Dead Silence Read online

  “Speak for yourself, Li’l Abner.”

  They’d laughed and dropped the subject. As long as Mimi’s happy . . .

  “I’m sorry, Jessie,” she says again. “I mean, I’m sure Aaron thought it would be a pain for you to try to get to the city on a weeknight, otherwise . . .”

  “Oh, it definitely would have been a pain. I have a lot going on here. It’s totally fine that . . . you know.” That your husband snubbed me. Needing to break the tension, she adds, “Really. It’s okay . . . Tess.”

  “Tess?”

  “Working Girl! The movie! With Melanie Griffith. Remember, we saw it together back in ’88? Tess was our hero.” Jessie gestures at the sneakers she’s wearing with her suit. “That’s what she wore. Don’t tell me you forgot?”

  “Never!” Mimi throws her head back and belts the first few lines of “Let the River Run,” the movie’s theme song.

  Jessie grins. “Man, you can sing.”

  And she’s beautiful as always, her black hair sleek and straightened, clipped back to accentuate her delicate bone structure and flawless cinnamon and sugar complexion. There are worry lines, though, around her large brown eyes. Maybe something went wrong with that new client, or with Aaron . . .

  “Did Carly Simon drop in?” Billy asks. “I could’ve sworn I heard her . . . oh, hey, it’s Mimi! Even better!” He wraps his beefy arms around her in an easy bear hug. “I didn’t know you were coming.”

  “Neither did I, until this morning. Jessie invited me, and I thought . . . what the hell. I missed you guys. Sorry to just show up, but I tried to call you, and text, and email . . .”

  “The Wi-Fi is out, and the landline, too,” Jessie tells her. “We had a couple of bad storms this week.”

  “Good old Ithaca. This house looks exactly the same as it did the first time I ever walked up this street, by the way. But the bus went past that fancy new Marriott, and I can’t believe all the new construction on the Commons. Remember when it was a ghost town back when we were in college?”

  “You took the bus from New York?”

  “Yes, just like the first time,” she adds with a nostalgic tilt of her head. “Only back then, I was nineteen and I’d run away from home. And Silas opened this door instead of Jessie.”

  “I showed up here right afterward,” Jessie says with a laugh. “I remember that day so well. I was royally pissed off at my mother.”

  “And your father. And pretty much the entire world. Not just that day, but every day.”

  “Now she’s just royally pissed at me,” Billy says.

  “Uh-oh. What’d you do?”

  “He ate a Zagnut!” Jessie tells her.

  “And you didn’t divorce him then and there?” Mimi’s grin is a bit drawn. “I love you two. You never change.”

  “Yeah, Jessie always was a tough little chick, and I’ve always been afraid of her.” Billy steps out onto the wraparound porch and reaches to help her with her luggage. “Hey, is this an animal carrier?”

  “Yes, I had to bring Clancy. I hope it’s all right?”

  “It’s fine,” Jessie assures her, sliding a don’t say anything look in Billy’s direction.

  It escapes him, but not Mimi.

  “Oh, no. I’m so sorry. I was thinking you guys have always had a menagerie, so I figured . . .”

  “We used to, but . . . not since Theodore. He doesn’t like animals.”

  “Except roosters,” Billy adds. “Roosters, he likes. Did Jessie tell you?”

  “I haven’t had a chance, but I will.” She leads the way to the stairs, with Billy hauling the bags along behind them. “Come on, let’s get you settled before . . .”

  Before Little Boy Blue wakes up.

  Before Theodore comes home and sees the cat, or the kid . . .

  Before all hell breaks loose.

  Mimi is shaking her head. “You know what? I’ll stay at the new Marriott.”

  “Nope. It’s not even opening until December.”

  “Then I’ll stay at—”

  “All the hotels are full because of the Apple Festival,” Jessie tells her, “so forget it.”

  “Come on, all of them?”

  “Every last one.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “You’re staying here, in Chip’s room. Just keep the kitten in there for now, and we’ll be fine.” She leans over to peer through the carrier’s mesh panel at the sweet ball of orangey pink fur. “He’s adorable. I hope you’re keeping him?”

  “I wish, but I can’t. Aaron’s allergic.”

  Guess that means you’re keeping Aaron, huh?

  At the top of the stairs, she gestures at Petty’s closed door and tells Mimi in a hushed voice, “We have a new foster child. He’s sleeping in there.”

  “I thought you weren’t fostering anymore.”

  “Long story. I’m going to check on him while you get settled.”

  Billy and Mimi continue on down the hall as she opens Petty’s door, trying not to let it creak. Impossible in this house. She slips into the room and winces as it creaks closed behind her.

  The child in the bed doesn’t stir. He appears even younger and more fragile than he had this morning, dwarfed in the queen-sized vintage four-poster Jessie’s parents had left behind when they’d moved away. Chip had found it too “girlie,” and Jessie and Billie already had a king-sized bed, so Petty got this, along with her grandparents’ high-end mattress, Egyptian cotton sheets, lofty pillows, and goose down comforter encased in a silky white duvet.

  “Mommy, I feel like an angel sleeping in the clouds,” she’d told Jessie after her first night in luxurious comfort.

  That’s how Little Boy Blue looks now, curled on his side, sucking his thumb with the comforter bunched in a tiny fist beneath his chin.

  No, not the comforter, she realizes, tiptoeing closer. Petty’s lace-trimmed lavender bathrobe is no longer hanging from the bedpost. He’s hugging it beneath the covers like a security blanket, a satiny scrap held just beneath the slightest hint of an upturn at the corners of his mouth. His features are serene, his breathing hushed and rhythmic.

  She should probably wake him to ensure that he’ll be able to sleep again overnight, but she doesn’t have the heart to rip him from the safe, sweet dreamy haven.

  Let him stay awhile longer. Reality will reclaim him soon enough.

  Jessie tiptoes back out and closes the door quietly after her.

  Barnes gapes at the shaggy-haired, bearded man.

  At a glance, he bears no resemblance to the clean-cut blond Manhattan businessman who’d worn a black custom-made wool suit every day of his life, according to the wife he’d left behind. He’s bare chested, and there’s a tattoo over his heart. The shape isn’t entirely discernable from this shadowy distance, but Barnes knows what it is.

  A horse.

  He impulsively opens his mouth to say something to Wayland, and clamps it shut again. He may not be on the job at the moment, but he’s smarter, better trained, than to allow that mistake. You don’t blindly jump in and engage, not even if you come across the suspect while vacationing in a foreign country several decades after closing a case.

  Yeah. Suspect.

  “It’s not a crime to leave your wife and kids, Barnes,” Stef had told him years ago, and he’d been right. It’s not a crime to leave your family, even for another woman . . .

  However, when that woman is a stone-cold murderer’s daughter for whom you’d do anything . . .

  Kill?

  In the days after Wayland disappeared, evidence had linked him to a deadly homicide spree. Yet even Barnes had thought it was contrived . . .

  Then, anyway.

  And now?

  “Arroz con pollo.” The waiter pounces from the shadows with a steaming plate, utensils, napkins, condiments, yet another beer, which Barnes hadn’t even ordered . . . had he?

  Damn.

  Things are fuzzy, and he needs clarity now more than ever before.

  “Oh,
no!” The waiter has spotted his bandana-wrapped finger and the broken glass on the ground. “Te lastimas!”

  Yes, he tells the young man, he had hurt himself, but he’s fine.

  “Estás seguro?”

  “Yes, I’m sure, really.”

  At the adjacent table, the group is disassembling, preparing to leave. The American’s seat—Perry Wayland’s seat—is already empty, its occupant vanished into the night . . .

  Again.

  In the upstairs bedroom, Amelia unpacks, changes into jeans and a sweater at last, and plugs in her laptop on the desk. She’d meant to get back to her renewed search for Marceline LeBlanc during the bus ride, but instead had spent it staring out the window, brooding about her marriage.

  Toward the end of the trip, she’d finally turned on her phone again, bracing herself for more messages and missed calls from Aaron. She’d been surprised to find that there hadn’t been another word from him. Somehow, that had bothered her more than a follow-up text about the dry cleaner would have.

  The stroll along the familiar Ithaca streets had tamped down her marital unease, but had stirred the memory of an unsettling incident involving Marceline LeBlanc.

  Throughout her childhood, Amelia had dutifully obeyed her parents’ orders to avoid the elderly neighbor. But after Bettina died, she’d befriended the woman. Or had it been the other way around?

  When you’re desperate for answers, you look for meaning where there is mere synchronicity. She knows that, has seen it firsthand with her clients. You can’t entirely trust autobiographical memory to remain unembellished. In her own, Marceline had been a guardian angel of sorts, always around, keeping an eye on things—or maybe just on Amelia. She’d even admitted having witnessed Calvin leaving Park Baptist with a baby on that Mother’s Day in 1968, though she’d claimed to have known nothing more about it.

  In October 1987, Marceline had left New York without warning, never to be seen or heard from again, unless . . .

  Having impulsively run off to Ithaca to hunt down Silas Moss around the same time, Amelia could have sworn . . .

  Come on, that’s even crazier.

  Marceline had told her she was going back home, down south. Amelia couldn’t possibly have glimpsed her here in Ithaca, because that would have meant Marceline had followed her.

  Why would Marceline have followed her?

  It made no sense, unless there had been more to their connection. If, say, the old woman had not only seen Calvin carrying a baby out of the church, but had also seen the person who’d carried her in.

  She’d often had a knowing look in her dark eyes, hadn’t she? And she’d owned a woven basket very similar to the one in which Amelia had been found, hadn’t she?

  Well, hadn’t she?

  Returning downstairs, she traces the carved banister with her fingertips and thinks of Silas Moss. It’s been twenty-nine years since she’d run away from Harlem to Ithaca and turned up unannounced on his doorstep, having seen him on television the night before. Yet no matter how many times she’s visited Jessie and her family here, she always expects to see Si, too—there, by the fireplace with his gray head nodding off over a book or puttering in the kitchen from fridge to stove to sink, whipping up some delicious-only-to-him concoction.

  Tonight, it’s where she finds Jessie, reaching for the faucet to rinse cherry tomatoes. A pumpkin-scented jar candle burns on the windowsill above the wide white porcelain farm sink, its dancing flame reflected in the glass.

  “You look comfy, Mimi. All settled in?”

  “Yes. Billy said to tell you he’s taking a shower, so don’t run the water.”

  She turns it on anyway—not full force, just enough to rinse the tomatoes. The old pipes squeal and groan overhead, and Billy stomps his foot in the upstairs bathroom, where, Amelia knows from experience, his shower has just gone ice-cold.

  “Hey, if you’re going to take a shower while I’m making dinner, that’s what you get!” Jessie tells the ceiling.

  “Guess you guys never did get the plumbing fixed, huh?”

  “Some things never change around here.”

  “Some things do, though. It’s so quiet here now.”

  “I know, right? Too quiet. Empty. I try to convince myself that it’s peaceful, but you know me.”

  Jessie has always thrived on a houseful of noise and chaos and people—her kids, other people’s kids, friends, family, pets, strays . . .

  “I don’t know how she hears herself think in that place,” Aaron had said the first time they’d come to stay—and that was before the extra kids and foster animals.

  “Maybe she doesn’t want to hear herself think.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  No, it wouldn’t, to a person whose thoughts are so streamlined and dispassionate.

  Jessie opens the fridge, rummages around, and then closes it with her hip, arms filled with containers of mesclun lettuce mix, olives, cheese, vegetables, fruit. Amelia helps her set it all out on the counter, helping herself to a couple of distinctly round, deep purple grapes from the cluster.

  The taut skins snap in her mouth, releasing sweet-tart juice, along with some of the day’s tension. “I love Concords. I can’t find them in the city.”

  “Tomorrow you’ll find them in town.”

  “So it’s the Apple and Grape Festival?”

  “It’s the Everything You Ever Wanted to Eat festival.” Jessie flashes her deep dimples. “Tell me about your party last night.”

  “Oh, it was, you know . . . I’d rather not talk about it right now, actually.”

  Jessie hands her a couple of fat pears, a paring knife, and a small cutting board. “Here, slice these. Please,” she adds. “Sorry, guess I even get bossy with houseguests.”

  “You’re allowed when your houseguest shows up unexpectedly with a cat. I would have left him at home, but . . .”

  It isn’t the kind of but she intends to continue.

  Jessie isn’t the kind of friend to let her get away with that.

  “But . . . ?”

  “How thin did you want these sliced?”

  “Medium thin. But . . . ?”

  “Well, Aaron’s allergic.”

  “I know. That didn’t just pop up today.”

  “He’s going away this weekend.”

  “And that just popped up today?”

  “Well, he was supposed to leave Sunday night, but when he found out I was coming here, he changed the flight to tomorrow so that he wouldn’t be home alone all weekend.”

  “Or have to take care of the cat.”

  Amelia shrugs, her marital anxiety bubbling back in.

  “Mimi, you sure you guys are okay?” Jessie asks, arranging cheese slices and crackers on a plate. “And don’t make excuses. It’s me. You can tell me anything.”

  “We’re supposed to be talking about your stuff.”

  “We will. I just worry about you. I feel like I’ve been neglecting you.”

  “Well, I feel the same way about you.” Finished slicing the second pear, she asks what else she can do.

  “Pour us some wine. Glasses are in the cabinet above the sink, corkscrew—”

  “Second drawer.” Amelia opens it.

  “You remembered.”

  “Well, it’s nice to know there’s a place in this world where things stay the same.”

  “You just said it’s different.”

  “The quiet, yes. But the way it looks, and the warm, welcome feeling . . .” She smiles. “That’s the same, Jess.”

  “I’m glad. And I can’t believe you showed up today, because I need you. So there’s a dry red”—she nods at a bottle on the counter—“and I’ve got white in the fridge. But I know you’ve never been a white girl.”

  Amelia has to laugh. “No, that is one thing I never have been.”

  Jessie laughs, too.

  Amelia twists the corkscrew into a bottle of Cabernet, opens it, and pours two glasses.

  Jessie adds the pea
r slices and grapes to the cheese and cracker plate and puts it on the table. “You get to be a guest now. Relax.”

  Amelia sits down with her wine, comparing the outdated kitchen to the sleek modern one being installed in her Manhattan apartment. Somehow, she finds this one more appealing, despite its battle-scarred Formica, linoleum, and dinosaur appliances. Cereal boxes line the top of the fridge, and the front is covered in yellowed, faded crayon drawings secured by magnets.

  Jessie is always talking about wanting to renovate, but they haven’t gotten further than removing the adjacent sunroom’s double French doors to create a wide archway. Amelia had assumed they were aiming to add natural light and open up the dark, cramped space, but Jessie’s motive had been typically frank. “Nah, we’re just getting ready for the kids to be teenagers, so we can spy on them when they’re in there with their friends.”

  In Si’s day, the sunroom had been “the conservatory” and housed only an array of plants that he paid Jessie to water. They invariably drooped and scattered dry, yellowed leaves across the old mosaic floor. Based on that, Amelia would never have pegged her as a future nurturer and nourisher to countless children and animals.

  Watching Jessie chop tomatoes and cucumbers, she says, “You’re so much like your mom—always doing a million things all at once and making it look easy. I can’t believe you’re putting out hors d’oeuvres when you’re in the middle of making dinner and you didn’t even know I was coming.”

  “You call that hors d’oeuvres? Diane would have whipped out shrimp cocktail and baked brie in one of those round bread loaf thingies. With homemade jam. Hey, don’t laugh. You know I’m right.”

  “You’re absolutely right. How are your mom and dad?”

  “You know—perfect, as usual.”

  “Tell me about the new foster child before Theodore comes home. Billy says they don’t get along.”

  “They haven’t even met, actually. I’ve barely met him.” She explains that the child, whom she calls Little Boy Blue, has been sleeping since his arrival this morning.

  “Little Boy Blue? You and your nicknames, Jessie.” Theodore is one of the few people in Jessie’s life whom she hasn’t rechristened—not that she hadn’t tried. But even just shortening his name to Theo hadn’t gone over well.