“Why don’t I just leave this here so that you can be on your way. Have a good day.” The waitress tears a green check off her pad, drops it by Gypsy’s plate, and scurries back toward the kitchen, ignoring the tip and dirty dishes on a newly vacated table in her path.
Gypsy hasn’t had a good day since she’d impulsively risked everything—everything—to execute a woman who wasn’t Margaret Costello’s daughter.
“But, Gypsy! Why did you think the maid was—”
“Because she looked like her! Like me!”
Like Carol-Ann Ellis!
He thrust a newspaper in front of her. Staring at Kasia’s photo beneath the tabloid headline the killer nobody saw, Gypsy could no longer see a resemblance to Carol-Ann. Nor to herself, or Margaret. But by then, she’d already discovered Margaret’s daughter.
Jessamine had been abandoned as an infant in the Ithaca gorge not far from Cornell University, on the eve of the new semester in January 1969. That’s precisely when Bernadette returned to campus from New York after her winter break and Oran’s sentencing.
Had Margaret Costello accompanied her? Or had Margaret persuaded Bernadette to take her child?
The details no longer matter. One of them had left her there, in the gorge, on a frigid night she likely wasn’t meant to survive.
After a well-publicized, futile search for the infant’s parents or a clue to her identity, she was adopted by a local couple who lived on North Cayuga Street. Their neighbor Professor Silas Moss later said that the foundling next door sparked his interest in using DNA to connect long-lost biological relatives.
For Gypsy, the missing pieces fell into place. Red’s final confrontation with Bernadette must have revealed that Margaret’s daughter was alive in Ithaca.
You were there that night to kill her, weren’t you, Red? And you were so close . . . if only you hadn’t made such stupid, reckless mistakes.
But going to the wrong address wasn’t one of them. Jessamine McCall lived in the house Red visited on that night in October 1987. Now she lives adjacent, in Professor Moss’s former residence, with her police officer husband and their three children. But she isn’t there today. She’s here on Marshboro’s Main Street with her old friend Amelia, settling into the white cottage with the blue door.
Gypsy leaves cash on the table with her check, exits the luncheonette, and pauses on the sidewalk to light a cigarette.
Across the way, the rental car is still parked in the driveway.
Gypsy had already known about the trip, courtesy of Amelia’s texts with Stockton Barnes. She hadn’t paid much attention, though, until she grasped Jessie’s true identity.
“Are you sure she’s your sister, Gypsy?” he’d asked.
“Stop calling her my sister. She’s Margaret’s daughter.”
“And your father’s daughter, so that makes her your—”
“I know what that makes her!”
She’d clenched her phone against her ear, gazing out the window at the former Wayland penthouse, breathing in and out. She knows what happens when a person gets reckless. Oran’s misstep resulted in arrest; Red’s in death. Mere mortals, both, in the end.
For Gypsy, immortality awaits. She won’t allow Jessamine Hanson and Amelia Crenshaw Haines and Stockton Barnes to claim it for themselves.
She won’t let that happen. But the conspirators aren’t meant to die today on a sunny street. No, they’ll meet their fate tomorrow, as foretold in Revelations, in the sea of glass glowing with fire.
Saddle River, New Jersey
“Here we are, sir,” the debonair British driver announces from the front seat of the Porsche SUV.
Barnes looks up from the text he’d been typing, asking a colleague for an update on a search he’d requested over a week ago.
They’ve arrived at Rob’s pillared redbrick mansion—white pillars, red brick, and a lineup of vehicles on the circular driveway awaiting the valet attendants. The fundraiser, held annually on Martin Luther King weekend, is a catered affair with live jazz music and two hundred glitzy guests, many of whom are in the entertainment industry. Barnes usually enjoys putting on one of his own well-cut suits, rubbing shoulders with them, and sipping champagne.
Not tonight. Back home after a long workday, he’d called Rob to say he couldn’t make it out to Bergen County tonight. Predictably, Rob insisted that he come, and said he was sending his chauffeur. There is no arguing with the man.
As Smitty comes around to open the back door for him, Barnes quickly sends his text, tucks the phone into his cashmere overcoat.
“Do let me know when you’re ready to return to the city. Mr. Owens has instructed me to await your call.”
“It won’t be long, I’ll tell you that.”
Inside, a member of the catering staff relieves him of his coat and another hands him a flute of champagne. The host and hostess greet him with hugs. Rob is dashing in a tux, Paulette lovely in blue velvet.
“I’m so glad you came! Now all we need is Kurtis,” she says, scanning the crowd of new arrivals. “He promised he’d be here.”
“Well, how many promises has he kept lately?” Rob asks.
Paulette glares at him, then turns to greet a newcomer with a bright smile and a gracious, “So nice to see you!”
“Everything okay with Kurtis?” Barnes asks Rob.
“He and I are on the outs again.”
“Again? I didn’t realize you two had been on the ins lately.”
Rob and his oldest son have never seen eye to eye, but their relationship has grown increasingly fractured over Kurtis’s inability to settle into a career despite his privileged background and Ivy League degree. He’s bounced from one industry to another, living off his father’s money while refusing his father’s attempts to bring him on board at the record label, or even connect him with influential people in other industries.
Ongoing financial support, in Barnes’s opinion, is where his friend went wrong, though he wouldn’t dare criticize another man’s parenting. If Rob cut off the bottomless cash flow, Kurtis might straighten out and settle down.
What do you know? You’re not a father.
Barnes should probably update Rob, one of the few people in this world who knows about Charisse. But before he can, an R & B legend comes over to introduce his fiancée, a rising Instagram model. Barnes didn’t know that was a thing, but Rob does, as do his daughters, who rush over with starstruck squeals.
Dodging the selfie session, Barnes heads for a quiet corner and reaches into his pocket for his own phone. Not there. Wrong pocket, wrong jacket. Damn. He’d checked it with his overcoat.
“Lose something?”
Barnes turns to see Rob and Paulette’s second-born son—Barnes’s own godson and namesake. Blessed with his parents’ good looks, confidence, and success, he’s an internal medicine resident at New York-Presbyterian.
“Hey, you haven’t seen Kurtis around, have you, Uncle Stockton?”
“No, but your parents were keeping an eye out for him.”
“I hope he shows up. They haven’t seen him since Christmas, and he and my father spent the whole time fighting.”
“The usual?”