Little Girl Lost Read online

  Dedication

  For my graduating godchildren,

  Hannah Rae Koellner, SUNY Fredonia, Class of 2018

  Rick Peyton Corsi, Dunkirk High School, Class of 2018

  For my husband, Mark, on his milestone birthday,

  And for my boys, Brody and Morgan, with love.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Acknowledgments

  An Excerpt from Little Boy Blue Chapter One

  About the Author

  By Wendy Corsi Staub

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  May 12, 1968

  New York City

  Footsteps approach the bed.

  She cowers under the covers, clutching the doll she got from her Sunday school teacher back in December, along with some candy canes and homemade doll clothes and a little plastic ornament of the baby Jesus. She tried to hand that back.

  “We don’t have a Christmas tree. Mommy hates Christmas.”

  “Keep it, sugar. Remember, He is always with you.”

  Plastic baby Jesus is tucked under her pillow, sleeping so peacefully.

  Please keep me safe, she tells him, clutching the doll, who’s wearing a pretty blue dress with ruffles tonight. Her name used to be Chatty Cathy. The girl renamed her Georgy Girl, after Daddy and that song Mommy liked to hear on the radio before she started turning sad and scary.

  If you pull a ring on Georgy Girl’s back, she says things like, “Tell me a story” and “Let’s play house.” The girl never tires of pulling the cord. It’s extended in her hand right now, frozen in place as the footsteps stop by the bed.

  Georgy Girl is silent. Mommy is muttering.

  The little girl keeps her eyes squeezed shut, thinking of Jesus—plastic Jesus, real Jesus.

  Please don’t let her hurt me this time.

  “Don’t you just lie around here! Come on!”

  Mommy yanks off the covers, wrenches the doll from her hands, and hurtles it across the room. The cord winds down. “I love y—”

  The doll hits the wall and drops to the floor, shattering the sweet, familiar phrase.

  “No! Georgy Girl!”

  “Shut up!” Something glows in the darkness—the tip of a cigarette? It bobs around as Mommy waves her hand, shouting. “It’s laundry day! Get up and help me! Do you hear me?”

  Hot tears spill over. “It isn’t day, Mommy. It’s nighttime! Please—”

  “Don’t you sass, young lady!”

  “I’m sorry! Please—”

  Her mother pulls her up by her hair.

  The little girl’s tears sizzle and her right cheek explodes in searing pain, burned by the thing in her mother’s hand—not the tip of a cigarette, but the red indicator light of an electric iron.

  According to its cornerstone, freed slaves built the Park Baptist Church of Harlem precisely one hundred years ago.

  According to Marceline LeBlanc, the Gullah Geechee priestess who recently moved into an apartment two blocks up and around the corner on 129th Street, the church is haunted as a low-country graveyard at midnight.

  “It’s built on a burial ground,” she told Calvin Crenshaw in her Creole patois the first time they met, deep crow’s-feet crinkling her narrowed black eyes. “Ooooold bones there.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I know. I feeeeel it. Here.” Her bony fingertip staccatoed her temple between a swath of purple turban and wide earrings that jangled like wind chimes. “Spirits are vengeful.”

  Ms. LeBlanc, Calvin decided, was full of bull. Maybe full of the devil, too. Yet she’s oddly unavoidable, even in a city populated by millions.

  Like an alley cat he once made the mistake of feeding, she seems to be everywhere he goes, lurking, prowling, staring. Yesterday morning at this hour, she sprang from murky shadows and scared the bejesus out of him. He was climbing the wide stone steps into the church; she was coming from God-knows-where. Not the butcher shop at 5 a.m., though she carried a small brown paper parcel oozing what appeared to be . . .

  Blood?

  He might have been wrong, but it sure did look like blood.

  She stood on a patch of sidewalk just beyond the streetlight’s yellow glow, barefoot on cracked concrete littered with beer bottle caps, saliva-scummed cigarette butts, ant-infested food wrappers, and worse.

  “Moon is full,” she said, pointing toward it, high above the church spire. “Dangerous to go in alone.”

  “It’s my job to clean the place.”

  “Some stains, you cannot scrub away.”

  He shrugged off the cryptic remark and left her there, unlocking the door with his janitor’s key ring and then locking it again behind him, just in case . . .

  In case Marceline isn’t merely a harmless addition to the neighborhood—colorful and slightly off, like the lone cobalt panel in the muted blue stained-glass mosaic window behind the altar.

  Calvin himself had replaced that broken piece a few summers ago, after sweeping away blue shards dotted with metallic pellets. Mischievous neighborhood kids, probably. Fooling around with a BB gun on a fire escape, aiming for a rat or pigeon. No one, not even an outsider, would deliberately deface a century-old sacred landmark.

  That’s what he thought then; what he’d like to think now. But things are changing out there, where the night air is often thick with sirens, shouts, shrieks, and a haze of marijuana smoke; where morning-after gutters are awash in a hideous flotsam—syringes, used condoms, human waste.

  Calvin snaps on thick yellow rubber gloves and rolls his creaky bucket of sudsy water toward the altar.

  Yesterday, his gloves were white cotton, and he pushed the pine casket with five fellow pallbearers. They halted right here at the front pew. On the left, his friend Ernie Fields’s black-veiled widow, Shirley, sat sobbing with their four anguished teenaged daughters. On the right, the Harlem political powerhouse Gang of Four—Basil Paterson, Charles Rangel, David Dinkins, and Manhattan Borough president Percy Sutton—wiped their eyes with crisp white handkerchiefs. The famous writer James Baldwin, a neighborhood fixture and close childhood friend of Calvin’s late daddy, gave a soul-stirring eulogy that began with the same words that have been running through Calvin’s mind ever since he heard about Ernie’s murder.

  “There but for the grace of God . . .”

  Calvin held his own emotions in check until the choir sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” Even now, tears sting his eyes as he swishes his mop in the bucket, blurring the tall stained-glass windows where lightning flares as if God Himself is enraged.

  The New York Times hadn’t bothered to cover the story about a humble negro bellhop killed in a hot rod hit and run, and the NYPD sure as heck isn’t conducting a citywide manhunt for the killers, white punks cruising for trouble.

  This weekend, the esteemed paper and local police are more concerned with escalating race riots, Vietnam protestors, a Brooklyn arson fire that had killed a young firefighter and left
another with life-threatening burns, and a string of unsolved murders. The latest victims, a couple, their twelve-year-old son, and the wife’s elderly mother, had been stabbed in their beds Friday night. A teenaged daughter, brutally raped, lies in Coney Island Hospital. No known enemies or motives, no witnesses. The culprit, now known in the press as the Brooklyn Butcher, is thought to be responsible for two similar cases this year.

  When well-off white people die, headlines scream and detectives mobilize, establishing a tip hotline with talk of a task force, even the FBI. But Ernie’s death was just one more violent crime in these dangerous times. No one beyond the neighborhood seems to even—

  An unearthly wail stops Calvin cold, reverberating through the cavernous nave.

  Marceline and her mambo mumbo-jumbo seep in as it fades.

  Wide-eyed, clutching his mop handle like a weapon, he gazes over the century-old carved wooden pews, the shadowy pulpit, and the locked vestibule.

  Maybe it was that damned alley cat. Probably snuck in to get out of the storm.

  Except, it sounded human.

  Maybe a hobo—hungry, harmless . . .

  Crying?

  All right, then who—what—is it? A ghost?

  No such thing as ghosts.

  He’s alone, as always, within the arched plaster walls. The sound must have come from outside.

  Unlike the dead, the city doesn’t sleep. Cars splash along Lenox Avenue. Pedestrians, shrouded in rain bonnets or holding umbrellas, sidestep streaming channels in galoshes. Some are calling it a night, others working the graveyard shift or beginning a new day. Even in this weather, desperate souls prowl in search of a fix, a good time, easy cash. Eventually, the junkies, streetwalkers, and hoodlums will pass out in grimy doorways until the harsh glare of morning or a beat cop’s flashlight bring a rude awakening.

  Calvin dips the mop into the water. The scent of Pine-Sol mingles with vintage wood, musty hymnals, and the cloying perfume of funeral lilies.

  Lightning flashes again. He listens for another phantom cry in its wake; hears only a resounding crackle of thunder.

  Jaw clenched, Calvin mops his way along the altar, shoulders burning as though he’s nearing the end of his shift, instead of just beginning it. He hasn’t slept much the last few nights. Since April, really, when the Reverend King was gunned down in Memphis. He admired the civil rights leader, but didn’t know him personally. Not like Ernie.

  Last night, Calvin had lain awake past midnight, thinking about the funeral, the murder. When at last he slept, he drifted into a nightmare. He was Ernie—running, running, running through dark streets, screaming for help, chased by a racing engine and taunting shouts.

  At four, the alarm jarred him back to reality. He splashed cold water on his face, pulled on his tattered overalls, and left Bettina sleeping soundly and his good black suit waiting on a hanger.

  He’ll return for both, and an umbrella, before the nine o’clock service begins. By then, he’ll have polished the woodwork and erased smudges and yesterday’s muddy footprints. If only he could scrub away the horror and grief, as well.

  Some stains, you cannot scrub away.

  He shoves his wheeled bucket over to the corner beside the choir stall. He doesn’t want to think any more about his dead friend, or the teetering world, or—least of all—about Marceline and her vengeful spirits. For him, as for many, the church is sacred ground; a haven amid the tempest of hatred raging beyond its limestone walls; a place to pray and count your blessings.

  Calvin has many, though fatherhood isn’t among them, despite years of beseeching the good Lord to bestow a child. But he and Bettina have each other, their health, a roof over their heads, food on the table, and their work—five jobs between them.

  Weekdays, Calvin drives a bus and Bettina is a housekeeper. Weeknights, he buses tables at Sylvia’s while she works the token booth at the 116th Street subway station.

  Weekend wee hours, he’s the custodian here at Park Baptist.

  The meager pay has grown the nest egg they started when they married a decade ago. Back then, they were saving for the larger place they’d need when children came along. Now, they’re just saving for a rainy day.

  Today is one of them. Sunday, a day of rest. Mother’s Day.

  Calvin swings the mop from the bucket. It hits the floor with a wet slap.

  On its heels, another wail pierces the air, so close this time that he whirls around, expecting to see someone in the choir stall.

  The rows of wooden seats beyond the carved rail are vacant.

  He thinks of the violence swirling out there in the darkness; rage that has yet to cross the sanctity of this place. Thinks of shattered blue glass and BB pellets scattered like confetti.

  Of his dead friend Ernie.

  “Anybody here?”

  He hears only his own uneasy breathing and the hard rain pattering high above the rib-vaulted ceiling.

  Fool. You’re imagining things. You need a nice long nap today, and maybe to get these ears of yours checked out by a doctor, and that is that.

  He shoves the mop along, creating a gleaming swath on the scarred hardwood. He thinks about working hard, and growing older. If you live a long life and are blessed with loved ones, loss is inevitable. People die before their time, some more violently than others. Let yourself dwell in that dark reality, and you’ll never move on.

  He thinks about Ernie, about Mama three years in her grave, about Bettina’s stillborn son ten years ago. About this being Mother’s Day, and all these years trying, trying, trying for another pregnancy . . .

  You try, and you hope, and you hold tight to what you have. Even if it’s nothing more than faith and hope, life itself, and love.

  Calvin is no teeny-bop Beatles fan, but they sure got it right last year when they sang “All You Need Is—”

  He whirls around, startled by a choking little gasp.

  It came from down near the floor toward the back of the choir stall.

  Resisting the instinct to flee, he closes his eyes, asking the Lord for guidance.

  Someone may be lying in wait there. Someone with hatred in his cold heart for men like Calvin, Ernie, the Reverend King . . .

  Or someone might need help.

  Calvin opens his eyes and relinquishes his mop handle, letting it fall against the rail.

  “Hey,” he calls, into the shadows. “Are you all right?”

  The question is met with a whimper.

  He moves closer and leans in to look, expecting to find a woman crouched on the floor.

  Instead, he sees a small bundle. At a glance, it appears to be someone’s coat or wrap left behind on the seat. Then it makes another wailing sound, and Calvin knows, before he reaches into the folds of fabric, exactly what it is.

  A baby.

  Chapter Two

  The D train was standing room only when Oran boarded in the Bronx just past four o’clock on this stormy Sunday morning. He dozes as it winds into Manhattan and back out again into the wilds of Brooklyn, dispersing the raucous after-hours bar crowd and world-weary shift workers along the way. When the conductor announces the end of the line, Oran wakes to find himself sharing the car with a lone woman.

  Elderly, dressed all in black, holding an open Bible, she meets his gaze as the train slows. When the doors open, she escapes on thick-soled old lady shoes.

  “Don’t worry!” he calls, ambling along behind, galoshes squeaking on the tile floor. “I’m harmless!”

  To you, anyway. You’re way too far past your prime.

  The Stillwell Avenue station has been spared the wrecking ball that shattered neighboring landmarks. When Oran was a boy, it was a grand place. Now it’s bathed in urine-colored light that seeps over scarred floors and peeling paint, falling short of dingy corners. He passes a vagrant sleeping on the shoe shine stand near the shuttered Philips Candy Shop, where he’d beg his mother, Pamela, to stop for saltwater taffy. Once, while he waited for her to come out of the restroom, a man who’
d overheard his fruitless pleas bought him some. Oran accepted, being the kind of kid who took candy from a stranger and lacked the manners to say thank you. Pamela was just a kid herself; too young and frivolous to keep him close by her side in public places, or give much thought to social etiquette, rules, and warnings . . . laws.

  He will never allow his own daughter to wander the way he used to. Terrible things can happen to a child. Terrible.

  He remembers trailing behind his mother as they walked out toward the boardwalk, cramming his mouth full of taffy, wincing as the sticky sugar zapped his cavities. When he tried to swallow the sodden mass, it lodged in his windpipe. He clawed frantically at his throat, searching for Pamela’s high blond ponytail, red lipstick, bobby sox, and saddle shoes. He spotted her up ahead in the throng surrounding Nathan’s Famous hot dog stand on the corner of Stillwell and Surf Avenue. She was laughing with a handsome man whose blond crew cut tufted high above his tanned, handsome face.

  He turned out to be Eddie. Later—weeks, months later—Oran realized he was the reason they’d come to Coney Island on that summer Saturday. It was Eddie who noticed Oran turning blue just before he lost consciousness, suffocated by the forbidden treat. Eddie who saved his life.

  Eddie who destroyed his mother’s.

  Oran thinks of his former stepfather now as he snaps open an umbrella and exits the station into the pouring rain, heading south to cross Surf Avenue. Is he still alive in prison?

  What about his mother? She’s likely dead by now, although you never know.

  The sky is still dark above the patchwork of dripping billboards that proclaim the iconic hot dog stand as The Only Original Nathan’s and urge pedestrians to Follow the Crowd.

  No crowd today, here or on the puddle-pooled boardwalk beyond. Near the spot where Steeplechase Park once stood, a flag whips in the wet sea wind, hooks clanging a desolate rhythm against the metal pole. Oran closes his eyes. He hears the triple carousel’s calliope, and penny arcade buzzers and bells. He smells sausage, cotton candy, roasted peanuts, fried dough, fried oysters, fried everything, all mingling with hot tar and damp marine air.