She thinks of her mother, a strung out, rail-thin beauty with long black hair, glazed blue eyes, and a faraway smile.
She hadn’t known Linda very well, never lived with her, and wasn’t particularly fond of her. She was just someone who’d drifted into their lives from time to time—never on holidays or for Gypsy’s birthday, never to attend parent conferences or tend to her when she was ill.
For years, Linda showed up without warning whenever she needed a place to stay for a couple of days, a week or two at most. And then one day—
Someone jostles her; people push past. The light has changed. She crosses the street and moves on down the next block, no longer in a hurry to get home.
She hears her father calling her Miss Smarty-Pants. She sees his mocking grin, sees him turn away, but not before she’d glimpsed something disconcerting in his gaze.
Why would he have drugged her? She’s heard of hippie parents smoking grass with their teenagers, but this wasn’t like that. This had been sneaky and underhanded, and it had been some kind of powerful knockout drug.
Her mind chases logic down dark alleys as she drags her feet along the sidewalk, trying to make sense of it. You don’t incapacitate someone in that way unless they pose some kind of threat—or maybe if you’re delusional.
Her father has his moments, but even his most feverish rants are a means to a benevolent end where his daughter is concerned. All he wants is to save her soul and lead her to eternal paradise when the world goes up in flames. He truly believes he’s the Messiah.
Does she believe it?
Not as unequivocally as she had when she was younger. She has more questions now. Sometimes he answers them, dispelling her doubts with patience and clarity. Other times, he raves that she’s a disbeliever.
At the Grand Concourse she waits shoulder to shoulder in a crowd of fellow New Yorkers impatient to cross to the subway on the opposite side.
Traffic zips along the busy boulevard, a transit bus speeding past so close it all but grazes the tip of Gypsy’s nose. She remembers her father’s warning about the hit and run and takes a step backward from the curb. Her gaze falls on a corner newsstand. There’s Twiggy on a magazine cover. She shifts her gaze to a stack of newspapers, and a headline engulfs her like a swirling black funnel.
BROOKLYN’S TENSE ANTICIPATION OF BUTCHER’S NEXT STRIKE: FEBRUARY 13, MARCH 23, APRIL . . . ?
Back home, Melody forages the cabinets, famished, and grateful that Honeybee will be here with supper later.
Munching a handful of dry cereal, she eyes the Betty Crocker’s Dinner for Two Cookbook she’d wedged under the kitchen window to keep it open this morning.
Raelene had given it to her as a wedding gift. “A wife should make supper for her husband. Only way to keep a marriage going strong.”
“Really? ’Cause Mother and Daddy just celebrated their twenty-fifth anniversary, and I’ve never even seen her light a stove burner.”
“Believe you me, your mama knows her way around a chicken fried steak. That woman made a mean pan gravy back in the day.”
Maybe, but in this one, Honeybee serves sandwiches for supper on Raelene’s nights off.
Still, Melody had given it a shot. The first night she’d attempted a homemade meal, Travis had poked at the brown blob on his plate. “Why in tarnation would you make pralines for supper?”
“That’s mashed potatoes!”
She’d dissolved into tears that he’d found even more amusing. Later, though, he’d gone out to a drive-in restaurant and come home with burgers and French fries for both of them. The next night, when she’d served up a still-smoking chicken that resembled a heap of coal, he’d suggested they make peanut butter sandwiches.
After the first couple of days, though, he hadn’t bothered to humor her. He didn’t even invite her along when he left to scrounge a meal.
Before he deployed, he told Melody, “I’m not eating chop suey over there, I’ll tell you that much.”
“It’s Vietnam, not China.”
“So what?”
“Chop suey is Chinese food.”
“What’s the difference? I’ll tell you what, I’m not eating whatever those people live on.”
“Guess you’ll get by just fine on C rations.”
He fixed her with a look. “Guess I’ll have a hankering for American home cooking when I get back. Since you like to spend all day watching soap operas, you can tune in to Julia Child instead, and learn something.”
“Julia Child makes French food.”
“How come you’re nitpicking about foreigners all of a sudden? Why you giving me sass when I’m going to fight for this country?”
She figured she’d have plenty of time to learn to cook while he was gone, but who wanted to slave over a hot stove in the heat of a Southern summer? Instead, she’d decided to knit him a sweater to send in a care package, and went looking in his bureau drawer to check his size.
That’s when she found his robe and hood, his UKA member card and pendant, copies of Fiery Cross magazine, and tucked into the pages of a dog-eared handbook, the damning newspaper clipping he’d so proudly preserved.
Raleigh in late July 1966—they’d been dating a few months by then. He’d claimed he was going on a fishing trip with his buddies, but his story hadn’t rung entirely true. She’d spent that steamy weekend agonizing that he’d gone off with another girl, but dismissed her fears when he’d proposed the following weekend.
What a fool she’d been. She might have forgiven him for a last fling, but this? Never.
“Melody! Where are you?”
Honeybee, with supper, though it’s nowhere near six o’clock yet, let alone the requested seven. Maybe her subconscious maternal mind sensed her daughter’s raging hunger.
Yet when she opens the door, Honeybee says, “Oh, thank goodness! I’ve been trying to call you, and I was worried when you didn’t answer.”
“I was napping,” Melody lies, “and I didn’t hear the phone.”
“I’ll just turn the ringer up.” Honeybee goes straight to the kitchen, moves the curly cord aside, and pushes the notched lever on the base all the way to the right. “There. You won’t be able to sleep through that. Now let me show you what I’ve brought.”
In addition to Raelene’s chicken à la King and more infant formula and diapers, she has a chocolate cake with Happy Birthday, Travis piped in blue frosting.
“But . . . Travis isn’t here.”
“That doesn’t mean we can’t celebrate his birthday. I thought it would be nice to invite his parents over later, and Daddy and Raelene. We’ll have a nice little party, and—”
“Mother, no! No parties. No company!” Seeing Honeybee’s expression, she adds, “Please, I appreciate it, really I do, but all I want is to eat my supper and go to bed. I’m just exhausted.”
“You poor thing. Here, get off your feet.” She pulls out a chair, and Melody all but collapses into it.
Her mother stands behind her, stroking her head and crooning reassurances.
Honeybee’s faults—the pride, the overprotectiveness, the strength—make her a wonderful mother.
A mother who’s lost a precious child.
For the first time in her adult life, Melody comprehends Ellie’s death with crushing maternal perspective. No wonder Honeybee had wailed and fainted her way through those terrible dark days. Yet for her family’s sake, she’d fought her way back.
Melody turns and hugs her hard, whispering, “Thank you.”
“For supper? Why, Raelene made it. All I did was—”
“For everything.”
It would be such a relief to confess the whole sorrowful situation and cry on her mother’s shoulder. But when she takes a deep breath, the wisteria-scented air reminds her of the conversation on Cyril’s porch, and she’d promised him she wouldn’t tell.
Oh, Mother. I’m so sorry I can’t spare you more heartache than anyone deserves in this lifetime.
Gypsy gazes at the televi
sion just as she had the newspaper’s front page this afternoon, seeing it and yet not, like a child watching clouds drift by. Only this time, the innocuous image doesn’t whirl without warning into a terrifying storm of speculation.
February 13, March 23.
Those are the dates when Oran had given her candy that could only have been laced with some kind of sedative.
On those same dates, a killer had crept into two households, one in Sheepshead Bay, the other in Bay Ridge, and murdered all but one member of each family.
Gypsy hadn’t paid much attention to the first slaying back in February, though she’d read about it in the papers. She always moves past articles that don’t tick Oran’s apocalyptic list.
The second crime was harder to ignore. The press was whipped into a gruesome frenzy unseen since the Boston Strangler case a few years back. Soon New York’s killer earned his own macabre nickname: the Brooklyn Butcher.
Gypsy had overheard Carol-Ann talking about it to her friends at school.
“My parents are wigging out about the psycho killer on the loose! They keep telling me to be careful, and they, like, barge into my room to check on me all night long. They think someone’s going to break in and kill us all in our sleep.”
“Not all of you,” Connie Barbero said. “He leaves the teenaged daughter alive.”
“Groovy. I wouldn’t mind being an orphan.”
She’d giggled, and Gypsy had fumed. Carol-Ann didn’t know how lucky she was, living her charmed life with two doting parents, her own bedroom, a fashionable wardrobe, and Greg.
Oran hadn’t warned Gypsy about the psycho killer, and she’d noticed that he’d been acting cagey from time to time. Does that mean—
No! He’s just far more fixated on the looming apocalypse than he is urban crime. As for the skittishness, she’d come up with a theory one day when he’d asked whether she wished she had brothers and sisters.
“What? No! I like it just the two of us.”
He’d been silent, staring down at his hands, clasped as if in prayer, and it had occurred to her that he might be seeing a woman. Maybe he thought she wouldn’t like that.
He’d be right.
Maybe he’s involved with someone, and that’s why he’s seemed so furtive. But would he drug his own daughter just so that he could sneak out on a date?
On television, a wayward dog snatches a woman’s purse.
Oran’s voice echoes in Gypsy’s head. “Can’t trust anyone these days.”
That’s what he’d said not long ago after a sweet-looking little girl had tried to pickpocket him on the subway.
“I’m telling you, man, you have got to be careful out there! Keep an eye out for trouble because you never know who’s out to get you.”
Yes, and he’d cautioned Gypsy to be careful crossing the street after that deadly hit and run on Webster Avenue. And when she was younger, he’d told her to stay away from the drug dealers who congregate on the corner by their building.
“I don’t want you turning into a strung out junkie like your mother.”
“Don’t worry. I don’t want to be like her in any way.”
“Just stay away from those freaks and stay strong. Linda is spineless and pathetic.”
It’s true. Her mother never defended herself when she and Oran argued—rather, when Oran raged at her. She’d just sit there staring into space, sometimes with tears rolling down her cheeks as he spewed scornful Bible passages about weak women.
Gypsy doesn’t want to think about Linda right now, or wonder what happened to her.
She tries to lose herself in a televised chase scene as the thieving dog escapes and its owner, caught red-handed with the purse, is jailed. He explains to a fellow inmate that he hasn’t always been law-abiding, but this time, he’s innocent.
The character’s name is Gypsy. A sign?
“Signs are everywhere, man,” Oran’s voice reminds her. “But only the chosen ones recognize them. You and me . . . we look, and we see, and we know . . .”
On-screen, the dog finds its way to Sister Bertrille on a beach with orphans.
Gypsy thinks again of Carol-Ann’s callous comment about her parents being murdered.
Again, thoughts of her own mother barge in.
Linda wasn’t maternal by any stretch of the imagination. She always seemed glad to see Gypsy, though. And no matter how little attention she paid her daughter, she never left without saying goodbye.
Never, until her final visit. One morning, she was gone. So was their shag rug. Oran had found it in a dumpster, good as new except for a couple of stains and worn spots. Gypsy misses that rug.
On TV, The Flying Nun has vanished, a grim news anchorman in its place, interrupting the program with a special bulletin.
The reporter begins, “Tragic news tonight out of Memphis . . .”
Chapter Eleven
Friday, April 5, 1968
Fernandina Beach, Florida
Melody forces herself out of bed and opens the shades, expecting to see a grim gray sky weeping the same tears she’d cried into her pillow last night. It betrays her, deep blue and streaming sunbeams.
She pads into the kitchen and notices the wall phone receiver dangling from its curly cord. Her mother had wanted to spend the night on the davenport, but Melody insisted she go home. Honeybee called, though, twice, to make sure everything was still all right. This time, Melody really was asleep. After the second call, she took the phone off the hook.
Now she replaces the receiver and turns to the fridge. The phone rings before she can open it.
“Melody! I tried to call you last night, and—”
“You did call me last night, Mother. Twice.”
“Well, I called again after that, and it kept ringing busy. Gracious, I had half a mind to send Daddy over to check on you, but he said you’d probably taken it off the hook and gone to sleep.”
“He was right, and how many times can you call to make sure I’m all right?”
“That’s not why I called you the second time. I wanted to be sure you’d heard about the assassination, and I figured you—”
“Assassination! President Johnson?”
“Martin Luther King.”
“What?”
“Shot dead last night in Memphis. Now, I did think it was disgraceful, the way he was riling people up, but he was a Christian and a man of the cloth and I . . .”
Melody’s knees buckle under the weight of tragic shock. The phone’s cord won’t reach the kitchen chairs. She sinks down onto the linoleum, leans against the cabinets and closes her eyes as Honeybee chatters on.
“Shot dead last night.”
April 4. The civil rights movement’s most prominent leader, who’d hoped that one day, black and white would no longer matter, had been assassinated on her make-believe due date. All that hope and promise, shattered with an assassin’s bullet.
Oh, Lord. Cyril will be devastated.
She cuts into her mother’s monologue. “I’m sorry, but I’ve got to run.”
“Are you in labor?”
“I just have to go to the supermarket. There’s no food and my grocery list is a mile long.”
Wrong thing to say.
Honeybee pounces on it. “I’ll come right on over to get the list and then I’ll go downtown to Food Fair.”
“No, please, Mother. I need to do this on my own.”
“Don’t be silly! It’s the least I can do. See you soon!”
Melody hears a click. She drops the receiver and reaches for a drawer handle to pull herself up. One tug and the drawer slides forward and drops out, narrowly missing her head. Flatware clatters around her. She ignores it, crawling to the locked back door so that she can use the doorknob as leverage. It takes a few wriggling tries.
You are not helpless, not a victim.
A brave, strong, enormously pregnant woman . . .
Only when she’s in the car on her way to Barrow does she realize she’s still wearing her nightgo
wn, had left the telephone receiver dangling from its cord, and forgot to lock the house. Not only that, but she punctured her knee on fork tines. She blots blood with the hem of her nightgown. Nothing matters but getting to Cyril.
Ordinarily, he’d be behind the counter at Morrison’s Meat Market on the mainland at this hour on a weekday, but there’s a sign on the window. Closed to Honor MLK.
Driving on, she sees similar signs on other businesses, not all of them Negro-owned. The world, according to one radio announcer, has shuttered and shattered overnight. He delivers frenzied news bulletins about the Memphis assassin manhunt, rioting in Washington, nationwide despair.
On Barrow, as on the mainland, all is quiet. Driving over the intracoastal bridge, she looks for the young brothers who fish there. They always turn to admire the Camaro, and the last few trips, they’d shyly returned her wave. Today, there’s no sign of them, or of another soul as she bumps along the dirt road to Cyril’s place.
His beat-up car isn’t out front. She pulls up and parks. The engine and radio give way to chirping birds and humming insects, and as she approaches, excited barks from Otis inside the house. She tries the door. Locked.
Shuttered. Shattered.
Otis barks and then whimpers for a while as she waits on the porch, but then quiets. She pictures him on the other side of the door, nose on his paws.
“It’s okay, boy. I’m not going anywhere. I’m here.”
She settles into the rocking chair with the bloody hem of her nightie draped over the gash in her knee.
She remembers a gray-haired woman with bloodstained white pumps.
December, up Macon way.
The pastor who’d answered her knock that day wasn’t at all what she’d been expecting. He reminded her of her grandfather, with a pot belly and a mostly bald head.
“You need a referral, ma’am?”
“I . . . I, um . . .”
“It’s all right. You come right around back to my living quarters and I’ll get you started and on your way.”
He sat her down in a parlor filled with comfortable antiques and books. She tried to eavesdrop on the phone call he placed from the next room, but his voice was muffled.
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