Barnes smiles and sends a return thumbs-up.
The other message—messages—are from Amelia. He heaves a weary sigh. She’ll have to wait. He puts the phone on the bedside table, turns off the light, and closes his eyes.
Those damned white lilies chase him as he drifts toward sleep. The moment he’d realized what they were, he’d suspected Perry Wayland and Gypsy Colt were involved in the Bed-Stuy murders.
It’s too late to save the Harrisons, but his own daughter may be in danger. No one is better equipped—or more determined—to protect her than Barnes himself. And Amelia, who can help him find her.
Wide-awake, he grabs his phone and calls her.
She answers immediately. “Where have you been?”
“Sorry. I was on a case all night and then I went to the Marcy Projects to look into the murders. No witnesses, no suspect, no apparent motive. Someone wanted to take them out.”
“Do you think it has anything to do with—”
“It could. You haven’t mentioned what I told you to anyone, have you?”
“No, but I—”
“Good. Please don’t. And you need to be careful, Amelia.”
A pause. “Where are you right now?”
“Home, about to sleep for a few hours. Why?”
“I was going to ask you to come to my office so that I can show you something. Here, I’ll send it to you. Can you put me on speaker?”
He obliges, hearing a whoosh on her end, and an incoming text alert on his.
There are two photos. At a glance, he can see that the first is a toddler portrait of Barnes himself. He’d given it to her at their first appointment.
The other is a little girl.
He clicks and waits for it to enlarge as Amelia says, “This child was found in New Haven, Connecticut, twenty-six years ago.”
“Brandy and Alma Harrison have family in New Haven. What do you mean by found?”
“Just like me, but . . . see any resemblance?”
“To you?”
“No! Barnes, I think she’s—”
He gasps as the enlarged photo loads on his phone’s screen, and he utters just one word, with wonder and conviction.
“Charisse.”
Part II
1968
Chapter Three
Friday, February 2, 1968
Jacksonville, Florida
Before last summer had even unfolded, the newspapers were calling it the “summer of love.” For Melody Hunter, it had turned out that way for reasons that had nothing to do with the counterculture convergence on San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, or her own newlywed status.
“All righty, then, Mrs. Hunter, let’s have a look-see.”
She can’t see the man sitting on a stool between her legs and the stirrups, but she can feel his gloved hands probing inside her. Her face is hot with embarrassment, though he’s a physician and she’s a grown married woman.
Last Wednesday had been her first visit to this low stucco bungalow that smells of mildew and orange peels. He’d collected a urine sample and sent her home. This morning, he called her in for the verdict.
The nine days between have been hell.
“Well, congratulations, Mrs. Hunter.”
“Am I pregnant?”
“You are indeed. First baby is something special. I’m sure you’re tickled pink.”
“Oh, I am.” Melody isn’t accustomed to lying to a doctor—lying to anyone, for that matter.
Better get used to it.
“How . . . pregnant?”
“Almost six months along, Mrs. Hunter. I’ve been in this business a long time, and you’re the first married lady I’ve met who didn’t know it until this late stage.”
“Well, I, um . . . I’ve always been irregular . . .”
A lie: her cycles have been clockwork ever since she got her first period at twelve. For a decade, until September, that time of the month has come precisely at that time of the month.
“No morning sickness, then? Fainting spells, cramping . . .”
“Not really. I didn’t realize I might be expecting till my stomach . . . popped.”
Another lie.
All those steamy late summer nights, lying awake on her side of the empty double bed, worrying—sensing—that a fragile new life had taken hold inside her.
By September’s end, her period had been MIA. She’d spent autumn mornings vomiting into the toilet, afternoons too drowsy to leave the couch, sleepless nights in denial.
Weren’t pregnant women supposed to gain weight? Melody had dropped a dress size.
Didn’t pregnant women have strange cravings and ferocious appetites? Melody felt queasy at the slightest whiff of frying food and couldn’t find anything remotely appealing on the Thanksgiving table.
Pregnant women couldn’t wait to share the news with their families, their friends . . . their husbands. Melody’s brain had tiptoed around the truth even when her appetite came raging back and her waistbands became tourniquets. Yet she didn’t dare see Doc Krebbs, the obstetrician who’d delivered Melody and her younger sister into the world.
Last year around this time, just before her wedding, her mother had enrolled her as a patient in his practice, and—in typical Honeybee Abernathy fashion—informed Melody after the fact.
“It’s time you saw a woman’s physician, poppet,” she’d drawled, folding linen napkins for her bridge club luncheon. “Doc Krebbs will answer any questions you might have about y’all’s wedding night.”
Melody’s face had burned, a blushing bride.
It’s burning now, too, but . . .
“Almost done with the pelvic exam, Mrs. Hunter. Take some deep breaths . . . In . . . out . . . Yes, that’s it.”
Breathe . . . In . . . Out . . . In . . .
“Ouch!”
“I am surely sorry about this,” he says. “Just try to relax.”
She’d chosen him from the yellow pages because his name is Stevens, like Elizabeth Montgomery’s character Samantha on Bewitched. People are always telling Melody she looks like her.
If only she could work a magic spell that would make this pregnancy disappear. But there is no magic in real life. Only the underground network she’d heard about back in high school, when a group of girls were gossiping about a classmate’s rumored pregnancy.
“There’s a place up near Macon where a girl can go to get it taken care of,” her friend Charlene had whispered. “You just show up at this church, and they whisk you away and take care of it.”
“Take care of it? You mean . . .”
“Shh!”
Melody had asked Charlene the specifics out of curiosity and not necessity. She would never find herself in that situation. She was a good girl, preserving her virginity for her wedding night.
And so she had. A good girl, a good wife . . .
She stares at a poster taped to the wall—an advertisement for clomiphene, a new fertility drug. It shows a happy woman encircled from behind in the arms of a happy man. Her head is leaning against his chest, his chin on her shoulder. They’re wearing dreamy smiles and wedding rings.
Melody and Travis were married last February. His draft notice was waiting when they returned from their honeymoon. After two months of basic training and two more of advanced infantry training, he was allowed a short leave to visit her and then transported to Vietnam. And then . . .