“Alma?”
“And her daughter, Brandy. They were murdered a few days ago.”
Her shock appears genuine. “Who did it?”
“Good question.”
“But . . . you said you were here on a missing persons case, not . . .”
“We are.” Barnes pulls a folded piece of paper from his notebook and hands it to her.
She stares at the photocopied article about the little girl found at Chapel Square Mall.
“Do you recognize her?”
She says nothing.
“Come on, Cynthia. She’s your stepdaughter. We know it, and you know it.”
Still nothing. But she looks up and nods, tears in her eyes.
In all her years working with foundlings, and being one, Amelia has met a couple of mothers who abandoned their infants out of fear and confusion. This is the first time she’s ever come face-to-face with someone who’d abandoned another woman’s child.
“Why didn’t you identify her when she was found in the mall?” she asks Cynthia.
“I . . . I would have, if I’d known, but I didn’t—”
“Cut the bullshit! It was all over the papers.”
“I don’t read the papers.”
“You were working at that mall when it happened. There is no way, and I mean no way, that you didn’t know. You kept your mouth shut because you’re the one who left her there.”
Silence.
Then Barnes says, “Look, Cynthia, we’ve got evidence.”
“Wh—what?”
“We know your husband’s ex-wife showed up and dumped her on you, and—”
“That’s a lie! You don’t have evidence.”
He pushes on. “We do. We know what happened. Delia showed up, and you—”
“It wasn’t Delia!”
“What do you mean?”
She presses a fist to her mouth.
“Cynthia. Tell us.”
“Alma brought her! I told her Bobby wasn’t even around, but she didn’t care. It was late, and she’d taken the bus up from the city with Charisse strapped in the stroller. Poor thing wasn’t even bundled up, and she was looking at me with those big sad eyes . . .”
“Keep going,” Barnes says, voice flat.
“She told me Delia had taken off a few weeks ago. It wasn’t the first time, but she’d had it, and she couldn’t take care of her like I could.” She chokes a bitter laugh. “That’s what she said. And then she just turned around and walked out the door. I was shouting after her, asking what about the rest of the family, you know? She said she’d been asking them, and no one wanted her.”
“That’s hard to believe. They seem like a close-knit family.”
“They are, but . . . not then. Not with Bobby. He treated them like dirt. Stole from them. They kept giving him chances, but he burned every bridge. That’s why we were alone here that Thanksgiving. He wasn’t welcome there anymore.”
“And they didn’t want Charisse.”
“No one did.” Wiping tears from her eyes, she doesn’t see Barnes wince.
“Including you. So you took her to a public place, and you abandoned her.”
“It seemed like the only thing I could do. If I got the police involved, or social services, she’d just wind up back with Bobby eventually, and . . .”
“And with you.”
“Look, I’m not proud of it,” she tells him. “But she was better off because of what I did.”
He says nothing.
Amelia has to. “How do you know she’s better off?”
“Because Bobby’s family must have seen those newspaper photos same as anyone else, and they didn’t step forward. Not one of them!”
“Are you saying the Harrisons knew the abandoned child was Bobby’s daughter?”
“Of course they knew. And I didn’t abandon her. I was on duty that night. I kept an eye on her until she was found.”
“But when she was, you pretended you had nothing to do with it.” Amelia bites her lip and tastes blood.
“You must have been questioned, Cynthia,” Barnes says. “So you lied?”
“To protect her.”
“To protect yourself.”
“And my daughter, Monica. A mother does what she has to do. A good mother, I mean. Delia wasn’t one. And Bobby wasn’t a good father.”
“And you take the prize for world’s worst stepmother,” Amelia says.
“You would have done the same thing in my shoes.”
“I would never do what you did! Leaving an innocent little girl alone in a public place is the most—”
“She wasn’t alone! I told you, I—”
“Yeah, you watched her. Terrific.”
“You don’t understand.” She brushes tears from her eyes. “Every year at Christmas, I thought about that little girl and I hoped—I prayed—she’d found a good home with parents who loved her, and that she wouldn’t remember where she came from.”
Maybe she doesn’t. And maybe that’s for the best. But Amelia knows too well that her original family and home must have left an imprint on her heart. She’s likely gone through life instinctively seeking some intangible face or place from the past, a search that can alienate a woman from people who love her in the present.
“I thought when Amelia found out that she really was her parents’ biological daughter, 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 isn’t 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.
And Amelia knows in her heart that no matter what she and Aaron and the therapist have said, this isn’t a trial separation.
It’s permanent.
In the white marble bathroom, Gypsy steps into a steamy shower for the second time today and leans into the hot spray like a cushion. Somewhere along her evening journey from the hotel to a distant Queens neighborhood, she’d acquired a pounding heart to accompany her pounding head. Neither had let up on the return trip, despite a satisfying, clockwork mission.
She doesn’t do anxiety.
Yet she hasn’t had to do what she’d done in Queens in a long, long time. For years now, decades, she’s had an army of devotees at her disposal.
She massages shampoo into her skull. The scented suds won’t ease the tension headache, but they’ll wash away any traces of Kasia’s blood.