She lets it go for now, having reached the Commons. The wide pedestrian mall is already filled with families, students, and sightseers, strolling in and out of stores and browsing beneath the white vendor awnings that stretch for two blocks. The air is fragrant with foliage and festive food.
Passing a student band doing a sound check—curtailed electric guitar riffs and squeaky-miked “testing, testings”—she’s transported back to her 1990 audition to be a lead singer for South Hill, a local band. When they’d hired a white girl for the gig, Amelia had told herself that it was about race and not talent. But that woman now sings backup vocals for a Grammy-winning rock band.
And this one has no one to blame but herself for not pursuing a musical career.
She rarely regrets having chosen a different path—Aaron, and genealogy work. But now she wonders what might have been if she hadn’t been so hungry in those pivotal years for love and stability and family, so hell-bent on the quest to discover her biological roots. Where would she be now?
“It’s never too late,” Jessie had told her.
She hopes that’s true, but she isn’t so sure.
She toys with her phone as she moves along with the crowd, looking for a quiet spot where she can call her cousin Lucky. Once she knows the truth about what happened, she’ll be able to figure out what to do about her life, and her marriage, and maybe she can—
No! You’re doing it again!
Making the future about the past by fixating on the thing that’s haunted her all her adult life.
She’s also just walked past the packing and shipping store.
She backtracks, clutching the white envelope, and steps inside.
The woman behind the counter is helping a college student fill out the paperwork to mail a large package overseas, and there’s another customer in front of Amelia. He turns and raises his eyebrows at her as if to indicate that this is going to be a while. Then he does a double take.
“Are you Amelia?”
“Yes . . .” He’s a little younger than she is, Asian, with a sleek ponytail and a nice smile. As she tries to place him, she wonders, as always, if she’s about to close the gap on her past. Then she remembers that the search for her birth mother has come to an end.
“We’ve never met,” he says, “but I’m a huge fan of the show.”
Amelia thanks him, aware that the clerk and the college student have turned to gape at her, expecting a celebrity.
“I was adopted from Vietnam,” the man goes on. “Sometimes I wonder about my biological parents—what they were like, how they met . . . you know?”
“I do. If you ever decide to look for them,” she says, opening her wallet to find a business card, “I might be able to help.”
“Oh, thanks, but they were killed when Saigon fell. Ever hear of Operation Babylift?”
She nods. He must be one of the thousands of orphans evacuated from the war-torn country in April 1975.
He confirms it and tells her about the American family that adopted him. “I count my blessings every day,” he says. “When I watch your show, and see all those people searching, I know I’m one of the lucky ones. There are some questions I’ll never be able to answer, but I’ve had a great life.”
Amelia nods, remembering what she’d said to Jessie back at the house. She’ll be okay now, even if she never finds out exactly what happened back in May 1968. She can call Bettina’s cousin in Marshboro, but she doubts Lucky will shed any more light on her past than she had the first time they’d talked. For all she’d known then, Amelia had been Bettina’s biological child.
And so I am.
Already she feels the burden shifting, lifting. She no longer has to go through life looking back or looking hard at strangers’ faces. From here on in, she can focus on the ones she loves.
As Billy speeds toward the Stoltzfus farm behind a sheriff’s department SUV, with another one coming up a little ways behind him, his thoughts spin and scream more wildly than the red dome lights ahead.
Levi is dead.
Murdered.
Billy’s heart aches for the gentle farmer, for his family, especially his sons, who had found him.
Billy’s heart . . . aches.
He shifts his weight uncomfortably in the seat, picturing the young men he’s gotten to know over the years at the farmer’s market, so soft-spoken, hardworking, and respectful, with their simple clothes, bearded smiles, kind blue eyes. He imagines them searching for Levi when he’d failed to meet them in town, imagines them finding his abandoned horse and buggy out at the orchard, finding their beloved father . . .
He doesn’t yet know the details. Lieutenant Xiang had briefed him as she prepared to rush to the scene.
It’s where Prewitt had been found.
That can’t be a coincidence.
The press should never have published Levi’s name in the article about the child being found.
But they hadn’t considered it a criminal case, hadn’t thought it would put anyone in danger.
His chest constricts.
Anxiety, pulled muscle, indigestion . . .
He needs to let Jessie know. Tell her to stay home with the doors locked, just in case . . .
Driving with his left hand, he dials the house with his right. It bounces right into voice mail.
That’s right. The landline is down, and the Wi-Fi.
He calls her cell instead. It, too, goes straight to voice mail.
He curses.
“Jess, call me as soon as you get this. I . . .” He thinks better of leaving an explicit message. Not just because she probably won’t get it, or because he doesn’t want to scare her, but because his voice sounds a bit strangled. “I’m following a lead, and I need to talk to you. But just . . . lock the doors and stay home and keep the kids inside.”
He hangs up, Dave Carver’s voice dropping into his whirling brain like a felled tree sweeping into a tornado.
You and Jessie are fostering the little kid they found out in the boonies yesterday . . .
The press hadn’t published the child’s whereabouts, only that he’s in temporary foster care. But the information is out there, churning the local gossip mill.
The sheriff’s vehicle flies around a corner ahead. Billy clenches the wheel with both hands, preparing to follow, but something is wrong.
He misses the turn, feels himself losing control of the SUV, careening toward a utility pole on the shoulder, and all he can think is that he should have listened to Jessie, and Theodore, and the cardiologist . . .
But it’s too late.
His arms are burning, his chest is burning, and he can’t breathe, he can’t breathe, he can’t—
Barnes shoves on his sunglasses and zooms in on the spot where he’d seen Gypsy Colt.
She’s vanished.
He turns to Rob. Maybe he noticed her.
His friend is squinting in the glare, and rubbing the lenses of his own shades on the hem of his silk guayabera, asking, “You hungry?”
Barnes again scrutinizes the bright pink stucco building across the square.
Had Gypsy gone inside, been enveloped by a troop of uniformed schoolchildren, taken cover behind a concrete planter . . .
Or maybe she hadn’t been there at all.
“Barnes?”
He blinks, looks at Rob.
“You hungry?”
“We just ate breakfast.”
“That was a couple of hours ago.”
They’d eaten at a small paladar, not Miguel’s. Upon their arrival, the smiling owner had presented them with complimentary chorote, a thick hot coconut milk flavored with cocoa and banana. It, along with pastries, fruit, and strong Cuban coffee had chased away the last vestiges of drowsiness, but not the lingering realization that something could have—or perhaps, had—gone dangerously wrong last night.
“Come on, I know a place down on the malecón, near the Museo Municipal del Fuerte Matachin,” Rob says, gesturing to the east, where a wide stone
embankment runs along the water. “We’ll grab some lunch and then walk over to the museum.”
They leave behind the church and the square and the building where Barnes had imagined Gypsy Colt. Imagined her, because he’s certain he’d seen Wayland, gotten a good look at him, at the tattoo, but in her case, it was fleeting.
Then again, could he have imagined Wayland as well? If someone had drugged him, maybe he’d hallucinated all of it.
“The museum traces the Taíno history. We can swing by the casa particular for Kurtis on the way. I want him to come with us and learn about his roots,” Rob says as they round a corner and pass a group of barefoot, bare-chested boys playing soccer in the street.
“If he’s there, he might just want to sleep.”
“I don’t care what he wants. He should have let me know where he’s been. Lord knows what he’s been up to. If I decide he’s coming with us, he’s coming with us.”
Barnes shakes his head. “Look, we all have our rough spots, growing up. Even you.”
Years ago, when he’d introduced himself as “Rob,” he’d said it wasn’t his first name, nor his last. “Just a reminder of something that happened. Something I never want to happen again.”
It hadn’t. He’d done his time for holding up a liquor store, and had come out with a new name and a new attitude.
“Barnes, my son isn’t growing up. He’s grown. But when he acts like a man, and lives his life like one, I’ll treat him like one. For now, he gets treated like a kid, because—”
“He’s not a kid, no matter what he’s doing. And I’m not defending him, I’m just relating,” he adds quickly, before Rob can accuse him of it yet again. They’d already discussed Kurtis at length this morning on the way to the cathedral. “Do you know how long it took me to grow up?”
“He isn’t you, Barnes.”
“I wasn’t always me, either.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know, you were Gloss.”
That had been his nickname in the ’70s on the mean Harlem streets, where nobody really gave a damn that his beloved father had dropped dead at thirty-nine. Barnes had been so slick and smooth back then—or so he’d believed—that nothing would ever stick. Warnings, charges, people—everything and everyone slid away and he moved on, unencumbered. Gloss.
One night, an old man had caught him breaking into cars and reached out to him with a handshake instead of a fist, with sympathy for Barnes’s loss instead of a threat to call the cops. Turned out Wash was the cops. Retired NYPD.
Wash had stuck.
If not for him, Barnes would have wound up in juvy and jail, instead of on this side of the law.
But Barnes wasn’t necessarily talking about his years as a juvenile delinquent. Even after that, after Wash had saved him from the streets, after he’d joined the force . . .
Yeah. Even after that, he’d had a long way to go before becoming a responsible, respectable man.
Maybe that’s true even now.
“Gloss was a long time ago,” Rob reminds him. “Different times, different place. Kurtis is—hey, look out.”
Barnes turns just in time to catch a wayward soccer ball flying toward him.
One of the boys races to retrieve it with a shy apology and thanks. Barnes hands it back, and he darts away after flashing a smile. “That,” he tells Rob as they walk on, “was a kid.”
“And Kurtis might as well be. By the time you were his age, you were an NYPD detective. I was married with a couple of kids, a couple of mortgages, a booming business . . . You can’t blame me for worrying about what’s going to happen to him. He won’t let me parent him; he won’t let me help him.”
“He lets you help him.”
“Financially. But he doesn’t want to follow in my footsteps, or—”
“Did you want to follow in your old man’s footsteps?”
“—or hear what I have to say about anything, not his clothes, his music, TV, the weather, politics—”
“Hell, Rob, I don’t want to hear what you have to say about politics—or my clothes,” Barnes cuts in, smiling to show that he’s teasing—sort of. He changes the subject, looking up at the cloudless sky. “What do you think about that crazy storm?”
“Doesn’t seem possible.”
“That’s what people said back home before Sandy slammed the coast.”
“At least this one is a few days away,” Rob tells him. “By the time it hits, we’ll be back home.”
“Yeah . . . I was thinking maybe we should try to get out early.”
“What happened to staying here forever?”
Perry Wayland happened.
Gypsy Colt happened.
Or even if they hadn’t happened . . .
Something had.
Barnes can’t shake the suspicion that someone, somehow, had slipped something into his food or beverage. Miguel, most likely, or his son . . .
Why would they do such a thing? Because they wanted to rob him? No one had stolen his money.
Because I asked too many questions?
Because I saw what I wasn’t supposed to see?
It all comes back to Perry Wayland. To October 1987. Everything, for the past three decades, comes back to that.
Something Miguel had said last night is troubling him now.
“What if it ends tomorrow . . . This life. The world.”
The words had slid right past his alcohol-lubricated brain at the time, but now . . .
Oran Matthews, the notorious Brooklyn Butcher who’d slaughtered several families back in the sixties, had been obsessed with biblical Armageddon.
A lot of people are, Barnes knows.
But they aren’t all serving dinner to Perry Wayland—and then feigning ignorance when questioned about the man, who’d been linked to the Brooklyn Butcher copycat murders in October 1987, and to Gypsy Colt, Matthews’s daughter.
Sitting at the kitchen table, Jessie hears Theodore descend the back stairway, wearing shoes. Ordinarily, he lounges around in slippers and pajamas till noon on a Saturday. Today, she’d been counting on him to do that, and watch Prewitt and keep an eye out for the repairman while she goes upstairs to take a shower. Maybe that will revive her energy, since a boatload of coffee and maple syrup haven’t done the trick.
But Theodore is wearing a jacket and heads straight for the back door without a glance into the kitchen.
“Hang on! Where are you going?”
“To check Espinoza!” The back door squeaks open and he barrels outside.
Jessie gets up and goes to the sink, watching him through the window. He unlatches the hinged chicken wire door and stoop across the small mesh-enclosed pen to peer anxiously into the wooden nesting shelter. Even from here, she sees his body relax.
Good. Espinoza must be there.
Come on, of course he’s there.
Dave Carver might be a first-class jerk, but he wouldn’t trespass, vandalize their property, or harm a living creature.
Then again, maybe he would.
Maybe Billy should buy a padlock.
She reaches for the wall phone to call and tell him to pick one up on the way home.
No dial tone.
Damn. She forgot.
Forgot, too, to plug in her cell phone. The battery is dead.
Can one thing go right today? Just one small thing?
She sighs, closing her eyes, shoulders burning with exhaustion. She needs that shower. Now.
She opens the back door. Ordinarily the squeak doesn’t bother her, though fixing it is on the long household to-do list. Today, the sound grates her like foam packing peanuts crumpling in dry hands.
“Theodore? I need you!”
“I’m busy,” he calls back, muffled, his top half still poking around inside the rooster’s house.
“Now!”
He backs out and turns toward her. “Mom! I said I’m busy!”
“And I said . . .” Her voice breaks—not because she’s going to cry, but because she’s going to collapse if she do
esn’t get five minutes alone under a hot, soothing spray. “I said, come here. I need you to do something for me.”
Her son—so rarely capable of interpreting body language—pauses to give her a closer look before responding with a shrug. “Okay.”
He closes the coop and reenters the house. “What do you need?”
“I made pancakes for breakfast.”
“I’m not hungry. I want to stay outside with—”
“No, Theodore. I need you here right now. The Wi-Fi repairman is coming and I have to go upstairs for a few minutes. If they think we’re not home, they’ll leave.” In truth, she left the front door ajar, so that if anyone knocks on the storm door and no one answers, they’ll be able to see lights on in the kitchen.
Theodore starts for the living room.
“Wait, no, I need you to be in the sunroom with Prewitt.”
So much for the flash of empathy. Her son’s gaze narrows.
“Tell him about Espinoza,” she suggests. “Maybe you can get him to say something. I’ve been trying all morning, but you’re the only one he’ll talk to.”
“That’s because I’m the only one who speaks French.”
“Right. He needs you. And I need you. I’m so glad I can count on you.”
He grudgingly heads for the sunroom—one small thing going right for a change—and she hurries up the back stairs.
Billy’s toolbox is still sitting in the hallway outside Chip’s bedroom. It’s not like him to leave it lying around. She remembers how he’d huffed and winced as he’d installed the bolt on the door. He probably hadn’t been up to lugging the heavy case back to the basement.
On Monday, she’ll tell him to call Dr. Varma. No, she’ll call herself, make an appointment for Billy to be checked out again.
In the bathroom, she turns on the hot tap, strips off her clothes, and jams them into the hamper with the never-ending pile of laundry.
The shower does help, though not as much as she’d hoped. The tension ebbs a bit in her muscles, but her brain is still clouded with exhaustion, stress, and nagging worry about her husband’s health.
Back in the master bedroom, she looks for the jeans and hooded sweatshirt she’d worn all day yesterday. She’d draped both over a hook on the back of the closet door, but they’re on the floor. Billy must have knocked them off and left them there. She puts them on anyway and is looking through her sock drawer for a matched pair when Theodore shouts up the stairs.
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