The Butcher's Daughter

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  After his arrest, Gypsy had been placed in the foster system. There, she could mask her true identity and become anyone she wanted to be. She could seduce damaged lost souls, like her friend, Red. She could forget the past, or she could use it to mold the future. She could learn from her father’s mistakes, and reinterpret the lessons he’d taught her. When memories overtook her, she could lose herself in her academic studies. She could earn a scholarship to a fine college where she could seduce wealthy, privileged lost souls like Perry Wayland, who would die for her.

  In 1987, an incarcerated Oran had concluded that the long anticipated biblical Armageddon was imminent. He’d ordered Gypsy to assemble Tara Sheeran, Christina Myers, Margaret Costello, and Bernadette DiMeo, along with their offspring, and await the Rapture.

  That’s not how it was supposed to be. All those years in prison had warped her father’s mind and memory.

  “You and me, we’re the chosen ones, Gypsy, baby. No one else matters. They’ll be gone, just like that, when Judgment Day comes . . .”

  There was no room in eternal paradise for her so-called sisters and brothers. Gypsy had summoned Red, who’d eliminated all but two in a spree the papers had dubbed copycat killings.

  By the time it was over, Gypsy and Perry were bound for a fresh start in Cuba. Judgment Day no longer seemed imminent, and her unfinished business—Margaret, and possibly a daughter, left alive—lost significance with every mile that separated her from the US, and faded with every year that passed.

  Now, though, the urgency has returned. Now everything has changed.

  Everything.

  Anticipating a post-apocalyptic wasteland, she finds the World Trade Center site crawling with tourists and hawkers selling 9/11 souvenirs. At the vast fountain memorial where the North Tower had stood, Gypsy lowers her umbrella to gaze at the empty sky. Her head throbs, and she remembers a perfect September night at Windows on the World, the elegant restaurant 107 stories above the city.

  It was there, over a bottle of Dom Pérignon, that she and Perry had formulated the plan that had led them to Baracoa. Donald Trump and his glamorous wife Ivana had stopped by their table to say hello. Tycoon to tycoon, he’d winked at the married Perry when he’d introduced Gypsy as a colleague.

  Thirty years later, the towers and Baracoa have been decimated, Trump is on his third wife, about to be inaugurated as president of the United States, and Perry—

  Her cell phone rings.

  She checks the Caller ID, as though it might be anyone other than the one person who’d call her on this number. But it’s him. Of course it is. He’s the only person who’d call her now, period; the only one in the world who knows, or even cares, that she’s alive.

  “Where are you?” he asks.

  “I had to run an errand.” She watches rain patter into walls of water cascading along the North Tower’s footprint, a symbolic rectangular bottomless pit at its center.

  “Get back to the hotel as soon as you can. I have something to show you. You don’t have to worry about Margaret Costello anymore.”

  “You found her?”

  “I found her obituary.”

  What year did Charisse die?

  James Harrison’s question hangs in the air, and Barnes grabs the hall table to steady himself.

  Charisse . . . died?

  “Hey, there, are you all right?” Harrison asks and he nods, unable to speak.

  Amelia looks equally stricken, murmuring, “How sad. What happened?”

  “Drowned with another teenager in a riptide off Coney Island about twenty, twenty-five years ago, and it put poor Esther in an early grave.”

  “Esther?”

  “My brother’s wife. Charisse’s mother. And if that tragedy hadn’t killed her, this one would have. Alma and Brandy. Oh, Lord.”

  “Why don’t you go make Grammy another pretty picture,” Regina tells her grandson, shooing him back into the next room and grunting as she straightens again. “I don’t like to talk about any of this in front of the little ones. Anyway, Jimmy, it was more than thirty years ago. Charisse died in August ’87, right before Hiram’s engagement party, and Esther was gone, too, before the wedding the following summer.”

  Barnes exhales at last, grasping details that had escaped him.

  Their Charisse’s mother had been Esther, not Delia, and the girl had drowned in August ’87 . . .

  His own Charisse hadn’t even been born yet.

  Now he recalls Delia mentioning that she’d named their daughter after Alma’s late sister. But for Barnes, the name was a link to his father, Charles, in some mysterious cosmic coincidence . . .

  Or not.

  Tawafuq.

  Hiram Trimble had been the attorney who’d tracked him down in 1987 when Delia was pregnant and threatening a paternity suit.

  “Forget the lawyer. Talk to her,” Wash had advised. “This isn’t about paper. It’s about people. And about perspective. Ask yourself who you are, Stockton. Better yet, who you want to be.”

  I’m trying, Wash. Man, am I trying.

  He looks at Jimmy. “According to the case file, there was another Charisse in Alma’s life. Her friend Delia’s daughter, born in October 1987. The two of them lived with Alma and Brandy for a few years. Do you remember them?”

  Jimmy and Regina exchange a glance so fleeting he isn’t sure he caught it.

  “Not really,” Jimmy says, picking invisible lint off his sweater.

  “Meaning . . .”

  “Alma had a lot of friends,” Regina speaks up, “and we never saw much of her.”

  “They did visit you here in Connecticut, though—Alma, and Brandy?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “With Delia and her daughter?” When Regina doesn’t answer, Barnes turns to Jimmy, who shrugs.

  “This house has always been full of people coming and going. Family, friends . . . Just like today.”

  “But today, you know exactly who’s here.” He waves his pad, where he’d written the list of relatives’ names. “Look, we’re trying to find out who killed your niece and her daughter, and keep you and your other loved ones safe. So I need straight answers. Where are Delia and Charisse now?”

  “I have no idea,” Jimmy says. “Do you, Regina?”

  “None.”

  “And when was the last time you saw them, Mr. Harrison?”

  “A long time ago.”

  “Five years? Ten?”

  He shrugs. “Longer.”

  “Fifteen? Twenty?”

  “Regina?” He looks to the wife, who seems to have the more accurate sense of time.

  “Oh, it’s been at least . . . let’s see, twenty-five, thirty years. Delia’s Charisse was just a little thing, and she was about the same age as Bobby’s other—”

  “About thirty years, then,” Jimmy cuts in, as if that settles it.

  “About thirty years. That’s right.”

  “And Delia’s daughter was the same age as . . .” Barnes prompts.

  “Bobby’s.”

  “Bobby’s . . .”

  “Right.” She turns toward the kitchen. “I need to go and check the—”

  “The same age as Bobby’s other . . . what?”

  “Daughter! Now can I please—”

  “Just a second.” He jots a note, thinking back to the few conversations he ever had with, and about, Delia.

  “Who’s Bobby?”

  “He’s my nephew,” Regina tells him. “My oldest brother’s son.”

  It’s a common name, and one that had also belonged to Delia’s ex-husband. Unless they’re the same person, and she’d been a part of this family at one time?

  “Tell me about Bobby and his daughter,” Barnes says. “Or is it daughters?”

  Jimmy toys with a new snag on his sweater sleeve, undoubtedly courtesy of having plucked at nonexistent lint.

  Regina speaks up. “Monica is twenty-nine. She’s in the service—special ops.”

  “She must be a tough cookie,” Am
elia comments, as Barnes writes it down.

  “She had to be, with—”

  “With . . . ?”

  “Bobby had a lot of problems, but he’s straightened out now, and—”

  “Aunt Regina? What’s going on?” A man steps into the room. He’s about Barnes’s age, lanky, casually dressed in running pants, high-tops with the laces dragging, and a Brooklyn Nets tee shirt.

  “These detectives are from New York. They’re trying to find out what happened in Bed-Stuy.”

  “You must be Bobby,” Barnes says.

  The man nods, stepping closer, and Barnes sees that he has a long slash of scar alongside his mouth. “How come you were talking about me?”

  “It’s all good, son. We were just saying that Delia’s Charisse was about the same age as Monica,” Jimmy tells him.

  “What does that have to do with Alma and Brandy getting killed?”

  “They were asking about it.”

  “About me and my ex?”

  So he is Delia’s no-good former husband.

  “Let’s back up. What’s your full name? No worries, sir, it’s routine,” Barnes adds, seeing his wary expression.

  “Bobby—Robert—Montague. No middle name.”

  Barnes writes that down, along with other basics. Bobby lives alone in nearby Bridgeport, and he works at a harbor freight company. His daughter Monica is stationed somewhere overseas—he isn’t sure where.

  “Backing up . . . you and Delia got married . . . when?”

  “In 1986.”

  “And you were divorced a few years later?”

  “We never got divorced.”

  “Then . . . you’re still married?”

  “Who knows? I haven’t seen her since Thanksgiving Day in 1990.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “Probably dead by now.”

  “Bobby!”

  “I’m not the only one who thinks that, Aunt Regina! Ask anyone in the family. Right, Uncle Jimmy?”

  “Drugs’ll kill you. I wouldn’t be surprised. But we don’t know for sure. Alma said she up and left one day, and that’s all we know.”

  Barnes turns back to Bobby. “What happened that Thanksgiving?”

  “Delia showed up at my place out of the blue. She said she wanted to have turkey with me and Cynthia.”

  “Cynthia?”

  “Monica’s mother. I moved in with her when I left Delia, because she was pregnant. The next thing you know, Delia is pregnant, too.” He smirks. “So that Thanksgiving, Cynthia went nuts, screaming at Delia, and Delia, you know, she’s whacked out of her mind, so she starts laughing like a maniac, and the girls are crying hysterically, and one of the neighbors called the cops, so now there’s sirens wailing, too, and—”

  “Hold on, back up . . . which girls were crying?”

  “Monica and Charisse.”

  “Delia brought Charisse?”

  “Yeah, they took the bus up to Bridgeport from the city. It was pouring, I remember, and they were drenched, and Delia had this pie she probably picked out of the garbage. It was soggy with pieces missing, and she kept trying to give it to Cynthia. Man, I thought Cynthia was gonna shove it into her face. But the cops got there in the nick of time.”

  Barnes scrawls the facts, wondering where he’d been that Thanksgiving, when his daughter was crying in the rain? Wash was gone by then, and so was his abuela. His mother had given up cooking when his father died. Most likely, Barnes had been working that holiday. Or maybe he’d been at Rob’s, where every holiday is a sprawling extravaganza.

  One thing is certain—wherever he’d spent that day, Charisse had been on his mind, same as she is every day.

  He asks Bobby what else had happened, but he’d been high at the time, and the details aren’t clear. All he knows for sure is that Cynthia kicked out Delia, gave him an ultimatum, and he checked himself into rehab the next day.

  “Saved myself. Too bad Delia didn’t do the same thing.”

  “Maybe that’s why she ran off.”

  “No way. We’d talked about it a few times—getting clean, you know. But she couldn’t do it alone, and she had nowhere to leave the kid.”

  “What about Alma?”

  “She was fed up. She wanted them both out. Not that I blame her. Delia was a hot mess, but man, there was something about her that was just . . . irresistible, you know what I’m sayin’?”

  Do I ever.

  “You know how I got this?” he asks, gesturing at the scar by his mouth. “Street fight. Some guy was harassing her, and I knew he had a blade, but I didn’t care. I was willing to die for that woman. Wound up in the hospital. Married her the second I got out. That’s how crazy I was about Delia Montague.”

  “That’s pretty crazy.”

  “Even crazier trying to get away from her a few years later. She kept roping me back in. She couldn’t pay the rent on her own, so she lost the apartment, and lost job after job, too. She started talking about moving up here with us.”

  “With you and your girlfriend?” Amelia asks Bobby as Barnes flips a page, writing notes, trying to keep up.

  “Yeah, she thought Cynthia would be cool with it and she wanted me to see if Cynthia could get her hired as a security guard! I said, ‘Girl, for one thing, Cynthia hates you, and for another, even I wouldn’t hire you to guard my beer while I’m in the bathroom. Forget a whole shopping mall.’”

  “Shopping mall?” Amelia echoes, and Barnes jerks his head up.

  “Yeah, that’s where Cynthia worked back then.”

  “Which mall?”

  “Chapel Square.”

  Chapter Eight

  Still shrouded in her wet plastic poncho, stomach queasy from the excessive painkillers that failed to kill her pain, Gypsy dons her new magnifying glasses and skims the printed page.

  Margaret Costello’s obituary is dated November 15, 2015. She’d died at sixty-five after a short illness, predeceased by her parents, brother, and grandmother, victims of the Brooklyn Butcher on May 10, 1968.

  No mention of the daughter she’d delivered the following winter, Gypsy points out to the rather smug man lounging on the velvet couch in the middle of the suite. He’d handed over the obituary looking like a dutiful toddler expecting praise, or a treat.

  “It says she leaves no survivors,” he comments.

  “But it doesn’t say that the daughter predeceased her. It would, if she’d been a part of Margaret’s life.”

  “That doesn’t mean she’s not dead.”

  “And it doesn’t mean she doesn’t exist.”

  Gypsy paces, boot heels clacking on the marble floor.

  Her old friend Red, so proficient and eager to please—Red, who’d gotten into sealed adoption records to locate Christina Myers’s son—even the clever, cunning Red had found no trace of Margaret’s daughter.

  The press had long speculated that the baby, born to an addicted, traumatized teen, hadn’t lived past infancy, perhaps destroyed by her own unstable mother.

  All very reassuring, but still . . .

  “If there’s any chance that girl is still alive . . .”

  “That girl—you mean your sister?” he asks with maddening emphasis.

  “Yes.” She glares at him, his face distorted through the lenses.

  She takes them off, and the poncho, too, letting it drop like a soggy garbage bag.

  “Sorry, Gypsy, but if you’re going to . . . I just want you to keep that in mind. In case you . . . forgot.”

  “I never forget anything. Never. Why do you suppose Red went to Ithaca?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The ‘copycat killer.’” She inserts the phrase in finger quotations. “In 1987, Red killed Bernadette DiMeo in Manhattan and then drove straight to Ithaca. Cornell University is there, and that’s where Bernadette went after her family was murdered. But she was the only one of those four girls who didn’t carry my father’s baby to term.”

  “Unless she did?”

 
; “What if Red found out and went to Ithaca to find him, or her?”

  “Bernadette isn’t the only one who has ties to Ithaca. Amelia Crenshaw Haines went to Ithaca College. She still has friends there, and she just spent the holidays with them.”

  Gypsy ponders that, circling the couch like a shark, fingertips pressing her temples in a futile effort to ease the throbbing.

  “Probably a coincidence,” she concludes. “Ithaca’s one of the most popular college towns in the country. I need you to find out whether Bernadette DiMeo and Margaret Costello have living offspring.”

  “What about Connecticut? You wanted me to go back up there tonight. Do you still need me to—”

  “Yes. That, too.”

  She needs him, unfortunately. Needs his money. But only for a little while longer.

  After leaving the Harrison home, Amelia and Barnes head for a Starbucks. Not for the caffeination, or the ambiance, but for the Wi-Fi. Located on the green across from the old Chapel Square Mall site, the place is busy even with Yale on winter recess.

  Barnes waits to order while Amelia stalks about-to-be-vacated tables. By the time he gets their beverages, she’s landed a prime corner spot and is answering a text from Jessie, who’s alarmed that she’s “disappeared.”

  Amelia replies with one word, all caps: RELAX!

  Jessie’s response is immediate. Are you ok?

  Amelia sends a thumbs-up and a heart, then puts down her phone and takes a steaming cup from Barnes. “Thanks. Decaf, right?”

  “Double caf.” At her alarmed expression, he flashes a smile. “Yeah, decaf. But why bother? You might as well have hot chocolate instead.”

  “I’m not a fan.”

  “Of hot chocolate?”

  “Or any chocolate.”

  “What is wrong with you, woman?”

  “I don’t like sweets, and I can’t drink caffeine this late in the day.”

  “Late? It’s not even noon. And if I don’t drink caffeine my brain will be mush.”

  “Doesn’t it keep you up at night?”

  “Plenty of things keep me up at night. Coffee isn’t one of them.”

  Charisse.

  She’d expected him to tell the Harrisons about the connection, or at least ask what they knew about the child abandoned at Chapel Square Mall. But Barnes hadn’t batted an eye when Bobby mentioned that Cynthia had worked there back in 1990, just asked for her contact information.