Lost Girls.

Robert Kolker.

DEDICATION.

For Kirsten.

AUTHOR'S NOTE.

Lost Girls is a work of nonfiction about five women connected to the same criminal investigation-the case of a suspected serial killer or killers operating in Long Island from 1996 until the present day. The narrative is based on hundreds of hours of interviews with the victims' friends, family members, acquaintances, neighbors, and members of law enforcement. No scenes were invented. All events and dialogue not witnessed firsthand are based on personal accounts and published reports. For reasons of privacy, the names of some children have been changed, as have the names of four adults: "Blake," "June," "Teresa," and "Jordan."

PROLOGUE.

To most travelers, the barrier islands of Long Island are just a featureless stretch between Jones Beach and Fire Island-a narrow strip of marsh and dune, bramble and beach, where the gra.s.sy waters of South Oyster Bay meet the waves of the Atlantic Ocean. The main artery of the barrier islands, Ocean Parkway, is long and straight and often empty at night-a drag racer's dream. A driver can see little more than the beach heather or bayberry tangled thick and high on the shoulders of the highway. Fifteen miles of darkness surrounds pa.s.sing vehicles like a tunnel, and the headlights of other cars are visible for miles down the straightaway. You can tell when you're alone.

Late on a warm night in May 2010, just after one A.M., Michael Pak weaved his black Ford Explorer around the traffic circle surrounding the elegant brick spire marking Jones Beach and shot out the other side on Ocean Parkway. From Manhattan, he was heading east on the straightaway, pa.s.sing right by the best-kept secret of the barrier islands, Gilgo Beach: a surfing mecca in the sixties, until erosion ruined the waves. Just before he reached the Fire Island turnoff, his GPS guided him off Ocean Parkway and down an unlit, unmarked side access road. The sign on the turnoff read OAK BEACH. In the backseat sat a young woman with chestnut hair streaked blond. Her name was Shannan Gilbert.

They moved slowly now in the dark. The narrow road was overgrown with Virginia creeper and shining sumac and poison ivy. Outside, the air was spongy and salty, and the hum of the car was drowned in the whir of insects. Through some pine trees on the left, they both could see the rushing glow of cars speeding by on the highway. Through the brush on the right were the lights of a house-the only indication that anyone lived at the end of the road.

After half a mile, Michael pulled up to a white gatehouse decorated with a wooden model of a lighthouse and, a few yards beyond the gate, a blue wooden sign that read OAK ISLAND BEACH a.s.sOCIATION EST. 1896 in the kind of gold cursive lettering you might find on the side of a sloop. Where the gatehouse once had an attendant was now a metal box with a keypad. Michael didn't know the code. Neither did Shannan. Michael dialed a number on his phone and, a moment later, another SUV-this one white-approached the gate from the other side.

The driver's door opened. Out stepped a middle-aged man with a potbelly and a wavy mess of dark hair. The man waved, jogged a few feet up to the gatehouse, and punched in four digits, smiling over at them.

The gate swung up. The Explorer rolled through, and Michael waited for the man to get back in his car before following him down a path he hadn't seen, back toward the house with the light.

Gus Coletti is shaving. He is eighty-six years old, a grandparent, long retired. He and his wife, Laura, are up early in their small wood-frame house in Oak Beach to head upstate to a car show. He hears pounding on his front door. He opens up and sees a girl with chestnut hair. In her hand is a cell phone.

The girl is shrieking. The only word Gus can make out is "help." Those who have heard the 911 recording say it sounds as if Gus never let her inside, though he will later insist that he did. In any case, all it takes to send her running away is Gus saying he's going to call the police.

The girl trips down the porch stairs. Gus heads outside, staying on the porch, watching as the girl beats on a few more doors, then finds a hiding place behind the small boat just outside his house. Both he and the girl see the lights of a truck coming down the Fairway toward them. When the car stops, he can see it more clearly-a black Ford Explorer with a young Asian driver.

The SUV slows to a stop. Gus comes down from the porch to talk with him. As soon as the girl sees that the driver is distracted, she bolts out past the headlights, across the road, and into the darkness.

Gus's driveway is just a few dozen yards from the Oak Beach gatehouse. The way out of the gated community is just yards away, plain to see, but the girl doesn't head in that direction. Instead, she runs down another road, Anchor Way, to knock on another door-that of Wanda Housman-but again, there is no answer. She keeps on running, a hundred more yards, to a street called the Bayou. Barbara Brennan hears the knocking, and she even sees the girl, notices her frantically fiddling with her cell phone. She calls out, but the girl doesn't respond, and Brennan doesn't open the door. Instead, like Gus before her, she calls 911. The girl runs.

When the police finally arrive-about forty-five minutes after Gus Coletti's and Barbara Brennan's 911 calls-the officer talks to the neighbors but doesn't get much of anywhere. It isn't the least bit clear what has happened here or what is to be done. Both the car and the girl are gone.

Seven months later, over three rainy days in December, police uncovered the bodies of four women in the bramble on the side of Ocean Parkway on Gilgo Beach, three miles from where Shannan Gilbert disappeared. Detectives thought at least one of them had to be Shannan. They were wrong. There was Maureen Brainard-Barnes, last seen at Penn Station in Manhattan three years earlier in 2007, and Melissa Barthelemy, last seen in the Bronx in 2009. There was Megan Waterman, last seen leaving a hotel in Hauppauge, Long Island, just a month after Shannan in 2010-and, a few months later that same year, Amber Lynn Costello, last seen leaving a house in West Babylon, Long Island. Like Shannan, they all were pet.i.te and in their twenties. Like Shannan, they all came from out of town to work as escorts. Like Shannan, they all advertised on Craigslist and its compet.i.tor, Backpage.

It had seemed enough, at first, for some to say the victims were all just Craigslist hookers, practically interchangeable-lost souls who were dead, in a fashion, long before they actually disappeared. There is a story our culture tells about people like them, a conventional way of thinking about how young girls fall into a life of prost.i.tution. But that story, in the Internet age, is quickly becoming outmoded. Shannan, Maureen, Melissa, Megan, and Amber took part in a modern age of prost.i.tution in which clients are lured with the simple tap of a computer keyboard rather than the exhausting, demeaning ritual of walking the streets. The method is easier, seductively so, almost like an ATM-post an ad, and the phone rings seconds later-but also deceptive about its dangers. They each made the decision to have s.e.x for money for intensely personal reasons: acceptance, adventure, success, love, power. They kept working, often, for reasons even they didn't comprehend. And they traveled in worlds that many of their loved ones could not imagine.

When they disappeared, only their families were left to ask what became of them. Few others seemed to care, not even the police. That all changed once the bodies were found on Gilgo Beach. Then, a few miles from where Shannan had last been seen alive, the police flailed, the body count increased, the public took notice, and the neighbors began pointing fingers. There, in a remote community out of sight of the beaches and marinas scattered along the South Sh.o.r.e barrier islands, the women's stories finally came together, now all part of the same mystery.

BOOK ONE.

I.

MAUREEN.

Hi! I'm Maureen! I'm calling from Atlantic Security! We have an offer right now-this is not a sales call-we're offering a free month for a demo, a free in-home estimate . . .

Maureen Brainard-Barnes was winsome and girlish, with porcelain skin, dark tousled hair, and green eyes that shifted to blue and gray and back-depending, it seemed, on her mood. Sara Karnes was blond and plump, with a dimpled chin and intense green eyes of her own. As employees at the same telemarketing company, they clicked right away-jabbering with each other over the cubicle walls, getting yelled at by their boss about how they were supposed to be making calls, and snapping back: "We are making calls! The computer makes calls for us. When we hear a pickup, we shut up!"

Groton, Connecticut, is an industrial port town of forty-five thousand on the Thames River and the northern reaches of the Long Island Sound, once known for manufacturing submarines and now better known for the nearby Indian casinos. Atlantic Security's office of ten cubicles was housed away from the water, in a storefront in the middle of a shopping strip on what the locals called Hamburger Hill-a spur of Route 95 with Burger King, Wendy's, and McDonald's. Sara had been working there for a few weeks when Maureen arrived, right before Christmas in 2006. After Maureen's first few days making cold calls, chirping from a prepared script about protecting your family and safeguarding your property, Sara decided that she was different from the others. Maureen might not have been happy there, but at least she wasn't actively hostile. She didn't act like she was risking her soul on the outcome of her calls. She smiled.

Sara soon learned that she and Maureen had a lot in common. They were the same age, twenty-four, and had gone to the same high school in Groton, Robert E. Fitch. They didn't remember each other. Sara had gone there only briefly, transferred there after being expelled from a Catholic school for playing a minor prank. Maureen, only a little less wild, left when she was sixteen to have a baby and never went back. She had two children now, each with a different father. The job had come in the nick of time: Unable to afford a place of her own, Maureen had crashed at the home of her little sister for a few months, then moved into a place in Norwich paid for by her son's father. Maureen told Sara she didn't like being so dependent on her ex. She complained about her roommate, who Maureen a.s.sumed had been asked to keep an eye on her. In this respect, too, Sara saw something of herself in Maureen. Both women were a little irresponsible and unselfconscious and more than a little annoyed by those who would hold them down.

As precarious as Maureen's situation seemed, it was far better than Sara's. Sara and her boyfriend were staying in a hotel room paid for with the two hundred dollars a week Sara made at Atlantic Security. When they couldn't afford food, they made the rounds at soup kitchens and food banks. Still, Sara had one thing that Maureen didn't: a car. Sara drove a '93 aqua pearl Chrysler LeBaron GTC, a gift from her mother. Carved into the driver's-side door was the word wh.o.r.e, a message to Sara from one of her boyfriend's bitter exes. Maureen thought that was funny. So did Sara. Soon after they met, Maureen, not wanting to b.u.m rides from her ex any more than she had to, asked Sara for a ride home after work in the wh.o.r.e-mobile. Sara said yes. From then on, Maureen had transportation every night.

Both women had been told that Atlantic Security offered seasonal work only; full-timers, of course, would have been ent.i.tled to health benefits. Sara was let go shortly after New Year's. A month or so later, Maureen was let go. Maureen and Sara kept in touch. Sara started working at McDonald's, but the money she made didn't cover her room. Sara's boyfriend moved in with an aunt, and Sara moved in with her McDonald's boss and his girlfriend. She was an inch away from homelessness. That was when Maureen stepped in with an offer.

"I need a driver," she said. "This guy wants a ma.s.sage."

"You're a ma.s.seuse?" Sara asked.

Maureen smiled. "Yeah."

Take the Long Hill Road exit off of 95 in Connecticut and curl south toward downtown Groton and you'll find, not far from Atlantic Security, each of the places, still standing, that briefly employed Maureen Brainard-Barnes. There's the Blimpie not far from the T. J. Maxx and the AutoZone and the Stop & Shop. And Cory's gas station, where she worked behind a Chester's chicken counter, making the JoJo's-what the locals call potato wedges. And the Groton Shopping Plaza, with the Groton Cinema 6 where she picked up discarded snacks from the carpet in exchange for free admission and a bag of popcorn.

Before the mid-nineties, when Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun came to this part of Connecticut, Groton was a two-company town. There was the navy submarine base-where, depending on the geopolitical situation of the moment, Tomahawk missiles would roll in and out after dark, for nights on end-and there was Pfizer. Scientists filled the wealthier suburbs like Mystic, home of the upper middle cla.s.s, or "stuck-up rich people," as Maureen's family put it. They avoided Mystic much of the time, just as they avoided the town on the other side, New London, where the gangs lived. Groton was in the middle-and in Groton, if you weren't navy, you didn't have anything.

Maureen grew up in a three-bedroom apartment in a federally subsidized housing development called Poquonnock Village. Each day her mother, Marie Ducharme, would walk two miles to clean rooms at a motel on the side of another highway off of 95; she would have driven, but the car almost never started. Maureen knew her father, but Bob Senecal, who stayed with them only from time to time, was just like Maureen-mellow though a little immature, not one to take life too seriously, quick with the Beavis and b.u.t.thead imitations. Bob worked in lumber, mostly, and a little as a mechanic. He was the one the kids would turn to if they had a question about Middle Earth. Marie, meanwhile, was short-tempered-understandably so, considering the whole family's fate rested on her shoulders. Bob treasured solitude, and he liked to go on long walks that gave him the chance to think. It was on one of those walks that he died a few years later, in 2003, on Maureen's twenty-first birthday. He was walking on a train trestle late at night, tripped, and drowned in the shallow water where he had fallen.

Maureen's mother stopped cleaning motel rooms when she became one of the first employees of Mohegan Sun. A new job as a slot attendant helped her afford the down payment on a car, a tan Ford Taurus, which allowed her to drive to a second job cleaning offices. From that point on, she was almost never home. Maureen and her younger sister and brother, Missy and Will, would take care of one another. Each week their mother bought a new stack of frozen meals, Ellio's pizza, and chicken cutlets that the children would heat up for dinner. They were left on their own to explore the woods behind the apartment complex, to pick berries and walk on railroad tracks when they weren't supposed to, to run from the police when they were spotted. Some evenings, Maureen would sneak Missy and Will into American Billiards to shoot pool and drink, or they would play with an old football in the big field right next to the apartment building. In warmer weather, they would climb on top of the sheds filled with lawn-maintenance equipment and just sit there staring up at the sky.

While her sister and brother spent a lot of time playing sports, Maureen looked inward. She would remember her dreams and scribble them down in a marble-covered notebook, and she used her Mys.p.a.ce page to let others know of moments when she sensed things happening before they happened: the death of her grandmother, a friend scorching herself with a cigarette lighter. She felt somehow anointed, in touch with things that others couldn't see. Her writing helped her arrive at some central questions: Is heaven a physical place or just a state of mind? Tell me what you think. She turned to certain books for answers. The book of Revelations fascinated her for a while. Later on, The Da Vinci Code became a sacred text for her, along with anything about the Illuminati. From there, she moved on to anything about the supernatural. Maureen believed that the answers to most of life's mysteries were attainable to anyone who sought them out. She told Missy and Will about what she read and learned, lecturing and making connections right before their eyes. Sometimes they believed, too.

Although school was easy for Maureen, she would rather read all day than be there. That changed when she started getting attention from boys. Maureen had never been a makeup-and-accessories girl, but she developed curves and b.r.e.a.s.t.s early. She didn't need makeup to be noticed, and by the time she started at Fitch High School, she was reveling in the attention. Where she once was pensive and introverted, now she was impetuous and needy. If she walked into a room, friends said, she made sure the boys knew it, and she ignored the girls. Jealous girls targeted her, and when they started fights, she withdrew again. She stopped going to school for a while, long enough for her mother to make an issue of it, and the two of them fought. Maureen left school for good when she was sixteen, as soon as she learned she was pregnant.

She had been with her boyfriend, Jason Brainard-Barnes, for just six months, but they were in love. He asked her to marry him, and she said yes. A justice of the peace performed a brief ceremony at a courthouse in 1999, after Maureen delivered their daughter, Caitlin. They moved into Jason's grandparents' place in Pawtucket, and then they went south for two years when Jason enlisted in the army. Shortly after they returned, the marriage fell apart, but there were no fights and no lawyers. Without drawing up papers, they decided that Caitlin would live most of the time at her father's place in Mystic, where the schools were better.

Maureen moved in with her sister, Missy, and her children in a low-income housing development in Groton called Branford Manor-once considered a grand experiment in suburban public housing, but by then another anonymous project in a struggling town. The three of them were reunited-Maureen, Missy, and Will, grown up, each with children of their own. As their mother receded from their daily lives, Missy hosted Thanksgiving and Christmas; she was younger than Maureen but had always been more grounded, more practical. At least once a week, Missy cooked large dinners to lure Will and his kids over. Will had been a Fitch High School football star and now was working as a mechanic at Midas. He became the family's protector and paterfamilias. If Maureen ever complained to him about a boyfriend, she knew the conversation would end with her brother attacking whoever had caused her to worry.

Maureen was the one everyone loved-the dreamer, the artist, the romantic. One morning she brought two stray kittens in from the rain. When Missy noticed they had fleas and told Maureen to kick them out, her sister went on about about how heartless she was, went shopping for the right shampoo, and came back and bathed them, even though they scratched her to pieces before it was done. The real world still stumped her sometimes. Her most promising job, as a card dealer at Foxwoods, ended in under a year when she started calling in sick too often. Delivering pizza or running the register at the ShopRite failed to capture her imagination. More and more, she left her daughter with Missy while she went out. Sometimes Missy would lose patience, and the little sister would lecture the big one, and Will, the peacemaker, would try to calm Missy down. These confrontations made Maureen feel guilty, and she'd spend whatever she earned to make amends-presents for Caitlin, a lobster bake, or pizzas for Missy and her kids.

Still, when Missy thinks of their time together now, all she can remember is a family idyll: Maureen reading Shel Silverstein aloud to Caitlin and, later on, Missy's children; Maureen playing dress-up with Missy's daughter and the cat; the whole crew heading out together to get grinders and sit in the park; Maureen filling her stacks of marble composition books with poetry and rap lyrics. The apartments were almost like townhouses, each with a yard out back. All weekend long in good weather, the grills would be going, the neighbors would come out, and the children ate and played. Maureen would bring Caitlin there, too, when she could; Maureen never seemed more at ease than when she was barefoot and in a sundress, running free in the backyard, smiling broadly.

It took a while for the situation to become strained. By 2003, Maureen was twenty-one with a four-year-old daughter, no steady job, and no place of her own to live. Another person might have resigned herself to the limitations that bound her life-no diploma, no job good enough to support her daughter-and never even tried. But Maureen wouldn't make the same choices that Missy did. For Maureen, the possibilities lay ahead, the breaks this way and that of a life she had barely begun. She remained flexible and curious. Who knew what luck would find her? Maybe she'd be a rapper, maybe a model. The plan always changed. If nothing else, Maureen always had a plan.

The following year, Maureen stopped by her friend Jay DuBrule's place, almost giddy with excitement. She'd brought Caitlin, then five, and directed her into another room to play with Jay's daughter, who was a year older. "Oh, look!" Maureen said before the kids ran into the other room. "I had the photo shoot!"

Jay was living down the hall from Missy at Branford Manor when he first met Maureen. He worked for a time doing remote broadcasting setups for a local radio station. Maureen interned for him once, but when they asked her to wear an elephant suit, she wasn't feeling it, and she quit before the shift ended. Since then, Jay had been laid off from that job and was working two others-delivering paint for Sherwin-Williams and delivering pizza. They had grown close. She could talk to Jay about anything. They slept together now and then, though neither of them talked about what that might mean. Better to be friends forever instead of ex-boyfriend and ex-girlfriend someday.

Maureen saw plenty of men, but recently, she had left Missy's and moved in with the one she was most serious about. Steve ran a p.a.w.nshop in Norwich. Tall with a mustache and beard, Steve was white but dressed and talked ghetto. He never wanted to be around any of Maureen's friends or family, not even Missy and Will. Their relationship seemed strained almost from the start. One friend remembers Steve talking about Maureen as if she were a child who couldn't be relied on to do anything. Maureen would say that was his way of saying he wanted her to stay home. Jay's place had become another refuge for Maureen, the way Missy's place had been. She and Jay wouldn't always hook up. Sometimes she'd come there to share some weed or go online. Jay always had a few different computers lying around. Being at Jay's place to tinker with her Mys.p.a.ce page was always better than using the computer at the public library. Other times they would hang out, watch their daughters play in the yard, watch a video, or write a new rap together.

Maureen talked more and more about writing for a rapper one day, or better still, becoming one herself-like Lil' Kim, she joked, only hotter. Her approach was different-less playful and more grave, like Three 6 Mafia. Where Lil' Kim wrote with coy, self-aware swagger about money and s.e.x, Maureen wrote indignantly about coming up in hard times.

There's too many people walking around with plastic faces Too many children hanging in the wrong places Too many dirty cops controlling ghetto blocks Too many fistfights ending in shots Too many girls taking to wrong paths It's not too late to do the math Jay thought she was nothing short of a poet. Missy thought so, too. But Maureen was twenty-two, and her music wasn't getting the attention she'd hoped it would. The photos were her solution-a stepping-stone. She had been using Mys.p.a.ce to market her music and network with other rappers when she noticed ads for modeling there. Those ads led her to a site called ModelMayhem.com, which invited her to send in a portfolio that bookers could reference. She'd found a friend to take some photos for free, as long as he got to keep the negatives. The pictures she showed Jay that night weren't provocative-just Maureen smiling from head to toe, wearing a few different dresses and one that would be considered lingerie, a red nightgown. Jay thought she looked adorable.

She was open to anything: catalogs, magazines, music videos. When she enrolled on the site, she started getting dozens of e-mails from places purporting to be modeling agencies that, after a few clicks, turned out to mean nude modeling and sometimes escorting. She wasn't exactly surprised. What surprised her was the money. Clicking some of the links, Maureen saw how escorting was made to seem like webcam stripping, only in person, with no s.e.x involved. From there, it was easy to see how much money she could make if she did have s.e.x. As far as she could tell, the only major catch was having to sign on with an escort service. Maureen had no interest in sharing her money or being an employee-trading, essentially, one dependency for another.

But there was another way to make the same amount of money completely on her own. On Craigslist, Maureen saw women posting ads right in Groton, earning a living without leaving their homes, and not having to share what they made with anyone-not a pimp, not a service, not a boyfriend.

MELISSA.

The black walk-ins at the Continental Beauty School were paying about an eighth of the normal price to get their hair styled. So they couldn't say a word, not one of them, when they saw that the girl who was about to work on their weaves and extensions was white.

As the customers mouthed silent prayers, Melissa Barthelemy went to work-smiling, confident, almost unnaturally relaxed for a stylist-in-training entrusted with kinks that she had never known herself. She'd comb through the hair first, making a neat part, and grab a very small section as close to the hairline as possible, pulling tight without sending the woman into hysterics. Using her hand as a pitchfork, she'd divide that tiny section of hair into three puffy strands that she held between her middle and index fingers. Next came the twist, from left to right, and finally the tuck. The twist was nothing without the tuck-grabbing the free hair left underneath and moving it into the braid. The underneath catch, followed by another twist, was what was so hard to remember each time, and even harder to get right without having to start all over. Braid, tuck, and twist, braid, tuck, and twist, braid, tuck, and twist. Melissa never slipped.

The cornrow designs weren't just a snap for Melissa; they were a pleasure. She had spent years practicing, not only on her friends but on her half sister. Amanda was nine years younger than Melissa; her father, unlike Melissa's, was black. On countless afternoons, Amanda would squeal as Melissa tugged and pulled and braided and twisted and experimented. Yet Amanda probably would have preferred white-people hair. She shopped at American Eagle and Abercrombie. Melissa, meanwhile, wore tight braids herself for a time, listened to nothing but hip-hop, and dated black guys almost exclusively. Sometimes their mother, Lynn, thought her daughters had been born in the wrong bodies. Amanda, in her heart of hearts, wanted to be white. And Melissa, for as long as anyone could remember, wished she had been born black.

Lynn Barthelemy had known before she bought a pregnancy test. She never missed her period. She told Mark the results. Mark, proud of himself, proposed marriage. That only upset her more-she didn't already have enough to worry about?

It was September 1984. Lynn was sixteen, beginning her soph.o.m.ore year at Seneca Vocational High School in Buffalo. Mark was two years older, a senior on the track team. He was from a Polish family in Kaisertown, the German-Polish section of South Buffalo. She was from the North Side, a neighborhood called Kensington-Bailey, a leafy section of town with large houses and wide, quiet streets. They had been together for a year. Mark used to join Lynn's family on picnics to Emery Park and the beach at Port Colborne, just across the border in Canada. The pregnancy posed a problem.

She thought about marrying Mark and what that might be like, and she drew a blank. Mark was so meek. He let his family run his life, and whatever free agency remained, he ceded to Lynn. She couldn't see spending the rest of her life that way. She thought about abortion, but that scared her. Mark was against it, too. They both came from Catholic families. Lynn had trouble processing the idea of giving a baby away. Whenever she thought about it, she'd start to cry.

For two months, she kept the pregnancy a secret. Finally, in October, she told her mother, Linda. The news was a shock; usually, it was Lynn's little sister who misbehaved, while Lynn was the one who had always performed well in school and followed the rules. Lynn was too afraid to tell her father, Elmer, so her mother did it for her. When he heard, he punched a hole in the bathroom door. They didn't speak for months. Her mother told Lynn not to worry, he'd get over it. Meanwhile, Lynn had a decision to make.

Lynn's grandmother offered her wedding rings for a ceremony, if that was what Lynn wanted. At the same time, she tried to be candid. "Don't marry him just because you're pregnant," she said. "You make sure you love him." When Lynn decided to say yes, her grandmother didn't let up. "Why don't you live together for a few months?" she suggested. Mark moved in with Lynn and her parents and sure enough, Lynn learned how he really was. He didn't dote; he hovered. If she got up off the couch to go to the bathroom, Mark would say, "Where are you going?" If she took a phone call, he wanted to know who was calling. She was about seven months pregnant when she told him the wedding was off.

Her parents feared for her. "You're going to have to get a job," Lynn's mother said. "And you're going to have to pay for day care." Lynn agreed to do both.

Lynn was offered a spot at a different school, one for teenage mothers. She said no. She wanted to stay at her school and graduate like everyone else. Her swollen belly drew catcalls from the boys as she walked the halls. She got into fights. When the instructor in her church's confirmation cla.s.s started talking about abortion and locking eyes with her, Lynn walked out and told her mother the b.i.t.c.h was lucky she didn't slap her in the face. That spring, when she went into labor at a nearby Catholic hospital and the nun in the room tried to quiet her through her pain, Lynn, as furious as she was terrified, cursed her out: "Shut up! You probably haven't even had s.e.x!"

Lynn's baby entered the world on April 14, 1985, after eighteen hours of labor, weighing seven pounds, nine ounces, with a stubborn head that needed coaxing out with forceps. A few weeks earlier, Grandma Mary had died during an epileptic seizure. Lynn named the baby Melissa Mary Barthelemy.

Lynn went back to school six weeks after Melissa was born. After the baby's three-month checkup, Lynn got a job washing dishes after school at the Manhattan Manor nursing home, a twenty-minute walk from her parents' house. Lynn didn't know it then, but she would keep that job for the next twenty-five years.

Linda and Elmer agreed to help with child care. Melissa spent most of her childhood in their house, a three-bedroom clapboard colonial on Stockbridge Avenue in the neighborhood of Kensington-Bailey. The family had moved there in 1978, when Lynn was in third grade. Elmer had paid nineteen thousand dollars for the place, putting down 10 percent, saving the money from his four-hundred-a-week salary working nights in industrial maintenance-first at Freezer Queen, a meatpacking company on the waterfront, and later at Wonder Bread. Both were union jobs; that was when Buffalo still had enough blue-collar work to go around. The neighborhood was warm and welcoming back then. Elmer, a reformed drag racer who served as an air force mechanic during the Vietnam War, tore the house apart room by room and restored it, adding a fourth bedroom up top. Black and white mingled well in the neighborhood; Buffalo had one of the least painful forced school integrations of any big city. Only in looking back did they notice how the conversations with their white neighbors had changed from "Isn't this a nice place" to "Let's get out before our house isn't worth anything." By the time Melissa was growing up on Stockbridge Avenue, the ice-cream and candy shop on the corner was gone, as was the big Rite Aid, victims of Buffalo's great rust-belt decline. A pizzeria was destroyed in a fire, and the movie palace also burned down. The crime rate was rising, people were leaving, and the new black neighbors frightened some of the older whites. Elmer thought the new people were decent, but their kids were trouble. He guessed it was jobs: They didn't have any. Both Freezer Queen and Wonder Bread had left town, around the same time that Buffalo lost Bethlehem Steel and Westinghouse and the auto plant that had employed their neighbor. Elmer found non-union work mowing lawns at an a.s.sisted-living community. In the end, it wasn't just a question of black or white. The whole middle cla.s.s seemed to be fleeing Kensington-Bailey, the same way Elmer's parents had fled the East Side a generation earlier.

Lynn was too busy working to pay much attention to where Melissa went or who her close friends were. With no one person to answer to, Melissa was left to police herself-or not, if she didn't feel like it. The other kids growing up in Kensington-Bailey were the kids of laid-off union workers-most not interested in finishing school the way Lynn had, and some in gangs. As a little girl, Melissa was adorable, and smart in school with lots of friends, just like Lynn had been. Despite her pixie looks, she was formidable-quick to shout down someone twice her size for looking at her the wrong way. That reminded everyone of Lynn, too. Lynn was kind of glad her daughter was feisty, as she'd been. Her only rule for Melissa was never to hit first.

Lynn never thought she would live in Kensington-Bailey forever. Melissa was just three when Lynn got an apartment with a boyfriend about ten miles away in South Buffalo. About a year later, Lynn came home early from work, and he was in bed with another woman. She and Melissa moved back to Elmer and Linda's house. A few years later, Lynn met Andre Funderburg, and they had Amanda, Melissa's little sister. Andre worked lots of different jobs, from nursing to telemarketing. Though he was black, Elmer and Linda never raised that issue with Lynn. Amanda was born when Melissa was nine. Andre got along well with Melissa, and for a time, the four of them were a family, living in the north end of town. When Andre cheated on Lynn, too, she came to live with Elmer and Linda again, this time with the baby.

By her early teens, Melissa had boyfriends, although years of long talks about how young Lynn was when she got pregnant seemed to successfully dispel any of Melissa's romantic notions about having a child. But as Melissa got older, the tough girl Lynn had seen so much of herself in was doing things Lynn had never done-leaving at night and staying out late with friends, then skipping school the next day. Lynn decided something needed to change. She tried sending Melissa to a Friends school for a time, and a teacher told her, "You don't belong here." Only when Lynn met one of her daughter's boyfriends did she start to panic. Jordan was tall and rail-thin, with pitch-black skin. That wasn't an issue-Amanda was black, Andre was black, most of the neighborhood was black now-but Lynn worried anyway. "He was like a hoodlum," Lynn said. "He was into dealing drugs, things I didn't want her to be around. She didn't agree. She was like, 'Aw, Mom, he's my friend.' " Lynn was running out of ideas, and now she felt she was running out of time. She had worked so hard to graduate from high school, even with a baby at home; her daughter didn't seem to care about going to school at all.

Melissa was about sixteen when Lynn thought of a Hail Mary maneuver. She called Melissa's father, Mark. He had recently moved to Dallas, where he and his wife had relocated for his wife's job. Mark agreed to take his daughter in. The reunion failed almost from the start. Melissa called Lynn every chance she could, complaining: "There are c.o.c.kroaches as big as cows!" She and her stepmother fought. Lynn secretly liked hearing that they hadn't hit it off, though she knew she might not be hearing the whole story. Maybe Mark's wife tried to be more like a mother to her, and Melissa fought back. Maybe Mark didn't know how to deal with Melissa. Plenty of people didn't. She stayed two and a half years in Texas until she acted out in a way that couldn't be ignored. Melissa stole her father's work van and drove it around without a license. She was so tiny-four feet, eleven inches and ninety-five pounds-that the police pulled her over, thinking there was no way she could be old enough to drive. Melissa was sentenced to community service. Her dad got a fine and, soon after, presented his daughter with a plane ticket home for Christmas. The trip was supposed to be just a visit. Mark hadn't told Melissa that she wasn't welcome back, leaving that part for Lynn. On the phone, Melissa told her father that his wife must be keeping his b.a.l.l.s in her purse.

Melissa was relieved to be back until she saw how much had changed while she'd been away. With two thousand dollars left on the mortgage, Elmer and Linda had sold the house in Kensington-Bailey to a single mother, African-American, who installed bars on all the doors and windows the second she moved in. Melissa's grandparents bought a new place in a suburb of Buffalo called Alden-basically farmland, a world away from Kensington-Bailey. Lynn and Amanda had moved there with them. For Melissa, Alden was almost Dallas all over again. "It's so boring here!" she'd moan. Her new school didn't change her mind. Alden was more white than the schools she'd attended in Buffalo.

She was a senior, with one more year to go, when she announced she was moving out. There was a fight, but Lynn had very little leverage. Melissa was almost eighteen, and Lynn had Amanda to think about as well. Little by little, Lynn started to ease up. Lynn's sister, Melissa's aunt Dawn, lived in the same part of South Buffalo where Melissa wanted to move. They were close in age and becoming confidantes. Maybe Melissa could get what she wanted and the family could keep her close. Not that she ever stopped worrying. She was convinced Melissa would never finish school. "You're not going to get a job without a degree," Lynn said. What went unsaid was what kind of future Melissa could expect in Buffalo even if she did graduate.

Melissa surprised Lynn. She found a roommate and got a job working at a pizzeria to make her half of the rent. She re-enrolled at South Park High, the school she most likely would have attended if her family had stayed in Kensington-Bailey. After a few months of not speaking, she and Lynn started going out to dinner. Melissa seemed upbeat to Lynn, trying to get her life together. She kept in contact with Jordan, but not all the time. She seemed to be outgrowing him, or so Lynn thought. She kept little notebooks, jotting down how much it would cost to have her own apartment, how much she would have to make, how much she could save.

She graduated with A's. Lynn came to the ceremony with Elmer, Linda, and Amanda. Lynn felt like a weight had lifted-her daughter was back on track; she would be the person Lynn knew she could be. Not long after graduating, Melissa decided she wanted to go to beauty school. She grabbed a financial aid form from Continental and filled it out. She needed Lynn to cosign the eight-thousand-dollar loan. They went to the bank together; half the debt was in Lynn's name and half was in Melissa's. Melissa went to school every day. If she missed a cla.s.s during the week, she made it up on Sat.u.r.day. She thought maybe she could own her own business someday-just like Lynn's new boyfriend, Jeff Martina, who was opening a diner on Bailey Avenue, not far from the beauty school.

Melissa quit the pizzeria and worked a few shifts for Jeff after cla.s.ses. Since she still didn't have her driver's license, Lynn would pick her up at the apartment she was sharing on the West Side and drive her to cla.s.ses, and Jeff would drive her home at the end of her shift at the diner. Practically every day, her hairstyle changed. She even dyed it red for a time. Melissa still kept mostly to herself; Lynn never met her roommate. But Melissa and Lynn had spent enough time away that they were ready to feel comfortable with each other again. Each day in the car, Lynn would listen to Melissa make plans from the pa.s.senger seat, doodling in her notebooks, figuring out how much it would cost to open her own hair salon. She seemed scared straight-maybe, Lynn thought, after seeing how little she made at the diner and pizza place. On one of those drives, Melissa talked about watching Lynn work so hard as a single mom and how that had affected her. She said she didn't plan on getting married or having kids until she was thirty-five. Lynn had seen enough of the inside of a nursing home, Melissa said. She didn't want her mother to end up in one herself. "I want to take care of you and give you things you never had," Melissa told her. "I want to walk into a store and not worry about a price tag. If I like it, I want to buy it."

Melissa was the only white face at the Continental graduation ceremony. She was beaming. But when the time came for her to cash in on all her work, the best job she could find was at Supercuts. At the location in Williamsville, a northeast suburb of Buffalo, she had to sit at a mall for two hours every night after closing just to catch a bus home. After a year, she moved to a Supercuts in a yuppie neighborhood near the zoo. Her customers at both locations were mostly white. Melissa tried to stay diverted with dye jobs and French braids. She was losing patience.

She hooked up with Jordan again and got mad at Jeff and Lynn when they disapproved. "We hope you're not going out with that monkey!" Jeff would shout as Melissa was on her way out the door. The race thing was a peculiar subject for all of them. Everyone in the family would toss epithets around with perverse familiarity. Even Andre, Amanda's father, in touch from time to time with both Amanda and Melissa, went out of his way to warn her: "You're just this little pretty white girl, and they want to use you."

Jeff would say it a little more cra.s.sly: "You're their trophy."

Melissa would only smile and say, "They're nice to me."

In 2006 Melissa and Jordan took a trip to New York together. "Jordan's uncle owns a recording studio," Melissa told Lynn and Jeff. They came back a few days later, then turned around and went to New York a few weeks after that. Upon her return, she announced that she and Jordan were going to move there.

"I met this guy," Melissa said. His name was Johnny Terry. He had offered her a job, she said, cutting hair.

Lynn tried to talk her out of it, but she'd been in this place with Melissa before and had less influence on her now. Part of Lynn felt defeated, as if everything she'd done to stop this from happening had been in vain. She felt like she had seen this moment coming all along. So her protests were perfunctory, thin. "Are you sure? It's not as easy as you think. The rent is high. It's so far away."

The conversation was over before it started. "I can handle it," Melissa said. "The guy has a place set up for me."

SHANNAN.

Someday I'll step on their freckles Some night I'll straighten their curls. . .

When she was in eighth grade, Shannan Gilbert took the stage in her middle school's production of Annie. She had hoped to play the little orphan herself-for the past six years, she had more or less been living the part, shuttling through several foster homes-and she was crestfallen when she was told she was too tall. Still, the teachers could tell that Shannan had a beautiful voice-booming and R&B-ready-not to mention a lush, round face with wide doe eyes. So they offered her the part of Miss Hannigan, the boozing, scheming head of the orphanage.

It took a little while for Shannan to see that this was the flashier role-the only truly funny grown-up character, the one part with any hint of s.e.xuality, ideal for a teenage ham. Nerves carried Shannan through the rehearsals, but on opening night, she killed. Vamping her way through Miss Hannigan's solo number, "Little Girls," Shannan ranted, merrily and nastily, about how Annie and the other orphans were all that stood between her and the life of her dreams.

Little cheeks, little teeth Everything around me is . . . little If I wring little necks Surely I will get an acquittal. . .

Shannan had never been in front of so many people, and the applause had a profound effect on her. One person in the audience mattered more than everyone else-a woman whose undivided attention Shannan had been fighting to capture almost her entire life. Onstage that night, as Shannan browbeat each of the little orphans into offering up fealty-one by one, saying, "I love you, Miss Hannigan!"-anyone who knew her mother, Mari, wouldn't have found it hard to guess whom Shannan was channeling. From then on, performing would be all that she would want to do.

From on high, the village of Ellenville, New York, seems preserved in time, the steeple of a church poking up above the trees, with glimpses of what once must have been a cozy main street nestled in the foothills of the Shaw.a.n.gunk Ridge in the Catskills. When Mari Gilbert and her family arrived there in 1991, the village was emptying into a ghost town, down to a ShopRite, a few banks, and some dollar stores. A nearby state prison was turning Ellenville into a village of transients: Relatives of inmates would come to town, rent an apartment for a few years, then turn around and leave. Many of Shannan's old friends from Ellenville say that half of their cla.s.smates are dead, in jail, or on drugs.

Mari had the same bright eyes as her oldest daughter, Shannan, only with long, wild blond hair and a raspy, lived-in voice. She'd grown up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the youngest of five children. Mari's father was a brickmaker who drank hard on the weekends. Her mother was a restless woman of faith, changing churches constantly. If religion was Mari's mother's response to a chaotic world, Mari came up with one all her own. In her view, life was combat, and no savior would change the fact that the next fight was looming just around the corner. She never saw a point in pretending that wasn't the case. "I can't be plastic," Mari often said, and she warned her daughters to be real, too, or deal with the consequences. "If you run your mouth about something, be ready," she'd tell them with a steady glare. "You're gonna have to fight the person, because they're either going to be mad you told the truth or mad you lied. So watch what you say. If you can't defend yourself, either you're gonna get your b.u.t.t kicked, or you better get ready to kick somebody's b.u.t.t."