Amelia had bought that traumatic tale and spent three decades building an investigative genealogy career, helping other people uncover their biological roots while searching for her own. She’d anticipated that the recent surge in autosomal DNA testing might lead to some answers in her own bloodline. Sure enough, four months ago, she’d finally received a genetic hit.
However, the long-awaited biological match hadn’t resolved the mystery. Far from it.
Her DNA test had linked her to a woman in Marshboro, Georgia—Bettina Crenshaw’s tiny hometown—and to Bettina’s own biological family tree.
“I thought that if my wife found out who her parents were, she’d finally be able to put this stuff to rest and move on,” Aaron had told their therapist during their final counseling session in November. “But she’s more obsessed than ever.”
“Because I still don’t have answers! If Bettina was my birth mother, why would Calvin have told me I was a foundling? Was he lying? Or did he not know the truth himself? Was he my father, or was it someone else?”
Aaron shot the therapist a see what I mean? look and then shook his head sadly at Amelia. “You said you were ready to move on. That’s why we’re here. That’s why we’re trying—but you’re not.”
“Of course I am. Whose idea was it to come to counseling? Mine! And if that’s not trying, then I don’t know what—”
“No, I mean you’re not moving on. I don’t think you can. I don’t think you want to. And I don’t think either of us can live like this anymore.”
He was right. He deserves to be spared the burden of her unresolved past, and she deserves . . .
What? To lug the damned past around like a lifetime’s worth of locked luggage without a key?
Back in September, she’d thought she’d found a clue to the key, if not the key itself. Lily Tucker, a fellow foundling, had hired Amelia to help track down her own birth parents. The young woman had shown Amelia a gold baby ring she’d had on when she’d been found years ago in Connecticut. It had been identical to one Calvin claimed Amelia herself had been wearing when he’d discovered her in the Harlem church.
She pours a cup of coffee, takes it to the living room, and gazes out at the towering skyline view, rigid rectangles against a swirly swath of gray, broken by thin patches of blue.
Is the weather supposed to be decent today? Maybe she can get outside for a bit—go for a long walk in the park, clear her head.
She turns on the TV and settles on the couch, making room for her feet on the coffee table amid the remnants of New Year’s Eve dinner, drinks, and entertainment for one—a protein bar wrapper, an empty wineglass, half a bottle of Cabernet, and the remote control.
Sipping coffee, she channel-surfs for a weather report, flipping past images of cozy flannel-clad couples and merry multi-generational gatherings. At least she’s almost made it through this season of homey, twinkle-light-lit commercials that remind her of happier holidays with Aaron and her in-laws.
Spotting a familiar face, she pauses to watch a few minutes of The Roots and Branches Project, a cable television show hosted by African American historian Nelson Roger Cartwright. As a genealogy consultant for the program, she appears in some episodes, and shows up a little later in this one. But she doesn’t need to watch it again, and anyway, it’ll be on all day. The network is airing a marathon, hoping to reach a new audience among the hundreds of thousands of people who received DNA test kits this Christmas.
That boom is sure to make her job easier in a couple of months, as their lab results are processed and loaded into online databases. She might even find more links to her own past—perhaps a biological connection to Calvin’s family tree.
Or not.
Unsettled, Amelia flips more channels until she finds a local newscast. Waiting for a meteorologist to appear, she considers the long, lonely day ahead. In years past, she and Aaron would curl up and watch bowl games into the night. She supposes she can do the same this year, but . . .
Maybe she should have spent a few more days in Ithaca after all. With Clancy in tow, she’d celebrated Christmas there with her old friend Jessie and her family, just as she had Thanksgiving. She’d been invited to stay on through this weekend, but Jessie’s husband is recovering from a recent heart attack, her youngest son is afraid of cats, and both her college kids were home with pals coming and going at all hours.
Amelia had been more than ready to come home, but this is one holiday she probably shouldn’t be spending solo. New Year’s is about nostalgia for auld lang syne and resolution for the year ahead. Her own future—and yes, her past, too—couldn’t be more uncertain.
She stares at the television, where a newscaster returns her bleak gaze.
“In Bedford-Stuyvesant,” he announces, “where the violent crime rate continued to drop last year, a double homicide at the Marcy Houses yesterday left a mother and daughter dead and neighbors looking for answers.”
The scene shifts to an elderly man standing on a Brooklyn street, with a yellow-crime-scene-taped brick doorway behind him. “Don’t know why anyone would do something like that to decent people,” he says, shaking his bald head. “They didn’t bother nobody, and they didn’t have nothin’ worth stealin’.”
The screen shows a pair of photographs. The older woman is obese and smiling and vaguely familiar; the younger is . . .
Also familiar.
Amelia gasps and sloshes hot coffee over her hand as the reporter’s voiceover continues, “The bodies of fifty-three-year-old Alma Harrison and her thirty-one-year-old daughter Brandy were discovered late yesterday in their apartment by relatives who’d grown concerned when they failed to show up at a family gathering. Police are seeking information and have ruled out robbery as a motive for the brutal slayings, believed to have taken place early yesterday morning . . .”
Brandy Harrison?
Amelia shakes her head. She’d know that face anywhere.
No, the dead woman’s name—at least, when Amelia had met her in September—had been Lily Tucker.
Not only that, but . . .
Alma Harrison?
Stunned, she hurries into the bedroom to find her phone.
At half past nine on Sunday evening, Stockton Barnes gets off the subway at Eighty-Sixth Street. A smattering of headlights zip south along Central Park West, mostly vacant yellow cabs cruising in search of a fare. Across the street, every bench along the low stone wall is vacant, the park beyond fringed by tall, bare limbs, and splotched with glowing lampposts.
Barnes checks his watch, late, and strides north, making a left onto West Eighty-Seventh. Pedestrians are few—a dog-walking matron wearing more fur than her Pomeranian, a jogger in a headlamp, a pair of teenaged girls sporting matching thousand-dollar down parkas with red arm patches. The jackets had been designed for arctic explorers, but are all the rage in Manhattan’s toniest neighborhoods, which don’t include Barnes’s own, a hundred blocks north.
New Year’s Day is just winding down, and already he counts more bedraggled Christmas trees tossed at the curb than are lit in the brownstone windows along the street.
Yeah, he gets it. For many, the holidays are steeped in loneliness, depression, and stress; overspending, overtiredness, overindulgence; fighting off the flu or still fighting with family over the November election results; coping with weather woes and travel snafus. None of those scenarios apply to Barnes, but this isn’t the merriest of seasons for him, either. A longtime detective with the NYPD Missing Persons Squad, he’d spent December chasing down people who weren’t where they should be, or where their families expected them to be.
’Tis the season for reflecting on the year behind, assessing the one ahead—and for some, resolving to make significant changes that don’t involve significant others. Precious few disappearances at this time of year—at any time of year—involve foul play, though it does happen. He’s in the midst of a case involving a Midwestern college kid who’d flown to New York last week and planned to spend New
Year’s in Times Square with friends, but had disappeared. Barnes had located him this morning hospitalized on life support, having been mugged and left for dead in a neighborhood where no tourist should wander.
The kid’s distraught parents are on a flight from Cedar Rapids, and Barnes will meet them back at the hospital around midnight. Between now and then, he’s got personal business to tend to, and as he rounds the corner and heads up Broadway, his heart isn’t just racing from his quick stride.
He reaches a jittery hand into his overcoat pocket for his cigarettes, then remembers he’d given up the habit more than three years ago. Damn. He sucks deep breaths of chilly night air into lungs that are growing healthier and pinker by the minute now that he’s kicked the pack-a-day habit. But if ever there was a time he could use a calming smoke, this is it.
Spotting his destination on the opposite corner, he waits for the light to change and wonders whether he’s ever been there before. Probably. He’s eaten at most of the all-night diners in the city. This one doesn’t appear to be an old-school greasy spoon like some, or cater to hipsters or tourists like others. It looks like your basic counter-booths-and-tables joint that will have pie behind glass, ketchup bottles on the tables, and a laminated volume offering everything from hash browns to seared mahi-mahi.
The place is nearly empty when he steps inside. Forty minutes late, he figures she must have given up on him and left.
Then he looks more closely at the lone African American woman way back in a corner booth, intent on her cell phone. That’s not her . . .
Wait, yes it is.
He’s seen Amelia Crenshaw Haines on television many times, and met her in person twice. But she’d always worn business attire, fully made-up, with her sleek dark mane falling to her shoulders. Tonight, she has on a navy hoodie emblazoned with gold letters, her hair is tucked under a Yankees baseball cap, and her face, when she looks up, bears no evidence of cosmetics. She’s even prettier, he decides, without all the trimmings.
“Trying not to be recognized?” he asks.
“Recognized?” She puts her phone facedown beside the nearly empty mug of tea sitting on her paper place mat.
“You know . . . you’re a celebrity. On TV and all. People must bother you when you’re out in public.”
“Oh, yeah. Me, Halle, Taraji, Beyoncé . . . pesky fans go with the territory for gals like us, you know?”
He grins. “Anyway . . . happy new year, and I’m sorry I’m late.”
“Get hung up watching the big Rose Bowl comeback?”
“I wish. I was working a case. What comeback?”
“Penn State was a scoring machine—twenty-eight points just in the third quarter. But USC tied up the fourth with a minute left and won with a forty-six-yard field goal.”
Ah, a fellow football fan. She’s precisely the kind of woman who might have convinced this longtime ladies’ man to give monogamy another try . . .
If their paths had crossed in another time and place.
If she didn’t already have a husband.
And if Barnes, who’d been briefly, reluctantly married and long divorced, hadn’t promised himself that he’ll never go down that road again.
He slides into the booth across from her. “Sounds like a great Rose Bowl game. Thanks for waiting for me.”
“It’s fine. Like I said, I have something to discuss, and anyway, I have nowhere to go, except bed.”
Barnes doesn’t want to picture her there. No, he does not.
Nor does he want to wonder why she needed to meet with him on a holiday, though he suspects he knows the answer. Is he ready to hear it?
She clears her throat, about to speak, but he cuts her off.
“I. C.?”
Amelia looks puzzled. “You see?”
He points at the letters appliqued on her sweatshirt.
“Oh—I. C. That’s Ithaca College,” she explains. “My alma mater.”
“I see.”
She smiles at that. “By the way, I caught a glimpse of your pal Rob on TV last night. He’s out on the West Coast, right?”
“Right. One of his artists was performing at the Billboard Hollywood Party.”
Rob Owens, founder and CEO of Rucker Park Records, is responsible for having led Barnes to Amelia in the first place. Rob had met her when his own ancestral story had been featured on an episode of The Roots and Branches Project, and had become obsessed with genealogy thereafter—with his own, and with Barnes’s.
“This woman specializes in reuniting long lost family members, Barnes,” Rob had told him. “You should hire her to find your daughter.”
“I’ve made a living for thirty years now finding missing people.”
“Well, you haven’t found her.”
“Who says I want to? Or that she wants to be found?”
That was before their autumn trip to Cuba, where Barnes had an unsettling encounter he’d never shared with a soul, including Rob. He’d flown home and immediately hired Amelia to help him find Charisse, whom he hasn’t seen since she was born in October 1987.
A skinny young waiter ambles over carrying a plate and a wineglass. Wrong table, Barnes figures, but he sets them both down in front of Amelia and she thanks him.
“Need a menu, or know what you’re having?” he asks Barnes.
“I’ll have what she’s having, which is, uh . . .”
“Cabernet,” she says, “and cheese fries.”
Oh, yes. A woman like her could have gotten the old Barnes into all sorts of trouble.
“Cabernet and cheese fries. Perfect. Thanks.”
The waiter walks away, and Barnes watches Amelia tilt the stemmed glass and swirl the maroon liquid before taking a thoughtful sip, as if they’re at a Napa Vineyard. “Well? How is it?”
“The wine? Not bad, for diner cab.” She sets down the glass, adds a liberal pool of ketchup to the plate, and asks if he wants some of her fries.
“No, thanks, but go ahead. I’ll wait for mine,” he says, though his empty stomach protests loudly. He hasn’t eaten since the buttered roll he’d grabbed from a coffee cart early this morning in Hell’s Kitchen, on a block littered with the remains of midnight revelry—confetti, garbage, and a few stray drunken tourists.
But sharing food strikes him as an oddly intimate thing to do in this moment. Plus, he’s too nervous to eat.
He watches her slowly dredge a cheese-sauce coated fry through the ketchup, staring down at her plate, and is unsettled by her energy. He wants to think it’s just that they’re here on a holiday, and it’s late, and she’s dressed down, but . . .
Every living creature is equipped with natural instinct, Stockton, a wise old detective had once told him. Listen to yours.
His instinct tells him they aren’t here because she’s found his daughter alive and well and none the worse for his having removed himself from her life.
She eats a couple of fries, and then pushes away the plate and looks up at him.
Here we go.
“Detective—”
“You can call me Barnes.” Again, he finds himself cutting her off. Coward.
She shakes her head. “How about Stockton?”
“Nobody but my mother calls me Stockton.”
Not anymore, anyway.
He hears that same wise detective’s voice in his head, the night Barnes had told him he’d gotten a woman pregnant during a one-night stand.
“You make a choice, Stockton, and someday you’re either going to regret it, or congratulate yourself that it was the right one.”
“There is no choice. I’m not going to help raise a kid, period. It’ll be better off without me.”
“Were you better off without your father?”
“Hell, no. It’s the same thing, whether you drop dead, or take off because the stock market crashed, or because their mother is a pain in the ass, or because you’re not cut out for being a dad and you never wanted kids in the first place. The kid gets hurt in the end.”
“So it’s better to hurt them in the beginning, is that what you’re saying?”
It was exactly what Barnes had been saying. Charisse couldn’t miss or grieve or hate a man she’d never known.
Barnes had held his baby girl just once before handing her back to her mother, Delia, along with enough cash to raise her right. Amelia doesn’t know about that, though.
“Barnes,” she says, as if trying out the name, and then again, as if warning him to brace himself. “Barnes.”
“What is it? Did you find her?”
About the Author
New York Times and USA Today bestseller WENDY CORSI STAUB is the award-winning author of nearly ninety novels and is a three-time Mary Higgins Clark Award nominee. She lives in the New York City suburbs with her husband, their two sons, and a trio of rescue kitties.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
Praise for the work of Wendy Corsi Staub, three-time finalist for the Mary Higgins Clark Award
Blue Moon
“Take one part Brothers Grimm, one part James Patterson, one part magic, and you’ve got Wendy Corsi Staub’s remarkable . . . Blue Moon. You never know who’s around the next corner or coming at you from out of the past.”
—Reed Farrel Coleman, New York Times bestselling author of Where It Hurts
Blood Red
“I loved Blood Red . . . it’s suspenseful and scary. This is a serious winner!”
—Alison Gaylin
Live to Tell
“Once Staub’s brilliant characterizations and top-notch narrative skills grab hold, they don’t let go.”
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
“Solid gold suspense . . . this one is a wild ride.”
—#1 New York Times Bestselling Author Lee Child
“I couldn’t put it down!”
—#1 New York Times Bestselling Author Lisa Jackson
“(Four Stars) Staub is a master of making the everyday somehow terrifying and giving a seemingly innocuous action life-altering implications.”
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