Dead Silence Read online

  “Nooooo!” Theodore wails, wriggling from her grasp. “It’s not fine! I can’t be here with a cat!”

  “Theodore!” Billy seizes his shoulders. “Open your eyes and look at me. Look at me!”

  He does, trembling, his breath coming hard and fast.

  “I know you’re upset, but that kitten is harmless. It’s the size of your—”

  “Noooooo!”

  “It doesn’t matter how big it is,” Jessie reminds her husband, hugging their son again with her arms wrapped around his thick middle like he’s a life buoy bobbing on that wreckage-strewn sea in her nightmare. “He’s terrified.”

  “I can see that. But he needs to get past this. He can’t go through life freaking out every time—”

  “If he could just ‘get past this,’ he would! And I should have told him about it before he came upstairs,” she says above Theodore’s crying. “You know how he is about animals! You know he has . . . challenges.”

  Of course he knows.

  That’s why, when she’d first brought up the idea of adopting Theodore, he’d asked, “Sure you don’t want to quit while we’re ahead?”

  The words had stung, though she’d secretly wondered the same thing. Not just before—but since, on days when she’s convinced Theodore would have been better off with a younger, more patient mother. Someone who doesn’t come with her own baggage and expectations. Someone who doesn’t know what it’s like to feel like the fifth wheel in a picture-perfect family.

  I got over it. So can you, she finds herself wanting to tell him when he retreats, makes demands, acts out—as though his issues stem not from a medically diagnosed situation, but from resentment, as Jessie’s own had.

  No, Theodore’s situation is different. His teenaged mother hadn’t turned her back on him. She’d loved her son fiercely, had every intention of raising him, and would probably have done a good job of it, had the circumstances been different. She just hadn’t been financially, emotionally, or intellectually equipped to handle a child with his needs.

  But am I?

  Are we?

  Mimi dives into the fray. “Guys, it’s my fault. I shouldn’t have brought the cat without checking first. I’ll get him out of here right away.”

  “That’s crazy! You’re our guest,” Jessie says, “and you’re not going anywhere.”

  “Yes, she is! She wants to go! Let her go!” Theodore protests.

  “Absolutely not! There’s nowhere to go, Mimi, even if we wanted you to!”

  “We want her to, Mom!”

  “Theodore!”

  “No, it’s fine,” Mimi says. “I don’t blame him, and there are plenty of places to stay around here. I’ll find a pet-friendly—”

  “Stop!” Billy shouts. “Everyone! Just stop and listen to me!”

  Even Theodore falls silent.

  “Here’s what’s going to happen. Mimi, you’re not going anywhere. Theodore, you’re going to go into your room and stay there until your mom tells you it’s time for dinner. I’m going to put on some clothes and then I’ll fix the door so that the kitten can’t get out and terrorize anyone.”

  He utters the last part with an undercurrent of sarcasm, for which Jessie forgives him.

  “Okay, good,” she says. “That works. Let’s all just . . .”

  Behind her, a door creaks open. She turns to see a small figure framed in the doorway of Petty’s room. She feels Theodore’s body tense in her arms and looks at Billy. He’s already on the move.

  “Hey, there, Little Boy Blue,” he says, going over to the child.

  He’s just standing there, looking tiny and unnerved, staring at them all with wide, groggy blue eyes.

  “I don’t want him here,” Theodore tells Jessie. He doesn’t shout, but the tone is vehement. “You said no more foster kids!”

  “I did say that. But it was a long time ago. Last night, I said that this is an emergency, and that he needed our help, and that he was coming. And now he’s here.” She keeps one eye on Billy, trying to keep his towel wrapped around his waist as he kneels beside the little boy. It would be comical if there were anything remotely amusing about any of this.

  “I don’t want him to be here. I want him to go away. And the cat. And her.” He shoots an accusatory glare at Mimi.

  “Theodore, that’s enough. I know this isn’t ideal for you, and I’m sorry, but—”

  “This is bad for me. This is . . . it’s so, so bad for me!” He breaks away from her and hurtles himself down the hall to his room, slamming the door after him.

  Jessie exhales.

  Mimi comes to her, putting an arm around her shoulders, leaning her cheek against the top of Jessie’s head.

  “Jess?” Billy asks in a low, composed tone, and she looks over at him.

  He’s crouched beside the little boy, who’s clutching Petty’s lavender robe against his heart. His head is bowed, shoulders hunched up as though he’s trying hard not to cry. Her heart contorts.

  “Listen, I’m going to take Theodore out for a while.”

  “Out . . . where?”

  “To . . . wherever I can buy a doorstop. And then we’ll get something to eat.” Billy sounds like he’s making it up as he goes along.

  “I made dinner . . .”

  “I know. But the caseworker is coming at some point, and I think it’s best if Theodore’s out of the house for that.”

  Her brain flies through various scenarios, none appealing, and she nods. He’s right.

  “That’s a good idea. Can you also pick up some cat food and litter for Clancy?”

  Mimi protests. “You don’t have to do that. I brought—”

  “You’ll need more, though. And that way, Billy can pick up a few things for . . .” She gives a slight nod at Little Boy Blue and then turns to her husband. “Maybe some warm pj’s? Socks? Sweats? Size 3T.”

  He nods, still crouched beside the child.

  Jessie crosses over to Petty’s doorway. “Are you hungry, sweetie? You must be.”

  No reply. He doesn’t lift his head. She sees a wet droplet land on the top of his bare foot.

  “Go, Billy,” she says softly. “I’ve got this.”

  “We’ve got this.” She looks up to see Mimi watching with tears in her own eyes and sends her a grateful smile.

  Barnes toys with his chicken and rice, the fork clutched awkwardly in his wounded hand, thinking about October 1987 and the Wayland case.

  The missing tycoon’s Mercedes had been found on the George Washington Bridge. He wouldn’t have been the first despondent person to kill himself that week, in the wake of Wall Street’s Black Monday. Yet Wayland’s assistant at the hedge fund had sworn he’d seen the market crash coming, and his financial records later revealed that he had indeed avoided catastrophic loss. His family insisted he’d always been terrified of heights and would never have jumped to his death. A tip line offering a large reward had yielded plenty of sightings—on the Long Island Railroad, out in Montauk, on Block Island across the sound.

  Turned out Wayland had escaped his high-maintenance blonde wife and a match set of daughters to run off with his longtime mistress. Not quite the oldest story in the book, but damned close.

  It’s a hell of a lot easier for a gazillionaire to disappear without a trace than for the average man. Especially when he had no qualms about offering the NYPD a bribe to look the other way and the NYPD—Stef, anyway—had no qualms about accepting it.

  And you had no qualms about accepting a cut. For your daughter, to save her life, but still . . .

  If Barnes had known the whole story, known the true identity of Wayland’s mistress—

  “Señor? You don’t like my food?”

  He looks up. A middle-aged man stands beside the table, dressed in sauce-spattered white clothing with a dish towel over his shoulder. He’s holding two open bottles of beer.

  “It’s delicious. Just a little awkward for me to eat it like this.” He holds up the bandana-tied finger. Better to blam
e his lost appetite on the injury than on rattled nerves. The Wayland sighting had conjured a barrage of ugly memories.

  “I am sorry. My son, he should have found bandages for you.”

  “Your son?”

  “The waiter.” He gestures at the young man handing out entrées at a nearby table.

  “No, he was very helpful. I don’t need a bandage. This is fine.” Barnes takes a bite of arroz con pollo. It really is delicious. “Are you the chef?”

  “Si, I am the chef, the owner, the host, the dishwasher, the bartender . . .” He grins, setting one of the beers in front of Barnes.

  “Oh, I didn’t order—”

  “It is on the house, acere.”

  “Gracias.”

  “De nada.” The man holds out a durable-looking brown hand. “I am Miguel Perez. My son, he is also Miguel Perez. You are . . .”

  “Not Miguel Perez,” Barnes says, earning a chuckle as they shake hands. “My name’s Stockton Barnes. Nice to meet you.”

  “And you as well.” Miguel pulls up a chair, takes a sip of the other beer, and pulls a pack of cigarettes from his pocket.

  He offers it to Barnes.

  Man, it’s tempting.

  He shakes his head. “No, thanks. I’d love to, but I quit.”

  “If you love it, why did you quit?”

  “Because it’s not good for me.”

  Miguel waves that off like it isn’t true or doesn’t matter. He lights a cigarette and leans back as if prepared to take a nice long break. A strange thing to do, Barnes thinks, in a restaurant with several occupied tables waiting for their meals. Oh, well. Different country, different culture.

  “So you think you will live forever, eh?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You deny yourself pleasure,” Miguel says, gesturing at his cigarette, “because you believe your lifetime will go on and on and on. What if it does not? What if it ends tomorrow?”

  “My life?”

  “This life. The world. For everyone. Then what?”

  “Then I guess I go to heaven and start chain-smoking Marlboros again,” Barnes says with a grin and sips his beer.

  Miguel isn’t taking this as lightly. “You believe in heaven? You are a religious man, then?”

  “Me? Not anymore,” he admits. Before his father’s death, he’d attended weekly Sunday services with his parents and abuela. “I mean, I believe in God, but I don’t go to church anymore. Although I’ll be going to one here tomorrow. Just sightseeing, though.”

  “Is this your first time in Cuba?”

  Sipping his beer, Barnes nods. “I’ve wanted to visit for years.”

  “Many Americans, they are coming to Cuba now. But I am impressed that you have found your way to Baracoa, acere.”

  “Wish I could take credit, but my friend traced his ancestry here, and I’m traveling with him. In fact, he’s the one who told me to eat at your restaurant.”

  “What is his name?”

  “Rob Owens.”

  “The record producer. The last time he was here, he promised to come back and bring his family. Did they come?”

  “Just his son, Kurtis.”

  “Ah, the candela. El esta flama.”

  “Candela? A candle? He’s on fire?” he translates, puzzled.

  “So you speak Spanish. Here in Cuba, it means troublemaker, messed up. Kurtis, I remember, he is the one who gives his father such problems.”

  Barnes shrugs, wondering how much Rob has shared. “He’s not bad. Just . . . searching. A lot of kids are at that age.”

  “What age is he?”

  “Almost thirty.”

  Miguel nods toward the waiter, bussing a nearby table. “Like my son.”

  “You know, Kurtis was supposed to stop in here earlier. By any chance, did you see him?”

  Miguel is shaking his head even before Barnes describes him.

  “So then you didn’t see him.”

  “He was not here.” Miguel’s succinct tone invites Barnes to note the difference. “When the tourists come, I will know them.”

  “Like me.”

  “Si.”

  Maybe everyone gets a cerveza on the house. Barnes drinks some, considering. “So the locals . . . you know them, too, then? Everyone?”

  “Si.”

  Pointing at the empty table, he says, “There was a group of men here before, sitting right there. Do they live here in Baracoa?”

  “Si.” This time, Miguel says it with a faint glimmer of mistrust in his eyes.

  Barnes rethinks the question he’d been about to ask. “One of them gave me this bandana. I want to buy him a new one. Do you know where I can find him?”

  “Give it to me, and I will give it to him.”

  “I’d like to thank him in person. Does he come in every day?”

  “Some days.”

  “And his friends . . . one is American?”

  Miguel regards him through a cloud of smoke, and shrugs. “I did not see who was here.”

  Sure you did. You said you know everyone.

  Do you know everyone’s secrets?

  “I just thought I might have recognized him,” Barnes goes on. “Do you know his name?”

  “I did not see who was here,” Miguel repeats. He stubs out his cigarette and gets to his feet, excusing himself to go back to work.

  Barnes raises the beer bottle and thanks him again, watching him disappear into the kitchen.

  He might simply be protecting Wayland because Barnes is an outsider, asking too many questions.

  But Barnes wouldn’t bet on it.

  Chapter Ten

  Sitting across the kitchen table from Jessie with Little Boy Blue between them on a plastic booster seat, Amelia forces salad and chicken past the lump in her throat. It’s not that the food is inedible. It is, in fact, delicious.

  Jessie has always been a good cook—though not, she’ll say if you compliment her, as good a cook as Diane. After all these years, she continues to refer to her adoptive mother by her first name when talking about her, but never to her face. Same with her father—he’s Al, unless he’s present.

  “Why do you only call your parents ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’ when you’re with them?” Amelia had asked her when they were young.

  “Because it matters to them. In my head, they’re Diane and Al, because I know I have other parents somewhere out there. It’s how I keep them separate, for myself.”

  Yeah. That made a skewed kind of sense to the two of them, in their strange little corner of the world.

  And then there were three.

  She and Jessie limit their dinner conversation to small talk—the food, the weather, Ithaca. Little Boy Blue still hasn’t uttered a sound and gives no indication that he’s listening, but he might be.

  Watching him gobble his second helping of buttered egg noodles as though he’s never tasted anything so delicious before, Amelia wonders whether that might be the case.

  Having never had children of her own, she’s no expert, but circumstances aside, it seems likely that he hasn’t led a happy-go-lucky existence until now. Pale, fragile, and skittish, he regards everything and everyone around him with a mixture of curiosity, circumspection, and fear.

  He’d allowed Jessie to lead him to the kitchen but had shrunk from Amelia’s attempts to engage him while Jessie was cooking. He’d stolen glances at her, though, and she’d caught him sneaking peeks at the cheese plate as well, though he’d refused to eat anything from it. He had, however, guzzled several glasses of milk before the food was ready, though he didn’t seem to know what to do when Jessie set the first before him.

  “It’s a sippy cup, see?” She’d demonstrated how to use the spout, and he’d waited for her to turn her back before mimicking the action.

  Such a basic element of American childhood, yet it was clearly a foreign object to him.

  “Do you want some more?” Jessie asks as he sets down his fork, having cleaned his plate again.

  He just looks at h
er and sticks his thumb into his mouth again, Petty’s lace-trimmed lavender bathrobe clasped in his fist.

  “How about dessert? Chocolate pudding?” Jessie gets up, and returns with a snack-sized plastic pudding cup and spoon. She peels back the lid and holds it out to the boy. “Here, sweetie. This is—”

  He gasps and jumps back as if from a hairy black spider.

  “It’s yummy, see?” Jessie raises the spoon to her lips, pretending to eat some, making num-num-num sounds. She starts to offer it again, and this time he throws up his arms to protect himself, trembling.

  “Okay, it’s okay. I’m so sorry, sweetheart.” Jessie throws the pudding into the garbage and the spoon into the sink and looks at Amelia with a slight shake of her head. What nightmare might a cup of pudding have conjured?

  “How about some TV?” Jessie asks.

  No reaction.

  “Or maybe you’d like to play with some toys?”

  Nothing.

  “You actually have toys for him, Jess?”

  “I have everything. I always thought we’d have another little one around here.”

  “Foster child? Or . . . wait, you’re not pregnant, are you?”

  “Pregnant!” She laughs heartily.

  Amelia joins in. Jessie still has the best, most contagious laugh in the world.

  The child looks up, startled by the outburst. After a moment, his lips curve. The expression is tentative, and fleeting, but it’s definitely a smile.

  Ah, progress.

  “Come on, kiddo. You need to have some fun.” Jessie leads him to the sunroom and flips a couple of switches. Lamplight glares off three walls of paned glass casement windows. Amelia recognizes the overstuffed floral print sofa and entertainment armoire from Jessie’s parents’ old living room next door.

  Clearing the table, she keeps an eye on the sunroom. Jessie tunes the TV to a children’s program with an obnoxiously lively host whose every comment is punctuated by boing boing sound effects.

  The child shudders, hiding his face.

  “Yeah, I don’t blame you, kiddo. Here, let’s find a cartoon . . .”

  The more she channel surfs, the more frightened he appears, and she clicks off the television.

  “It’s okay. There are plenty of other things to do.”