“Someday,” she’d told an incredulous Amelia, “when you come across someone who looks like they need a friend, or a favor, you’ll do the same for them.”
She’s since done just that, more times than she can count.
But she’s not so certain her own benefactor that day at Moosewood had been a stranger.
She could have sworn she’d glimpsed a Harlem neighbor in Ithaca—and not just any neighbor. Like Bettina, the enigmatic Marceline LeBlanc was from somewhere down south.
After Bettina’s death, Marceline had come to pay her respects and befriended Amelia. All that summer and into the fall, she’d been almost . . .
A guardian angel.
Like Barnes had wanted for his daughter. Only Marceline had been very much alive, and she was no angel, with a sharp tongue and sharper eyes. Bettina, and Calvin, too, had always warned Amelia to stay away from her—because they were devout Baptists, and she was rumored to practice voodoo? Or because they were afraid she’d tell Amelia something they didn’t want her to know?
Marceline said she’d seen Calvin leave Park Baptist with a bundle—Amelia—on that predawn Mother’s Day in 1968. But had she also seen whoever left the baby?
Amelia never had a chance to pry it out of her. She left New York for good, headed back home, down south, she said.
Looking back, Amelia understands that Marceline’s departure had felt like something of an abandonment. If she hadn’t left, Amelia might never have found her way to Ithaca.
Surely, it had been wishful thinking that Marceline had followed her upstate and yes, paid for her lunch. Surely, she hadn’t really been there.
But if she had . . . why?
Smoking her last cigarette in the cold night air, the woman leans closer to the diner window to block the reflected glare. She’d forgotten that New York nights are never truly dark.
She misses the balmy black Cuban sky glittering with stars. Here, they’re dimmed by streetlights and floodlights, blocked by skyscrapers.
Every time she looks at the new skyline, she expects to see the twin towers. She’d been thirteen hundred miles away in Baracoa, Cuba, when terrorists destroyed them. Monitoring the media hysteria, she believed Judgment Day was nigh, as foretold by her father, via Revelations.
“Alas, alas, that great city, wherein were made rich all that had ships in the sea by reason of her costliness! for in one hour is she made desolate.”
The September 11 attacks had been a false alarm. Not the first, nor the last, nor the most notable in her own life.
In October 1987, the Black Monday stock market crash instigated her escape from New York; this past October 2016, Hurricane Matthew triggered her return. Neither catastrophe brought biblical Armageddon, but both are monumental bookends in her personal history, marking the end of the world as she knew it.
And in both incidents, the man in the diner had played a pivotal role.
Shifting her position, she notices that his dining companion is now alone at the table.
She whirls just in time to see him step through the glass door onto the sidewalk, flipping up the collar on his woolen coat. He turns in her direction, looking right at her, but doesn’t see her.
Focused on the traffic stopped just beyond the red light on Broadway, he steps to the curb and raises an arm to hail a taxi. The light changes, a yellow cab pulls up, and he’s gone.
He’s sneaky like that, Stockton Barnes. She’ll have to keep a closer eye on him.
She exhales a stream of smoke and returns her gaze to the woman in the diner.
Anyone who’s ever lived in New York City knows that it can be an extraordinarily small world. She supposes it was inevitable that Amelia Crenshaw Haines and Stockton Barnes would eventually cross paths. If a missing persons detective wants to find the daughter he’d abandoned in infancy, he’s going to turn to an investigative genealogist. Amelia is one of the country’s most high-profile experts. And they have a mutual acquaintance, Rob Owens.
The Hudson River unfurls a bitter wind. The cigarette has burned to a nub. Isaiah’s prophecy rings in her head as she takes a long last drag.
“Woe to the wicked! It will go badly with him, For what he deserves will be done to him.”
Her phone buzzes in her pocket, a reminder that someone is waiting for her.
Gypsy Colt crushes the butt on the sidewalk with her black boot and slips away into the night.
Chapter Two
Monday, January 2
Despite a sleepless night, morning-after clarity has left Barnes grateful that his NYPD-issued phone had cut short his diner meeting with Amelia. He’d been about to ask her if she remembered Oran Matthews, the Brooklyn Butcher, and tell her that Wayland’s mistress was—is—the Butcher’s daughter, Gypsy Colt.
As Barnes completes paperwork for a missing persons case after a sleepless night, his body begs him to go home to bed, but his brain is fixated on the damned ring, and the Harrisons’ double murder. He makes a couple of calls, asks a couple of questions, and discovers that his old friend Sumaira El Idrissi is working the Harrison case.
One more phone call, this time directly to her.
“Hey, Barnes, what’s up?”
“I’ve got a lead on the Bed-Stuy murders.”
“Yeah? What—”
“I need to tell you in person. Are you at the scene?”
“Where else?”
“I’ll be there within the hour.”
He makes it in forty-five minutes, including a stop at the halal deli and a pause to greet the uniformed cops at the entrance to Alma Harrison’s building.
Sumaira is in the hallway outside the apartment, talking to another detective. Seeing Barnes, she excuses herself and strides toward him, phone in hand and a navy wool coat draped over her shoulders like a cape.
Decades ago, Barnes had sworn off dating fellow cops after a brief, disastrous marriage to one, but he regrets it whenever he connects with Sumaira, an attractive brunette in her early forties. Her black pantsuit is unrumpled, her hair looks freshly brushed, and if she has circles under her eyes, they’re masked by makeup.
“How are the knuckles holding up?” he asks.
“Exactly how you’d think.”
Yeah. Working a case in an impoverished building without interior security cameras to capture criminal activity, detectives have to knock on a lot of doors, and the search for witnesses and information can be grueling and fruitless. Regardless of what neighbors know and their willingness to share, they’re understandably wary of unexpected visitors calling “Police!”
“For you.” He hands Sumaira a large black coffee and white paper bag from the deli.
She peers inside. “My favorite! Thank you. Let’s talk inside,” she says around an enormous bite of black-and-white cookie, and leads him past crime scene tape and uniformed cops into Alma Harrison’s apartment. A forensics guy is on his phone in a corner of the kitchenette, and another packs up equipment.
If Barnes had never been here before, he might attribute the disarray to crime scene aftermath. But other than fingerprint dust, he’s guessing this is what it looked like before the murders, if not what it had smelled like. The corpses are gone, but the stench of death remains despite windows wide-open to the cold morning wind.