Back home, Melody forages the cabinets, famished, and grateful that Honeybee will be here with supper later.
Munching a handful of dry cereal, she eyes the Betty Crocker’s Dinner for Two Cookbook she’d wedged under the kitchen window to keep it open this morning.
Raelene had given it to her as a wedding gift. “A wife should make supper for her husband. Only way to keep a marriage going strong.”
“Really? ’Cause Mother and Daddy just celebrated their twenty-fifth anniversary, and I’ve never even seen her light a stove burner.”
“Believe you me, your mama knows her way around a chicken fried steak. That woman made a mean pan gravy back in the day.”
Maybe, but in this one, Honeybee serves sandwiches for supper on Raelene’s nights off.
Still, Melody had given it a shot. The first night she’d attempted a homemade meal, Travis had poked at the brown blob on his plate. “Why in tarnation would you make pralines for supper?”
“That’s mashed potatoes!”
She’d dissolved into tears that he’d found even more amusing. Later, though, he’d gone out to a drive-in restaurant and come home with burgers and French fries for both of them. The next night, when she’d served up a still-smoking chicken that resembled a heap of coal, he’d suggested they make peanut butter sandwiches.
After the first couple of days, though, he hadn’t bothered to humor her. He didn’t even invite her along when he left to scrounge a meal.
Before he deployed, he told Melody, “I’m not eating chop suey over there, I’ll tell you that much.”
“It’s Vietnam, not China.”
“So what?”
“Chop suey is Chinese food.”
“What’s the difference? I’ll tell you what, I’m not eating whatever those people live on.”
“Guess you’ll get by just fine on C rations.”
He fixed her with a look. “Guess I’ll have a hankering for American home cooking when I get back. Since you like to spend all day watching soap operas, you can tune in to Julia Child instead, and learn something.”
“Julia Child makes French food.”
“How come you’re nitpicking about foreigners all of a sudden? Why you giving me sass when I’m going to fight for this country?”
She figured she’d have plenty of time to learn to cook while he was gone, but who wanted to slave over a hot stove in the heat of a Southern summer? Instead, she’d decided to knit him a sweater to send in a care package, and went looking in his bureau drawer to check his size.
That’s when she found his robe and hood, his UKA member card and pendant, copies of Fiery Cross magazine, and tucked into the pages of a dog-eared handbook, the damning newspaper clipping he’d so proudly preserved.
Raleigh in late July 1966—they’d been dating a few months by then. He’d claimed he was going on a fishing trip with his buddies, but his story hadn’t rung entirely true. She’d spent that steamy weekend agonizing that he’d gone off with another girl, but dismissed her fears when he’d proposed the following weekend.
What a fool she’d been. She might have forgiven him for a last fling, but this? Never.
“Melody! Where are you?”
Honeybee, with supper, though it’s nowhere near six o’clock yet, let alone the requested seven. Maybe her subconscious maternal mind sensed her daughter’s raging hunger.
Yet when she opens the door, Honeybee says, “Oh, thank goodness! I’ve been trying to call you, and I was worried when you didn’t answer.”
“I was napping,” Melody lies, “and I didn’t hear the phone.”
“I’ll just turn the ringer up.” Honeybee goes straight to the kitchen, moves the curly cord aside, and pushes the notched lever on the base all the way to the right. “There. You won’t be able to sleep through that. Now let me show you what I’ve brought.”
In addition to Raelene’s chicken à la King and more infant formula and diapers, she has a chocolate cake with Happy Birthday, Travis piped in blue frosting.
“But . . . Travis isn’t here.”
“That doesn’t mean we can’t celebrate his birthday. I thought it would be nice to invite his parents over later, and Daddy and Raelene. We’ll have a nice little party, and—”
“Mother, no! No parties. No company!” Seeing Honeybee’s expression, she adds, “Please, I appreciate it, really I do, but all I want is to eat my supper and go to bed. I’m just exhausted.”
“You poor thing. Here, get off your feet.” She pulls out a chair, and Melody all but collapses into it.
Her mother stands behind her, stroking her head and crooning reassurances.
Honeybee’s faults—the pride, the overprotectiveness, the strength—make her a wonderful mother.
A mother who’s lost a precious child.
For the first time in her adult life, Melody comprehends Ellie’s death with crushing maternal perspective. No wonder Honeybee had wailed and fainted her way through those terrible dark days. Yet for her family’s sake, she’d fought her way back.
Melody turns and hugs her hard, whispering, “Thank you.”
“For supper? Why, Raelene made it. All I did was—”
“For everything.”
It would be such a relief to confess the whole sorrowful situation and cry on her mother’s shoulder. But when she takes a deep breath, the wisteria-scented air reminds her of the conversation on Cyril’s porch, and she’d promised him she wouldn’t tell.
Oh, Mother. I’m so sorry I can’t spare you more heartache than anyone deserves in this lifetime.
Gypsy gazes at the television just as she had the newspaper’s front page this afternoon, seeing it and yet not, like a child watching clouds drift by. Only this time, the innocuous image doesn’t whirl without warning into a terrifying storm of speculation.
February 13, March 23.
Those are the dates when Oran had given her candy that could only have been laced with some kind of sedative.
On those same dates, a killer had crept into two households, one in Sheepshead Bay, the other in Bay Ridge, and murdered all but one member of each family.
Gypsy hadn’t paid much attention to the first slaying back in February, though she’d read about it in the papers. She always moves past articles that don’t tick Oran’s apocalyptic list.
The second crime was harder to ignore. The press was whipped into a gruesome frenzy unseen since the Boston Strangler case a few years back. Soon New York’s killer earned his own macabre nickname: the Brooklyn Butcher.
Gypsy had overheard Carol-Ann talking about it to her friends at school.
“My parents are wigging out about the psycho killer on the loose! They keep telling me to be careful, and they, like, barge into my room to check on me all night long. They think someone’s going to break in and kill us all in our sleep.”
“Not all of you,” Connie Barbero said. “He leaves the teenaged daughter alive.”
“Groovy. I wouldn’t mind being an orphan.”
She’d giggled, and Gypsy had fumed. Carol-Ann didn’t know how lucky she was, living her charmed life with two doting parents, her own bedroom, a fashionable wardrobe, and Greg.