And yet the place had a feeling of transience. An indifference to design that suggested eclectic taste—a chintz-covered couch paired with steel end tables. Generally, her tastes were eclectic, though for her own space she preferred English country. She didn’t consider this her own space. It was just an apartment. She would have English country when she bought her house. She’d been living in the apartment for five years now, three years longer than she’d planned, but this didn’t discourage her. She was used to setbacks. So many things had happened in her life.

She’d been born in Jamaica but had no memory of the place except that she’d lived in a house near water. It was a wooden house, in a yard with three other houses that, when she was younger, she’d remembered as outhouses or something—a kitchen and a bathroom perhaps. There was a time when she thought the house was big, with concrete walls and a wide lawn. But she knew now that the house had seemed big only because she was small, and that her recollections of concrete walls came from her stay in the sanatorium where she’d been quarantined from four to eight with TB.

She didn’t remember very much of her childhood. According to Syd, who raised her for a while, her father was a butcher and her mother was a go-go dancer, the black sheep of a rich Syrian family who ran away to shack up because “she was the lowest dog around.”

She could only remember a year with her parents, the year she returned home, when the sounds and smells of the hospital—coughing and Dettol—were replaced by those of animals. The sourness of shit and sweat. Hair being singed from skins to make drumheads. The arcing whoosh of the butcher’s knife. The gush of blood and the squeal of death.

Of her parents there were few recollections. Her mother was the color of almond paste and had curly hair down her back. Her father was antenna-thin and hacked and spat a lot. That was it and no more. She still had no idea who they were. What did they believe, she wondered. What had made them laugh? What had been their hopes for her, their only child? Why had they visited her only once a year when she struggled to breathe each day?

Sometimes, less now than during high school, she would wonder how much she was like them, ask which of their traits were hers. Was it her need for order? Her love of the arts? Her aversion to risk? Her strength in academics? There was no way to know. Her father murdered her mother in a jealous rage when she was nine years old. Chopped her up, buried some parts, and minced the rest for dog food.

A week before he closed the case by making a confession, Mr. Lucas sent Sylvia to the last known address of his estranged brother, Syd, a decommissioned sailor who worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. His face a shallow engraving of Billy Eckstine—whom he claimed was a distant cousin—Syd lived alone in a rooming house in Bedford-Stuyvesant. He was an alcoholic and had no children—at least none for whom he felt responsible—and didn’t know how to raise a child, least of all a girl. He would send her to school with her hair uncombed, and dress her in clothes that were sizes too big, and he never checked her homework, because, he claimed, his eyes got dim in evening light—but really because he was illiterate.