He’s taking a red-eye home so that they can spend the weekend together. He hates red-eyes.
But he loves me.
And she loves him. Any other morning, she’d have gotten up to make him coffee and see him off, even at that hour.
But she’d finally fallen asleep just an hour before he left, having lain awake most of the night, thinking about her birth father and trying to decide if she wants to let him into her life.
A thumping sound startles her from sleep. She opens her eyes and listens. Silence. The dog is sound asleep at the foot of the bed.
The thumping must have been part of her dream. It’s fuzzy, but it had involved her father.
What time is it? She reaches for her phone to check and finds several texts from her husband, whose flight was delayed out of JFK due to weather.
Looks like it might be canceled, the last one reads. Will keep you posted.
She gets out of bed and peers through the shade. There’s weather, all right. It’s snowing like crazy . . . and there’s that thumping sound again, coming from downstairs. This time, even Briana stirs.
“It’s okay,” she tells the dog. “Someone’s at the door.”
It must be Bryant, back from the airport. She shoves her feet into her slippers, and hurries down the stairs.
Throwing open the door, she sees a familiar young Black man, not her husband, smiling at her.
“Morning,” he says, shovel in hand. “Just wanted to let you know, I’m here to clear the walks and driveway, but I’m not sure where you want me to dump the snow out back by the deck. You want to come out and see what I mean?”
“Oh! Um, I’m sure it’s fine.”
He hesitates, looking over his shoulder. “Please, Mrs. Ford. Come on out and show me.”
“What? But I—”
She sees the gun.
“Why the hell are you calling me this early the morning after my party?” Rob’s voice grumbles.
“Because you didn’t answer my text, and it’s urgent.” Barnes clenches his phone hard against his ear. “Come on, Rob, wake up. Are you awake?”
“No.”
“This is really important. I need you to listen to me. Something’s happened, and I need—”
“What? What happened?” His friend sounds alert now. Alarmed.
“I’m looking for—” Barnes breaks off as his phone vibrates. It’s an incoming call.
Kurtis.
“Rob—never mind. I just found it.”
Rob mutters a reply and hangs up as Barnes answers the other line.
“Uncle Stockton?”
“Yes.” He braces himself, nausea pumping through his gut.
“I’m sorry to bother you, but I saw your text last night, and I . . . I really would like to meet you. Thank you for offering to help me, because I’m kind of in trouble here, and I don’t know what to do, and if you can possibly come . . .”
Barnes hesitates. He takes a deep breath. He has no choice. None at all.
“Anything you need, son. Where are you?”
“Up in Connecticut. Westport.”
Gypsy returns to Marshboro in the rental car she’d parked last night near the waterfront development. The Reel Gent waits there, tied up to an empty private pier behind an unoccupied mansion.
She’d been prepared for small town bustle on this Saturday morning, and the main drag is thick with parked cars, but even Aunt Beulah’s appears deserted. It doesn’t take her long to realize that everyone is at the Baptist church, where a Martin Luther King fundraiser is underway.
She pulls into the cottage driveway behind Jessie’s rental car, thinking about Kurtis Owens. He was wealthy enough to deliver her from the ruins of her life in Cuba, but he’s so young, and he isn’t a billionaire tycoon, and even if he were, she’ll never grow fond of him the way she had Perry. Never love him, the way she’d loved Perry.
Yes, loved him, a fact she hadn’t realized until it was too late.
She closes her eyes, remembering the last day in Baracoa.
Perry, looking back at her, blue eyes full of hope and trust. He was the only man she’d ever loved who hadn’t betrayed her. No, he’d followed her command, and led the group into the tempest.
She’d promised them eternal salvation, just as her father had promised her. But they, like Oran Matthews, had turned out to be mere mortals, and she’d condemned them, lambs to the slaughter.
“And he said, Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the Lord. And, behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind . . .”
After the hurricane blew north, she emerged from the depths of her cave high above the sea to find her island paradise reduced to rubble. The local population that had ridden out the hurricane in government shelters had survived, but her followers—her family—had not.
Gone. Perry. All of them.
Perry . . .
Sorrow washed over her as she stood staring into the wreckage-strewn waves lapping what was left of the beach.
She should have been more careful. She would have been more careful, had an unwelcome visitor from the past not invaded her sanctuary at that crucial time.
In sorrow’s wake came vengeful fury.
Stockton Barnes has to pay. He, and his daughter, and Amelia Crenshaw, and Margaret’s daughter—they will die today, all of them, just as Perry had, swallowed by the sea.
Behind the wheel, racing up the snowy highway toward Connecticut, Stockton calls Amelia.
This time she answers, with an apology. “I meant to get back to you last night, but you wouldn’t believe what—”
“Where are you?”
“Hang on a second.”
He hears a voice in the background calling, “Mimi?”
“I’m on the phone!” Amelia calls back and then, to Barnes, “Sorry.”
“Who is that?”
“Just Jessie. That’s her nickname for me. We’re going—”
“Where are you?” Barnes asks again, urgently.
“What? We’re at the house, getting ready to—”
“Okay, listen closely. It’s important, Amelia. Really important. You and Jessie might be in danger.”
“What?”
He explains quickly, telling her as much as he knows, and hears her gasp when he mentions the Brooklyn Butcher.
“Do you remember the copycat crimes in 1987, Barnes?”
“I worked that case, and I know the killer wound up in Ithaca, and that’s why I wanted you to—”
“That was me!” She lowers her voice to a near whisper. “I’m the one who stabbed the killer after she broke into Jessie’s house. We were there.”
“You . . . you and Jessie were the teenaged girls who—”
“Yes. Oh, God. I need to tell her about this, but I think . . .”
“Mimi!”
This time, Jessie’s background voice is closer, and Amelia drops hers to a whisper.
“I’ve got to go, Barnes. Thanks for the warning.”
“I could be wrong. I’m praying I am. But if not . . . just be on guard. And don’t trust anyone. No matter who it is, no matter what they say . . .”
Marshboro
Be on guard . . .
Barnes’s words ring in Amelia’s ears, phone and a dish towel trembling in her hands.
She’d been drying dishes when he called.
“I’ll throw together an omelet while you get ready, Mimi,” Jessie had said earlier. “And then you can clean up the kitchen while I get ready.”
Amelia had grumbled good-naturedly about always getting the raw end of that familiar deal. Sure enough, her friend had left a mess—eggshells in the sink, crumbs and coffee grounds on the counter, a cutting board littered with onion skins and green pepper stems.
Cleanup had taken much longer than she’d anticipated, and as she greeted Barnes on the phone, she’d heard someone knocking at the cottage door. Jessie had called
out to her from the bedroom, and then gone to open it.
By the times Barnes passed along the warning, Amelia could hear conversation in the next room.
Don’t trust anyone, he’d said.
Too late.
Someone is in the house. A stranger’s voice mingles with Jessie’s.
The conversation sounds pleasant enough.
But Amelia whirls to the drainboard, that terrible Ithaca night thirty years ago blazing vividly in her memory.
The copycat killer had broken into Jessie’s house after killing five of the Butcher’s survivors.
“Where is she?” she’d demanded, and then Amelia had—
“Mimi!”
She whirls as Jessie appears in the doorway. An attractive older woman is with her. She’s tanned and dressed all in black, with long black hair parted in a pronounced widow’s peak.
Jessie, too, has a widow’s peak.
“This is Gitana. She’s a friend of your birth mom’s. Your cousin Lucky asked her to drive us down to Amelia Island to meet your mom. Isn’t that sweet?”
Amelia murmurs that it is, and thanks the woman. She smells of stale cigarette smoke.
Gitana . . .
She’s smiling.
Jessie is smiling, too.
She and the stranger have the same dimples. The same smile.
Only Gitana’s smile isn’t reflected in her eyes. They’re hard. Dangerous . . .
Purple.
Just as Barnes had described.
And gitana means “gypsy” in Spanish.
“Are you ready to go, Mimi?”
“Ready.”
Amelia follows them out the door, pausing to swap the dish towel for the jacket she’d left draped over the chair, the kitchen knife she’d grabbed from the drainboard concealed beneath it.
When Barnes arrives at the waterfront address Kurtis had provided, he finds a deserted marina and a lone car in the parking lot. Kurtis is behind the wheel, engine idling. He rolls down his window. He looks gaunt, Barnes thinks. And he doesn’t make eye contact.
“Thanks for coming, Uncle Stockton. Hop in. I need to talk to you.” Seeing Barnes’s expression, he holds up a paper cup. “I got you a coffee. Extra extra large, ’cause I know you.”
Barnes forces a smile. “You sure do.”
But I don’t know you at all, son.
Barnes reminds himself that he has the edge here. Kurtis has no idea he’s even suspicious. He thinks good old Uncle Stockton is here to lend a hand and an ear and maybe a couple of bucks. When Barnes reached out last night, that had been his intention. Now . . .
If he weren’t armed, he would never have gotten out of his car and into the passenger seat of Kurtis’s. But he is, so he does, though there’s no way he’s going to use his gun on Kurtis.
You will do what you have to do, Stockton.
I don’t know if I can, Wash. Not this time.
“Hope it’s still hot enough for you.” Kurtis hands him the coffee.
“It’s fine.” Barnes sets it into the console cup holder. “Give it to me straight. What’s going on with you?”
“I . . . I got myself into trouble.”
Barnes hears the uncertainty, and he reminds himself that this is Kurtis. His best friend’s son, born the same day as Charisse.
But then he thinks of the surly, troubled young man who’d accompanied him and Rob to Baracoa. Of Perry Wayland’s warning, and of the ominous letter he’d found on his pillow.
Who had access to his apartment?
Rob.
Kurtis could easily have borrowed his key, duplicated it . . .
He could have . . . but . . .
It has to be a mistake. Kurtis would never, could never . . .
“Aren’t you going to drink your coffee, Uncle Stockton? It’s going to get cold.”
Barnes looks down at the cup, then up at Kurtis’s face. His jaw is tense.
He’s trying too damned hard.
Did he put something in it?
That, more than anything else, is impossible to believe.
Then he hears a thump in the car trunk.
Part VIII
1968
Chapter Nineteen
Friday, May 10, 1968
Fernandina Beach
“Home sweet home,” Honeybee says, pulling up at the curb and looking at Melody in the passenger’s seat. “Feeling all right?”
Nothing has changed since her mother asked the question five minutes ago—nor since the previous inquiry five minutes before that. But Melody nods. She can’t fault Honeybee for being concerned, or for insisting that Melody stay here with her and Daddy while she recuperates.
“You can’t come home from the hospital to an empty house,” she’d told Melody, just as she had back in April.
This time, Melody didn’t argue. She has no desire to return to the house she’d shared with Travis, even to get her clothes. Her mother had done that before her release. The woman has been an efficient and selfless stanchion of maternal valor throughout this ordeal.
The sun is high and the warm salt breeze is scented with southern magnolia and the sweet confederate jasmine that spills from every trellis and picket fence. Pedestrians stroll along, greeting neighbors tending to their gardens or perched on porch swings. Melody sees every head turn in her direction as she emerges from the car. Honeybee takes her arm gently, as if she’s an elderly visitor or a young child.
“After we get you settled, we’ll have some sweet tea out on the porch or in the garden. The fresh air will do you a world of good.”
Melody keeps her gaze fixed on the front door as they walk toward the porch, her mother pointing out a hummingbird nosing a showy scarlet bloom along the border.
“Look! Look! See it? Right over there in the red buckeye tree. You’re not looking, dear!”
“I’m sorry, Mother, I . . .” She lowers her voice. “They’re looking. At me.”
“Who . . . ?” Honeybee swivels her head as they climb the front steps. “Oh. Yes. I suppose they are, but we can’t blame them. They’ve been so concerned. Mrs. Brady dropped by with vegetable soup for you just last night, and Bev Leonard said she’ll—”
“Mother! Have you told everyone about this? About the baby, and . . . me?”
Honeybee pauses with her hand on the doorknob. “They already knew about the baby, Melody. It was in the papers.”
Of course a kidnapping would make headlines. Melody stares at her feet, still too swollen for anything but tennis shoes, and at the welcome mat with its bright pink daisies.
Honeybee opens the door. “Doesn’t it smell divine in here? I had Raelene make two pineapple upside down cakes, one for dessert, and the other in case of company, or . . .”
Something to celebrate.
She’s thinking the baby might come home after all.
Raelene rushes from the kitchen to embrace Melody.
“Careful, careful,” Honeybee says. “She’s fragile right now.”
“I’m just so relieved. Now we can take care of you and help you heal. Whenever y’all are ready for lunch, I’ve got hot biscuits and honey ham.”
“Thank you. I think I’ll just go up and take a nap.”
“Your room is all made up for you,” Honeybee says. “I’ll just help you—”
“I’m just fine on my own. But thank you both, for . . . everything.”
“You just holler if you need me,” Honeybee calls after her as she heads up the polished wooden flight.
“Or me,” Raelene chimes in.
On the second floor, Melody exhales for what might be the first time since she’d left the hospital. She continues down the hall, past her parents’ bedroom at the front of the house and four doors along the wide hallway leading to her own. Linen closet, bathroom, guest room, Ellie’s . . .
She stops. The door, so rarely opened, is slightly ajar and she peeks through the crack.
Frozen in time, Ellie’s bedroom is pastel pink with ruffled linens. Stuffed animal
s—all dogs—mingle with pinup posters of Elvis and Frankie Avalon torn from 16 magazine. On the bookshelves, Dr. Seuss shares space with nine Beany Malone novels Melody had passed her sister’s way, ignoring Honeybee’s protests that Ellie was too young.
Melody crosses the threshold, running her fingertips along the row of neatly organized books.
Poor Ellie, perpetually trying to catch up with Melody and wrench herself from her mother’s overprotective grasp.
Poor Honeybee, trying to hold on long before any of them could have known . . .
The ninth Beany book is aptly titled A Bright Star Falls, about a terminally ill teenaged girl. Melody and Ellie had cried over it together back in 1959, never imagining that the plot would play out in their own lives a year later.
“Am I going to die like Rosellen did in the book?” Ellie asked when she got her own diagnosis.
“Of course not!” Honeybee glared at Melody.
“I told you she was too young.”
Melody has long since come to regret sharing A Bright Star Falls with Ellie, and Lenora Mattingly Weber has since published four more Beany books that Melody couldn’t bear to read.
She turns away from the bookshelf.
The February 1960 issue of Teen World lies on the bedside table, its cover featuring Kookie Byrnes and an article headlined “For Girls Who Will Marry Young.”
“This is us, Melly!” Ellie had said. “We’ll get married when we’re eighteen and be each other’s maids of honor and live next door to each other and have lots of children and Mother will babysit when we go dancing with our husbands.”
Poor bright star Ellie . . .
As she turns away, Melody spots the one thing in the room that had never been part of the frozen-in-time shrine.
She’s only seen the bassinet in an old album filled with photos of her and Ellie as infants back in the ’40s. Now it’s trying to hide in a shadowy corner, stashed between the bed and the wall. White wicker, with a pink organza skirt Honeybee had made for her first grandchild.
Nearly two weeks ago, the emergency hysterectomy that had saved Melody’s life had stolen her fertility. On top of losing a child, and their only grandchild, her parents have lost the promise of any others.
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