The Butcher's Daughter - Wendy Corsi Staub Page 0,1
she appears later in this episode of Black historian Nelson Roger Cartwright’s The Roots and Branches Project. She’s been working for a few years now as an on-air genealogy consultant for the program. With Nelson’s new book on bestseller lists, the cable network is airing a holiday weekend marathon to attract his readers and the hundreds of thousands of people who received DNA test kits this Christmas.
Amelia turns the channel to a local newscast and swaps the remote for her steaming coffee mug, waiting for a weather report. If today is nice, she’ll kick off 2017 with a long run in the park. If not, she supposes she’ll watch the Sugar Bowl—though it won’t be much fun without Aaron.
The anchorman returns her bleak gaze. “In Bedford-Stuyvesant, where the violent crime rate continued to drop last year, a double homicide at the Marcy Houses yesterday left a mother and daughter dead and neighbors looking for answers.”
The scene shifts to an elderly man standing on a Brooklyn street, with a yellow-crime-scene-taped brick doorway behind him. “Don’t know why anyone would do something like that to decent people,” he says, shaking his bald head. “They didn’t bother anybody, and they didn’t have anything worth stealin’.”
The screen fills with a pair of close-up photographs of the victims. The older woman is vaguely familiar; the younger is . . .
“The bodies of fifty-three-year-old Alma Harrison and her thirty-one-year-old daughter, Brandy . . .”
Amelia gasps, sloshing hot coffee over her hand.
“. . . were discovered late yesterday in their apartment by out-of-state relatives who grew concerned when they failed to show up at a family gathering. Police are seeking information and have ruled out robbery as a motive for the brutal slayings, believed to have taken place early yesterday morning.”
Brandy Harrison?
No. Amelia would know that face anywhere.
The dead young woman’s name—at least, when Amelia had met her a few months ago when she’d shown up in Amelia’s office with her long-lost baby ring—had been Lily Tucker.
Not only that, but . . .
Alma Harrison.
She hurries into the bedroom to find her phone.
Newark Airport
Three decades since she’s seen the Manhattan skyline, and she’s on the wrong side of the aisle. When the plane pops out beneath a swirly gray swath, her view is of New Jersey sprawl. Still, she presses her forehead to the window, feigning fascination, back turned to her seatmate.
He’d slipped off his wedding ring as he’d boarded back in Punta Cana, leaving a white band etched on his sunburnt finger. She’d pretended that she didn’t speak English. Undaunted, he dusted off his clumsy, American-accented Spanish, claiming his name is Reed and that he lives on the Upper East Side. With his dingy teeth and paunch, he doesn’t look like a cosmopolitan “Reed.” He looks like a Monty from the boroughs—which is exactly who he is, according to the luggage tag she’d glimpsed on his worn nylon carryon.
One duplicitous turn deserves another. She’d introduced herself as Jadzia Hernandez. That’s the name on the expertly forged passport that had been delivered to her suite last night, along with a laptop, and a bouquet of white ginger lilies.
She’d slept on crisp hotel linens and boarded her flight long before dawn. Subjected to the Monty monologue, she’d attempted to read the airline magazine, but the type was blurred even when she held it at arm’s length. Her once perfect vision has changed. The world has changed, beyond the secluded tropical haven where she’s spent the last three decades. These days, everyone is plugged into something, lost and insulated.
Not Monty. He has much to say and questions to ask, like whether she’s coming to New York on business, or pleasure.
“Ninguno de los dos,” she tells him. Neither one.
He waggles bushy eyebrows and says that he can give her pleasure. She shrugs as if the innuendo went right over her head and resumes staring down at ribbons of gray highway winding through gray hills dotted with gray buildings. She remembers a place with turquoise water and verdant mountains and rainbow-hued homes, and knows she’ll never see it again, never see—
“Ladies and gentlemen, we have begun our final descent. Please be sure that your seatbelts are securely fastened . . .”
Monty taps her shoulder and informs her in clumsy Spanish that someone who doesn’t speak English won’t be able to navigate ground transportation, and she can share his cab to the city.
“Mucho más barato para compartir,” he adds.
Much cheaper to share it? So he’s not even offering to pay her way?