Blue Moon: Mundy's Landing Book Two

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  There used to be plenty: cousins, old college roommates, family friends, former colleagues. But Annabelle and Trib have allowed time and distance—and yes, Oliver’s anxiety issues—to relegate those relationships to Facebook and annual Christmas cards. Their lives, and their support system, are centered here in Mundy’s Landing.

  “We could charge a hotel room on a credit card,” Trib suggested last week, when they dismissed the idea of reaching out to far-flung acquaintances, with all the accompanying complicated explanations—not to mention the anxiety and perhaps panic Oliver would experience staying under a stranger’s roof.

  “We’re almost maxed out, between the move and all the unexpected doctor bills,” Annabelle reminded him.

  They decided to scrape together the money anyway, having momentarily forgotten that in addition to Mundypalooza and the latest media frenzy, it was Fourth of July weekend. There were no vacancies within well over an hour’s drive. To find a room, she and Oliver would have had to travel a considerable distance away from Trib, home, and police protection. It might not make sense to stay here, but it didn’t make sense to leave, either.

  She keeps telling herself that Oliver is better off in familiar surroundings. And she herself is better off if she faces the reality of living here, instead of running scared. This is her home, and she’s stuck with it.

  No one is going to try anything with an armed cop in the house.

  Besides . . .

  Her saving grace—the one thought that keeps floating through her mind on a tide of guilt—is that unlike the Sleeping Beauties, past and present, Oliver is a boy.

  Does that mean he’s safe?

  Of course. He’s safe, and their family is safe. No one harmed the Yamazakis, and no one harmed those families a hundred years ago.

  No one is going to harm us.

  Opening the trapdoor for the first time in a week, Holmes doesn’t know what to expect.

  As tempted as he was to visit Catherine after he’d installed her in the dungeon beside Indigo Edmonds, he forced himself to take an enormous step back.

  Grabbing her had been reckless and dangerous. He’s gotten away with it, yes. But barely. And only because she’d mentioned that she was considering running away.

  That doesn’t mean anyone—law enforcement, locals, media, or even her own parents—truly believes that’s what happened to her. But at least it’s in the realm of possibility.

  For now.

  He’d snatched her because the opportunity presented itself when he was crazed with frustration over the death of his third Beauty, and delirious with exhaustion. He hadn’t been in his right mind.

  He is now, and he has been all week.

  Well-rested, well-prepared, he’s going to move ahead according to plan.

  As he opens the trapdoor, a terrible stench hits him.

  The dead Beauty.

  He left her there to rot, and rot she has.

  Holmes smiles. It can’t have been a pleasant week in the dungeon. His second Beauty might welcome the alternative.

  “Soup’s on,” Barnes calls to Sully as she sits in the living room reading this morning’s Tribune, with its bold black headline Area Police on High Alert.

  “Please tell me it’s not soup,” Sully says, putting her empty iced tea glass down on top of the newspaper so that the box fan won’t blow it around.

  In the kitchen, Barnes is setting out the steaks charcoal-grilled on the small Weber he bought for the backyard.

  “It’s not soup,” he tells her. “Everything is cold, except your steak. Because you never listen to me.”

  “I don’t like it rare.”

  “You made me ruin a great piece of meat.”

  “Thanks. I think.” She sits at the table. He’s set it, as every night this week, with a lit votive candle and a couple of yellow wildflowers stuck in what he calls his “Bud vase”—an empty Budweiser bottle.

  Barnes opens the fridge and removes a couple of beers, some plastic tubs containing Price Chopper deli potato salad and coleslaw, and a bowl of green pods sprinkled with sea salt.

  “Is that edamame?” she asks.

  “It is. I miss real food.”

  “Hey, rigatoni à la Sully is real food,” she protested, having cooked her specialty for last night’s dinner.

  “Okay, A—I wouldn’t necessarily say that, and B—I’m talking about Japanese food. And Thai. And Chinese.”

  “There’s Chinese food here.”

  “I mean good takeout. Tell me you wouldn’t kill for some Szechuan Emperor right now.”

  Yeah, she would.

  And when she’s in New York, she tells Barnes, she would also kill for the decent night’s sleep she’s had every night here.

  “You can’t have everything,” he says with a shrug.

  “Sure you can. You just can’t have it all at once.”

  Barnes cuts into his steak and proclaims it perfectly done. “Not too red inside, not too charred outside. How about yours? Well done enough for you?”

  “We’ll see.” She stabs it with her fork cuts off a small piece. No blood—always good sign. And a grim reminder. “So what do you think?” she asks Barnes.

  “I think that if you’re not hungry, you can turn it into a nice pair of shoes.”

  “What?”

  “The steak. It killed me to cook it through, because no one should eat leather, but—”

  “I meant what do you think about tonight. And you knew that.”

  “Yeah. I knew that. But I’m sick of talking about it.”

  He’s also sick of Mundy’s Landing. But she refused to accompany him to the Adirondacks, and he refused to leave her alone at the cottage.

  So here they are, a week later, settled into this odd semblance of small-town domesticity. They spend their evenings at this table and on the porch swing, recapping days spent searching for leads in Catherine Winston’s disappearance and trying to link it to Juanita Contreras’s.

  Some vacation.

  It’s not official business, rather an independent investigation of their own volition. But as Ron Calhoun said this afternoon when they saw him getting out of his car, home to catch a few hours’ sleep, forget procedure—even with the state troopers on the job, the MLPD needs all the help it can get.

  “I’m sick of talking about it, too,” she tells Barnes. “But we have to. Time is running out. So what do you think is going to happen tonight?”

  Silence.

  She watches Barnes cut off another piece of steak, chew thoughtfully, and wash it down with a swig of beer.

  Then he sets down his fork and looks at her. “I think your friend Nick Colonomos is going to nab some lunatic trying to move a dead girl into 46 Bridge Street. That’s what I think. You?”

  “I think you’re right. And based on what we know, I’m afraid it’s going to be Catherine Winston.”

  A faraway voice reaches Indi’s ears.

  “It’s time. Come on.”

  It’s Tony, waking her up for school.

  She feels him shaking her, and he’s hurting her arm. Her entire body hurts. She’s sick. She has to stay in bed today.

  “Get up. Let’s go.”

  She burrows into the pillow, but there is no pillow. There is no bed. There is no Tony.

  Someone is crying.

  Not Kathryn. Kathryn died.

  Not Juanita. She died, too.

  There’s someone else, she remembers. Another voice. Here in the dark. Someone new.

  The man grunts, close to her ear, and Indi feels herself being lifted.

  Her parched lips struggle to form the word. At last, it spills into the dark.

  “Why?”

  “Because,” he says simply, “it’s your turn. And because you were born under a blue moon. That’s why I chose you.”

  Blue moon.

  Yes.

  “Blue moon . . .”

  Her mother’s voice, singing, drowns out the ugly sound of a blade flipping open in his hand.
r />   “You saw me standing alone . . .”

  It’s the last sound she’ll hear on this earth . . . Or maybe, she thinks as she imagines herself swooping into the night sky toward a beautiful full moon, I’m already gone.

  “Availability, vulnerability, desirability,” Sully tells Barnes, the food before her still untouched. “Catherine Winston represented every quality a serial offender would be seeking.”

  “Exactly. And—carpe diem, right?”

  She nods. It stands to reason that he’d have all three Murder Houses under surveillance. It isn’t hard to imagine that he spotted her inside 46 Bridge and seized the opportunity.

  But there was no sign of forced entry. Had she opened the door to the offender because she recognized and trusted him?

  Their profile suggests that he’s intelligent and—obviously—obsessed with the original case. That describes just about everyone in Mundy’s Landing.

  He was carrying a 1916 coin wrapped in vintage cloth, most likely a scrap of fabric from the historical society’s stolen nightgown. Forensics has yet to confirm that, according to Nick, who briefed them on various details of the case.

  “Are you going to eat?” Barnes asks, gesturing at her plate.

  “I’m eating.” She picks up an edamame pod. “I’m just trying to get inside his head. What does that nickel tell us, other than that he was obsessed with the original case?”

  “That he was ritualistic,” Barnes ticks off on his fingers, having been over this countless times before, “and that he probably went through the backyard with the body and dropped the coin there.”

  “Right. But—”

  “Eat, Sully.”

  “I’m eating.” She bites down on the velvety, salt-dappled pod, releasing a couple of tender soybeans onto her tongue before resuming the conversation around a salty mouthful. No need to stand on ceremony with Barnes. “But how can he expect to do the same thing tonight?” she asks. “He has to know the cops will be watching the house.”

  “He sure as hell does if he reads the Tribune.”

  “He’d have known that all along, though.”

  “He’s blinded by narcissism. He thinks he’s going to get away with it.”

  “Either that, or he’s lain the groundwork so that he will. Like the burglar alarms.”

  Barnes nods. Colonomos told them that Yamazakis’ burglar alarm went off incessantly before the break-in. The offender rightly assumed that after so many false alarms, the police response would lose its urgency, or that the alarm would be disarmed.

  “The Binghams don’t have an alarm system,” he points out.

  “No, they have something better. Police protection.”

  “Do you think he’d actually kill a cop? That doesn’t fit the MO.”

  “No, it doesn’t.” Considering that, Sully raises a bite of meat to her mouth at last, then hesitates. “There must be some other reason he thinks he’ll be able to waltz into that house tonight.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like he belongs there.”

  Barnes shrugs. “Eat, Sully.”

  “I’m eating.”

  She bites, chews, swallows.

  “How is it? Well done enough for you? No blood, right?”

  “No blood,” she agrees.

  Yet somehow she tastes it anyway.

  Watching the sun set over Mundy’s Landing from the window of her attic bedroom, Ora wonders where she’s going to go from here. When the Sleeping Beauty Killer’s identity becomes known to the world, should she act as though it’s a surprise to her? Or should she admit that she’s known all along?

  Great-Aunt Etta pieced together the crime years ago, before Ora was even born. She’d known the players personally and been an eyewitness to the Purcell family drama. She’d heard the rumors of incest involving Augusta Pauline, George’s suicidal sister, and of Florence’s affair with her father-in-law, and of a little girl living in the attic. People said the house was haunted by Augusta Pauline’s spirit, but Aunt Etta was too pragmatic to believe in ghosts.

  One night, when bathtub gin got the better of Florence, Etta had snuck a peek at the photo in the locket Florence used to wear around her neck. She believed the guilt-ridden woman wasn’t just mourning her lost child, but eventually driven mad over her complicity. In later years, long after George’s death, she’d visited her old friend at the Rockland Sanatorium. There, she told Ora, Florence had rambled on, often incoherently, yet in part revealing the tragic truth.

  “Why didn’t you tell?” Ora asked her aunt.

  “Because by then it was much too late, and I didn’t see any reason for their surviving children to suffer the consequences. George was dead. Florence had been punished enough. Long after he stopped punishing her, she punished herself.”

  “But they were fiends, locking a little girl in an attic for all of those years, and then he killed her and two others.”

  “Yes. He was mentally ill, and a victim of his circumstances, and the era. So was Florence.”

  “He was a monster, and she was selfish and greedy.”

  “George was the son of a controlling man who blamed him for his mother’s death in childbirth, and who abused his sister until she killed herself. Florence came of age at a time when women were regarded as helpless without a man to take care of them. I understood them. And I watched her transform afterward. She wanted to be independent.”

  “Instead, she went crazy.”

  Aunt Etta shrugged. “Dementia runs in some families, my dear,” she said pointedly. The conversation took place during a time when Papa was yelling at Rip Van Winkle and the gang to stop making all that noise playing ninepins in the living room.

  “Sometimes, it can be a blessing,” Aunt Etta added. “It was for Florence. In her lucid moments, she didn’t realize she’d unburdened her guilt upon her doctors—and upon me, when I visited her. And upon her daughter.”

  Yes, Augusta. She had met her sister, Zelda. She knew of her existence. She must have pieced things together, and her mother probably filled in the rest in later years.

  The statue, a poignant monument to her lost sister, is proof that she had known. No wonder she isolated herself in that house all those years, guarding her family’s secrets, estranged even from her own brother, who presumably didn’t know. No wonder she never married, or had children of her own. She had seen those very institutions destroy her parents’ lives.

  For now, George Purcell’s journal still sits, undiscovered, in the chest down at police headquarters. The time capsule has been forgotten in the uproar over the copycat crime that took place last week, and the anticipation of another tonight.

  Early last Friday morning, Ora met with Police Chief Calhoun, Lieutenant Colonomos, and Mayor Cochran to discuss what she should do about the remaining Mundypalooza events. Workshops were scheduled for the remainder of the weekend, and attendees had paid hefty registration fees. There would be an uproar if she canceled.

  As it turned out, they encouraged her to go on with the events as planned. Believing the killer might be among the museum’s visitors, the police stationed a uniformed officer at the door and a plainclothes cop inside to keep an eye on the crowds.

  The remainder of Mundypalooza passed without incident.

  Well of course it did.

  Because the second crime isn’t slated to take place until tonight. Tomorrow morning, rather. Sometime before sunrise.

  Staring at the pink-streaked sky, Ora is certain that somewhere out there, a dead girl is being dressed in the bloodstained nightgown stolen from her collection.

  Lying on the floor in Holmes’s upstairs bathroom, the Beauty is almost ready. He took great care to make sure that this one is just right.

  He washed the blood from the gash in her throat and the ones he inflicted on her torso, in accordance with the autopsy photographs of S.B.K.’s second victim. He combed her long hair, braided it, and carefully tied the fragile satin ribbons at the tip of each one. Her arms are folded, hands clasp
ed across her breast. Her eyes are closed.

  But the nightgown—the one she was supposed to wear, the one Zelda had worn—does not fit.

  Fitted in the bust and waist, with a small, constricted neckline, the gown goes over her head, but starts to tear when he attempts to tug it down over her fleshy, wounded torso. Her breasts are in the way.

  He could lop them off—but that wouldn’t be right. It would ruin his careful replication of the original victim’s wounds.

  Clutching the garment, he stands over the naked corpse, his thoughts swimming with uncertainty as darkness falls beyond his window and the clock ticks on.

  What the hell is he supposed to do now?

  “What the hell were you going to do anyway?” he shouts, and clamps his hands over his ears.

  “No! Stop it! Shut up for a minute so I can think! I have a plan!”

  He’d planned to stash her out behind the detached garage and then sneak her into the house when he was ready. But he’d underestimated the police presence around the house. There are officers everywhere. Even if he gets her to the backyard, how will he ever get her inside?

  “You should have known! S.B.K. would have known!”

  “You don’t know that!”

  “Yes, you do! It’s proof!”

  Is that true? Is this the proof that he wasn’t—that he isn’t—S.B.K. after all? That his visions of 1916 are mere visions, and not memories?

  “No! Be quiet!”

  His thoughts spin through the possibilities. He can use one of the nightgowns he bought at Macy’s for this purpose. But they feel like cheap imitations now that he’s in possession of the real thing.

  “So which is more important? Come on, make a decision!”

  “Shh! I’m thinking!”

  “Is it the Beauty? Or the nightgown?”

  He stares at the yellowed, bloody fabric clutched in his violently trembling hands. This, he could smuggle into the house.

  He imagines pulling it over someone else’s head. Would it, too, feel wrong? If it feels wrong, will he feel compelled to make a rash, impulsive compensation as he did before?