Dead Silence Read online

  “I didn’t tell her. I couldn’t say a word, Jess. I—” Hearing the click of an incoming call on Jessie’s end, she asks, “Do you have to get that?”

  “It’s just Billy. Probably telling me he’s late coming home, which . . . yeah, I figured that out two hours ago. I’ll call him back. Anyway, why didn’t you tell her?”

  “Because I was shocked. She was basically sitting there holding my ring telling me my own story. She said she’d been abandoned as a little girl, and that she’d been wearing the ring the day she was found.”

  “In New York?”

  “Connecticut. She was three or four at the time, she said. She’s in her late twenties now—maybe.”

  “Maybe,” Jessie echoes.

  Most foundlings never know the precise date or circumstances of their own birth. Amelia celebrates hers on the anniversary of the date Calvin Crenshaw, a quiet, hardworking church janitor, had found infant Amelia in a basket in Harlem’s Park Baptist Church. He’d brought her home to Bettina, and they’d kept her, passed her off as their own.

  Every year since 1987, Jessie has called her on May 12 to sing “Happy Maybe Birthday to You, Happy Maybe Birthday to You . . .”

  “So, Mimi, this Lily person came to you to find her birth parents?”

  “Yes, and all I could think was, ‘How did you get my ring?’”

  “I can’t believe you didn’t ask her.”

  “What good would that do? What more could she have told me? It’s not like she knows where the ring came from. She doesn’t even know where she came from. But if I can help her figure it out, it might tell me something about my past, too.”

  “That’s why you should have said something.”

  “The last thing I want to do is scare her off by making a bizarre accusation—”

  “Claim, Mimi. Not accusation. Having your ring isn’t a crime.”

  “No, I know. But my new clients are fragile. They’ve already been through the worst kind of emotional upheaval. They don’t need me to add my own to the mix, or complicate matters.”

  “Have you thought about . . . I mean, she could have been playing you.”

  Amelia stops walking.

  The person behind her slams into her. The hit isn’t nearly as jarring as Jessie’s comment.

  “Playing me? What do you mean?”

  “You’re on TV, Mimi. How many people know about your ring?”

  “I’ve never once mentioned it on the show, or even that I’m a foundling. I’m there as a consultant, not to tell my own story.”

  “No, but people see it. That info is on your website.”

  “That I’m a foundling, yes. But nothing about the ring.”

  “Well, have you ever put the information out there on any database or social media?”

  “Yes, I put it out there in the ad, but that was eight years ago.”

  “Ad?”

  “Aaron and I placed it on the Lost and Foundlings website. I must have told you about it.” Jessie is her prime confidante when it comes to life-changing moments, day-to-day minutia, and everything between.

  “Eight years ago—2008? That’s when Theodore came along. I couldn’t keep track of what was going on in my own life, let alone anyone else’s.”

  She tells Jessie about the advertisement, which had offered a significant reward for information leading to her birth parents.

  “If you mentioned the ring in the ad, what makes you think this Lily Tucker didn’t know that when she came to see you?”

  Amelia pushes aside misgiving, reminding herself that she’d taken precautions. She isn’t stupid. Like a cop withholding crime scene specifics from the press, she’d kept a key detail to herself.

  “I’m a good judge of character, Jessie. She’s not playing me.”

  “I hope not. I just worry that you’re too vulnerable and trusting. Someone might take advantage of you.”

  “You worry that I’m too vulnerable and trusting?” Amelia laughs, shaking her head. “Hey, I’m the New Yorker here.”

  “Yeah, but I’m the one with the edge. You say it all the time.”

  “I used to say it, when we were younger. Not anymore.” Marriage, motherhood, and career have softened Jessie. She’s the kind of woman who doles out therapy on her own time and fosters children and strays.

  “Just tread carefully, Mimi. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “I always do.”

  “Not always. Not when it comes to the past. Sometimes, you have to let it be and focus on the present.”

  “Easier said than done.”

  “I know, but—” Her phone clicks with another incoming call. “Crap, it’s Billy again.”

  “Better get it.”

  “Okay, hang on.”

  “No, I’ll let you go. I’m about to meet Aaron,” she says, though she still has quite a ways to go before she reaches Sutton Place.

  But she can’t take up any more of Jessie’s time. Or maybe she just doesn’t want to hear any more cautionary advice or doubt that the tiny gold ring is the same one Amelia had lost in Harlem decades ago, and that Lily Tucker is exactly who she claims to be.

  A few hours after checking in to the oceanfront Cuban hotel, Barnes looks at Rob lounging beside him in a low sand chair, puffing a cigar. “You were right, amigo.”

  “You mean acere. That’s amigo here.”

  “Amigo is Spanish.”

  “Yeah, but there’s Spanish-Spanish and then there’s Cuban-Spanish,” Rob tells him. “You’ll see. So what was I right about, acere?”

  “That this place is incredible. I’m never going back. I’m staying right here.”

  “In Cuba?”

  “In this chair. On this beach. With this . . . what do you call this?” He holds up the hollowed-out coconut.

  Rob peers into his own coconut. “Beats the hell out of me. I’m pretty sure it’s got papaya in it.”

  “And rum, and . . . definitely rum.”

  “Rum. Oh, yeah. Whole lotta rum.” Rob sips his drink, dribbling a few drops onto his bare torso.

  Barnes watches him swab his lean, sculpted abs with a corner of beach towel. “You sure did get rid of that beer gut you were lugging around. You are cut, brother.”

  “It’s the climbing wall. I’m thinking of putting one in at the house. You should try it.”

  “Yeah, I don’t think it’ll fit in my apartment.”

  Rob smirks. “I mean climbing.”

  “No, thanks.” Rob is one of those people who is forever throwing himself headlong into some newly discovered passion, and wants everyone else—or at least, Barnes—to join him. “Like I said, all I need from here on in is rum, and . . . what’s the other thing?”

  “Women? Song?”

  “Women are nothing but trouble. Song—that’s your thing, not mine. Me, I just need rum and this view.”

  “If you think this is magnificent, you just wait till tomorrow.”

  They’re only spending this first night in Santa Maria del Mar, just outside Havana. In the morning, they’re flying on to Baracoa, a remote eastern coastal town that lies in the shadow of a mountain Barnes has no intention of climbing.

  “You’ve got to check out the view from the summit of El Yunque. You’ll think you died and went to heaven.”

  “Put me on a mountain after all this rum, and I won’t just be thinking it, I’ll be doing it. How ’bout I just take your word for it, Spider-Man?” He sips his drink into a final slurp and looks around for Luis.

  When they’d first wandered out to the beach, they’d been taken aback to find a twelve-year-old serving drinks. But Luis seems pretty happy-go-lucky. Even happier and luckier after Rob handed him a hundred-dollar tip to set them up with the sand chairs at the water’s edge and fetch a trio of cocktails from the pool bar.

  The third chair has remained empty, and Barnes and Rob had split the drink meant for Kurtis. He’d said he would come down in a little while, but that had been a long while ago.

  Over by the p
ool, Luis is shooting the warm, briny, flower-scented breeze with Ana Benita, the gorgeous brunette female bartender, and a suave older gentleman with a thin mustache.

  Barnes had shaved his around the same time he’d quit smoking. Now he’s rethinking both those decisions. Rethinking everything.

  He lifts his coconut cup and waggles two fingers at Luis. The boy nods, grins, and says something to Ana Benita. She turns and gives Barnes a languid, appreciative look, as women tend to do.

  That’s not his ego’s perception, just the story of a life in which nothing has ever come easily, except the opposite sex.

  He turns back to gaze out at the water. It shimmers gold in the late day sun, dotted with fishing boats, battered buoys, and fat white floating seabirds. “Geez. Remember New York?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It sucks, doesn’t it? Why does anyone even live there? Why doesn’t everyone just . . .” He gestures with his coconut. “. . . live here?”

  “Plenty of people do.”

  “Everyone should. I should.”

  “Your apartment is in New York. Your job is in New York. Your whole life is—”

  “My whole life isn’t my apartment and my job. There are other apartments. Other jobs. Other places.”

  “Placessesssss?” Rob mocks his slur.

  “Come on, I’m serious.” Sssssseriousssss . . .

  Yeah, he’s well on his way to wasted.

  “I get it, man. I told you, the first time I came to Cuba, I felt this kinship. And now that I know what I know about my family here?” Rob pauses to exhale a pungent Cohiba cloud. “I just want to keep digging and finding surprises.”

  A year ago, one of Rob’s hip-hop musician pals had done a guest segment on a genealogy television show The Roots and Branches Project. He’d introduced Rob to the host, Nelson Roger Cartwright, and the next thing you knew, Rob was taping an episode himself.

  “I don’t know if it’s kinship I’m feeling,” Barnes says, stretching his legs so that the turquoise tide licks his bare toes. “I’d say it’s just more of a buzz.”

  “Yeah, that, too. But you’ve got roots here, just like me. And in this life, there’s nothing more important than that. It’s like I keep trying to tell Kurtis. You’ve got to know where you belong. Know who you are. Why you are.”

  Barnes remains silent, thinking of his daughter. What if she decides to find out who she is?

  Why she is?

  Two strangers walk into a bar . . .

  If there’s anything his work has taught him, it’s that some family mysteries are better left unsolved.

  “What about that DNA test I gave you for Christmas?” asks Rob, whose newfound fascination had him handing out genealogy kits last December like a mall Santa with candy canes.

  Barnes shifts in his chair. Speak of the devil.

  The devil being the vial into which he’d finally spit a saliva sample after Rob had nagged him about it all year.

  “I can’t believe you’re bringing that up again,” Barnes says. “You know damned well it could open the door to all kinds of complications for me.”

  “You’re worried there might be a twenty-nine-year-old girl—woman—out there looking for you, right? But this is about finding your ancestors, not your descendants finding you.”

  “No, that’s what it’s about for you because you know where your descendants are. They know where you are. You married their mother. It’s different for me.”

  “You don’t want to be found, then, is that it?”

  “No. I mean . . . I don’t know if I do. But once my DNA is out there, I can’t change my mind.”

  “You’re crazy, Barnes. Your kid is Kurtis’s age. All they care about is right here, right now. Themselves. If your kid wanted to find you, she’d have done it a long time ago. She doesn’t need to order some fancy science kit. It’s not like you’re hiding. You have the same name, live in the same city, have the same job.”

  True.

  But . . .

  “I’d be a lot easier to find if my DNA is in a public database.”

  “So you’re going to let that stop you from finding out where you came from.”

  “What I want to know is where I’m going . . . and right now, I’m not interested in going anywhere at all.” He wiggles his toes in the warm seawater. Somewhere down the beach, a guitarist is picking out “Guantanamera,” faint strains rising and falling between the waves. “Anyway, I already know my father’s family was Cuban and Jamaican. My mother’s ancestors came from Africa in the 1800s.”

  “Not by choice.”

  Barnes shakes his head. “No, definitely not.”

  During Rob’s episode of The Roots and Branches Project, he’d wept when the show’s genealogist presented him with antebellum records revealing that his third great-grandfather had been sold at a Georgia auction to a Virginia plantation owner in 1858. He’d been twelve years old, and had never seen his parents and siblings again.

  “I know it’s tough, brother, to face what our ancestors went through,” he tells Barnes. “But don’t you think you owe it to them to find them? I can put you in touch with the investigative genealogist I worked with on the show. She specializes in this stuff.”

  “Thanks, but no thanks. I spend every working day of my life looking for real people. I’m not interested in adding more to the list, especially when they’ve been dead for a hundred years, and I’m not getting paid for it.”

  “All I’m saying is that you should—”

  “Rob! Enough.” He shoots him a sideways glance. “Anyway, I already sent in the sample over the summer.”

  “Well, great! Good for you!” Rob pats his arm. “Did you get your results yet?”

  “No. When I do, I’ll let you know. Until then, case closed.” Barnes leans back, feet digging into the wet sand until the tide swings in to wash it out from beneath them, exposing his toes and scattering shell shards in its wake. He scoops up a small, intact white one.

  “That’s a conch,” Rob tells him. “The meat makes great fritters. We can get some for dinner at a little paladar I know, just down the beach.”

  A paladar, Barnes has learned, is a family-owned restaurant here in Cuba, as opposed to those that are run by the government.

  He runs his fingertips along the shell’s satiny pink lining, wondering whether its former occupant had chosen to move on, or been deep fried and served with dipping sauce.

  Wondering whether his daughter might one day, years from now, care about her roots. She’ll find him, or maybe just his name on a splintered branch of her family tree.

  He shoves the shell into his pocket and the thought to the back of his mind as Luis arrives with the round of fresh rum drinks. Chatting with him in Spanish, Barnes learns that he doesn’t have a mother, and his fisherman father is gone for days at a time. At twelve, he’s pretty much on his own.

  Barnes watches him walk away like he hasn’t a care in the world.

  “Maybe it really is time to get out of New York.”

  “You gave Sully hell when she left.”

  Sully—Sullivan Leary, his former partner.

  “We’re not talking about Sully. She moved to the middle of nowhere. This is somewhere.”

  He gestures at the wide beach, bordered by a stretch of pastel hotels populated by tourists and locals who’d spent the afternoon swimming and sunning nearby. Now that they’ve gone, it’s peaceful, cast in a haze of late day sun and rum. Paradise. Not like Main Street, USA, where his former partner now lives, that’s for damned sure.

  “You know what I think, Barnes? I think you wish you’d gone with her.”

  “Okay, number one”—he counts off on his index finger—“this isn’t about her and I don’t wish that because the woman drove me crazy. She’s nothing but trouble. And number two—”

  “See, you admit it! She drove you crazy.”

  “Not in a good way.”

  “Yeah, in a bad one. You wanted her, bad.”

  Barnes goes on
, talking over him, “And (B) she didn’t ask me. And I wouldn’t have if she had.”

  “B? You mean, two.”

  “Right. She didn’t ask me to.”

  Rob grins. “You, my friend, are wasted.”

  Maybe. But Barnes doesn’t want to think about Sully or the life he left behind. He’s finally found the kind of place where you can lose yourself. Right now, that sounds like a damned good idea.

  Chapter Four

  “Sergeant Hanson?”

  The attending physician emerges from behind the curtain and strides toward him. She’s petite, with a bouncy black ponytail, and had introduced herself on her way in. What was her name? Dr. . . . something.

  He stands, wiping chocolate-flecked golden crumbs from his navy uniform pants, almost expecting a reprimand from the physician. But she’s not Dr. Varma, the cardiologist who’s been keeping tabs on him since his chest pain episode just after Labor Day. This woman’s only concern is the little boy on the other side of the curtain.

  “How is he, Dr. . . . ?” He can’t make out the name tag on her blue scrubs. Something that begins with a B. Maybe an E.

  “Handler.”

  H? He squints at her name tag. Still looks like a B or an E to him.

  Terrific. His eyesight is going, along with his memory and his ticker. Possibly his hearing as well. He can’t always make out what sportscasters and actors are saying on TV, but Stevie Nicks’s throaty voice is loud and clear in his head, crooning about how time makes you bolder and children get older. He’s always loved that song, but hadn’t grasped the lyrics until he’d turned fifty last year.

  At this age, his own father only had a few years left. He, too, had been an accomplished athlete before the pounds piled on. He, too, had been a cop with the Ithaca Police Department.

  You have to take care of yourself. No more candy bars.

  He tucks the wrapper into his pocket with a mental note to toss it before he gets home. He knows what his wife would have to say about the candy bar he just scarfed down. But it’s long past suppertime, he’s famished, and the lunch she’d packed him had consisted of fewer green grapes than he has fingers, and a Tupperware container filled with what appeared to be wilted weeds. Plus, seriously, how often do you find a Zagnut in a vending machine?