Dead Silence

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  Penny turns off the music and the engine, hearing her daughter’s voice in the whoosh of silence.

  “You’re still using a CD player?” she’d asked the last time she’d ridden in the passenger’s seat, home from Atlanta and plumb full of big city swagger. “We need to get you into the twenty-first century!”

  “I don’t want one of those iPod things, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “You don’t need an iPod. You can get a new phone and play music right from there. If you’d get a car with Bluetooth, you wouldn’t even need to plug it in.”

  She’d just shaken her head. That girl never has been content to leave well enough alone. Penny’s perfectly happy with her trusty flip phone and sedan, even if the odometer is edging toward two hundred thousand miles. She likes to have a good, sturdy hunk of car around her when she drives down here from Marshboro. The interstate is chockful of trucks and crazy drivers these days, and the island bridge makes her nervous, with orange cones and concrete construction barriers and fancy cars that tailgate you across.

  She doesn’t like it, any of it. But soon enough, her reason for coming here will be gone, and then, she supposes, she’ll miss it.

  She gets out of the car, grabs the bouquet she’d bought on the mainland, and peels the Publix price sticker from the cellophane.

  Her feet crunch on the gravel as she heads toward the cottage, wading through evening air as thick with humidity as it is with humming insects and the scent of bacon and black-eyed peas.

  A Creamsicle-colored kitten lolls on the pathway beside a crepe myrtle. The branches are stuck with upended glass bottles in the same bright cobalt shade as the cottage. Haint blue, the Gullah Geechee call the color, believing it wards off evil spirits. Maybe, but it didn’t work on a certain blue-eyed man Penny will always remember as evil incarnate.

  She steps over a second orange kitten on the steps, and past a third littermate watching flies buzz around tuna fish dregs in a couple of shallow metal bowls. A spry black cat springs from the porch rail to join her on the mat as she knocks on the screen door.

  Tandy comes bustling from the kitchen, wiping sweat from her forehead with a dish towel, then slinging it over her shoulder. She grins, her few remaining teeth gleaming white in her plump Black face as she unhooks the screen door and opens it with a welcoming squeak.

  “There you are! I was startin’ to worry. Was there an awful lot of traffic?”

  “More and more every week. Used to be not a lot of folks knew about this island.”

  “Now they’re building condos and beach houses that sleep two dozen,” Tandy tells her, holding the door wide. “Come on in out of the heat, child.”

  If anything, it’s hotter inside the cottage, where paddle fans twirl from a beadboard ceiling so low it’s a wonder no one’s been decapitated.

  She follows Tandy through the sitting room, with its slanted wide-planked floors and hand-crocheted doilies, and Billie Holiday croons Cole Porter on the old stereo. In the steamy kitchen, Hoppin’ John bubbles on the stovetop in a black-rimmed white enamel pot with more scratches and dings than the old sedan out front.

  A window above the sink faces the deep backyard bordered by dense vegetation tangled in greenbrier vines. Gators occasionally emerge to bask in remarkable harmony with the property’s feline population, a fact that has never surprised the resident cat lady.

  “They all leave each other alone and get on just fine. People should do the same out there in the world,” she’s often said in her Gullah accent, pronouncing both they and there, “day.”

  Tandy unwraps the flowers. “Well, aren’t these somethin’. Daisies, cornflowers, lilies—a big ol’ kiss from summertime.”

  “This weather feels more like August than October.”

  “That it does, child. That it does.” She clips the bottom inch from the stems, puts them into a waiting mason jar already filled with water, and bustles to the fridge. “Now let me pour you some cold lemonade. And I made your favorite for supper.”

  “Oh, I can’t stay. Nighttime driving is getting harder and harder with these old eyes of mine.”

  “Almost full-on dark out now, so guess you’ll be going home in the dark either way. Might as well do it with a belly full of home cookin’.”

  “Might as well,” she agrees with a grin. Tandy never takes no for an answer.

  She hands over the jar bouquet, along with lemonade in a tall, moisture-beaded glass and calls toward the back bedroom, “Penny’s here now, honey!” No response. Tandy shrugs. “You just go on in there while I get our cornbread into the oven. She had a restless night and a drowsy day with the heat, so she might’a dozed off again waitin’ for you.”

  “Maybe I should let her sleep.”

  “No, you go on and wake her up. She’s been askin’ about you all the livelong day. If she misses seein’ you, she’ll be heartsick.”

  So will I.

  She wonders, every time she visits, whether this will become the last time—the occasion she’ll look back on years from now, thinking of all the questions she should have asked, though they’re no more likely to earn deathbed answers than they were decades ago. Still, if she fails to ask, she’ll remember the final conversation with regret, just as she does the final one she’d had with her mama, gone more than twenty-five years now.

  She crosses the threshold into a tiny bedroom shadowed in dusk, setting the lemonade on a folding wooden tray table, and the flowers on the windowsill. A fat calico cat stares back at her from the ledge beyond the screen. Ignoring a lizard crawling along the frame, the feline keeps vigilant watch over the room as if intent upon witnessing the old woman’s last breath.

  A kitchen chair is pulled up alongside the hospital bed that had arrived with Tandy about a decade ago to accommodate a stubborn ninety-eight-year-old woman who wouldn’t hear of going to a Marshboro nursing home. She’s grudgingly grown accustomed to both, though she remains inarguably fonder of the adjustable mattress than she is of her home health aide.

  Poor Tandy, Penny and the rest of the family often say. She surely has her hands full here, and for more years now than anyone other than the patient had ever anticipated.

  Above the bed, a framed photograph captures the newly minted centenarian eight years ago, beaming before a towering cake ablaze with a hundred birthday candles. She’d shared her secret to longevity with the guests at her family party.

  “Y’all have got to stay away from buckrahbittle. You need supshun if y’all want to live to see one hundred years.”

  “Buckrahbittle? Supshun?” one of the great-grand-nephews had echoed, helping himself to a handful of chips and Cheetos from the snack table. “What the heck is she talkin’ about?”

  “Buckrahbittle is what you got there in your hand,” she’d retorted in that lazy growl of hers, old ears, eyes, and tongue still sharp as ever. “And supshun is all that good food your mama is always tellin’ you to eat.”

  Nowadays, she spends more time in bed than she does in the folded wheelchair propped against the wall. Her hearing and vision are waning, and her throaty voice warbles with age whenever she deigns to speak. She’s often silent, steeped in introspection, though she still occasionally picks up on things you wouldn’t expect—or want—her to notice.

  “Watch that mouth of yours, missy,” she’d snapped just last week when Tandy had emitted a hushed cuss after bumping her shin on the footboard.

  The nurse had rolled her eyes at Penny, whispering, “Can’t get away with anything around here, even when she looks like she’s sound asleep.”

  “Heard that, too,” the patient muttered, eyes still closed as if deep in slumber.

  She looks the same this evening, chest rising and falling in a steady rhythm. Despite the heat, she’s swathed in two sweaters and tucked beneath a quilt she’d hand-pieced seventy-five, maybe eighty years ago for a newborn niece who’s long dead now.

  Having outlived not just everyone she’d ever known and loved in her own generati
on as well as many who came after, she’s acutely aware that her time on this earth is drawing to an end. Her mind remains astute as ever, though her waking hours are dwindling and her robust physical presence is no more. Her thick mass of cornrows has been replaced by gray wisps, that rich ebony complexion is now whitewashed in chalky pallor, the once sturdy hands reduced to wizened bones clasped as if in prayer, resting on what’s left of her bosom.

  Planting a kiss on her withered forehead, Penny whispers, “Auntie? I’m here.”

  The old woman’s eyelids flutter, but she doesn’t awaken.

  “It’s all right. I’ll just set a spell and let you rest.”

  Now she stirs, almost defiantly. Her gaze, behind thick red-framed glasses, is unnervingly bright, like a sinking ship’s beacon gleaming on the misty night sea. It’s impossible to imagine, in moments like this, that this bold light will soon be extinguished. When she goes, a trove of family secrets will be lost with her. Time is running out.

  She gives an approving little nod. “Lucky.”

  There aren’t many people left in this world who remember the childhood nickname bestowed by her own late mama.

  Lucky Penny, Birdie used to call her, and the name had stuck, if only within the family.

  The eyes scan the room and settle on her face again. “Where’s Cyril?”

  “Cyril?” Wide-eyed, she shakes her head. “I don’t know.”

  A troubled frown. “What time is it?”

  “About six thirty.”

  “How are you comin’ all this way so early in the day, child? Don’t you have to work?”

  “It’s six thirty at night, Auntie.”

  “Night!” She turns her head toward the window.

  Beyond the screen, the backyard’s shadows have deepened, and the feline sentry has disappeared into the palmetto jungle—for now.

  “Thought I’d slept right through to dayclean,” the old woman mutters. “The sun was comin’ up over the ocean, and the dolphins, they were dancin’ around like crazy, and Cyril, he was just laughin’ and laughin’, and . . . you sure he’s not here?”

  “No, he’s . . . no.”

  “Guess it was a dream.” She shakes her wispy gray head, lost in thought.

  Penny clears her throat. “I got a phone call, Auntie. Bettina’s girl, askin’ questions I couldn’t answer, or didn’t think I should. I thought maybe you—”

  “Maybe later, child. Maybe later. I’m goin’ to rest up a little bit until it’s time for supper.”

  With that, Marceline LeBlanc closes her eyes and drifts back to a place where sunshine sparkles on the water with her lost boy’s laughter.

  Acknowledgments

  With deepest gratitude to you, my readers; to booksellers and librarians; to my editor, Lucia Macro, who coaxed me through with infinite patience and encouragement; to all at William Morrow who had a hand in bringing this to life; to my literary agent, Laura Blake Peterson, who specializes in hand-holding over sushi and wine; to my film agent, Holly Frederick, and the gang at Curtis Brown; to Carol Fitzgerald and the Bookreporter team; to my Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, RWA, and Bouchercon colleagues; to the always warm and welcoming crew at the Ithaca Marriott on the Commons and the Ritz Carlton Amelia Island, particularly sweet Carolina; to my friends and family who stood by with the answers to all my research questions—or who simply stood by me: Anita Borgenicht; Nikki Bonnani; Pete Criscione; Alison Gaylin; Laura Himmelstein; Hannah Rae Koellner; Andrew and Jessica Krawitt; Suzanne Schmidt; Chris Spain; Brody, Morgan, and Mark Staub. A special shout-out to feline fan club Chance, Chappy, Sanchez, Pippa, and the real Clancy.

  The Butcher’s Daughter

  Don’t miss the rest of the story in

  THE BUTCHER’S DAUGHTER

  Coming in 2020!

  Chapter One

  Sunday, January 1, 2017

  Upper West Side

  It’s the silence that gets her.

  Strange. It’s not as though Aaron goes banging around the apartment, blasts music and television, or speaks in a booming voice. These last few months, he’s hardly spoken at all. Yet on this particular morning, six weeks into his absence, stillness hangs in the Upper West Side apartment as if it’s been wrapped in acoustic foam. Even the Manhattan streets far below their—her—bedroom window are oddly quiet, as though the whole world has decided to sleep through the dawn of the new year.

  Amelia Crenshaw Haines had intended to do the same, having lain awake long after watching the ball drop—on television, not the real thing forty-odd blocks down Broadway. But it’s not quite seven a.m., and she can tell this isn’t going to be one of those Sunday mornings when she can slip back into slumber. Might as well get up and get moving, as if she has someplace to go, something to do. Or maybe even go somewhere, do . . . something.

  “Child, it’s Sunday morning and you can just get yourself to church,” Bettina Crenshaw drawls in her head. When Amelia had been growing up in Harlem, her mother had never missed a service at Park Baptist Church.

  She never let me miss one, either, as long as she was alive.

  How tickled Bettina would have been to see Amelia sing there every other Sunday, in the gospel choir. This was supposed to be her week, but she’s been on hiatus since November. You can’t resonate uplifting spirit when it’s been depleted from your world.

  She reaches for her phone on the nightstand. She’d expected Aaron to get in touch at midnight, but had reminded herself that 2017 was arriving three hours later for him, on the West Coast. He’d been invited to ring it in with a client at the Billboard Hollywood Party, but hadn’t been planning to attend. Yet Amelia, watching the LA live feed interspersed with New York’s coverage, had found herself scanning the crowds for him. No glimpse.

  No call, either, and no text. Not then, and not overnight. She plunks down the phone and gets out of bed.

  Maybe he’d changed his mind and gone to the party after all. Maybe not.

  Maybe it’s a simple case of out with the old . . .

  “And I’m the old,” she tells the lump of drowsy fur on Aaron’s former pillow.

  Allergic to cats, he hadn’t been thrilled when Amelia pulled a kitten from a kill shelter a few months ago. It was supposed to be a temporary foster situation, but when the time came for little Clancy to go, Aaron was the one who left.

  Amelia pads to the bathroom, plucks the lone toothbrush from the holder, and tries to find perverse pleasure in squeezing a tube of Crest in the middle.

  Babe! From the bottom!

  Why?

  Because that’s how you’re supposed to do it.

  Says who?

  Aaron and his rules.

  “It’s going to be okay,” she tells her bleary-eyed self in the mirror, and drowns her own oddly hushed and echoey voice in a roar of tap water. But these new pipes don’t creak like the old ones did, and when she turns off the faucet, it no longer continues to drip.

  She pads barefoot from the sleek, just-remodeled bathroom to the sleek, just-remodeled kitchen. True to his word, the contractor had finished it in time for Thanksgiving.

  Aaron had moved out the week before.

  It’s a trial separation. Nobody’d had an affair. There had been no dramatic argument. In fact, they’d been actively working on their relationship. But couples’ counseling had only confirmed that they’d grown apart.

  Amelia measures grounds and water for a full pot of coffee out of habit, and then waits for it to brew, glaring at the gleaming white subway tile backsplash. She’d have preferred a vibrant, intricate mosaic one, but Aaron got the last word, saying simplicity had better resale value. At the time, it hadn’t made sense. She’d still assumed this would be their forever home; that their marriage would be, well, forever.

  “Who knows? We might find out we can’t live without each other,” her husband had said, zipping his suitcase on that chilly November morning.

  “I hope so.”

  “Do you, Amelia?”

 
She couldn’t answer the question then for the fierce lump in her throat. She can’t now, because she’s not sure.

  Her life has gone on much the same way it always has. Ever since Aaron had made partner at his corporate law firm, he’d traveled more than he was home. She’s accustomed to being on her own. In fact, her loneliest moments unfolded when they were here together.

  Clancy is affectionate company, her investigative genealogy business is busier than ever, and her social life is unchanged. Childless by choice, Amelia and Aaron hadn’t hung out with fellow couples in years. The ones they’d enjoyed early in their marriage had long since embraced parenthood, more interested in preschool and potty-training than late-night reservations at hot new restaurants. He’s cultivated his circle of pals and colleagues; she has hers, though her longtime friendship with his sister has grown slightly strained.

  “You’re part of the family. My parents still want you to come for Thanksgiving,” Karyn said back in November.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “Oh, Aaron is fine with it. He knows we all love you. He loves you, too. I’m sure you guys will work things out. I know he can be difficult, but he’ll come around.”

  “It’s not just him, Karyn. I have some stuff of my own to work out, too.”

  “You mean, the thing with your mother?”

  The thing with your mother—as if it’s some innocuous To-Do List detail that needs tending. As if Amelia hadn’t finally clawed her way out of a gaping bomb crater, scarred and dazed, only to be hit again.

  She’d been eighteen years old when she’d discovered, at Bettina’s deathbed, that she wasn’t her parents’ biological daughter. Her father—Calvin Crenshaw, the man she’d grown up believing was her father—had admitted that he’d found her as an abandoned newborn in Park Baptist Church on Mother’s Day 1968. He and Bettina had raised her as their own.