Dead Silence Read online

  Dedication

  For my Aunt Marian Corsi, a font of fascinating information and suggestions, including . . . a rooster;

  For my friend and fellow U2 fan Maureen Martin, who kept me sane this past year when the muse tried to do otherwise;

  For the three men who love me unconditionally, even on my most frantic “I’m on a deadline!” days: Mark, Morgan, and Brody Staub.

  And in loving memory of my foundling great-grandfather, Vincenzo Tampio, abandoned on a doorstep in Valledolmo, Sicily, in 1869. We may never find out who his birth parents were, but he lived a long and rich life as the patriarch of an enormous family, raising seven sons and three daughters—the youngest, my beloved TT, Sara.

  Epigraph

  “Hope” is the thing with feathers

  That perches in the soul,

  And sings the tune without the words,

  And never stops at all.

  —Emily Dickinson

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  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

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  The Butcher’s Daughter Chapter One

  About the Author

  Praise for the work of Wendy Corsi Staub

  By Wendy Corsi Staub

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  Thursday, September 29, 2016

  The Laurentides, Quebec, Canada

  The vast sky had been black and glittering when the Angler cast off from shore with his tarped burden. Milky gray oozes now from the east, extinguishing stars and veiling the lake in rippling shadows.

  Damp chill permeates his waxed cotton jacket. Even under the circumstances, he’d had the presence of mind to grab it from the car. He’d shivered through many a night-fishing excursion on this lake as a child, even in August. You learn. You remember.

  Some things, anyway. The good things.

  Precious few of those.

  A crowing rooster scolds the songbirds’ dawn chorus into a smattering of chirps as the Angler reaches the deepest part of the lake. He’d hoped to do this and escape under cover of darkness, before the old man stirs to awareness back at the house.

  Hugo is ninety-two, though. How aware can his waking hours possibly be?

  The Angler hasn’t spent time with his uncle in decades but has glimpsed him now and again through a farmhouse window, noting the way he shuffles and stares. No evidence in that stooped, gnarled figure of the vibrant man who’d been saddled with an incorrigible great-nephew one rainy summer.

  All his life, the Angler had been told that royal blood ran through his paternal family, courtesy of an ancestor illegitimately descended from the great Capetian Dynasty. He’d anticipated the worst of his father’s authoritarian behavior in Hugo, but instead encountered a humble farmer with aristocratic bearing.

  Hugo had taught him how to row in an old wooden kayak, and to swim after it capsized one terrifying morning, and most importantly, how to fish.

  “Did you learn anything this summer?” his father had asked in September, driving him south back to Ottawa.

  “Oui.” French had become second nature; Hugo had spoken no English.

  “Oui?” his father echoed, flashing a rare grin of approval.

  “Parle-moi en français!” he’d commanded for years, but the older the Angler had become, the more he’d resisted.

  Yes. I learned something that summer, you miserable bastard.

  I learned I never wanted to sound like you, or look like you, or become like you, and yet . . .

  Tossing aside the oars, the Angler turns to the tarp in the bottom of the boat, picturing her under there. Not the way she’d looked when he’d shrouded her—blue eyes fixed in horror, mouth gaping with a silent scream, her blond hair and pale lavender blouse soaked in blood. No, he sees her as she’d been the night they’d met, an angel dressed in white, haloed by a streetlight.

  She’d told him her name was Monique. Not true, he’d discovered weeks later, spotting her face on a Missing Persons flyer. Nor had she been eighteen, as she’d assured him when he’d invited her into the car. Nor twelve, as she’d later claimed when she’d begged him to let her go, promising she wouldn’t tell anyone, calling for her mother.

  “Je suis seulement une petite fille!”

  “I’m only a little girl . . .”

  Then, she’d been a fourteen-year-old freshman computer whiz who’d run away from home after she’d caught her boyfriend cheating on her.

  Now she’s—she was—eighteen.

  “Oh, Monique,” he whispers, reaching for the tarp. “You should have stayed the way you used to be. So innocent . . .”

  He lifts the tarped bundle with a grunt. He’d wrapped her with a large rock he’d feared might swamp or tip the boat. Now he just hopes it will be heavy enough to sink her to the murky depths.

  He heaves the deadweight overboard with a gentle splash and watches it descend.

  As he rows back toward shore, daybreak reveals a tangle of flattened and broken weeds along the overgrown path where he’d dragged her corpse down to the lake.

  He keeps his eyes on the dim outline of the henhouse in the distance, rowing in rhythm to the refrain in his head.

  One down, one to go . . .

  New York City

  As sleep’s mellow hush lifts, Amelia Crenshaw Haines knows she’s alone in her bed, in the room, in the apartment. She hears traffic honking on Amsterdam Avenue ten stories below, sirens in the distance, and the soft whir of the HEPA air purifier on Aaron’s dresser. He’d discovered his cat allergy two months ago, after she’d rescued a little Scottish Fold kitten. She hadn’t offered to return Clancy to the kill shelter. Nor had Aaron asked her to.

  He hadn’t offered to skip his client dinner meeting tonight. Nor had she asked him to.

  She’d thought maybe, though, since it’s their anniversary . . .

  She opens her eyes.

  Dayclean.

  Even now, the Gullah word tends to pop into her head in moments like this, when she sees that last night’s storm has given way to an incandescent autumn day. Her old neighbor Marceline LeBlanc had shared it with a young, grieving Amelia twenty-eight years ago. “Dayclean means early morning, after dawn breaks. A fresh start. Yesterday’s troubles scrubbed away.”

  Amelia sees a gift sitting on the pillow beside hers. Drenched in buttery sunlight, the small box is telltale turquoise, tied with a white satin ribbon: Tiffany’s. A year or two ago, her heart would have leapt. Today, it sinks.

  She leaves the gift where it is, reaching past it for her cell phone to check her email. She scans the list of messages, searching the sender column for genetic genealogy website addresses, hoping one of them has informed her that there’s been a hit on her DNA at last.

  Not today.

  She turns off the alarm that has yet to ring and slogs into the adjoining bathroom. Aaron’s navy cotton pj’s with the white piping sway on a hook as she kicks the door shut. Early in their relationship, she’d gotten a giggle out of his pajamas, the old-fashioned kind with matching top and bottoms.

  “What else would I wear?”

  “You know . . . boxers and a tee shirt or something, or . . . nothing.”

  He
’d laughed and pulled her into his arms.

  She reaches for her toothbrush, past his, back in its holder after a two-day absence. She’d slept soundly through Aaron’s late-night return from taking a deposition in Chicago . . . or had it been Denver? Not LA. That trip is next week. She’d toyed with tagging along until he’d told her his schedule will be too jammed for time together.

  So much for celebrating their silver anniversary there—or here—or anywhere.

  She stares into the mirror above the sink, searching for some remnant of the luminescent young bride she’d been twenty-five years ago today. She’s read that light-skinned Black women don’t age as well as their darker counterparts. Maybe it’s true. She notes the deepening lines around her eyes and mouth, the slight sag beneath her jaw. There are no wiry gray strands in her sleek shoulder-length hair, but only because she’d had it straightened and colored last month.

  “Girl, you are getting old.”

  The woman in the mirror turns away.

  She takes her steamy time in the new shower with gleaming white marble and dual high-end rain heads. “Plenty of room for two,” the contractor had said with a sly wink, but she and Aaron have yet to test that. He’s taken to showering when he gets home at night. She’s tried not to wonder why and hasn’t asked him. She has never been, and refuses to become, a suspicious wife.

  Wrapped in a fluffy white towel, Amelia returns to the bedroom and lifts the shades. The tall windows face east, and the first beams of sunlight have cleared the building next door, spilling over the unmade bed and the turquoise box on Aaron’s pillow.

  She goes to her closet and pulls out a navy lightweight wool Brooks Brothers skirt suit and white silk blouse. She dresses quickly, adding panty hose, low-heeled pumps, a string of pearls, matching earrings. Boring, boring. She’d prefer jeans, boots, a splashy-hued fall sweater, and the chunky teal and purple beads she’d bought in Union Square last week. But she has a new client coming this morning, and when her wardrobe leans casual, newcomers—the ones who haven’t seen her on television, anyway—don’t seem to take her as seriously.

  She turns to the bed, tucking in the sheets, smoothing the duvet, and aligning the pillows, though she’ll climb back in tonight long before Aaron does. Making the bed is second nature when you grow up sleeping on a pullout couch in the center of a cramped apartment. There had been a time, though, after her mother had passed away and before Amelia had gone away to college, when she’d taken perverse pleasure in leaving a rumpled tangle of bedding in the living room every morning.

  She’d been so angry back then—at her mother for dying; at her father for letting grief consume him; at both for not having told her she wasn’t their biological child. She’d discovered that shocking truth the day she’d lost her mother.

  A few years later, her father, too, was gone. She’s been an orphan for most of her adult life—an orphan who might still have parents out there somewhere.

  “You have me,” Aaron says, when she grieves for what she’d had and lost.

  “You’re my husband, not my parent.”

  “You have my mother and father, though, and my brothers and sisters, and all the nieces and nephews . . .”

  Yes, they’re her family, and she loves them, and she knows better than anyone that familial bonds don’t depend on blood. But she’s the in-law. The connection would sever if she weren’t married to Aaron.

  Which you are.

  For a quarter of a century to this very day.

  Marrying a handsome, stable, upwardly mobile law school graduate had been the easiest decision she’d ever made. Their disparate backgrounds kept things interesting, but they were similar enough to want the same things out of life—except when it came to their wedding.

  He’d wanted an extravagant affair; she’d have preferred to elope. She’d had no mother to help her pick a gown, no father to walk her down the aisle, no family to line the church pews on the bride’s side.

  The future litigator had gotten his way, and so her friend Jessie had helped her pick her gown, and Silas Moss had walked her down the aisle. The groom had more than enough family to fill both sides of the church.

  The large, loving Haines clan is part of the reason Amelia had been so drawn to him in the first place. She can’t imagine life without her in-laws. As for life without Aaron . . .

  He’s abandoned her on their anniversary.

  Well, that might not be entirely true.

  Your birth parents abandoned you. Your husband has a business dinner. Big difference—unless Aaron is lying.

  She picks up the shiny turquoise box. The white satin ribbon slips away with a slight tug. She lifts the lid, bracing herself for the sparkly diamond bracelet, sapphire earrings, some expensive bauble a possibly philandering husband presents to his supposedly unsuspecting wife.

  But inside, she finds a silver Tiffany horseshoe key ring. It holds a set of keys.

  What in the . . . ?

  The heart-shaped charm is engraved with a Sutton Place address and 7:30 p.m.

  A slow smile spreads across her face.

  Googling the address on the charm, she finds that it belongs to a luxurious garden town house along the river.

  She opens the top drawer of her dresser and retrieves the velvet jewelry box that contains the simple gold wedding band Aaron had placed on her finger twenty-five years ago today. She usually wears the diamond-studded platinum one he’d given her on their fifteenth anniversary, after he’d made partner at his law firm.

  “Now you can get rid of that cheap old thing,” he’d said.

  “It wasn’t cheap. It’s gold, and it matches yours.”

  “Well, it looks like it belongs in a hardware bin. And don’t worry about matching. I got myself a new platinum band, too. Let’s throw the old ones away.”

  “We can’t just throw away gold! Those rings symbolize fifteen years of marriage behind us. Sometimes I wonder if you have a sentimental bone in your body.”

  He laughed. “I do. But the new rings symbolize all the years ahead, and they’re going to be even better.”

  Some days, she isn’t so sure about that. And most days, she doesn’t even think about the old gold ring. But this is the perfect occasion to wear it in memory of all the reasons they’d exchanged rings and vows in the first place. She slides it over a simple gold chain and fastens it around her neck, trying not to remember another time, another ring on another chain . . .

  She opens the door to the adjacent former nursery. Amelia and Aaron had agreed early on to be content with each other, their careers, and a dozen nieces and nephews, so the tiny room had served as her office until she’d moved her burgeoning business downtown. Now it’s a kitten corral.

  Clancy is perched on top of a bookshelf, swatting at the floor lamp’s fringed shade.

  “Good morning, Clanc—whoa!”

  A grasping, fat little paw makes contact, and the lamp teeters. Amelia steadies it, then picks up the kitten. He protests loudly. As she strokes his pinkish-orange fur, she notes that his food bowl is empty. Aaron filling it on his way out the door would have been an even more welcome surprise than the Tiffany key ring.

  One thing’s certain: he didn’t buy the Sutton Place town house as an anniversary surprise. They’re not hurting, but they can’t afford eight-figure real estate. This Upper West Side junior four had needed extensive work, even at the top of their budget in an ever-skyrocketing Manhattan market.

  A plumber and several workmen arrive as she’s leaving the apartment. They’d completed the bathroom renovation on the Friday before Labor Day and had begun kitchen demolition the Tuesday after.

  “We should have the appliances in by next week,” the contractor tells her. “Bet you’ll be glad to get back to home-cooked meals.”

  She thanks him, not mentioning that those were rare around here even before her kitchen had been gutted and tarped off. Aaron dines with colleagues or clients most nights—or so he says; Amelia gobbles takeout in front of reality
TV shows he finds ridiculous.

  “Haven’t you ever heard of guilty pleasures, Aaron?” she’d asked the other night, when he’d walked in on her in sweatpants, clutching a plastic container of greasy beef chow fun, riveted by a Real Housewives catfight.

  “Sure I have, babe. But this would definitely not be mine.”

  What is yours, Aaron?

  She’d been afraid to ask.

  She’s never been one to meet conflict with taciturnity. Theirs has not been a marriage in which questions are unasked or unanswered. She and Aaron have always aired their grievances and hashed out differences. But they don’t talk much anymore, whether they’re together or apart. Phone calls have given way to texts; conversation to coexistence; companionable silence to a disquieting quiet that permeates the apartment even when the workmen are there with hammers and power tools.

  The doorman, Alex, greets her in the lobby and tells her he caught her on television last night.

  For the past couple of years, she’s been an occasional on-air consultant for The Roots and Branches Project, a cable program hosted by renowned African American historian Nelson Roger Cartwright.

  “I know it sounds crazy,” Alex says, “but I bawled like a baby when you gave that guy the document about his great-great-grandfather being sold as a slave when he was just a little boy.”

  “He cried, too. We were all teary, on and off camera.”

  “I bet that happens a lot.” He holds open the door. “It’s a beautiful day out there. Enjoy.”

  Her wedding day had been nice as well—Indian summer, with sunlight streaming in the stained-glass church windows, and an outdoor reception at her in-laws’ country club.

  She bypasses the subway, deciding to treat herself to a cab. Happy anniversary to me.

  The driver signals to turn down Broadway.

  “Sir? Can you take the Central Park transverse instead?”

  “It’s the long way.”

  “That’s okay.”

  She pulls earbuds from her bag and scrolls through her phone’s playlists, ranging from classical jazz to hip-hop. Music had been her first passion. She’d once hoped to make vocal performance a career, but now she’s content singing with the Park Baptist Church gospel choir every other Sunday.