The Butcher's Daughter

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  “Not a word. I’d told him I didn’t ever want to hear her name again, and he never mentioned it. But it wasn’t hard to figure out, since I never saw Delia or Charisse again after that Thanksgiving.”

  “You just said you did.”

  “Did I?”

  Barnes flips back a page in his notebook. “You said you saw her right after Bobby left for rehab.”

  “Then I guess I did. Delia probably showed up to dump her off with me on Bobby’s weekend.”

  “Probably?”

  “It’s not easy to remember the stuff you spent the last twenty or thirty years trying to forget. I had a lot going on back then, raising my daughter with Bobby out of the picture, and working two jobs.”

  “Where were you working?”

  “I was a teller at the Bank of New England. But they’re long gone,” she adds, seeing Barnes writing it down. “They went belly-up a year later. Seized by the FDIC in the banking crisis a year later.”

  “What about your other job?”

  “I was a security guard.”

  “At the shelter?” Amelia asks when she doesn’t elaborate.

  “Nah, I’ve worked security at a lot of places.”

  “Where were you in December 1990?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Bobby says you were working at the Chapel Square Mall,” Barnes informs her. “And while he was gone, Delia and Charisse disappeared.”

  “What do you mean they disappeared?”

  “They moved out of Brooklyn and no one ever heard from them again,” Amelia says, though they’re not entirely certain that’s the case.

  “Delia was an addict. If she disappeared, she probably OD’d on some street. That’s what Bobby always said was going to happen.”

  Amelia and Barnes had considered that while driving to Bridgeport. He’d called a colleague back in New York and asked her to pull records for unidentified female DRTs fitting her description in late November and December 1990.

  “DRTs?” Amelia had asked, and he’d explained that it’s police jargon for dead right there, and that there were plenty of them back in the height of New York’s crack epidemic.

  “If Delia Montague OD’d, where’s her little girl?” Barnes asks Cynthia.

  “How would I know if Bobby doesn’t? They were living with one of his cousins. You should ask—”

  “She’s dead, Cynthia.”

  “Alma?”

  “And her daughter, Brandy. They were murdered a few days ago.”

  Her shock appears genuine. “Who did it?”

  “Good question.”

  “But . . . you said you were here on a missing persons case, not . . .”

  “We are.” Barnes pulls a folded piece of paper from his notebook and hands it to her.

  She stares at the photocopied article about the little girl found at Chapel Square Mall.

  “Do you recognize her?”

  She says nothing.

  “Come on, Cynthia. She’s your stepdaughter. We know it, and you know it.”

  Still nothing. But she looks up and nods, tears in her eyes.

  In all her years working with foundlings, and being one, Amelia has met a couple of mothers who abandoned their infants out of fear and confusion. This is the first time she’s ever come face-to-face with someone who’d abandoned another woman’s child.

  “Why didn’t you identify her when she was found in the mall?” she asks Cynthia.

  “I . . . I would have, if I’d known, but I didn’t—”

  “Cut the bullshit! It was all over the papers.”

  “I don’t read the papers.”

  “You were working at that mall when it happened. There is no way, and I mean no way, that you didn’t know. You kept your mouth shut because you’re the one who left her there.”

  Silence.

  Then Barnes says, “Look, Cynthia, we’ve got evidence.”

  “Wh—what?”

  “We know your husband’s ex-wife showed up and dumped her on you, and—”

  “That’s a lie! You don’t have evidence.”

  He pushes on. “We do. We know what happened. Delia showed up, and you—”

  “It wasn’t Delia!”

  “What do you mean?”

  She presses a fist to her mouth.

  “Cynthia. Tell us.”

  “Alma brought her! I told her Bobby wasn’t even around, but she didn’t care. It was late, and she’d taken the bus up from the city with Charisse strapped in the stroller. Poor thing wasn’t even bundled up, and she was looking at me with those big sad eyes . . .”

  “Keep going,” Barnes says, voice flat.

  “She told me Delia had taken off a few weeks ago. It wasn’t the first time, but she’d had it, and she couldn’t take care of her like I could.” She chokes a bitter laugh. “That’s what she said. And then she just turned around and walked out the door. I was shouting after her, asking what about the rest of the family, you know? She said she’d been asking them, and no one wanted her.”

  “That’s hard to believe. They seem like a close-knit family.”

  “They are, but . . . not then. Not with Bobby. He treated them like dirt. Stole from them. They kept giving him chances, but he burned every bridge. That’s why we were alone here that Thanksgiving. He wasn’t welcome there anymore.”

  “And they didn’t want Charisse.”

  “No one did.” Wiping tears from her eyes, she doesn’t see Barnes wince.

  “Including you. So you took her to a public place, and you abandoned her.”

  “It seemed like the only thing I could do. If I got the police involved, or social services, she’d just wind up back with Bobby eventually, and . . .”

  “And with you.”

  “Look, I’m not proud of it,” she tells him. “But she was better off because of what I did.”

  He says nothing.

  Amelia has to. “How do you know she’s better off?”

  “Because Bobby’s family must have seen those newspaper photos same as anyone else, and they didn’t step forward. Not one of them!”

  “Are you saying the Harrisons knew the abandoned child was Bobby’s daughter?”

  “Of course they knew. And I didn’t abandon her. I was on duty that night. I kept an eye on her until she was found.”

  “But when she was, you pretended you had nothing to do with it.” Amelia bites her lip and tastes blood.

  “You must have been questioned, Cynthia,” Barnes says. “So you lied?”

  “To protect her.”

  “To protect yourself.”

  “And my daughter, Monica. A mother does what she has to do. A good mother, I mean. Delia wasn’t one. And Bobby wasn’t a good father.”

  “And you take the prize for world’s worst stepmother,” Amelia says.

  “You would have done the same thing in my shoes.”

  “I would never do what you did! Leaving an innocent little girl alone in a public place is the most—”

  “She wasn’t alone! I told you, I—”

  “Yeah, you watched her. Terrific.”

  “You don’t understand.” She brushes tears from her eyes. “Every year at Christmas, I thought about that little girl and I hoped—I prayed—she’d found a good home with parents who loved her, and that she wouldn’t remember where she came from.”

  Maybe she doesn’t. And maybe that’s for the best. But Amelia knows too well that her original family and home must have left an imprint on her heart. She’s likely gone through life instinctively seeking some intangible face or place from the past, a search that can alienate a woman from people who love her in the present.

  “I thought when Amelia found out that she really was her parents’ biological daughter, she’d finally be able to put this stuff to rest and move on,” Aaron had told their therapist during their final counseling session in November. “But she’s more obsessed than ever.”

  “Because I still don’t have answers! If Bettina was my bir
th mother, why would Calvin have told me I was a foundling? Was he lying? Or did he not know the truth himself? Was he my father, or was it someone else?”

  Aaron shot the therapist a “See what I mean?” look and then shook his head sadly at Amelia. “You said you were ready to move on. That’s why we’re here. That’s why we’re trying—but you’re not.”

  “Of course I am. Whose idea was it to come to counseling? Mine! And if that isn’t trying, then I don’t know what—”

  “No, I mean you’re not moving on. I don’t think you can. I don’t think you want to. And I don’t think either of us can live like this anymore.”

  He was right.

  And Amelia knows in her heart that no matter what she and Aaron and the therapist have said, this isn’t a trial separation.

  It’s permanent.

  In the white marble bathroom, Gypsy steps into a steamy shower for the second time today and leans into the hot spray like a cushion. Somewhere along her evening journey from the hotel to a distant Queens neighborhood, she’d acquired a pounding heart to accompany her pounding head. Neither had let up on the return trip, despite a satisfying, clockwork mission.

  She doesn’t do anxiety.

  Yet she hasn’t had to do what she’d done in Queens in a long, long time. For years now, decades, she’s had an army of devotees at her disposal.

  She massages shampoo into her skull. The scented suds won’t ease the tension headache, but they’ll wash away any traces of Kasia’s blood.

  There had been surprisingly little spatter. Not a hint of commotion to draw witnesses even though Gypsy killed her right there in public after following her off the subway. They shuffled along in a weary crowd from a well-lit platform to a dimly lit staircase to a shadowy street, thick with honking traffic and shiny with rain. Seasoned New York commuters, they wore earbuds, nearly all of them, and opened umbrellas without missing a step as they ventured into the downpour.

  Gypsy held her own umbrella low and close to shield the pistol. Her hand was shaky, but she fired one bullet into Kasia’s blond wig and kept on walking, turning into another subway entrance a few yards away. She stripped off the plastic rain cape, shoved it into a garbage can, and pushed through the turnstile as a Manhattan-bound train pulled into the station. This one had vacant seats and only a few passengers, vacant eyed. No one noticed Gypsy. She wondered whether anyone had yet noticed that the woman lying in the street above hadn’t tripped or slipped and fallen.

  There’s no way they’ll think this is an accident. Not like in the Bronx. Mother’s Day 1968. It had been raining then, too. Rushing gutters awash with blood.

  As the subway carried her back to Manhattan, she imagined Kasia’s blood pouring into a puddle, pooling into the gutter, down the storm drain, trailing her through the tunnels.

  Now she looks down, expecting to see red swirling into the drain at her feet, but sees only water and suds.

  She wraps herself in a thick white towel. Had Kasia herself folded and placed it here earlier?

  No, because she’s not really a maid. She was just posing as one, to outwit you. But you knew she was your sister.

  She doesn’t bother to close the drapes before slipping into bed, hair still damp, head still throbbing, heart still racing. Beyond the window, the old Wayland penthouse glows like a constellation.

  When at last she falls asleep, Perry—young again, dashing and handsome—is waiting for her. They’re sipping champagne at Windows on the World.

  “I don’t need you,” she tells him. “Only your money.”

  “You’re wrong. You need me.”

  “I’m never wrong.”

  “But you are.” He points and the wall of glass is gone. The city far below has become a roaring ocean, the building a windswept cliff.

  “See? There she is!” Perry shouts above the gale, waving his arms, trying to show Gypsy something just over the edge.

  “I know! I saw her! I killed her!”

  “No! You missed her.”

  “I shot her in the head, just the way Red and I learned at target practice years ago . . .”

  “You’re wrong, Gypsy!”

  “I’m never—”

  “You’re wrong! She was right there in front of you, and you missed her.”

  She wakes up, jarred out of the dream by a noise—a door closing, footsteps tapping.

  “Perry?” she calls, wide-eyed in the dark. Or . . .

  Kasia.

  Footsteps again—not in this suite, she realizes after a moment, but retreating to a distant corner of another. It’s just another guest. Not a ghost. The luxurious grand dame of a hotel isn’t any more soundproof than it is haunted.

  Gypsy turns on the lamp. Her laptop is on the nightstand; Perry’s voice in her head.

  “She was right there in front of you . . .”

  “Shut up, Perry. What do you know? You weren’t even there. You aren’t even here.”

  It was just a dream. A nightmare, the ocean raging as it had in the hurricane . . .

  Gypsy grabs the laptop. It’s still open to the page she’d been reading earlier when the so-called maid barged into the suite.

  She scans the text and picks up where she’d left off.

  . . . Silas Moss is credited with mentoring Amelia Crenshaw Haines, one of the nation’s foremost investigative genealogists and a regular on Nelson Roger Cartwright’s The Roots and Branches Project . . .

  So there is a connection that goes beyond Ithaca being one of the country’s foremost college towns. But Amelia would have attended college almost twenty years after Bernadette. She never even met Stockton Barnes until a few months ago, and that was only because he hired her to find his daughter.

  Gypsy launches a new search: Amelia Crenshaw Haines, Ithaca.

  She begins on Amelia’s own website, studying her bio, her career, her photos . . .

  One leaps out at her.

  There’s a young Amelia in a college cap and gown . . .

  And she’s standing arm in arm with a young Margaret Costello.

  How can it be? A miracle. A sign. A prophecy.

  Quilt fisted against her mouth, eyes wide, Gypsy reads the caption.

  Commencement Day 1990: Amelia with her close friend Jessamine McCall, 21, of Ithaca . . .

  All right, then. Of course the girl with the widow’s peak and dimples isn’t Margaret Costello. In 1990, she’d have been pushing forty. The child she’d conceived with Oran would have been twenty-one.

  Perry was right. There it is, right in front of Gypsy. There she is.

  That blonde maid wasn’t Margaret’s daughter.

  Jessamine McCall is.

  Part IV

  1968

  Chapter Ten

  Thursday, April 4, 1968

  Fernandina Beach

  After the Tet Offensive, Travis had resurfaced in Vietnam. Melody hadn’t been home on the February afternoon when he tried to reach her by telephone to tell her he had survived, so he dialed his mother next.

  Doris told him about the baby.

  Never much of a correspondent, Travis reacted to the news with a barrage of enthusiastic letters to his wife. They were dated through late February, but have since stopped coming.

  Melody isn’t sure what to make of that.

  Surely she’d have heard by now if something had happened to him. Somber word reaches the States with heightened military efficiency these days. The newspapers publish a list of local casualties and POWs on the front page after the families have been informed. But the silence is ominous.

  Travis’s birthday, and her own fake due date dawns with bright sunshine and phone calls from her mother and mother-in-law, anticipating labor to be punctual as sunrise and high tide.

  “Not yet,” she says, “but I’ll let you know.”

  Doris accepts that reply, hangs up, and moves on with her plans to go to the beauty shop, golf all afternoon, and dine at the country club. Becoming a grandmother isn’t the highlight of her life, or even her
year. She seems pleased, but hardly euphoric.

  But the hypervigilant Honeybee shows up in person with a still-steaming batch of Raelene’s homemade biscuits for Melody’s breakfast, along with the morning paper and a fragrant vaseful of cascading lavender blossoms.

  “The wisteria finally bloomed!” Her mother sets the flowers in the middle of the table with a triumphant smile. “When I looked out and saw it this morning, I said to your daddy, that surely is a sign!”

  “A sign?”

  “That our grandbaby is coming today. How must poor Travis feel, on the other side of the world for the big event?”

  “I’m sure he’s been through worse, Mother.”

  “Well, yes, but . . .” Honeybee chatters on. “Daddy got the bassinet out of the attic before he left for work, and Raelene cleaned it up real nice and we set it up in your old room. I bought two new skirts for it. One is pink and the other is blue just in case—”

  “Wait, Mother, what are you talking about?”

  “The bassinet. The one we had for you and Ellie.” A brief, sad flash of smile before she goes on, “I told you I’d have it all set for when you and the baby come to stay.”

  “No, you told me you’d have it all set for when the baby comes.”

  “To stay.”

  “I don’t think you mentioned that part. I need the bassinet here.”

  “Don’t be silly. You can’t come home from the hospital to an empty house. You have no idea the toll childbirth takes on a woman’s body, or how demanding it is to care for an infant. I told you I’d help you.”

  “I thought you meant here!”

  Honeybee shakes her head. “Of course not. You’ll stay with us for the first few months.”

  “Months!”

  “Weeks, anyway. Eight to twelve at the very least.”

  Melody unfolds the newspaper and looks for an article to read aloud—anything to change the subject. She skims past war news and lands on an article about LBJ’s meeting yesterday with Senator Robert Kennedy to discuss the president’s decision not to seek or accept another term in office.

  “Oh, it would be marvelous to elect another Kennedy, wouldn’t it? Bobby and Ethel are so attractive, and they have that enormous family. Ten children romping in the White House would surely go a long way toward healing this country after what happened to poor JFK!”