Sprinting the rest of the way, she prays that she’ll find Catherine watching television and Oliver asleep in his bed.
“Ma’am!” The cop’s pounding footsteps are still behind her as she throws open the gate and rushes up the walk. “Ma’am, just wait a second! You can go into the house, but I’ll go with you. Okay?”
Winded, she nods, stops on the porch, and fumbles with the keys. Her hands are shaking violently.
“Here, let me,” Officer Greenlea says, and gently takes them from her. “I’m sure everything is fine.”
She nods, allowing him to insert the key into the lock and open the door for her.
“I’m a gentleman,” he says, “but I go first this time. What is your babysitter’s name?”
“Catherine.”
“And your son?”
“Oliver.”
He nods, stepping over the threshold, looking around, and beckoning for her to come inside. “Catherine?” he calls. “Catherine?”
Annabelle’s heart is racing from the run, and from the fear. “Catherine!”
No reply.
She hurries toward the stairs, telling the officer, “She might be asleep on the couch in the parlor back there. I’m going to check my son’s room.”
“Catherine?” she hears him calling as she rushes to the second floor, remembering her strange dream the other night.
But this isn’t a nightmare, she reminds herself, reaching for the knob to open his door. This is reality.
Stepping into his room, she sees that there is no stone angel lying on Oliver’s pillow.
There is no Oliver, either.
The bed is still neatly made and it’s just like the room itself. Empty.
With Barnes at the wheel, Sully had intended to race to police headquarters in Mundy’s Landing to see how they could help. But there is no racing along Battlefield Road tonight.
“This has got to be the unluckiest small town in the world,” Barnes says, shaking his head as he stares ahead at the unforgiving traffic. “What are the odds?”
“I’d say they’re pretty damned high, under the circumstances. This town has gone out of its way to draw attention to the 1916 murders, and that’s a double-edged sword. It’s not as if they could pick and choose the audience for all that media attention.”
“Note to the criminally insane: please disregard this press release.”
“Right?” She shakes her head. “Somewhere out there, some lunatic has been waiting to take his turn in the spotlight and prove that he can accomplish what the Sleeping Beauty Killer did. Pure hubris.”
“So you think he’s going to reenact the crimes at all three Murder Houses on the anniversaries of the crimes?”
“I think he’s going to try.”
“After this, the cops are going to be staking out the other two locations. How does he think he’s going to get past them?”
Sully shrugs, troubled. He must have reason to think it’s possible—and he might be one step ahead of them all.
Annabelle was wrong.
This is a nightmare.
“Yeah, I need backup at 46 Bridge,” she hears Officer Greenlea saying into his phone. “We have two missing kids.”
Their quick, frantic search of the house from top to bottom turned up no sign of Catherine or Oliver. Somehow, Annabelle has managed—so far—to keep from dissolving into tears or panic.
“Mrs. Bingham? How old is your son?” the young cop is asking her, blatant shock and concern radiating from his blue eyes. He wasn’t expecting to find this. He was expecting to find . . .
Catherine and Oliver, of course. Business as usual.
But then, this is business as usual at a Murder House.
“Oliver is twelve.”
“Twelve?” he echoes. “And your sitter?”
“Thirteen.”
He nods, relaying that information to the person on the phone.
She knows how it sounds—a twelve-year-old boy with a babysitter. Especially one as young as Catherine. She should explain, but right now, it’s all she can do to remain on her feet and coherent.
“They’re on their way,” the cop says, hanging up his phone. “Look, I know you’re worried about your son. Are you sure he wouldn’t have left the house on his own?”
“No. No way. Not at night. Not Oliver.”
“And your babysitter . . .”
“She might have. She’s been threatening to run away. But Oliver is—”
“Wait a minute—the girl, Catherine, threatened to run away? When? Recently?”
“Yes. Her mother—my friend—said she’s been talking about it a lot lately. But that doesn’t mean—I mean, I don’t think she’d just leave my son.”
“No, but she might take him with her.”
Annabelle is already shaking her head. “He wouldn’t go.”
“Forgive me for a second here, ma’am, but if a beautiful thirteen-year-old girl asked me to run away with her when I was twelve, well . . .” He shrugs.
His expression, which had already begun to shift when she mentioned the kids’ ages, is now laced with far more objectivity than concern. She supposes she can’t blame him, all things considered. But he doesn’t know Oliver. Doesn’t know that he’s the kind of kid who wouldn’t—
The front door opens. “Annabelle!”
Trib.
“Kim’s ankle might be broken,” he calls as she and Officer Greenlea hurry to the foyer. “I had to leave her there. I promised I’d text as soon as—”
He stops short, seeing her with the cop.
“Trib . . .”
“Where’s Oliver?” he asks hoarsely, and all she can do is shake her head.
Stepping into the Mundy’s Landing Police Department, Sully and Barnes find the anticipated chaos. Called in to aid the tiny local force, a cluster of gray-uniformed state troopers, faces somber beneath their broad-brimmed tan hats, is being briefed in a glass-windowed conference room. Wilbur is so busy on the desk phone that he couldn’t bite into a cookie if Sully had brought him one, which of course she has not.
Before she has a chance to ask for Nick, he strides in the door, summoned from a sound sleep between shifts.
“Can we help?” she asks, knowing the answer is going to be no, but feeling compelled to ask.
To her surprise, he says, “Maybe. We’ve got two missing kids, and they were last seen at 46 Bridge Street. That’s the location where—”
“We know,” she says quickly, mind racing. “We’ve been looking into the 1916 case, and we were with the Binghams tonight at the gala. Do the children belong to them?”
“The boy does. He’s twelve. The girl is a thirteen-year-old neighbor, and she was babysitting for the kid. Overprotective parents. Don’t ask.”
She wasn’t going to ask. She’s seen firsthand the tragic results of underprotective parenting. How can she blame any parent, especially in Mundy’s Landing, for taking excessive precautions?
“Does the girl match the description of the one who just turned up on Prospect Street?” Barnes asks.
“No. We’ve already tentatively ID’d her.” He reaches into his pocket, takes out a piece of paper, and unfolds it to show them.
Sully immediately recognizes the missing persons flier she’d seen posted on the bulletin board in the station vestibule.
“It’s Juanita Contreras?”
The lieutenant nods. “Looks that way.”
Barnes shakes his head. “Tragic.”
“It is,” Colonomos agreed as he shoves the paper back into his pocket.
Sully and Barnes exchange a knowing glance. Juanita Contreras isn’t vulnerably young, she isn’t particularly attractive, and her family isn’t prominent or local. She barely blipped the missing persons annals leading up to her role in this high-profile case.
“What about the two kids who just went missing? Any leads?”
“My gut tells me that they’re runaways. The girl has been talking about it to anyone who will listen. But I’m
on my way over there right now.”
“Want us to come along?”
He hesitates, then shakes his head. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“But—”
“I’ll call you if I need you,” he says tersely as he walks away.
Sully looks at Barnes. The message in his eyes is as loud and clear as the one Colonomos just sent: You don’t belong here.
“Mrs. Bingham?”
Sitting at the kitchen table as Trib stands in the adjoining parlor talking with Officer Greenlea, who’s filling out a report, Annabelle looks up to see Lieutenant Nick Colonomos standing over her.
“I’m sorry about your son.”
“Don’t say that!” she responds sharply.
“I only meant that I know how hard it is, not knowing where he is right now.”
“I know, but it sounded like . . .”
“I’m sorry.” He pauses, his dark eyes troubled and lined with dark circles. “I just wondered if you could show me Oliver’s room?”
“Sure.” She grips the table as she stands.
He puts a firm hand on her elbow to help her—so firm that she’s reminded of the presumption by law enforcement that the vast majority of abducted children have been taken by family members, often the parents themselves.
Does he think . . .
Of course he doesn’t. And even if he does, hundreds of witnesses will confirm that she was at the gala all evening, along with Trib and Ross and Kim.
The Winstons are, at the moment, being transported to the hospital in an ambulance—perhaps the very ambulance that was so obviously unneeded at the Yamazaki house. They’re going not just because Kim injured her ankle, but because she’s in the midst of a severe panic attack. Annabelle overheard Trib on the phone with Ross, who said she had to be sedated when she heard that Catherine is missing.
Ross firmly believes she ran away. The police seem to be leaning in that direction as well, despite the fresh homicide.
Trib and Annabelle might be inclined to believe the theory, too—if they didn’t know their son so damned well.
“Has Oliver mentioned anything about running away?” Lieutenant Colonomos asks her as they ascend the stairs.
“No. He wouldn’t do that. Is that what everyone is thinking?”
“It’s one theory.”
Reaching the door to Oliver’s room, Annabelle turns to face him. Desperate to get through to him, heedless of protocol, she addresses him by his first name. “Nick, you can’t make any assumptions based on age or statistics or circumstances. My son is missing. Something is wrong.”
He nods and assures her that they’re going to do everything they can to find him. But she can tell from his expression that he isn’t entirely with her. There’s a dead girl around the corner. He has other priorities.
Earlier, she’d left Oliver’s bedroom door open in her frantic, futile race to find him. Now, as she steps over the threshold again and looks around, a lump forms in her throat. The room is just as it was when they left for the gala a few hours ago.
Battleship is back on the stack of old games he’d taken out of the cupboard, alongside piles of books.
She remembers thinking he must have grown nostalgic for the childhood possessions she’d stashed away in the cupboard beneath the bed; remembers Catherine saying it was her idea to play Battleship; remembers—
Hide-and-seek.
Nick Colonomos is asking her something—she’s hearing words coming from his mouth, but they have no meaning.
An idea has formed in Annabelle’s head. An idea so unlikely—and yet not—that she can only grab on to it like a lifeline that may or may not be untethered.
Striding over to the bed, she bends down and opens the cupboard door.
There, stretched on an array of patterned tiles lain across the bottom of the cupboard like a floor, wearing headphones that are plugged into a handheld video game, is Oliver.
From the Sleeping Beauty Killer’s Diary
July 16, 1916
. . . I shall hereby reiterate that my motivation stemmed in love and not in hate. From the moment I first glimpsed my wife, I was overcome by emotion the like of which I had never before experienced.
Seventeen years ago, on a warm summer evening, fate propelled me to Springwood, the Hyde Park mansion owned by the family of my old boarding school friend Franklin, a distant cousin of former President Theodore Roosevelt, at that time the newly elected governor of New York.
Teddy was in attendance that night, regaling a rapt crowd with tales of his adventures on San Juan Hill the previous summer.
When I stepped out onto the portico for a breath of fresh air, my eye fell upon a beauty seated with a book on a garden bench. Dressed all in white, with rippling flaxen hair, she looked like an angel. So enchanted was she by the book on her lap that she failed to hear me approach until my shadow fell over the page.
I asked what she was reading before I ever asked her name. The story, she said, was “Sun, Moon, and Talia,” a seventeenth-century work by Giambattista Basile. I asked whether she knew the tale was the basis for Charles Perrault’s later work “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood.” She did know that, and much more.
Her name was Florence.
Before the night had drawn to a close, I knew that she would provide salvation from the abyss.
We wed the following year. She moved in with Father and me. He, too, was smitten with my bride. Too smitten, though I did not guess that then—or that she would return his affection.
I should have known. Others had always found my father a commanding yet gregarious man, while I considered him overbearing and controlling, as did my poor sister. I fear I turned a blind eye to my sister’s plight. At last she escaped his insufferable house—and, I suspect, his nocturnal visits to her chamber—by tying a noose around her neck and hanging herself from the cupola stair rail.
Plagued by guilt after Augusta took her own life, I in turn escaped, embarking alone on the journey the three of us were supposed to make to the World’s Fair. It was my first taste of freedom, yet I dutifully returned to Father.
He trampled my youthful rebellion and I submitted to his authority, but always, always, I knew I would flee the moment I had the means. When I met Florence, I fantasized that the two of us would be vagabonds together. She had grown up destitute, a charity case whose benefactors clothed her, educated her, and allowed her to mingle with the right sort of people. She would have me—but only if I continued to live in the world she longed to inhabit. And so I allowed Father to mold me into his own image.
By day, I was a respectable banker, filling his chair at the bank after his retirement, which—aha!—coincided with my marriage. By night, I climbed the stairs to the cupola and trained my telescope upon the moon and stars. I buried myself in the poetry that—much like I myself—had once captivated my wife’s attention.
Now she turned away from me in our marriage bed. If we had ever discussed the matter—and we did not—then she might have blamed her distance upon my obsessions, and I, in turn, my obsessions upon her distance.
It matters little now.
Perhaps Florence assumed, when she informed me that she was with child, that I had been too busy or too detached to recall the date of our last physical encounter. But just as her abrupt change of heart beneath a golden harvest moon had not escaped my attention, nor had the affection between my father and my wife.
That, however, appeared to have dissipated due to her delicate condition—small satisfaction for me.
Knowing I could not bear the sight of her until the summer, I gathered cohosh to ensure that she would deliver the child in early spring, just as soon as it had sufficiently developed, not because I wanted it to survive, but because I did not.
It would have to enter the world in order to exit, and I deemed that it would do so according to my command, in the unsettling glare of the rare blue moon.
Watching my wife cradling her swollen womb, I could see that
she already dearly loved the life within. I knew, too, that the longer and more deeply you love another being, the more you suffer upon losing it.
I commissioned a builder to construct a small room—a nursery, I called it—adjacent to our bedroom. He wanted to add a window; I told him—and my wife, and my father—that I could not bear to think of the child catching a deadly draft.
In February, Father’s favorite cousin, Griselda, passed away. In keeping with family custom, he requested that the child be named after her if it was a girl, and we agreed. Her middle name, my wife said, should be Delphine, after her late mother.
“And what if it’s a boy?” my father asked.
“Then perhaps it should be named for its father,” I said pointedly, and left the two of them to ponder that.
The child was born according to plan, beneath a full blue moon. I roiled with resentment as I stood at the cradle, much like the neglected antagonist in Perrault’s fairy tale who cursed the newborn Beauty.
Intending to erase every bit of evidence that the child had even existed, I burned the birth document at the hearth before the ink was dry. Yet I found myself wrestling with strange bursts of affection for the tiny creature, even as my father ignored its existence, and my wife’s as well.
Just as he was not man enough to own his mistakes, I was not man enough to correct them. The moon waned and still little Zelda, as my wife called her, was alive.
At Easter, claiming that he pined for warmer weather, Father abruptly decided to visit an old acquaintance in the Carolinas, leaving us alone with the child and the servants. Now man of the house at last, I finally summoned the mettle to do what had to be done.
I crept into the nursery one night, unaware that Florence was in the room, silently watching me from her rocking chair in the corner. As I pressed the pillow against the infant’s chubby face, my wife leaped upon me like a snarling lioness.
Time runs short, as do the pages in this journal; thus, I will not recount the conversation that ensued. In the end, she begged me to allow the child to live. I said that I would, under the condition that it never see the light of day in this small village. Having endured the shame of my sister’s suicide and the whispers about her motive, I could not endure more of the same over a bastard daughter.
Blue Moon: Mundy's Landing Book Two Page 32
