Little Girl Lost

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  “From where?” Red asked that first day, standing on tiptoes to peer out the two small windows high on the wall above the couch. Nothing to see but other buildings and between them, a fleck of sky—gray that day. Always gray. Here, and back in Rockland, everywhere in between.

  “The roof. You can see the river from up there.”

  “Do the other tenants use it?”

  “No, so if you’re looking to make friends—”

  “I’m not.”

  Red’s a loner, not always by choice. People don’t notice that, though, in New York City. Not like back home. Here, you can go days without small talk, or even eye contact. That’s a good thing, on good days. On bad days, memories barge in.

  One bad day after moving into this place, Red searched for the roof access and found the door locked, marked with a bold RESTRICTED sign.

  Trapped. In this building, in this dark world, in this skin . . .

  After that, Red explored other options and discovered anyone could take the elevator all the way up to the 107th floor of the World Trade Center’s South Tower. From there, escalators climbed even higher, to a 110th floor outdoor deck called Top of the World. Ironic, to a person who was feeling anything but. Essentially a series of catwalks, the viewing area had blue floors that matched the sky and surprisingly flimsy white railings that were only waist-high. Beyond lay a tranquil sea of skyscrapers, even the Empire State Building far below, and helicopters and birds and wisps of cloud.

  On bad days, as the wind whipped and tourists chattered and snapped photos, Red stood gripping the rail with both hands, trying to work up the nerve. Always thinking this would be the time; always leaving a coward, doomed to struggle through another day, until the one when a voice jarred from the past.

  This time, it came not from inside Red’s head, but there. In real life. Real.

  “Won’t work.”

  Stunned, Red turned to see familiar translucent violet eyes—backlit, as if the sun were setting behind them and not on New Jersey across the river.

  “What . . . what are you doing here?”

  “Looking for you.”

  “But how . . . Did you follow me?”

  “I’ve been following you for a while now.”

  “Why?”

  White shrugged. “Someone has to keep an eye on you. Just like the old days. By the way, unless you can fly, there’s only one way down from here. It’s suicide-proof. See?”

  Below, the tower’s flat roof extended well beyond the platform on all sides. If you jumped, you might break a bone, but you’d find yourself sprawled on a broad stretch of roof. It, too, was surrounded by a white railing, well within the footprint. Beyond, yet another railing lay before the edge, where a tall, slanted barrier tilted out into the sky.

  Maybe Red always knew it wasn’t possible to free-fall over that railing. Does it matter? Not anymore.

  “So, can you?” White had asked.

  “Can I what?”

  “Fly?”

  “Look, I don’t know why you’re—I mean, I didn’t say anything about jumping.”

  “You’ve had some rough times in your life.”

  White knows that, better than anyone.

  “And you know I’m a really good listener.”

  Yes. In Red’s darkest days, White was there.

  “Come on. I’ll buy you a drink.”

  “I don’t drink anymore.” Turns out alcohol, like drugs, can tear down walls, allowing memories to slip in.

  “Coffee, then. Let’s go.” White reached out a gentle hand.

  Red took it, just like the first time.

  “You didn’t really want to die,” White said later.

  “Do you think I’m a coward? You’re wrong! I did want to die. That’s why I started going to the tops of tall buildings every day. I was planning to jump.”

  “But you didn’t do it. Not because you’re a coward. Because you’re brave, and strong, and you were meant to live. You knew deep down that I would come for you.”

  Red hadn’t known. Seeing White again that first day had been a shock.

  “But how did you find me?”

  “You can find anyone if you have the patience, and the time, and the money. That’s what I need from you.”

  “I don’t have any money.” Red had inherited some, after Mother died. But it was running out, and time to find a job.

  White offered one, handing over an envelope filled with cash, and a list with four names on it.

  Margaret Costello

  Tara Sheeran

  Christina Myers

  Bernadette DiMeo

  “Hey, aren’t they—”

  “Yes.” White smiled. “Good memory. I need you to find them, and their children.”

  “For what?”

  “Just find them. Watch them. The Bible tells us that false prophets will arise in end times. When the time comes, they’ll need to be eliminated. Do you understand?”

  “I think so. But I don’t think I can—”

  “You can. You have.” White is the only person in the world who knows Red’s darkest secret. “Whose salvation is more important? Theirs, or yours? It’s that simple. They haven’t been chosen. You have.”

  “All right. I’ll do this for you.”

  “No, it’s for us. The four of us. The chosen ones.”

  The search began with a mountain of old press clippings, records, notes, and true crime books about the Brooklyn Butcher, New York’s most notorious serial killer.

  Nearly twenty years ago, he’d methodically slaughtered four families as they slept. In every home, a teenaged daughter was the sole survivor. Overburdened in that violent, uneasy summer of 1968, the NYPD assigned every available detective to the case. On the heels of the fourth incident, they’d solved it.

  Windows throughout Dyker Heights had been open on the steamy June night when the DiMeo family was murdered. People were up late, too hot to sleep in the heat, or unsettled by Bobby Kennedy’s assassination the day before. Several neighbors heard screams and called the police. They arrived too late to save anyone but Bernadette, the teenaged daughter.

  But this time, there had been an eyewitness—a milkman who glimpsed a masked figure running from the building and disappearing into the subway as sirens closed in. And this time, the police found several clues at the scene. Most important, Bernadette had recognized and was able to identify her rapist. The fingerprints matched up. An arrest swiftly followed. The suspect was tried, convicted, and sentenced to several consecutive terms of life imprisonment, Governor Rockefeller having abolished the death penalty a few years earlier.

  The young women faded into obscurity, though the brutal crime spree hadn’t just robbed them of their families and their innocence.

  All had been raped. All were pregnant.

  Red has located the four, along with two of their offspring. Tara is in Boston with her daughter, Emily. Christina remains in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn; her son, adopted in 1969 as a newborn, lives in suburban Westchester County. Both Bernadette and Margaret are in Manhattan. Bernadette had reportedly lost her baby early in the second trimester.

  Margaret’s is missing.

  She’d refused to answer reporters’ questions about her obvious pregnancy back in the winter of ʼ68, but court transcripts revealed that she’d admitted it on the stand. She’d eventually carried the pregnancy to term, delivering a daughter that January, unnamed on the birth certificate.

  There are no records of her anywhere, not even adoption. Yes, those would be sealed. But like White said, when money is no object, a person can find just about anything. Red failed to find a trace of Margaret’s daughter in New York or the tristate area, and Margaret hadn’t raised her.

  So what did you do with her . . . or to her?

  That’s the question Red had planned to ask Margaret yesterday in the park, if it hadn’t been crawling with police. She was supposed to be the first to die.

  “It’s okay,” White said last night, on the phone, u
naware that Margaret’s daughter is still missing. “Do the Sheerans first, tomorrow night. Come here, first, on the way to Boston, so that I can see you. I miss you.”

  “I miss you, too. I wish—”

  “I know you do, but soon we’ll be together forever.”

  Off the exit, Red jiggles an anxious right leg, resisting the urge to stop for a bushel of apples at a farm stand heaped with orchard fruit. The rural road winds on toward the coast, past weathered homes bordered by vibrant foliage and remnants of ancient fieldstone walls. It looks like the scenic November photo from a wall calendar that had hung in the trailer, always open to the same page from an earlier, happier year, further in the past than Red’s memory can stretch.

  A few fast-food chains and service stations cluster near the Post Road intersection, where the remaining stream of traffic turns toward the quaint tourist towns to the north. Red goes right, following ferry signs past bait and tackle shops and a clam shack with missing letters on the sign.

  The working-class bayside neighborhood is no picturesque calendar scene. Familiar elements from Red’s childhood dot the landscape. Clotheslines and rusty pickup trucks; battered-looking indoor furniture on outdoor porches; vinyl siding and windows stapled with plastic sheeting to insulate against the bay wind. Red remembers drafty Decembers backlit by other people’s flashing twinkle lights, with a blaring singsong soundtrack of television commercials advertising toys Santa would never bring.

  Once, when Mother wasn’t home, Red took the calendar off the wall and flipped through the previous pages. Earlier in the year, there were handwritten appointments with a Dr. Schultz—once, twice, occasionally three times a week. After that November, nothing. Life had stopped moving forward long before it ended for Mother, lying in a pool of blood, her throat slit ear to ear.

  Her blubbery flesh bulged beneath the tracksuit she’d lived in for weeks. Her tangled hair was matted with grease and blood. Her left hand clutched her bloody throat, her right, a knife. The same blade had been used to slice Red’s after school apple into wedges. Before calling the police, Red ate them, standing over her, then washed the plate, dried it, and put it back into the cabinet.

  “How come?” White asked, when Red first shared the story, years ago.

  “I was hungry. And it wasn’t like she needed an ambulance. She was dead, you know? Her eyes were wide open, just staring.”

  “If you think your story’s bad . . .”

  “You don’t?”

  “I do. It’s nasty. But I can top your dead mother,” White said, like a poker shark upping the ante.

  “I doubt it.”

  “Oh, yeah? Ever hear of the Brooklyn Butcher?”

  Chapter Seven

  The towering redbrick apartment building has a Park Avenue address and takes up the entire block. After speaking to the doorman and building manager, neither of whom can shed any light on Perry Wayland’s disappearance, Barnes and Stef ride the elevator to the top floor.

  Place like this, you expect to be greeted by the help, but the woman who answers the door is no housekeeper.

  “Kirstin Wayland?” Stef asks, as they show their badges, and she nods, inviting them in.

  Bathed in golden sunshine falling through the skylight, she’s attractive, Barnes supposes, if you like your women Aryan and angular. Everything about her is pale—complexion, long hair held back in a narrow velvet band, sweater and pants, even the polish on her toenails. Her left hand is weighted by a hunk of a diamond set in a platinum band.

  Barnes is surprised to note that she’s barefoot, until she asks them to take off their shoes. He looks down at his polished black oxfords, then at Stef, who speaks for both of them.

  “Sorry, can’t do that on the job.”

  She arches a blond brow. “It’s just that Wellesley just started crawling, and I worry about germs . . .”

  “Wellesley?”

  “My youngest,” she says, as if he should have known. “It’s cold and flu season.”

  “Ma’am, I’m sorry, but our shoes stay on.”

  Seeing the flash of indignation in her chalky blue eyes, Barnes speaks up. “If you want, we can talk out in the hallway, or somewhere else.”

  “I can’t leave the apartment, in case Perry calls, or . . . someone asking for ransom. Just wipe your feet really well. But if Wellesley gets sick . . .”

  Scraping his soles against the doormat, Barnes dismisses the likelihood of either of those things. Not that he’s an expert on crawling babies. Or ever intends to be. But statistically speaking, a ransom demand is unlikely.

  He takes in the surroundings as he and Stef follow Kirstin Wayland across presumably sterilized white marble floors. Beyond an archway, the living room is an untouched coloring book—walls, carpet, draperies, furniture, artwork. Even the sky has been stripped of its glorious blue up here, monochromatic beyond three walls of floor-to-ceiling windows and French doors that have surely never been opened. Most people’s homes have a distinct smell, and Barnes always makes note of it when he enters. Here, there’s not a whiff of food, fragrance, or even furniture polish.

  Kirstin invites them to sit in a pair of silvery club chairs facing the matching sofa. She’s one of those people, Barnes notes, who keeps an eye on her own image reflected in various surfaces around the room. Some are furtive about it, but Kirstin Wayland might as well be addressing herself, gazing into strategically placed mirrors and spotless windows around the room.

  A magazine fan arcs across the glass coffee table, possibly more for show than for reading. The top issue of Vogue, featuring Cindy Crawford sporting towering teased hair, features headlines in a foreign language—Dutch? German?

  “Can I get you some water? I’d offer you coffee, but my housekeeper is busy keeping the twins out of the way right now. They just got home from school and I don’t want them asking any questions just yet.”

  “So they don’t know your husband is—”

  “No, they don’t. They’ll just worry. They’re at that fragile age.”

  Which age, Barnes wants to ask, is the fragile one? Ten? Twelve? Thirteen?

  Five, he discovers when he asks instead for the children’s names and ages. The twins, Eaton and Gardner, will be six next month. Their baby sister, born on Valentine’s Day, is napping in the nursery down the hall. The nanny is there, too, presumably watching her sleep.

  Barnes gets the staff’s names. “Maria Ruiz and Millie Ruiz—they’re related?”

  “I think they’re cousins. Maybe sisters. Something like that.”

  “Where do they live?”

  “Somewhere up in Harlem. Or the Bronx, maybe?” she asks, as if he might know.

  “They live together?”

  “I have no idea.” Seeing his expression, she adds, “I mean, it’s not like I visit them.”

  “You have addresses and phone numbers for them, though, right?” Stef asks. “Unless you’re paying them under the table. That would be illegal, and I know you wouldn’t—”

  “We wouldn’t,” she says hastily. “I have it somewhere around here.”

  “Good, because we’ll need to interview them. They know your husband is missing, right?”

  “I mentioned that he didn’t come home last night, but it would be a waste of time for you to discuss this with them.”

  “How so?”

  “For one thing, they barely speak English.”

  “Well, Barnes here is bilingual, so don’t worry. They’ll understand each other perfectly.”

  Kirstin goes to the kitchen for the water and Barnes looks over the notes he just scribbled in the notebook balanced on his knee. Eaton, Gardner, and Wellesley . . . the Wayland daughters might as well be a law firm.

  “Hey, Barnes, you ever hear that phrase ‘picture perfect’? ʼCause there it is.” Stef gestures at a framed oil painting that hangs beneath one of those wall spotlights, like in a museum.

  It’s a family portrait, with the four Wayland females all dressed in white; Perry in a black su
it. Kirstin is seated front and center with a cherubic blonde baby on her lap, flanked by a pair of miniature versions of herself, right down to the petulant expressions. Looks can be deceiving, but to Barnes, the Wayland twins don’t appear to be sweet little girls.

  Perry’s hand on his wife’s shoulder looks as clenched as his smiling jaw. He’s handsome in the same way that the Nazis are handsome in Barnes’s favorite all-time movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark. Clean-shaven and buttoned up, with perfect posture and fair Teutonic features.

  “What is it those Valley Girls say? Gag me with a spoon.”

  “Somehow, you don’t seem like the Valley Girl type, Stef.”

  Kirstin is back, carrying a silver tray that holds three glasses filled with ice and three individual-sized bottles of mineral water. She hands them around, cautioning them to please use coasters. Barnes has spotted those same green bottles in stores lately—not fancy ones, but regular supermarkets and delis where he shops. He’s been wondering what kind of New Yorker would shell out money for water in a bottle when the city’s drinking supply is abundant and potable. He sips, and finds that the fancy water tastes no different than what he gets for free out of the sink tap.

  Kirstin settles on the couch, and Stef goes over the initial report she gave over the phone when she called the precinct. She strikes Barnes as preternaturally unruffled, though it doesn’t necessarily mean she knows more than she’s telling.

  Her full name, she tells them, is Kirstin Billington Wayland.

  “Billington—that’s your middle name?” Barnes asks, pen poised on his notebook.

  “Maiden name. My middle name is Eaton. That’s my mother’s maiden name. I’m descended from the Mayflower on both sides,” she adds, answering a question nobody asked.

  “Mayflower—you mean, the pilgrims?”

  “Yes.”

  “Got that, Detective? Mayflower,” Stef says, with a hint of smirk she might catch if her eyes weren’t fixated on her own reflection in the mirror across the room.

  “Got it.” Barnes writes it down and underlines it, as if it’s as relevant a detail as she seems to think.