Blue Moon: Mundy's Landing Book Two

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  It has to be right.

  “So which is it going to be? The nightgown, or the Beauty? Make up your mind!”

  He’d carefully chosen Indigo Selena Edmonds because she shared an important characteristic with Zelda Delphine Purcell: she, too, was born beneath a blue moon. Yes, he’d painstakingly searched birth records for girls born on those rare dates. Of all he tracked down, she was the most readily available.

  But what if he can find another child, even more available? What if the child were to share not the blue moon birthday or even the gender, but a body type slender enough for this garment to slip on easily?

  “You have the nightgown. All you need is a child.”

  Holmes paces, twisting the fabric in his hands.

  “A child living at 46 Bridge Street.”

  “I know that.”

  “A child already inside the house, already tucked into bed in the room at the top of the stairs.”

  “I know! I know!”

  “Then do it.”

  Holmes nods, turning away from the corpse, forgetting all about Indi.

  “Yes,” he agrees, “It would be right. It would be exactly right.”

  Standing sentry in the downstairs hall as it has for over a century, the Purcell family’s black walnut clock strikes midnight.

  Hearing it, Annabelle wishes she hadn’t switched spots with Trib tonight.

  He’d offered to share the bed with Oliver so that she could get some sleep for a change, and to her surprise, Oliver agreed—after Trib told him they could watch the Yankees game on the bedroom television.

  “Mom never lets me turn on the TV in bed.”

  “I don’t,” she agrees. “That’s because I’m no fun.”

  “You’re fun,” Trib said. “Just not as much fun as I am.”

  “Have at it, Fun Guy.” She handed him the remote and picked up her pillow.

  “We will. The little mushroom and I will see you in the morning.”

  “Mushroom?” Oliver protested as she grinned at Trib’s quip, instantly getting the joke. “Why am I a mushroom?”

  “Because you’re a fun guy, too.”

  “Huh?”

  “Fun guy. Fungi.”

  Standing there in the master bedroom, joking around with Trib and Oliver, was almost like old times.

  Then Annabelle kissed them both good night, and Trib said, in a low voice, “Stay. All three of us can sleep in here.”

  “No, it’s okay. I need to rest. I can’t take another day feeling like a zombie.” It’s hard enough for her to fall asleep in a dark, quiet room. The last thing she needs in her current state of exhaustion is light and noise—and on this hot, sticky night, an extra person in her bed.

  As she climbed into Oliver’s, she reminded herself that Officer Greenlea—armed and vigilant—is posted right at the foot of the stairs. Two additional officers are outside, one on the front porch and one on the back. Squad cars are parked at either end of the block, and others are patrolling The Heights. Short of a helicopter hovering over the roof and a SWAT team in the shrub border, the Mundy’s Landing Police have taken every precaution.

  Now, hours later, she can’t get her thoughts to settle, can’t get past the dread that something is going to happen here tonight.

  Downstairs, the clock chimes again: one o’clock.

  And then two o’clock.

  Three.

  Maybe she was wrong. Maybe daylight will come without incident, and she can breathe easily at last.

  As the Westminster Quarters chime three-fifteen, Annabelle hears another sound—the faint sound of a voice in the hall. A man’s voice, murmuring.

  It isn’t Trib’s.

  She turns toward the door just in time to see, in the dim glow of Oliver’s nightlight, that the knob is slowly turning.

  Sully’s insomnia is back, along with the headache.

  She may have worked through her sorrow over Manik Bhandari, but she can’t stop thinking that another child’s life hangs in the balance tonight.

  She’s certain Catherine didn’t run away.

  Sully was once a teenage girl herself. At thirteen, she fought incessantly with her mother. She, too, threatened to leave home—yet she never would have followed through.

  You don’t know Catherine. You shouldn’t assume she didn’t just take off, like she said.

  But if Sully looks at the circumstantial evidence, and assumes that Catherine didn’t run away, then she’s been abducted.

  Who, she’s been asking herself, would Catherine have trusted? Who could have come to the door, and the girl would have opened it without question?

  Her parents have solid alibis, as do other adults in her life—family, friends, teachers, clergy.

  “Don’t ever let a stranger into the house,” Sully lectures the teenagers who do just that when she and Barnes knock on doors during an investigation.

  They flash their badges and ask for the resident adult, but the kids often let them in.

  What if someone posing as a cop came to the door at 46 Bridge?

  It’s a small town, though. Surely Catherine would recognize the local police officers. Even Sully has gotten to know all the faces in her short time here.

  All right, then what if . . .

  At last, Sully allows in the thought that’s been lurking on the periphery like an unwanted intruder:

  What if the offender really is a cop?

  As he crept up the stairs clutching the nightgown, with the antique barber’s blade ready in his pocket, S.B.K. knew he’d made the right decision.

  “The boy is the one who has to die,” he mutters.

  A light glows in the second-floor hallway. At the end, his precious Augusta’s door is closed. So are the others, including the one at the top of the stairs, across from the master bedroom.

  The boy will be asleep inside.

  He has to die.

  He deserves to die, just as Zelda did one hundred years ago.

  What do I care? He isn’t my son.

  He pushes open the door at the top of the stairs.

  And she wasn’t my daughter. She belonged to Father, just like this room, and everything else in this house, in my life. Even my wife.

  His hand clenching the blade, S.B.K. crosses swiftly toward the figure in the bed.

  “What . . . what are you doing?” a frightened voice asks in the dark.

  Trembling with anticipation, S.B.K. raises the blade, preparing to strike.

  Sully throws on shorts, a T-shirt, and sneakers, and hurries down the stairs. The living room is dark and warm, the box fan whirling in the window.

  “Barnes,” she calls. “Barnes, wake up!”

  She flips the light switch at the foot of the stairs and sees that the couch, made up as always with sheets and a pillow, is empty.

  Where the hell, she wonders, did he go?

  “What are you doing?” Annabelle repeats in terror, though she knows.

  The momentary relief that flooded her veins when she saw who had entered the room is swept away on a tide of sheer terror. Madness torches his eyes, and she can feel the hatred radiating as he stands over her.

  “I’m killing you,” he says calmly.

  She starts to scream, but he shoves something into her open mouth, gagging her with a wad of cloth. His fingers clutch her hair, jerking her head back into the pillow so that her neck arches, exposed.

  Annabelle intakes a strangled breath through her nose, her last breath, and she thinks of Trib and Oliver, how much she loves them, how much they need her . . .

  Oliver. Oliver needs her. He can’t survive without her. He isn’t strong enough to endure this.

  She has to fight, dammit. She has to fight for her life. She can’t let him do this.

  Flat on her back, she bends her knees toward her chest, preparing to kick him, hard, with both feet. It isn’t much, but it’s all she’s got left. If she can catch him off guard . . .

  But someone else has beaten her to it.

 
She sees a shadow in the doorway and a flash of movement behind him. Before he can react, she hears the dull thud of something hard hitting his skull from behind in precisely the moment she thrusts her feet into his chest.

  The madman is no longer standing over the bed.

  Oliver is, holding his baseball bat, panting, wearing a familiar frightened expression as he peers down at her.

  “Dad!” he shouts. “Dad! Help!”

  Annabelle sits up and fumbles with the gag. Trib bursts down the hall and into the room. He takes in Oliver with the bat, Annabelle in the bed, and the uniformed police officer lying on the floor, unconscious and badly injured from a well-placed blow to the skull. “What happened? Oliver, what did you do?”

  “I had a nightmare, so I came to find Mom, and . . . and . . .” He falters.

  “You hit a police officer?” Panic edges into Trib’s expression. “Oliver, why would you—”

  Removing the gag at last, Annabelle finds her voice, trying to explain. “No, Trib, he saved me.”

  “The officer saved you? And then Oliver—”

  “No! Oliver saved me.” She gestures at the man on the floor. “He was going to kill me.”

  “Oliver saved you?”

  She nods, folding her son into her arms, her throat choked with emotion. But she manages to say, as she hugs him, hard, “You’re the most courageous kid I’ve ever known, Oliver.”

  “I’m not. I was scared.”

  “Everyone was scared. I was terrified. He was going to—” She breaks off, shuddering, unable to fathom how close she’d come to death just moments ago—or that the child who needs her protection just saved her from the man who tried to kill her.

  “I’m out here,” Barnes’s voice calls through the screen.

  Sully finds him on the porch swing wearing only boxers, his bare feet propped on the railing.

  “What are you doing out here?”

  “It was too hot to sleep in there. I can’t take it anymore, Gingersnap. I need A.C. I need the city. I need—”

  “You need to listen to me for a minute,” she cuts in. “I think I know—”

  Her words are curtailed by the sudden wail of sirens in the night.

  “Uh-oh.” Barnes swings his feet to the porch floor and looks at her. “That’s not good.”

  Dread slices her gut. “No. It isn’t.”

  “What were you going to say? What do you think you know?”

  “I think it was an inside job. One of the cops on the force.”

  “Which one? Colonomos?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know who. And I’m afraid,” she adds, as the sirens bawl into The Heights, “that it might be too late to figure it out.”

  Annabelle has yet to let go of Oliver, who sits beside her on the couch in the back parlor, bookended by Trib on his other side. Their trembly hands are clasped across their son’s bony shoulders as they answer questions for a pair of state troopers, one grandfatherly, the other perhaps Ryan Greenlea’s age.

  Ryan Greenlea . . .

  Ryan Greenlea?

  How can it be?

  In the half hour or so that has passed since he attacked her upstairs, Annabelle still can’t fathom that it really happened. Surely any second now, she’ll wake up in bed upstairs in the master bedroom—or maybe even back at the cottage off Battlefield Road. Maybe it was just a bad dream, all of it, including the Murder House.

  Yet every time she squeezes her eyes closed, she can still hear sirens and troopers’ voices and radios squawking and heavy footsteps tromping in the next room, up and down the stairs, overhead. When she opens her eyes, she sees a room bathed in fluid bloodshot light, diluted in its path from the front lawn through unfettered front parlor windows to the back of the house.

  A fresh siren wails in the night—an ambulance, she knows. Paramedics stormed into the house on law enforcement’s heels. They examined Annabelle and Oliver, proclaimed them shaken but remarkably resilient. She didn’t watch them tend to the fallen Officer Greenlea, but she could hear the commotion, and heard them carrying him down on a stretcher just moments ago.

  Searching her soul for a scrap of mercy toward the man, she finds none. He may be badly injured, and he’s clearly mentally ill, but he violated her home, and he . . .

  Catherine.

  Catherine is still missing.

  The pink light fades away with the siren.

  Footsteps descend the stairs, more voices in the hall.

  Lieutenant Colonomos appears in the doorway between the parlors. His handsome face has aged a year or two for every day that’s passed since she saw him on the street the night Kim was here with her, drinking wine and complaining, as always, about Catherine.

  Lieutenant Colonomos beckons the troopers over and speaks to them in a low voice. Annabelle overhears part of it: the troopers are to go help conduct a search of Greenlea’s home.

  Annabelle is familiar with the small house located off Colonial Highway near the elementary school, where he’d lived with his mother until she died a few years ago. The woman was eccentric—unkempt, outspoken, the kind of person who stands out in a small town. She’d always felt sorry for the boy, but now . . .

  He isn’t a boy. He’s a man.

  He attacked her family, and . . .

  Catherine is missing. Dear God.

  The troopers disappear into the next room.

  Crossing over to take one of the vacated chairs, Colonomos asks Oliver how he’s feeling.

  “I’m okay now. Where’s the . . . bad guy?” he asks, after searching briefly for the right phrasing.

  “On his way to the hospital. You really clobbered him, kid. The Red Sox could use a swing like that.”

  “I’m a Yankee fan,” Oliver replies, and Colonomos cracks a fleeting, but genuine grin before turning his attention to Annabelle and Trib. He tells them that the investigation is continuing upstairs and it will be a while before they’ll have their house to themselves again.

  “That’s okay,” Trib says. “Whatever it takes.”

  Annabelle wants to ask if there’s any news on Catherine. She can’t in front of Oliver, though, and there’s no way he’d leave their sides right now; no way she’d let him if he would.

  If there were news, she reminds herself, he’d tell us right away. Good news, anyway. Bad news . . .

  I don’t want to know. I’m not ready to hear it.

  How would Kim and Ross ever get over something like that? How would Oliver? Or any of them, really?

  “So you never had any idea what was going on in Greenlea’s head?” she asks Colonomos. A stupid question, she realizes as soon as it escapes her, because of course he didn’t. If he had, he’d have put a stop to it. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—it’s just—”

  “No, I understand. Believe it or not, he was a good cop. Always said that a detective was the only thing he ever wanted to be, from the time he was a little boy. He lived for the job. I never thought—”

  “No one ever would have thought that,” Trib says quickly. “I trusted him here with my wife and child.”

  Annabelle, too, had trusted him. So had Oliver. That’s the most frightening realization: that the killer was hiding in plain sight, right under this roof.

  Standing on the front lawn at 46 Bridge Street, bathed in the swirling ruddiness of at least half a dozen patrol car dome lights, Sully sees Nick Colonomos step purposefully out onto the porch.

  She hurries toward him, leaving Barnes to carry on a somber conversation with a shell-shocked local cop still trying to grasp that a fellow officer was behind all this.

  For Sully, who had guessed the truth too late, the shock is laced with guilt and concern for the missing Catherine Winston. The girl’s hysterical parents had rushed to the scene just ahead of Sully and Barnes, and were hastily escorted away by a pair of troopers.

  “How can we help?” Sully had asked another trooper, stationed along the perimeter of the property as a wave of onlookers and media descended.


  “You’re NYPD Missing Persons, right? Friends of Lieutenant Colonomos?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, we’ve got a missing person, and even if Greenlea was willing to tell us where to find her—which I doubt—he’s out cold. Go talk to the lieutenant.”

  They tried, but Nick was inside the house, and the trooper at the door wouldn’t let them in. That’s understandable. They’re lucky to be on the property, considering they’re not technically part of the investigation.

  Now Nick Colonomos has stepped outside at last, striding purposefully down the steps toward a cluster of cars.

  “Lieutenant!” Sully catches up to him. “I want to help. I know that Catherine Winston is still missing, and—”

  “A couple of my guys just found a 419 at Greenlea’s apartment. Female.”

  419—a corpse.

  She closes her eyes and curses softly. “Is it . . . ?”

  “They don’t think so. They turned up some kind of log he’d been keeping. It mentions a location out by the river. I’m meeting them over there now.” He throws open the driver’s side door of a black police SUV.

  “I’m coming with you.”

  He doesn’t argue as she jumps into the passenger’s seat. They take off, siren wailing, as officers hold back the throng lining the sidewalk.

  Her phone vibrates with a text from Barnes.

  Where the hell RU going?

  She hurriedly types To find Catherine.

  A moment later, an answering Be careful.

  Colonomos speeds west through town. A television news crew is filming on the Common, garish spotlights trained on a reporter standing in front of the historical society. Sully sees them all pivot as the SUV flies past, wondering, undoubtedly, if the unfolding story has taken another turn. It doesn’t matter to them whether there’s a happy ending, or a tragic one. To them, it isn’t personal. To Sully, long immune to media indifference, this case—even though it isn’t her own—is personal.

  She doesn’t know Catherine Winston, and Mundy’s Landing isn’t home, but . . .

  It could be, she realizes as the village proper falls away behind them. I could stay.

  Barnes wouldn’t be happy with her if she did. But Barnes has his life, and she has hers. They’re friends, and they’re partners, but they aren’t anything more than that.