The notorious Brooklyn Butcher had slaughtered four families, orphaning and raping and impregnating teenaged survivors Tara Sheeran, Christina Myers, Margaret Costello, and Bernadette DiMeo. The first three later gave birth to their rapist’s babies; the fourth didn’t carry her pregnancy to term. The media coverage was relentless.
Gypsy was fourteen years old, and her name had been kept out of the press, but her father’s made every headline.
Oran Matthews was the Brooklyn Butcher.
After his arrest, Gypsy had been placed in the foster system. There, she could mask her true identity and become anyone she wanted to be. She could seduce damaged lost souls, like her friend, Red. She could forget the past, or she could use it to mold the future. She could learn from her father’s mistakes, and reinterpret the lessons he’d taught her. When memories overtook her, she could lose herself in her academic studies. She could earn a scholarship to a fine college where she could seduce wealthy, privileged lost souls like Perry Wayland, who would die for her.
In 1987, an incarcerated Oran had concluded that the long anticipated biblical Armageddon was imminent. He’d ordered Gypsy to assemble Tara Sheeran, Christina Myers, Margaret Costello, and Bernadette DiMeo, along with their offspring, and await the Rapture.
That’s not how it was supposed to be. All those years in prison had warped her father’s mind and memory.
“You and me, we’re the chosen ones, Gypsy, baby. No one else matters. They’ll be gone, just like that, when Judgment Day comes . . .”
There was no room in eternal paradise for her so-called sisters and brothers. Gypsy had summoned Red, who’d eliminated all but two in a spree the papers had dubbed copycat killings.
By the time it was over, Gypsy and Perry were bound for a fresh start in Cuba. Judgment Day no longer seemed imminent, and her unfinished business—Margaret, and possibly a daughter, left alive—lost significance with every mile that separated her from the US, and faded with every year that passed.
Now, though, the urgency has returned. Now everything has changed.
Everything.
Anticipating a post-apocalyptic wasteland, she finds the World Trade Center site crawling with tourists and hawkers selling 9/11 souvenirs. At the vast fountain memorial where the North Tower had stood, Gypsy lowers her umbrella to gaze at the empty sky. Her head throbs, and she remembers a perfect September night at Windows on the World, the elegant restaurant 107 stories above the city.
It was there, over a bottle of Dom Pérignon, that she and Perry had formulated the plan that had led them to Baracoa. Donald Trump and his glamorous wife Ivana had stopped by their table to say hello. Tycoon to tycoon, he’d winked at the married Perry when he’d introduced Gypsy as a colleague.
Thirty years later, the towers and Baracoa have been decimated, Trump is on his third wife, about to be inaugurated as president of the United States, and Perry—
Her cell phone rings.
She checks the Caller ID, as though it might be anyone other than the one person who’d call her on this number. But it’s him. Of course it is. He’s the only person who’d call her now, period; the only one in the world who knows, or even cares, that she’s alive.
“Where are you?” he asks.
“I had to run an errand.” She watches rain patter into walls of water cascading along the North Tower’s footprint, a symbolic rectangular bottomless pit at its center.
“Get back to the hotel as soon as you can. I have something to show you. You don’t have to worry about Margaret Costello anymore.”
“You found her?”
“I found her obituary.”
What year did Charisse die?
James Harrison’s question hangs in the air, and Barnes grabs the hall table to steady himself.
Charisse . . . died?
“Hey, there, are you all right?” Harrison asks and he nods, unable to speak.
Amelia looks equally stricken, murmuring, “How sad. What happened?”
“Drowned with another teenager in a riptide off Coney Island about twenty, twenty-five years ago, and it put poor Esther in an early grave.”
“Esther?”
“My brother’s wife. Charisse’s mother. And if that tragedy hadn’t killed her, this one would have. Alma and Brandy. Oh, Lord.”
“Why don’t you go make Grammy another pretty picture,” Regina tells her grandson, shooing him back into the next room and grunting as she straightens again. “I don’t like to talk about any of this in front of the little ones. Anyway, Jimmy, it was more than thirty years ago. Charisse died in August ’87, right before Hiram’s engagement party, and Esther was gone, too, before the wedding the following summer.”
Barnes exhales at last, grasping details that had escaped him.
Their Charisse’s mother had been Esther, not Delia, and the girl had drowned in August ’87 . . .
His own Charisse hadn’t even been born yet.
Now he recalls Delia mentioning that she’d named their daughter after Alma’s late sister. But for Barnes, the name was a link to his father, Charles, in some mysterious cosmic coincidence . . .
Or not.
Tawafuq.
Hiram Trimble had been the attorney who’d tracked him down in 1987 when Delia was pregnant and threatening a paternity suit.
“Forget the lawyer. Talk to her,” Wash had advised. “This isn’t about paper. It’s about people. And about perspective. Ask yourself who you are, Stockton. Better yet, who you want to be.”
I’m trying, Wash. Man, am I trying.
He looks at Jimmy. “According to the case file, there was another Charisse in Alma’s life. Her friend Delia’s daughter, born in October 1987. The two of them lived with Alma and Brandy for a few years. Do you remember them?”
Jimmy and Regina exchange a glance so fleeting he isn’t sure he caught it.
“Not really,” Jimmy says, picking invisible lint off his sweater.
“Meaning . . .”
“Alma had a lot of friends,” Regina speaks up, “and we never saw much of her.”
“They did visit you here in Connecticut, though—Alma, and Brandy?”
“Sometimes.”
“With Delia and her daughter?” When Regina doesn’t answer, Barnes turns to Jimmy, who shrugs.
“This house has always been full of people coming and going. Family, friends . . . Just like today.”
“But today, you know exactly who’s here.” He waves his pad, where he’d written the list of relatives’ names. “Look, we’re trying to find out who killed your niece and her daughter, and keep you and your other loved ones safe. So I need straight answers. Where are Delia and Charisse now?”
“I have no idea,” Jimmy says. “Do you, Regina?”
“None.”
“And when was the last time you saw them, Mr. Harrison?”
“A long time ago.”
“Five years? Ten?”
He shrugs. “Longer.”
“Fifteen? Twenty?”
“Regina?” He looks to the wife, who seems to have the more accurate sense of time.
“Oh, it’s been at least . . . let’s see, twenty-five, thirty years. Delia’s Charisse was just a little thing, and she was about the same age as Bobby’s other—”