He, however, was wearing one on the chain around his neck. Not a wedding ring, but a baby ring she’d discovered had belonged to his late father, as had the dog tags hanging alongside it.
She sees it now, as Cyril answers the door barefoot in dungarees, pulling a tee shirt over his bare chest. Otis bounds out, yapping in excitement.
“What are you doing here at this hour? Is everything okay?”
Melody just looks at him as she pats the dog’s head, and Cyril nods. Of course not. Nothing is okay.
“Come in and sit down. I can make coffee? Or I have sweet tea . . .”
“Just sit with me, Cyril. We need to talk.”
“You’re right. We do.”
The house is tiny, and modestly furnished. No sofa and no dining table, no record player or rugs or framed photos . . .
Back in September, she’d brought her Kodak Brownie to Barrow to photograph the wild horses and dancing dolphins. The creatures had evaded her lens that day, but she’d captured Cyril. When she later showed him the prints, he told her that no one had taken a picture of him since he was a child. She gave it to him. Tangible keepsakes would be dangerous for her.
“Have a seat,” Cyril says, gesturing at the one ancient upholstered chair, and pulling up a wooden one across from it. The dog’s wet nose nudges her bare knees.
“Otis! Stop that! Sit!”
“It’s okay. He’s happy to see me.”
“Well, so am I.”
Buoyed by his faint smile, she leans in to embrace him and for a moment, her world is righted. Then she remembers the missing letter, and that her parents and in-laws know about the baby. She tells Cyril, and the news scrapes the light from his face.
“Maybe no one ever needs to know it isn’t Travis’s child. Maybe she’ll be the spitting image of her mama.”
“First of all, I don’t want that. I want her to look like you. And second—”
“You’re a damned fool! That child looking like me wouldn’t be good for anyone, and you know it!”
“Don’t talk to me that way!”
“Don’t be so stubborn! It’s risky for you to even be here!”
“Risky for you,” she says slowly, as the light dawns.
“Risky for both of us.”
“I’m sorry. I just—I needed you. Please, Cyril. Please don’t turn your back on me. On us—me and the baby.”
He looks at the ceiling, and she sees his jaw working. When he meets her eyes again, his voice is hoarse. “I will never turn my back! Never. I’ll give you all the money I have to take care of this child. It isn’t much, but—”
“I don’t want your money. I want you. I want your love.”
“I love you. All right? I love you. It isn’t enough. It isn’t anything.”
Air whooshes out of her as if someone pushed her to the ground and stomped a boot into her gut.
“It’s everything,” she whispers. “To me, it’s everything.”
“Melody—”
“Times are changing, Cyril. Laws are changing, people are changing, the whole world is changing. Everything’s changing, except my mind. I don’t care who this baby looks like. I’m not raising her with Travis. You’re her father. I’m raising her with you.”
“If you’re sure about this—”
“I’ve never been more sure about anything in my life.”
“Then we’ll find a way. But we can’t go rushing into anything.”
“It’s a little late for that, don’t you think?” She flashes a wry smile.
“I’ll save every cent I can, and I’ll figure out where we can go when the baby comes. My mother has family up north. Maybe we can stay with them awhile. I don’t even know them, really, but family’s family.”
Yes. How can she leave hers, after all her parents have been through?
Yet how can she stay? What will happen to her parents when people find out their daughter left her husband to have another man’s baby?
Not just any man. A Black man.
Either way, their hearts will be broken. Reverend King and the Supreme Court and civil rights activists are making progress, but true change will be a long time coming.
Cyril pulls a clean red bandana from his back pocket and hands it to her. “There now. Wipe your eyes. I have to get to work, and you best get on home.”
“What about Travis, though? Do you think I should write and tell him?”
“What I think doesn’t matter. I’ve got no say in this.”
“You have a right to an opinion, considering it’s your child.”
“You think that gives me rights? You think I got any rights at all in this world?” Catching sight of her expression, he softens. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to snap at you. But I don’t know what to tell you, except what we already know. Travis Hunter is dangerous.”
“The baby’s not due for a few more months. I’ll wait a little longer, until we have a plan.”
He walks her out to her car and opens the driver’s side door for her.
“Listen now, just in case . . . if anything goes wrong, I want you to tell her about me. That I was a good man, in here.” He taps his chest, just left of the gold chain dangling with the baby ring and military tags.
“What are you talking about?”
“If it turns out we can’t be together, tell her that I loved her, and you, more than—”
“But she’ll know that. Because you’ll be there to tell her.”
“I hope so. I just hope and pray the world is different for her.”
“She’ll do whatever it takes to make it better, just like her daddy.” Sitting behind the wheel, she smiles up at him.
He leans in and kisses her forehead.
“And she’s going to grow up to be a brave, strong woman just like her mama.”
Part III
2017
Chapter Seven
Tuesday, January 3, 2017
New Haven, Connecticut
On this gray Tuesday morning, the seventy-five-mile drive from Upper Manhattan has taken nearly four hours in rush hour traffic on rain-slicked Interstate 95. Barnes is at the wheel, Amelia in the passenger’s seat. She clutches Lily Tucker’s case file and fields texts from Jessie, who’d reacted to today’s trip as if it were an abduction. Amelia had promised to keep in touch, though she hadn’t meant every minute. Thankfully, Jessie’s first therapy client arrives just as they exit the interstate, allowing Amelia to sign off for a while.
“All good?” Barnes asks. She’d told him she was dealing with a client.
“All good.”
“We’re almost there. I just hope . . .” He thrums the top of the steering wheel, shaking his head.
“I know.”
She can offer no reassurance that they’re about to find his daughter, or a clue to what’s become of her. Even if they do, it may not be positive news. But with luck, they’ll be closer to untangling the past—his, hers, and the mysterious ring that links them.
Noticing a street sign, she tells him that the Chapel Square Mall, where Charisse was found, was located nearby. “If she was Charisse,” she adds belatedly.
“She was. Those huge eyes . . . she looks so much like Delia. And maybe a little like me, too.”
Amelia doesn’t disagree. But when you’re looking for a lost biological relative, the mind’s eye sometimes sees what it wants to see.
“Anyway,” she goes on, “the mall closed years ago.”
“In 2002. I looked it up yesterday. Looks like every bus in New Haven stopped there back in the day. If someone came up from the city and was looking for a convenient, busy public place to dump an innocent kid, that was it.”
He’s right. She, too, had done her homework.
Built in 1967, the mall was intended to become an urban crown jewel, but it had deteriorated through the ’70s and ’80s. By the time the little girl was found, the place had a seedy and dangerous reputation.
She recognizes the broad, boxy structure, now an upscale apar
tment building. It’s located just across from the historic town green lined with local government and Yale University buildings. She sees Barnes watch it disappear in the rearview mirror as they drive on.
All these years, he thought he’d provided a better life for his daughter by giving Delia that money and walking away. Now he’s learned the little girl was endangered and abandoned soon afterward. He isn’t just curious, but furious.
She breaks the moody silence as they cruise on through the city, past stately brick university buildings. “Pretty fancy around here.”
“Welcome to the Ivy League.”
“Reminds me of Cornell.”
“You went to Cornell?”
“Ithaca College.”
“IC. The sweatshirt you were wearing at the diner the other night.”
“Good memory.”
“Yeah, well . . . I’m a detective. I pay attention to details . . .”
She senses an unspoken and.
Another silence follows, this one awkward, at least for her. He seems to be pondering something, but says nothing.
The Ivy League buildings give way to close-set wood-frame houses, crumbling pavement, and shuttered industrial properties. Pockets of redevelopment and rehabilitation bloom amid poverty and blight. Church steeples poke the stormy sky above revitalized storefronts and seedy bars. Abandoned slums and vacant lots share blocks with renovated Victorians. Some residents push strollers or stride with backpacks; others loiter on corners, looking for trouble.
Barnes slows in front of a two-story house that looks freshly painted in a creamy green with maroon trim. There’s a fat wreath on the front door, and the windows twinkle Christmas lights in January morning gloom.
He squeezes the car into the lineup parked at the curb. “Looks like they’ve got company. Not surprising at a time like this.”
They get out of the car and Amelia follows him up the walk to the doorstep. “Wait, are we going to say we’re . . . you know, on official business?”
“Just follow my lead.” He rings the bell, jaw clenched.
A portly bald Black man opens the door. Neatly dressed in a blue cardigan and tan corduroys, he has a trimmed gray mustache and wary gaze.
“James Harrison?”
“Yes. Can I help you?”
“I’m Detective Stockton Barnes, and this is Investigator Amelia Crenshaw Haines. We’re so sorry for your loss. We just drove up from New York, following up on a few things.”
It’s all true, though he doesn’t show his badge. Nor does the man ask for it before opening the door and inviting them into a wallpapered foyer with a Christmas garland trailing up the wooden staircase and a shrub-like red poinsettia at its base. In adjoining rooms, a television is tuned to a children’s show, adult voices chatter, dishes clatter, a sink tap runs. The air is fragrant with bacon.
“The family’s all still here,” Harrison says. “They came for the holidays, and . . . well, they stayed, now that Alma and Brandy are . . .”
“We understand, and we apologize for interrupting,” Barnes tells him. “I know you’ve already spoken with detectives, but if we could just ask some additional questions . . . we’re following up a couple of leads.”
“Anything I can do to help.”
“Thank you. I understand you were expecting the victims here for a family party.”
“That’s right. When they didn’t show, we sent a cousin and her husband over to check on them, and they found . . .” He sighs, head bowed.
“Are they here today, by chance?”
“Kendra and Jeremy? No, they live in New York.”
“Jimmy?” a female voice calls from the other room. “Who’s here?”
“NYPD!” he calls back.
Though Barnes never said that, specifically, he doesn’t correct the assumption that they’re part of the homicide team. Uncomfortable, Amelia looks at the floor, spots a couple of stray plastic Lego blocks, and feels even worse.
A woman appears in the doorway, attractive and sharp-eyed, drying her hands on a dish towel. James introduces her as his wife, Regina, and their visitors as New York detectives.
“I’m actually . . . an investigator,” Amelia clarifies.
Barnes tenses beside her, but the Harrisons nod. It makes no difference to them.
Anyway, Amelia reminds herself, she and Barnes are here to help these people—and maybe, yes, themselves in the process. It’s not as if she’s never bent the rules on a client-related quest—even broken a few to wheedle her way into private or sealed records.
Barnes takes out a notebook. “And how are you related to the victims, Mr. and Mrs. Harrison?”
“Alma is—uh, was my niece,” James says, and his wife pats his shoulder.
Barnes asks him about his past, and he proudly tells them that his mother wanted her children to get good educations and build careers. He’d studied accounting at CUNY; his sister pursued law enforcement at John Jay.
“Now you’re an accountant. Is your sister a police officer?”
“She didn’t finish school, but she married a cop, and her son Hiram’s a lawyer,” he adds proudly.
Barnes asks if they’re here today, probably thinking that they’ll know criminal case procedures and will likely ask to see their credentials. But James says his sister, now widowed, lives in Florida and his nephew is tied up on a case in New York, where he practices.
A little boy comes into the room, calling Regina “Grammy” and showing her a picture he colored.
“Who all is here?” Barnes asks James as his wife admires her grandson’s artwork.
He writes down the names as the Harrisons mention them—their daughter and her fiancé; their son, daughter-in-law, and their three children; Regina’s brother and nephew; Jimmy’s sister . . .
“Not the one in Florida? With the lawyer son? Hiram, you said?”
“Right. Hiram Trimble.”
Barnes frowns as if that rings a bell, and he jots it down. “He would have been Alma’s cousin?”
“Right. But he doesn’t practice criminal law,” he adds, as if that might be why Barnes is asking.
Why is he asking, Amelia wonders, when he’d been asking about the guests who are currently in the house.
He looks up from his pad. “And Alma’s parents are . . .”
“My brother and sister-in-law. They died years ago.”
“Any siblings?”
“Only one, but she passed away back in . . . when was it, Regina—’90, or ’92?”
“What’s that?” she asks, still crouched on the floor beside her grandson. She looks up at them as though she’d lost track of the conversation, but Amelia has been keeping an eye on her, and she’s been following it.
“What year did Charisse die?”
Upper East Side
Gypsy awakens alone in the suite, the top of her skull gripped in a crown of pain. It’s the kind of headache that doesn’t abate with food, coffee, water, a hot shower, fresh air; the kind of headache that has struck before, and never stopped her. She doesn’t allow herself to wallow in pain any more than she’d wallow in self-pity or grief.
Standing at the curb trying to hail a cab as the traffic flies past her, close enough to touch, makes her think of Carol-Ann Ellis. She seldom has, in all the years since she left New York, and it isn’t a memory she welcomes, so she heads for the IRT subway at West Seventy-Second Street.
On the median that separates Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, the street-level station is just as she remembers it, with wrought iron pillars and windows. The system map, too, remains intact. But the turnstile slots for tokens have given way to card readers.
A man sees her pondering the ticket machine, mistakes her for a tourist, and helps her buy a MetroCard. Then he offers to show her around the city later and hands her his business card. The type is bold and large enough for her to see that he works for a hedge fund.
She turns away, pitches the card into a trash can right there in front of him, and descends the s
teps to the tracks. She thinks of Perry. He, too, had worked for a hedge fund, had also been clean-cut, worn custom-made suits, and carried a briefcase. But Perry drove his Mercedes to his lower Manhattan office every day. He wouldn’t have dreamed of setting a Ferragamo wing tip on the subway back then. But the Perry who’d since lived in Cuba for twenty-nine years had done many things that would have made his younger self shudder.
Gypsy marveled at the well-lit platforms, electronic signs predicting arrivals to the minute, and sleek, graffiti-free train that whisked her to Fulton Street in eighteen minutes.
The financial district is more crowded than it had been in her day, and not just with Wall Street types. Midtown offices in various industries have moved downtown over the last fifteen years, bringing hordes of commuters and endless construction. Chain stores, hotels, and restaurants now line the maze of narrow streets.
Her first stop is a drugstore, where she buys a plastic rain poncho, small folding umbrella, ibuprofen, a bottle of water, and—an afterthought, because she can’t read the label—a pair of readers. The recommended dose is two capsules. She downs four.
Next stop: 195 Broadway, the building where Perry’s hedge fund career had unfolded. She steps into the cavernous lobby, planning to visit the floor where he’d worked. But the elevator banks now lie beyond a security desk, and the guards won’t let her through.
Back out on the street, she heads for the site where the twin towers had begun their fateful climb to the sky in 1968. She remembers thinking then that stone and steel were indestructible compared to the world that came crashing down in that tumultuous year of war and racial tension, assassinations . . . murder.
The notorious Brooklyn Butcher had slaughtered four families, orphaning and raping and impregnating teenaged survivors Tara Sheeran, Christina Myers, Margaret Costello, and Bernadette DiMeo. The first three later gave birth to their rapist’s babies; the fourth didn’t carry her pregnancy to term. The media coverage was relentless.
Gypsy was fourteen years old, and her name had been kept out of the press, but her father’s made every headline.
Oran Matthews was the Brooklyn Butcher.
The Butcher's Daughter Page 11