Part I
2017
Chapter One
Sunday, January 1, 2017
Upper West Side
The silence gets her.
Strange. It’s not as though Aaron ever went banging around the apartment or spoke in a booming voice. These last few months, he’d hardly spoken at all.
Yet on this morning, six weeks into his absence, stillness hangs in the Upper West Side apartment. Even the streets far below their—her—bedroom window are oddly quiet. The city that never sleeps seems to be snoozing right 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 in Times Square. On television, not the real thing forty-odd blocks down Broadway. But this isn’t going to be one of those easy, lazy mornings. Might as well get up and get moving, like she has someplace to go, something to do.
Child, it’s Sunday, and you can just get yourself to church, her mother’s voice drawls in her head.
Bettina Crenshaw had never missed a service at Harlem’s Park Baptist. How tickled she’d have been to see her grown-up daughter sing there in the gospel choir every other Sunday. But Amelia’s been on hiatus since November. You can’t resonate uplifting spirit when it’s been depleted from your own life.
In the sleek, just remodeled bathroom, she plucks the lone toothbrush from the holder and finds perverse pleasure in breaking one of Aaron’s rules: squeezing a tube of Crest in the middle. When she turns on the faucet, the new pipes don’t creak like the old ones did, and when she turns it off, it no longer continues to drip.
She brews coffee in the sleek, also-just-remodeled kitchen. True to his word, the contractor had finished it just in time for Thanksgiving. But Amelia had spent the holiday at her friend Jessie’s boisterous Ithaca household; Aaron had been in New Jersey with his family.
He’d moved out the week in mid-November. Nobody had an affair. There was no dramatic argument. They’d tried couples counseling. It confirmed that they’d simply grown apart.
In the living room, Amelia opens the shades to a towering skyline. The overcast sky is patched with blue, the same shade as the tiny dress mounted in a shadow box across the room. The dress and the tightly woven sweetgrass basket on an adjacent shelf are precious tangible links to whomever she’d been before she became Amelia Crenshaw on Mother’s Day 1968.
Amelia was eighteen when she 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—told her she’d been abandoned as a newborn in Park Baptist Church. He said he’d discovered her in the basket, wearing the dress and a little gold sapphire-studded signet ring, which she’d lost years ago.
She settles on the couch and makes room for her coffee mug amid remnants of a solo New Year’s Eve—protein bar wrapper, empty wineglass, half-empty bottle of Cabernet. Not half-full. Not today.
She’d welcomed the prospect of quietly winding down the season after a rollicking Ithaca Christmas, but 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.
A recent surge in autosomal testing has made her job easier as lab results are processed and loaded into online databases. And a few months ago, she’d finally received a genetic hit on her own bloodline. The long-awaited biological match hadn’t resolved the mystery, though. Far from it.
Her DNA test had linked her to a woman in Bettina Crenshaw’s tiny Southern hometown—right back to Bettina’s own family tree.
If Bettina was Amelia’s biological mother, had Calvin been her biological father? Why would he have made up a crazy story about finding her in a church?
Bettina’s Georgia kin have been no help. Her closest cousin claimed she knew nothing about the Crenshaws taking in an abandoned baby. Yet when Amelia pressed her with the details, she said, “I don’t know about any initial rings for babies . . .”
Amelia had never mentioned that it was an initial ring, specifically—engraved with a little blue enamel C.
Why the lie? Could Bettina’s Southern relatives have been part of a cover-up?
Or am I just paranoid?
Amelia channel surfs past political news and bickering pundits as the media ramps up for the upcoming Trump inauguration. She also skips images of cozy flannel-clad couples and merry multigenerational gatherings, having almost made it through this season of homey, twinkle-light-lit commercials that remind her of happier holidays.
Clicking along, she spies a familiar face. Not her own, though she appears later in this episode of Black historian Nelson Roger Cartwright’s The Roots and Branches Project. She’s been working for a few years now as an on-air genealogy consultant for the program. With Nelson’s new book on bestseller lists, the cable network is airing a holiday weekend marathon to attract his readers and the hundreds of thousands of people who received DNA test kits this Christmas.
Amelia turns the channel to a local newscast and swaps the remote for her steaming coffee mug, waiting for a weather report. If today is nice, she’ll kick off 2017 with a long run in the park. If not, she supposes she’ll watch the Sugar Bowl—though it won’t be much fun without Aaron.
The anchorman returns her bleak gaze. “In Bedford-Stuyvesant, 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 anybody, and they didn’t have anything worth stealin’.”
The screen fills with a pair of close-up photographs of the victims. The older woman is vaguely familiar; the younger is . . .
“The bodies of fifty-three-year-old Alma Harrison and her thirty-one-year-old daughter, Brandy . . .”
Amelia gasps, sloshing hot coffee over her hand.
“. . . were discovered late yesterday in their apartment by out-of-state relatives who grew 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?
No. Amelia would know that face anywhere.
The dead young woman’s name—at least, when Amelia had met her a few months ago when she’d shown up in Amelia’s office with her long-lost baby ring—had been Lily Tucker.
Not only that, but . . .
Alma Harrison.
She hurries into the bedroom to find her phone.
Newark Airport
Three decades since she’s seen the Manhattan skyline, and she’s on the wrong side of the aisle. When the plane pops out beneath a swirly gray swath, her view is of New Jersey sprawl. Still, she presses her forehead to the window, feigning fascination, back turned to her seatmate.
He’d slipped off his wedding ring as he’d boarded back in Punta Cana, leaving a white band etched on his sunburnt finger. She’d pretended that she didn’t speak English. Undaunted, he dusted off his clumsy, American-accented Spanish, claiming his name is Reed and that he lives on the Upper East Side. With his dingy teeth and paunch, he doesn’t look like a cosmopolitan “Reed.” He looks like a Monty from the boroughs—which is exactly who he is, according to the luggage tag she’d glimpsed on his worn nylon carryon.