How much money will it take to make sure she has the care she needs?
More than Barnes can possibly earn or borrow, that’s for damned sure. What the hell is he going to do?
Stef interrupts his thoughts again.
“Something’s eating you, kid. Everything okay with your family?”
“Yeah.”
“Because this morning, you said—”
“Turned out fine. Nothing to worry about.”
“Good. Hey, you want to know what’s eating me?”
He does not, but Stef is going to tell him.
“Missing game six.”
The World Series. After all that’s happened today, Stef is thinking about a baseball game?
To be fair, it’s just another day on the job for him. He’s jaded enough after all these years not to be thrown by Christina Myers’s brutalized corpse. He isn’t losing an old friend. He doesn’t have a newborn in the ICU. He isn’t trying to come up with . . .
How much?
“Listen, I like to bust your chops, kid,” Stef says. “But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t help you if something’s wrong.”
“Weren’t we talking about baseball?”
“I was talking. To myself.”
“I told you. The case—”
“Yeah, the case. The case can wait for a second. You and me, we got each other’s backs. You know that, right? You’re not alone. You got family.”
Stef isn’t talking about Wash, or the baby.
He’s talking about the job.
“Thanks. That’s good to know.”
“Good. So let’s get this done and get back to the city so you can . . . do whatever you have to do. Take some time off if you need it. Maybe a leave—”
“Thanks, Stef, but I don’t need a leave. I just need to keep working.”
Keep getting paid.
But it’s never going to be enough.
Bernadette remembers the cold more than anything else.
The January wind whipped through the gorge so that she could feel the bridge tremor and sway beneath her thin leather loafers. She’d grown out of last season’s snow boots, and the wool car coat that had carried her through Brooklyn winters was no match for the harsh Ithaca climate. Her hands were so numb in knit gloves that she couldn’t feel the handle of the baby’s carrier as she lugged it onto the span.
It was slippery. She skidded more than once, nearly losing her footing close to the edge.
But that was the whole point, wasn’t it?
She wanted to make the death plunge into the gorge. She was planning to die. And she wasn’t going to do it alone.
“Where are you taking her?” Margaret had asked when she handed over her tiny daughter, wearing a pink snowsuit. But she didn’t seem to care very much. She was ready to forget the nightmare and the child she’d been forced to bear.
“Don’t worry. I’m giving her to someone who deserves her.”
Margaret gave a resolute nod. Maybe she suspected the truth. Maybe not, because she gave Bernadette a few formula-filled bottles, some cloth diapers and safety pins, and two spare outfits, all she had. She was surrounded by boxes, preparing to leave the apartment where her family had been murdered. Free to make a fresh start unencumbered, she had rented a studio apartment in Manhattan.
“What should I tell people?”
“You mean family? Friends?”
Margaret shook her head and explained that she was a first generation American; her relatives were strangers in Italy. She’d had few friends before it happened, and had distanced herself from them in the months since.
“Then who are you worried about?”
“The press knows I had a baby.”
Just as they knew Bernadette had not—though they weren’t aware of the true reason.
“This is going to fade now that the trial is over. They’re not going to keep tabs on you forever. Especially if you’re moving out of here. No one needs to know where you went. You can disappear.”
That, essentially, is what Margaret had done, swallowed by the city and a drug habit that might have been inevitable even before the tragedy.
That day, as Bernadette was walking away with her baby, Margaret chased her down, calling, “Wait!”
She turned back, certain the other girl had changed her mind. But she was holding something out.
“Here, this should go with her.”
“What is it?”
“One of the nurses at the hospital left it under my pillow for me.”
“You mean, when you had the baby?”
“No, not then. Last May. When I was . . . recovering. After . . . you know.”
“Oh.”
“They were really nice to me there. One day, they left me a cross made of palm fronds, and another day, they left this. It was too small for me, though, so I might as well give it to her.”
Bernadette took the packet and left her standing there. As she walked toward the subway, she looked back once, certain she’d see Margaret wistfully watching them go.
She was wrong. She’d already gone back inside and closed the door.
Bernadette boarded an Ithaca-bound bus crowded with students heading back for the new semester. None gave her a second glance, and the tiny girl slept quietly the whole way.
Back on campus, she smuggled the baby into her empty dorm room. Her roommate was from California and wouldn’t be back until the next evening. That would give Bernadette plenty of time to write a suicide note. She’d been composing it in her head for a month, ever since she’d failed one final and barely passed the rest before returning to Brooklyn for Christmas in an empty apartment.
But who would find the note? The roommate she’d met a few months ago? They weren’t even friends, really. She’d probably be glad to find herself living alone in a double room this semester.
Instead of writing the note, she unwrapped the packet Margaret had given her.
It contained a little gold necklace.
She put it on the baby, then changed and fed her. Not because she had a nurturing bone in her body, but because she was wet and hungry and starting to fuss. An infant’s wails would bring curious co-eds to her door.
To this day, Bernadette is certain things would have been different if her bus had arrived after dark and she’d gone straight to the gorge. Without time for second thoughts—time to take a good look at the baby and wonder if she really was pure evil.
How could she not be? She’d been conceived in a heinous act and her father was Satan himself, hell-bent on a mission to populate the earth with his disciples. If she was allowed to live, she would grow up to do terrible things.
Yet she seemed so sweet, cooing softly and staring up at Bernadette with big dark eyes that looked so like Margaret’s.
Looking to her Bible for answers, Bernadette found them in John 8:44. “You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires.”
She waited until after midnight to leave the dorm, carrying the baby inside her coat. That was a mistake.
She wanted to hide her from prying eyes, not . . .
The child’s warmth enveloped her, and her sweet scent infiltrated every breath. She was a reminder of what Bernadette might have had, if she hadn’t ended her own pregnancy. She contemplated living—keeping Margaret’s child; raising her as her own, even as she stood on the bridge, staring out into the black chasm.
The baby whimpered.
“It’s okay,” Bernadette whispered, teeth chattering. “It’ll be over soon, and it won’t even be that scary. I’ll be with you.”
And I’m terrified.
Not just of the fall, but of what lay beyond.
Before she’d decided to take her own life, she’d thought she might have a chance at going to heaven. Abortion wasn’t murder if you were killing the devil’s spawn, was it? Tossing this child into the precipice would be the same thing, wouldn’t it? But if she went over, too, it was a sin. No gray area with suicide.
/> As she stood wrestling with that, she heard footsteps crunching down the snowy path. Someone was coming.
Her first instinct was to flee, and take the baby with her. But if she wasn’t going to take her own life, she wasn’t going to take the child’s.
She laid the baby on the snowy ground. As she ran into the frigid darkness, she heard thin little wails piercing the night, and then sirens.
She followed the saga in the newspapers, keeping all these clippings in case Margaret ever came back into her life and wanted to know what had happened to her baby.
They did cross paths a few times, years ago. But Margaret was vacant, brain fried, too dead inside to care what had happened to the daughter she hadn’t wanted, or about Bernadette, or herself. Now—
A shadow falls over the page.
Startled, Bernadette looks up.
A woman is standing in front of her. She has a bright red scar on her right cheek . . . and a gun in her hand.
Sitting at the counter island, Amelia turns the pages of Jessie’s scrapbook as her friend bustles around the kitchen. Claiming to be a great cook, she’d stopped at a huge, beautiful modern supermarket and bought groceries for dinner using her parents’ credit card.
“They just let you use it to buy stuff?”
“Within reason.”
“What’s it like to be rich?”
“We’re not rich. We’re just regular.”
“Not where I come from.”
Busy at the stove, Jessie wants dinner to be ready before her favorite television show, My Sister Sam, airs.
“I can’t believe you don’t watch it,” she tells Amelia as she sautés mushrooms in butter to make the kitchen smell as homey as it looks. “You’d love it. It’s so real. Like, last week, the teenaged sister, Patti, was thinking she should lose her virginity. Have you?”
“Have I what?”
“Lost it.”
“Oh. No.” Nowhere near.
“I lost mine to Ryan. That’s why I was so upset when he broke up with me. He was my first.”
Her first. Have there been more?
Jessie falls silent, perhaps pondering her lost love as she stirs the mushrooms.
Amelia might be the city girl, but she’s nowhere near as worldly as her small town new friend.
After the supermarket, Jessie had stopped at a liquor store and bought a jug of wine with a fake ID.
“Aren’t you afraid of getting arrested?”
“It wouldn’t be the worst thing that ever happened to me.”
No. It would not.
Amelia goes back to the scrapbook, reading an article that includes a statement from the female student who came across an infant girl abandoned on the bridge before dawn that frigid winter morning. The baby was lying on the ground, bundled in a pink snowsuit.
“I still don’t get what would she be doing out there in the middle of the night,” Amelia muses.
“Cutting through to get back to her dorm.”
“All alone? At that hour?”
“There’s a fraternity house right there. She probably got together with some guy.”
“He could have walked her home.”
“Yeah, well . . . frat guys,” Jessie says, as if she knows something about it.
Amelia studies the photographs in the scrapbook, grainy on the age-darkened newsprint, with captions. There’s the baby with the police and hospital staff, and a long shot of the bridge. The backdrop is snowy, the pristine blanket trampled along the span.
“I wonder if the police tried to follow footprints to track the person who left you there?”
“The way the wind blows up there, they’d be covered right away.” Jessie splashes wine into a simmering pan. “I’m lucky I wasn’t buried alive before someone found me. But maybe that’s what she wanted. Or worse.”
She pours more wine into two large plastic tumblers and offers one to Amelia.
“No, thanks.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t drink.”
“Why not?”
“It’s illegal, for one thing.” For another, teetotaler Bettina drilled the evils of alcohol into her head.
“Only as of a few years ago. When Michelle turned eighteen, Diane and Al bought her a bottle of champagne because they thought it was unfair that the drinking age had been raised to twenty-one. They’d never do that now, for me. Everything goes her way.”
“Your sister’s?”
“And my brother’s, too.”
“I thought he was younger than you.”
“Michael? He is. But everything goes his way, too.” She pauses to swig some wine from the glass. “Diane and Al can’t do enough for him and my sister—their real kids, you know? They’re both geniuses, they never get into any trouble, they look like each other and like Diane and Al . . . I mean, come on. Their names even match. Michelle and Michael. Michael and Michelle. Guess who’s the odd man out around here? I’m like Cinderella. That’s what I tell Si. They should have named me that.”
“Cinderella?”
“Cindy for short. I always liked that name. Instead they named me after a stupid necklace.”
“There’s a necklace named Jessamine?”
“Nobody calls me that. I just go by my nickname. And Diane thought Jessie sounded like a Western name, you know? Like a cowgirl.”
“Why would she want you to be a cowgirl? Because of the Dairy Barn?”
“No!” She laughs, gulps more wine from her plastic glass and offers the other one to Amelia.
This time, she takes it, sips cautiously, and swallows. It’s room temperature, and kind of bitter, and she hates it—until it slides down to warm her from the inside out. Hmm. Not so bad, after all.
“My name has nothing to do with the Dairy Barn.”
“Then why did they want you to be a cowgirl?”
“Here, I’ll show you.” Jessie leans toward her, unbuttoning the top two buttons of her shirt. For a weird, awkward moment, Amelia thinks she’s going to make a drunken pass.
“When they found me, I was wearing this charm, see?” She pulls out a gold chain fastened around her neck. “I wear it every single day. I used to think my real mother might see it and know it was me. Yeah. She’d come up and be like, ‘Hey, where’d you get that little gold horse? Because I gave the exact same one to my baby girl.’”
Relishing Bernadette DiMeo’s look of stunned terror, Red watches the paper she was holding slip from her slack hand and flutter to the floor.
She’d thought she was safe here, barricaded in her little apartment with a police officer outside the door. She’d never dreamed that she’d locked herself inside with her executioner.
She opens her mouth to scream.
Red cocks the pistol. “Make one sound, and I will kill you right here, right now.”
Bernadette closes her mouth.
Fool. Doesn’t she realize it’s going to happen anyway? Does she really think Red is here to talk to her, and walk away?
Red can see the wheels turning. She’s wondering how Red got in. It never even occurred to her that someone might have been waiting for her. Watching her apartment—for a while now.
Someone who could see everything from the roof next door—including the neighbor who used the key to let herself in and out of the apartment to feed the cat one day when Bernadette was out of town. A neighbor who conveniently leaves town herself on weekends. Sally won’t know until late tomorrow night that someone broke her window, crawled into her apartment, and borrowed the key to the apartment next door. By then, it will be over.
Red had been hiding under the bed when Bernadette arrived with that police officer, but they hadn’t bothered to look under there.
If they had, I’d have shot them both on the spot.
Killing a cop isn’t part of the plan, but you do what you have to do.
Like the stairwell junkie.
Like the cufflink, tossed like a breadcrumb on the bedroom floor up in Boston, meant to lead the cops t
o Wayland. Just in case White is wrong about what’s going to happen. In case the world is going to keep on turning after all.
Red looks down at the newspaper clipping on the floor. The word baby jumps out from a headline.
Bernadette’s boot-clad foot comes up off the floor and kicks, hard. Red starts to fall backward, catching herself on the table.
The woman is up off the couch, moving to the door.
Red chases her down, gun in one hand, grasping with the other. Her fingers clutch and then lose a wisp of Bernadette’s hair. She’s almost made it to the door, lunging toward the lock.
Red would waste precious moments reaching for the knife. Nothing to do but squeeze the trigger.
The bullet zips past and lodges in the wall. “Help!” Bernadette shrieks.
Hearing a commotion in the hall, Red takes aim.
This time, the bullet reaches its target.
Bernadette drops to the floor, blood splattered across the white walls.
Any second, the cop is going to burst through the door. Red turns back, racing toward the couch. She twists the lock on the window behind it, throws it open, and remembers to grab the paper-clipped newspaper articles before she climbs out.
Chapter Twenty-One
“Yeah, I’m one thousand percent sure that’s the guy,” the Montauk cab driver tells Stef and Barnes with a nod at Perry Wayland’s photo. “He had a baseball cap pulled down low over his face, but I got a good look at him.”
“From where?” Stef asks, and the man gestures at a row of parking spots near the platform.
“I was waiting right there, same as always, when the train pulled in around midnight. This is the last stop. He got off with a handful of locals. Summertime, you got all kinds of people coming out from the city, and they double, triple up in my cab. This time of year, fares are hit-and-miss. I thought for sure that guy would need a ride, so I asked him, but he ignored me. Just kept on walking.”
“He wasn’t with a woman, was he?”
“Nope, alone.”
“Have you ever seen her?” Barnes shows him the photo of Gypsy Colt.
“Good-looking. No. Her, I’d remember.”
“So you say he kept walking . . . Did you notice which direction, by any chance?”
Little Girl Lost Page 29