The Butcher's Daughter

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  His phone’s robotic voice announces that he has arrived at his destination.

  He parks in front of a small shingled colonial with a front porch and a brick chimney puffing smoke into the night sky. It’s the kind of home he’d hoped Charisse was living in years ago, when he’d learned she and Delia had left the housing project a month before he came looking for them. A month. Mere weeks. Things would have been different if he’d been sooner.

  He thinks of that little girl, all alone in a cavernous mall on a cold December night.

  Of Amelia, left in a Harlem church.

  Of her friend Jessie, abandoned in a snow swept Ithaca gorge.

  Regardless, all had been raised by loving parents. They’d been lucky.

  So am I.

  Barnes picks up his phone and sends a text.

  I’m here. Too late?

  He climbs out of the car, clutching his phone, waiting for wobbly dots to appear, indicating that she’s writing back.

  The screen remains empty.

  Barnes exhales heavily, breath frosty white in the damp night air. It’s okay. It’s late. She must have gone to bed. He’ll just have to wait a little longer.

  But as he turns to get into the car, the porch light flicks on and the door opens. She’s there, with her husband’s protective arm encircling her shoulder.

  “Come on in,” his daughter calls. “You’re not too late at all.”

  Standing before her mother, Amelia finds that her lungs have forgotten how to breathe, and her brain has shed its vocabulary, and her legs are barely, just barely, supporting her.

  The woman, Melody, is just staring down at the bracelet in her hand. She’s beautiful—so beautiful, tall and slender, with wideset green eyes and blond hair pulled back in a chignon. Her face is fully made up, complexion luminous despite her age and a fine network of wrinkles around her mouth and eyes.

  At last, she looks up, dazed. “Where did you get this?”

  “From . . . Lucky. She had it . . . I don’t . . . I guess . . .”

  “Who?”

  “Lucky. My mother’s cousin . . .”

  Melody is shaking her head, holding up the bracelet. “She died.”

  “What? No, she lives up in Marshboro.”

  At the last word, Melody gasps. “Marshboro.”

  “Yes. She’s Birdie’s daughter, and Marceline’s . . .”

  Another gasp.

  “. . . niece.”

  Melody’s head jerks up, and she stares hard at Amelia. “My daughter . . . my daughter died. She was kidnapped from my arms, and she was murdered, with her father and her grandmother. My daughter is dead.”

  “No. She—I—was kidnapped. By Marceline, but . . .”

  “Marceline. Yes . . .”

  “But she’s alive, and . . .” She reaches into her bag and pulls out the framed photograph. “She wanted me to show you this.”

  Melody cries out, pressing a fist to her mouth.

  “My father. Cyril. Marceline gave it to me, and she told me how she brought me to New York City after he died. She—I, I was raised by his cousin Bettina and—”

  She’s still shaking her head. “I lost Martina. I lost her . . .”

  “You didn’t.” Amelia draws in a ragged breath. “I’ve been looking for you all my life, and I can’t believe . . . I can’t believe . . .”

  “You’re . . .” Melody is sobbing. “You’re . . .”

  “Yes . . . I’m . . . I’m—”

  Melody lunges at her, and the rest of the halting sentence, whatever it was going to be, is sacrificed to a savage embrace.

  I’m . . .

  “Melody?” a voice calls from above, and a dog is barking. “Land sakes!”

  At last, she loosens her grip, not letting go, but allowing Amelia to see a large black Labrador bounding down the stairs toward them.

  “That’s my mother’s dog, Otis. We, uh, name them all after . . .” Melody clears her throat, wiping tears on her shoulders, as though unable to let go of her daughter for even a moment. “It keeps him alive, you know?”

  She doesn’t know. But she laughs as the dog nudges their legs with his wet nose, tail wagging.

  “Melody? What in the world is going on down there?”

  I’m . . .

  Alive . . .

  “Who . . .” she asks Melody. “Who’s upstairs?”

  “That’s Honeybee. Come on.” Suddenly urgent, she grabs Amelia’s hand and pulls her toward the stairway. “She always said we’d find you again, even though—and I always said she was crazy. I mean, she is . . . she’s crazy all right, but good crazy.”

  She’s laughing, and they’re walking up the stairs, past framed photos. A family. Melody’s family. Amelia’s family.

  I’m . . .

  Back . . .

  “Melody!”

  “Mother! Oh, Mother! You were right! Martina came home.”

  Yes.

  I’m home.

  Epilogue

  Mother’s Day

  Sunday, May 14, 2017

  Amelia Island

  It had taken some maneuvering to score an ocean view table for ten at the Ritz-Carlton’s lavish brunch, let alone changing it to eleven at the last minute. But Melody had accomplished it, and now here they are, a big happy group on a sunny spring Sunday.

  “What are we celebrating, folks?” the waiter asks, arriving with a tray of crystal flutes. Ten mimosas, one straight orange juice for the youngest member. “Mother’s Day?”

  Melody looks at her daughter, seated to her right. Amelia beams at her, but she, too, has tears in her eyes and neither of them manages to speak.

  Amelia’s friend Jessie has no such problem—now, or ever. “We’re celebrating everything!” she tells the waiter. “Including Mimi’s belated maybe birthday!”

  “But we already celebrated my maybe birthday Friday night, on the actual date,” Amelia points out. “And my real one back in April.”

  “That doesn’t count, because I wasn’t there,” Jessie informs her.

  Melody was. She’d flown to New York for the occasion with a special birthday gift—a little black Lab puppy, part of the latest litter she was raising, and descended from Cyril’s beloved dog.

  Amelia named him Otis, of course.

  She showed Melody around the city that week. Not just the tourist attractions, but the places that matter to her—her office, the block where she’d grown up, and of course, Park Baptist Church. It had been her week to sing at Sunday services. Melody sat in the front pew, her own voice raised with the choir. Afterward, they visited the cemetery where the Crenshaws are buried with their infant son between them.

  “I found comfort when they died, knowing they were reunited with their child,” Amelia said.

  Melody nodded. “I felt the same way years ago when we laid my daddy to rest beside my sister.”

  She placed an enormous bouquet of lilacs on the grave and then stood arm in arm with the daughter Calvin and Bettina had raised, mascara trickling down her face and Amelia’s.

  There have been so many tears these last few months, but few are the bitter, sorrowful kind. Melody only sheds those when she’s alone, pining for what might have been or realizing how close she’d come to losing her precious daughter forever.

  “Keep the champagne coming!” Grant tells the waiter.

  Melody had been surprised when he walked into the lounge last night just before she and the band started their last set. He was supposed to be spending the weekend up north with his daughters and their families.

  “My flight was canceled,” he said. “Thunderstorms. Good thing your group wasn’t flying in today.”

  Yes. A very good thing. Melody has been longing all her life for a Mother’s Day like this. It almost—almost—makes up for the one that had ended so tragically. Here she is, incredibly, celebrating with her mother and her daughter.

  Honeybee’s “I told you so’s” haven’t worn thin . . . yet.

  In the decades that passed
after Melody confided the tragic story about her lost child, Cyril, and Marceline, Honeybee had inexplicably believed it might still end happily.

  “You never know, Melody, honey. You just never know.”

  I do know, Mother. I do know.

  Still, shocked and relieved by her mother’s acceptance of a Black granddaughter, she’d allowed the aging woman to cling to futile hope.

  “We didn’t get our miracle last time around,” Honeybee would tell Melody over the years.

  “This time, we will. That child will come back to us.”

  As if it were that simple. As if the angels in heaven above could wave celestial magic wands and make things right.

  Now Honeybee believes that’s precisely what happened.

  Maybe, on this glorious spring Sunday morning, Melody almost believes it herself.

  Amelia had arrived last weekend and the rest of the group on Friday—Amelia’s friend Jessie, Jessie’s husband, Billy, and their three children. The older two, Chip and Petty, are college students—blissfully unencumbered, Melody thought when she met them. Just like Lucky’s daughter, Quinnlynn. As it should be. Though they’re separated by more than a decade, the three of them have their heads together, talking about a podcast their elders have never heard of and the youngest, Theodore, dismissed as “sheer drivel.”

  He’s an awkward adolescent with a gifted mind.

  “He has special needs,” Amelia had told Melody and Honeybee before they arrived.

  “Don’t we all, my dear,” Honeybee said. “Don’t we all.”

  She and Lucky have both taken a shine to young Theodore, seated between them. The two women are having a grand time regaling him with tales of the good old days, and he doesn’t seem to mind a bit.

  “I’d like to propose a toast,” Grant says, lifting his champagne flute.

  “Please don’t make my wife start crying again,” Billy warns him, and Jessie swats his arm.

  “No more tears! I just want to say thank you for including me, and lift a glass to family and friends, new and old, young and old.”

  “I don’t know who you’re calling old. I’m only ninety,” Honeybee says, and the group dissolves in laughter.

  “Your mom is quite a pistol,” Grant tells Melody, clinking his glass against hers.

  “Isn’t she just.”

  She smiles, glad she’d impulsively invited him to brunch when he showed up last night. “We’d love to have you. I’ll just change the reservation and add another person.”

  “It’s not that easy,” he protested. “I can’t even get a table for one tomorrow.”

  “You just have to know someone,” Melody assured him, and sent him off to sit with Honeybee and Jessie’s family as she stepped into the spotlight.

  “I’ve been solo all these years,” she told the crowd. “But tonight, I’m doing a duet. Let me tell you a little story . . .”

  By the time Amelia joined her to sing “At Last,” there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

  “Mom?”

  Melody hears the word, but doesn’t realize it’s meant for her until Amelia touches her hand.

  “I have something for you.”

  She stares at the small gift box wrapped in lavender sprigged paper.

  Purple for Melly . . .

  “Oh, honey, you didn’t have to get me a present.”

  “Trust me. It’s something you need to have.”

  “Trust me. I have everything I need.” Melody squeezes her hand.

  “You should open it.”

  She tears off the paper, the group around her occupied in their own conversations. Only Amelia is focused on her as she lifts the cover.

  Inside the box is a tiny gold ring, encrusted with sapphires, etched with a blue letter C.

  Melody closes her eyes and sees it against Cyril’s bare chest, dangling on a gold chain, glinting in early morning sunlight. Hears his voice, rich as pecan pie, saying, “Dayclean—a fresh start, with yesterday left behind.”

  You’d be so proud, Cyril. We didn’t get to raise her, but she’s grown up to be a brave, strong woman just like you said.

  She opens her eyes and looks at her daughter.

  “See? I told you it was something you needed.”

  “I did. I surely did. Thank you, my love,” Melody says aloud, and her heart whispers, Thank you, Cyril.

  Amelia stands on the beach, barefoot in warm, shallow surf, gazing at the water.

  In January, the ocean had been a dark, blood-tainted death trap. Today, it’s translucent, a lovely shade Melody calls haint blue.

  “I don’t care if it’s rainbow-sprinkled with surfing unicorns,” Jessie said yesterday on the beach, before the rain rolled in. “I’m not going near it.”

  Her daughter rolled her eyes. “Then why are we even here? I could be back on campus, studying for finals.”

  “You mean doing shots with your suite mates,” Jessie shot back. “And we’re here because it’s Mother’s Day weekend, and I get to choose!”

  “You’re impossible!” Petty stormed away.

  Jessie sighed and looked at Melody. “You dodged a bullet, believe me.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Diane—she’s my mom—always said raising a daughter is no picnic until they’re all grown up. You got the good part with Mimi.”

  “Jessie!” Amelia and Billy scolded in unison.

  “My mother would probably say the same thing,” Melody said, and if she was stung, she hid it behind a good-natured laugh.

  Amelia knows that Jessie, too, is hiding an ache behind her usual buoyant, acerbic facade. She’d given up on finding her biological family decades ago, deciding she was content with the one she’d grown up in and the one she was raising.

  She should have been spared the terrible truth—that her mother was a teenaged rape victim, her father one of the most notorious serial killers in history, her half-sister a delusional murderess.

  “They’re all dead, though, Mimi,” she’d said. “Thank God I never have to deal with them, you know?”

  “You’re the most resilient person I’ve ever known, Jess.”

  “Oh, it sucks. And believe me, I’m going to need a hell of a lot of therapy after this. But I’m going to focus on the good things, and I feel lucky to be alive.”

  Rob Owens hired the country’s most powerful criminal defense attorneys to defend his son.

  Stockton Barnes predicts a lesser conviction or case dismissal.

  “Sometimes, for better or worse, the punishment doesn’t fit the crime,” he said. “And sometimes, the penance a person gives himself is worse than anything the justice system could hand him.”

  Back in January, he’d told Amelia about Stef and the bribe from Wayland. And then he’d told the bureau chief.

  He’d been prepared to turn over his badge, serve time, make restitution . . .

  Nothing happened.

  There was an investigation, but when Stef was questioned, he said he’d made up the story about Wayland. The money had been his own. A gambling windfall.

  “Maybe it’s the truth,” Amelia told Barnes.

  “It isn’t. It’s the code of silence.”

  “Well, there’s nothing you can do about it now, is there? I mean, you tried to go back, and undo, and redo, and . . . you can’t. Sometimes, you just have to move on, Barnes.”

  Amelia stares out at the ocean, thinking about Cyril, and about his mother. She’d never had the chance to see Marceline again. She passed away in early February.

  “She was just hangin’ on all these years ’cause she needed to make things right, child,” Lucky told Amelia when she flew down for the funeral. “Now she’s at peace.”

  We all are.

  She paid her respects to Marceline, and a month later, to Silas Moss. She and Jessie delivered a joint eulogy, and then they drank an entire bottle of wine in the spot where it all began, on the steps of a yellow mansion that had once belonged to Si, and now belonged to Jessie.

  “J
ust like old times, Mimi,” Jessie said as they passed the bottle back and forth. “Who needs stemware?”

  “Or coats?” Amelia said, shivering a little in the cold March night.

  “Jess, have you seen my uniform pants?” Billy called from inside the house.

  “Nope!” she called back, then hissed at Amelia, “And who needs men? Or pants?”

  They were drunk, and silly. Just like old times.

  Back at home in New York, Amelia ended her marriage.

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t always present . . . in the present,” she told Aaron.

  “And I’m sorry I didn’t understand where you were coming from. I’m glad you found what you were looking for.”

  She certainly has.

  Her phone buzzes with a text.

  Hope you had a great brunch with your mom.

  She smiles.

  Yes. Hope you did, too.

  Great? Clearly, you haven’t met my mom yet.

  No, but she will next week. He’s taking them both to dinner. He says it’s time. She agrees. He’d met Melody when she came to New York.

  “I’m so happy you have such a wonderful man in your life, Amelia,” she’d said.

  “We’re taking it slow. I’m not sure where it’s going . . .”

  “Life is too short to take anything slow.”

  “You’re right, Mom. Remember that when you get back to Florida, and Grant.”

  Her mother had protested that they were just friends. Maybe. But they’ll get there.

  Amelia texts, I hope you have a better dinner with your daughter tonight.

  The response comes quickly—a thumbs-up and a heart emoji. Counting down the hours. Did you give your mom the ring?

  She smiles. Yes! It was perfect. Thanks again.

  He responds with the same words he said in person, when he gave it to her after the police released it as evidence.

  It was always yours.

  The screen vibrates with ellipses, indicating he’s typing again.

  Just fed Clancy and Otis.

  The text is accompanied by a photo of a kitten and puppy snuggled together on Amelia’s bed.

  Aw! I miss them!