, haunting him as usual.

  In the living room, Barnes notices that the coffee table poinsettia has gone limp, and the Douglas fir’s branches have withered beneath the ornaments. He’s been too busy to water them and now he’s too tired and too cold, and anyway, the holidays are over.

  Uh-huh, Ebenezer, you just go right ahead and let them die, chides the Ghost of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, all rolled into one. Barnes sighs and returns to the kitchen, dumping this morning’s cold coffee from the pot and filling it at the sink.

  Petals drop as he waters the plant, and when he reaches for the tree’s holder, dry needles rain over a small stack of wrapped gifts. They’re from him, waiting for the woman who already has everything and can afford none of it.

  His mother is away on a cruise—her Christmas gift to herself, along with a boatload of costume jewelry courtesy of a home shopping program.

  “They’re from Jennifer Lopez’s new line,” she’d said at the pier, showing off her shiny earrings and bangles. “What do you think?”

  I think you’re no J. Lo, and you should have put the money toward your insane credit card bills, or the rent.

  But he’d long given up trying to curtail his mother’s impulse buys and untangle her finances. She’d given him a heap of Christmas presents he can’t wear, use, or fit into his apartment. He’d thanked her and then returned everything, crediting her account, well aware she’ll never realize.

  He gave himself the only gift that matters this year, revisiting the neighborhood tattoo parlor that had long ago inked his father’s initials, and later Wash’s, on his right bicep. Now his daughter’s name is on his left, scrolled across a heart.

  “You make a choice, Stockton, and someday you’re either going to regret it, or congratulate yourself that it was the right one,” Wash had said the night Barnes confessed he’d gotten a stranger pregnant during a one-night stand.

  “There is no choice. I’m not going to help raise a kid, period. It’ll be better off without me.”

  “Were you better off without your father?”

  “Hell, no. It’s the same thing, whether you drop dead, or take off because the stock market crashed, or because their mother is a pain in the ass, or because you’re not cut out for being a dad and you never wanted kids in the first place. The kid gets hurt in the end.”

  “So it’s better to hurt them in the beginning, is that what you’re saying?”

  It was exactly what Barnes had been saying. Charisse couldn’t miss or grieve or hate a man she’d never known.

  Now that someday is here, is he looking back congratulating himself that he’d made the right choice?

  “I still don’t know, Wash,” he mutters. “How can I know if I regret it until I see how her life turned out?”

  He takes a long, hot shower that warms him, leaving him drowsy and craving bed. In the chilly bedroom, he sets the alarm for 3 p.m., and plugs his work phone into the bedside charger.

  His personal phone contains a couple of texts. He opens the first as he shoves his bare feet between cold sheets and pulls the quilts up to his chin. It’s a video snippet from Rob aboard a private jet with an iconic jazz musician who says, “Hey, Barnes, I hear you’re a fan of mine. Happy new year, brother. I hope to see you at Rob’s party MLK weekend.”

  Barnes smiles and sends a return thumbs-up.

  The other message—messages—are from Amelia. He heaves a weary sigh. She’ll have to wait. He puts the phone on the bedside table, turns off the light, and closes his eyes.

  Those damned white lilies chase him as he drifts toward sleep. The moment he’d realized what they were, he’d suspected Perry Wayland and Gypsy Colt were involved in the Bed-Stuy murders.

  It’s too late to save the Harrisons, but his own daughter may be in danger. No one is better equipped—or more determined—to protect her than Barnes himself. And Amelia, who can help him find her.

  Wide-awake, he grabs his phone and calls her.

  She answers immediately. “Where have you been?”

  “Sorry. I was on a case all night and then I went to the Marcy Projects to look into the murders. No witnesses, no suspect, no apparent motive. Someone wanted to take them out.”

  “Do you think it has anything to do with—”

  “It could. You haven’t mentioned what I told you to anyone, have you?”

  “No, but I—”

  “Good. Please don’t. And you need to be careful, Amelia.”

  A pause. “Where are you right now?”

  “Home, about to sleep for a few hours. Why?”

  “I was going to ask you to come to my office so that I can show you something. Here, I’ll send it to you. Can you put me on speaker?”

  He obliges, hearing a whoosh on her end, and an incoming text alert on his.

  There are two photos. At
a glance, he can see that the first is a toddler portrait of Barnes himself. He’d given it to her at their first appointment.

  The other is a little girl.

  He clicks and waits for it to enlarge as Amelia says, “This child was found in New Haven, Connecticut, twenty-six years ago.”

  “Brandy and Alma Harrison have family in New Haven. What do you mean by found?”

  “Just like me, but . . . see any resemblance?”

  “To you?”

  “No! Barnes, I think she’s—”

  He gasps as the enlarged photo loads on his phone’s screen, and he utters just one word, with wonder and conviction.

  “Charisse.”

  Part II

  1968

  Chapter Three

  Friday, February 2, 1968

  Jacksonville, Florida

  Before last summer had even unfolded, the newspapers were calling it the “summer of love.” For Melody Hunter, it had turned out that way for reasons that had nothing to do with the counterculture convergence on San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, or her own newlywed status.

  “All righty, then, Mrs. Hunter, let’s have a look-see.”

  She can’t see the man sitting on a stool between her legs and the stirrups, but she can feel his gloved hands probing inside her. Her face is hot with embarrassment, though he’s a physician and she’s a grown married woman.

  Last Wednesday had been her first visit to this low stucco bungalow that smells of mildew and orange peels. He’d collected a urine sample and sent her home. This morning, he called her in for the verdict.

  The nine days between have been hell.

  “Well, congratulations, Mrs. Hunter.”

  “Am I pregnant?”

  “You are indeed. First baby is something special. I’m sure you’re tickled pink.”

  “Oh, I am.” Melody isn’t accustomed to lying to a doctor—lying to anyone, for that matter.

  Better get used to it.

  “How . . . pregnant?”

  “Almost six months along, Mrs. Hunter. I’ve been in this business a long time, and you’re the first married lady I’ve met who didn’t know it until this late stage.”