The Butcher's Daughter

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  Years ago, before she and Perry left New York, she’d learned how to cover a paper trail. Leaving an electronic one is a new concern, and the reason she’s numb with exhaustion, having just spent seventeen hours driving a thousand miles from New York.

  “But you flew here from Cuba, Gypsy,” he’d pointed out yesterday afternoon as she was leaving.

  “Well, I couldn’t have driven, could I?”

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea, a woman on the road alone in the dead of night, dead of winter . . . I’ll come with you.”

  “What? You know I need you here to take care of Stockton Barnes and his daughter.”

  “I thought you were going to hire someone to do that, like the Harrisons,” he said, as if they were discussing whether to send shirts out to be laundered.

  She’d reminded him, yet again, that this—tomorrow—will be different. It has to be handled precisely according to her plan, and he needs to be the one to do it.

  “Is everything okay, ma’am?”

  She turns away from the window. The restaurant has emptied since she sat down an hour ago, and the waitress stands beside her table. “You haven’t touched your fried chicken. I’ve never had a customer who didn’t . . .”

  She talks on, just as she had when Gypsy first arrived, ordered coffee, and sat staring at the menu. She’d blabbed about how the fried chicken is the house specialty, has won awards, people come from all over just to taste it. Gypsy only wanted caffeine, but ordered the meal just to shut her up.

  Now she pushes the plate away, knocking into her water glass and sloshing some on the paper place mat. “Sorry—Aunt Beulah, is it?”

  “Uh, yes, this is Aunt Beulah’s, ma’am.”

  “But you’re not Aunt Beulah?”

  “She’s, uh, not a real person. It’s just a name. I don’t know if there ever was a—”

  “Then you won’t be offended,” Gypsy cuts in, “when I tell you that the chicken is lousy.”

  The woman’s eyes widen in dismay.

  What are you doing?

  Gypsy clamps her mouth shut. She’s exhausted, nerves frayed, body still aching from clenching the wheel through Washington, D.C.’s rush hour last night and Savannah’s this morning, with a Carolina ice storm in between. Exhausted, and steeped in the hot fury that had ignited ten days ago, when she’d discovered that Margaret Costello’s daughter is alive after all.

  “Why don’t I just leave this here so that you can be on your way. Have a good day.” The waitress tears a green check off her pad, drops it by Gypsy’s plate, and scurries back toward the kitchen, ignoring the tip and dirty dishes on a newly vacated table in her path.

  Gypsy hasn’t had a good day since she’d impulsively risked everything—everything—to execute a woman who wasn’t Margaret Costello’s daughter.

  “But, Gypsy! Why did you think the maid was—”

  “Because she looked like her! Like me!”

  Like Carol-Ann Ellis!

  He thrust a newspaper in front of her. Staring at Kasia’s photo beneath the tabloid headline the killer nobody saw, Gypsy could no longer see a resemblance to Carol-Ann. Nor to herself, or Margaret. But by then, she’d already discovered Margaret’s daughter.

  Jessamine had been abandoned as an infant in the Ithaca gorge not far from Cornell University, on the eve of the new semester in January 1969. That’s precisely when Bernadette returned to campus from New York after her winter break and Oran’s sentencing.

  Had Margaret Costello accompanied her? Or had Margaret persuaded Bernadette to take her child?

  The details no longer matter. One of them had left her there, in the gorge, on a frigid night she likely wasn’t meant to survive.

  After a well-publicized, futile search for the infant’s parents or a clue to her identity, she was adopted by a local couple who lived on North Cayuga Street. Their neighbor Professor Silas Moss later said that the foundling next door sparked his interest in using DNA to connect long-lost biological relatives.

  For Gypsy, the missing pieces fell into place. Red’s final confrontation with Bernadette must have revealed that Margaret’s daughter was alive in Ithaca.

  You were there that night to kill her, weren’t you, Red? And you were so close . . . if only you hadn’t made such stupid, reckless mistakes.

  But going to the wrong address wasn’t one of them. Jessamine McCall lived in the house Red visited on that night in October 1987. Now she lives adjacent, in Professor Moss’s former residence, with her police officer husband and their three children. But she isn’t there today. She’s here on Marshboro’s Main Street with her old friend Amelia, settling into the white cottage with the blue door.

  Gypsy leaves cash on the table with her check, exits the luncheonette, and pauses on the sidewalk to light a cigarette.

  Across the way, the rental car is still parked in the driveway.

  Gypsy had already known about the trip, courtesy of Amelia’s texts with Stockton Barnes. She hadn’t paid much attention, though, until she grasped Jessie’s true identity.

  “Are you sure she’s your sister, Gypsy?” he’d asked.

  “Stop calling her my sister. She’s Margaret’s daughter.”

  “And your father’s daughter, so that makes her your—”

  “I know what that makes her!”

  She’d clenched her phone against her ear, gazing out the window at the former Wayland penthouse, breathing in and out. She knows what happens when a person gets reckless. Oran’s misstep resulted in arrest; Red’s in death. Mere mortals, both, in the end.

  For Gypsy, immortality awaits. She won’t allow Jessamine Hanson and Amelia Crenshaw Haines and Stockton Barnes to claim it for themselves.

  She won’t let that happen. But the conspirators aren’t meant to die today on a sunny street. No, they’ll meet their fate tomorrow, as foretold in Revelations, in the sea of glass glowing with fire.

  Saddle River, New Jersey

  “Here we are, sir,” the debonair British driver announces from the front seat of the Porsche SUV.

  Barnes looks up from the text he’d been typing, asking a colleague for an update on a search he’d requested over a week ago.

  They’ve arrived at Rob’s pillared redbrick mansion—white pillars, red brick, and a lineup of vehicles on the circular driveway awaiting the valet attendants. The fundraiser, held annually on Martin Luther King weekend, is a catered affair with live jazz music and two hundred glitzy guests, many of whom are in the entertainment industry. Barnes usually enjoys putting on one of his own well-cut suits, rubbing shoulders with them, and sipping champagne.

  Not tonight. Back home after a long workday, he’d called Rob to say he couldn’t make it out to Bergen County tonight. Predictably, Rob insisted that he come, and said he was sending his chauffeur. There is no arguing with the man.

  As Smitty comes around to open the back door for him, Barnes quickly sends his text, tucks the phone into his cashmere overcoat.

  “Do let me know when you’re ready to return to the city. Mr. Owens has instructed me to await your call.”

  “It won’t be long, I’ll tell you that.”

  Inside, a member of the catering staff relieves him of his coat and another hands him a flute of champagne. The host and hostess greet him with hugs. Rob is dashing in a tux, Paulette lovely in blue velvet.

  “I’m so glad you came! Now all we need is Kurtis,” she says, scanning the crowd of new arrivals. “He promised he’d be here.”

  “Well, how many promises has he kept lately?” Rob asks.

  Paulette glares at him, then turns to greet a newcomer with a bright smile and a gracious, “So nice to see you!”

  “Everything okay with Kurtis?” Barnes asks Rob.

  “He and I are on the outs again.”

  “Again? I didn’t realize you two had been on the ins lately.”

  Rob and his oldest son have never seen eye to eye, but their relationship has grown increasingly fractured over Kurtis’s inability
to settle into a career despite his privileged background and Ivy League degree. He’s bounced from one industry to another, living off his father’s money while refusing his father’s attempts to bring him on board at the record label, or even connect him with influential people in other industries.

  Ongoing financial support, in Barnes’s opinion, is where his friend went wrong, though he wouldn’t dare criticize another man’s parenting. If Rob cut off the bottomless cash flow, Kurtis might straighten out and settle down.

  What do you know? You’re not a father.

  Barnes should probably update Rob, one of the few people in this world who knows about Charisse. But before he can, an R & B legend comes over to introduce his fiancée, a rising Instagram model. Barnes didn’t know that was a thing, but Rob does, as do his daughters, who rush over with starstruck squeals.

  Dodging the selfie session, Barnes heads for a quiet corner and reaches into his pocket for his own phone. Not there. Wrong pocket, wrong jacket. Damn. He’d checked it with his overcoat.

  “Lose something?”

  Barnes turns to see Rob and Paulette’s second-born son—Barnes’s own godson and namesake. Blessed with his parents’ good looks, confidence, and success, he’s an internal medicine resident at New York-Presbyterian.

  “Hey, you haven’t seen Kurtis around, have you, Uncle Stockton?”

  “No, but your parents were keeping an eye out for him.”

  “I hope he shows up. They haven’t seen him since Christmas, and he and my father spent the whole time fighting.”

  “The usual?”

  “Worse. They’re opposite sides of the same coin.”

  “I disagree.”

  Rob is a vibrant person who embraces many passions with fervor bordering on obsession. Kurtis—at least in recent years—is moody and apathetic.

  “But they’re both addictive personalities, Uncle Stockton. Only my father doesn’t dabble in dangerous stuff anymore.”

  “I don’t know about that. Seems like he’s always hanging from the side of a mountain lately. Upside down. No harness.”

  “Yeah, but who knows what my brother’s doing these days? I hate to say he’s a lost cause, but—”

  “Don’t say it.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “Plenty of people said that about me, too, once upon a time. I turned myself around. So will Kurtis.”

  Though Barnes had been a lot younger when he’d reformed himself, and he couldn’t have done it without Wash. Maybe Kurtis, too, would benefit from an older, wiser mentor. Barnes makes a mental note to reach out to him, maybe invite him to lunch over the weekend.

  He spends the next couple of hours eating exquisite food, listening to world-class jazz, mingling with other guests, and trying to get his mind off his own troubles. But every time he manages to forget, his subconscious nudges him that something’s wrong, just as Amelia had described.

  “Everything seems fine but you have this feeling that things are off, and then—bam. It hits you again.”

  This isn’t a death, but it feels like one.

  At last, he makes his escape, summoning Smitty, thanking Rob and Paulette, and reclaiming his coat. In the car, he checks his phone and sees a missed call from Marissa Gomez, the colleague he’d texted on the way over.

  “Damn,” he says under his breath, dialing. It rings just enough times for him to think he’s missed her for the night, but she picks up.

  “Good, you’re there. It’s Barnes.”

  “I know it is and I’m always here. What, did you think I have a life, or something? Listen, sorry it took me so long to get back to you about that DB you were asking about, but it’s been a crazy week, and I wanted to double-check a few things.”

  His pulse quickens. “Did you find something?”

  “Sure did. I found her.”

  “You mean . . . Delia Montague? Where?”

  “Morgue. Records, anyway. Jane Doe, Black, five foot seven, 115 pounds, in her late twenties, early thirties. Never identified. But I checked the postmortem photos against her mug shots, and it’s her.”

  “How . . .”

  “Medical examiner said it was an OD. She was found on a sidewalk outside a known crack house on . . .” He hears keys clacking. “December 4, 1990.”

  The small cottage had turned out to be charming, if no-frills, inside—dating back to the 1880s, Thelma had boasted. Jessie and her family live in an even older and far larger house that had once belonged to Silas Moss. As the two women discussed the charms of old architecture, Amelia had gazed out the window facing the Second Baptist Church, hearing Bettina’s voice in her head. “When I was a young’un in Georgia, we woke up bright and early on Sunday mornings, shiny clean from our Saturday night baths, so excited to put on our best dresses and walk on down the road to worship.”

  She and her sisters had only bathed once a week, with water that had to be heated on the stove. Their Sunday clothes were threadbare hand-me-downs, and Bettina’s feet were often blistered from outgrown shoes.

  “But we never complained, child. Never, ever. We had everything that mattered, until our daddy died.”

  Her smile would fade then. Sometimes she talked about his funeral in the church next door. He and Bettina’s mother are buried in the little graveyard out behind it. She’d married Calvin in the church, too, on September 8, 1956. Amelia has been planning to visit to see what she can piece together in the family tree. Church records and cemeteries are valuable genealogical resources. But now that she’s here, remembering Bettina, and her stories . . .

  I need to pay my respects.

  She and Jessie had unpacked their bags and then walked right on over to Amelia’s cousin Lucky’s house, just a quarter mile down the road from the cottage.

  “I have a good feeling about this,” Jessie said. “It’s Friday the thirteenth, you know.”

  “Then why do you have a good feeling?”

  “Because her name is Lucky. It’s a sign!”

  No one answered their knock. They’d have to return later.

  They drove back to the interstate and headed south, looking for a more populated area where they could eat dinner. They settled on a chain restaurant just off the last exit before the Florida State Line, too hungry to drive on in search of a place with homegrown appeal.

  They decide to take the local roads back to Marshboro. Jessie’s the designated driver, as Amelia had ordered Cabernet with dinner to calm her jittery nerves. It hadn’t worked.

  “Mimi, look!” Jessie says as they set out, and points at a green sign that lists mileage and arrows for nearby destinations. Jacksonville is to the west, Savannah to the north, and to the south . . .

  “Amelia Island, Florida?” she reads.

  “That must be where your name comes from.”

  “Maybe.” Her heart is pounding. After all these years, another clue.

  Half an hour later, they approach Lucky’s front door again. This time, lamplight spills from the windows. Amelia is about to knock when her phone vibrates with a terse text from Barnes.

  Delia OD’d 12/4/90.

  Amelia closes her eyes, digesting it. So it had happened exactly as the family, and Cynthia, and even Amelia herself had suspected. But Delia Montague, Charisse, the Harrison murders, and even Stockton Barnes seem far away and far less significant than they had before she arrived in Marshboro.

  “Mimi! Come on!” Jessie pokes her. “Knock, before you lose your nerve.”

  Text unanswered, she turns off the phone. Tonight is about her own past.

  Again, she lifts her fist toward the door. It opens before she can make contact.

  A woman stands there, looking out at her with Great Aunt Birdie’s dark eyes, unsurprised and expectant.

  Amelia steps forward. “Lucky? I’m—”

  “Lucky! Well.” The woman offers a faint smile and shakes her head. “It’s been a long, long time since anyone called me that.”

  “Sorry, it’s—I, uh . . . I know you’r
e my mother’s first cousin—her Aunt Birdie’s daughter—and I’m . . . uh, I’m Bettina’s daughter.”

  “No, you aren’t.”

  Amelia’s jaw drops. Jessie is, for once, at a loss for words.

  “I heard you were in town,” Lucky says. “Been waiting for you. Let me get my coat, and we’ll go.”

  “Go where?”

  “It’s time you learned the truth. But it’s not mine to tell.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Approaching Manhattan’s glittering skyline with Smitty behind the wheel, Barnes dials Bobby Montague’s number. It goes into voice mail, and he leaves a brief message asking the man to get in touch.

  Wondering how likely it is that Bobby will call back, he decides to reach out to James and Regina Harrison. It’s well past ten o’clock, and the news isn’t urgent, but the family should know, for closure’s sake, whether they actively seek it or not.

  And, selfishly, Barnes is looking forward to finally getting some sleep without Delia keeping him awake or haunting his dreams.

  “It’s Stockton Barnes,” he says when Regina picks up. “I’m sorry to call so late, but I just wanted to update you on some information I’ve received.”

  He tells her about Delia Montague’s death in 1990. She murmurs that it’s a shame, but takes the news in stride. He asks if she knows how he can get in touch with Bobby and is told he’s working the night shift.

  “I left a message for him. If you see him, though, let him know what happened.”

  “He always said Delia was dead. He won’t be surprised. What about Alma and Brandy?”

  He clears his throat. “Ma’am?”

  “You said you were investigating the murder. Do you have any updates on that?”

  “Oh . . . no, not yet,” he says, with a bit of remorse that finding out who killed their loved ones is no longer a top priority for him. But Sumaira El Idrissi is a top-notch investigator. She’ll solve it . . .

  Or not. Probably not. Eventually, without leads or suspects, it won’t be a priority for Homicide, either.