Blue Moon

by Wendy Corsi Staub

“Oh, it is. But Lester prefers to avoid actively soliciting the ‘ghouls’—not the Halloween kind, if you know what I mean.”

  They do. Plenty of locals use that word to describe the tourists who visit every summer in an effort to solve the cold case. The event—colloquially dubbed Mundypalooza—has taken place every year since 1991. That’s when, in conjunction with the seventy-fifth anniversary of the cold case, the historical society first extended a public invitation: Can You Solve the Sleeping Beauty Murders?

  So far, no one has—but every summer, more and more people descend to try their hand at it. The historical society sponsors daily speakers, panel discussions, and workshops. Even Trib conducts an annual seminar about the sensational press coverage the case received in 1916.

  He turns to Annabelle. “That’s something we’d have to deal with if we bought this place.”

  “You’re right. We’d be inundated with curiosity seekers. I don’t think I want to—”

  “Just in the summer, though,” Lynda cuts in quickly, “and even then, it’s not a big deal.”

  “This house will be crawling with people and press,” Annabelle points out.

  A Murder House isn’t just branded by century-old stigma; it bears the brunt of the yearly gawker invasion. No local resident escapes unscathed, but those who live at 46 Bridge Street, 65 Prospect Street, and 19 Schuyler Place are inundated.

  “Let’s just walk through before you rule it out,” Lynda urges. “A comparable house at any other address in this neighborhood would sell for at least six figures more. I’d hate to have someone snatch this out from under you.”

  The odds of that happening are slim to none. Lester, who insists on pre-approving every showing, requests that prospective buyers already live locally. Not many people fit the bill, but Annabelle and Trib passed muster and they’re here. They might as well look, even though Annabelle is sure she doesn’t want to live here after all. She’d never get past what happened here during the summer of 1916, let alone what will happen every summer forever after, thanks to Mundypalooza.

  They step through the massive double doors into the dim, chilly entrance hall. So far, so not good.

  Before Annabelle can announce that she’s changed her mind, Lynda presses an antique mother-of-pearl button on the wall. “There, that’s better, isn’t it?”

  They find themselves bathed in the glow of an elegant fixture suspended from a plaster medallion high overhead. Surprisingly, it is better.

  There’s a massive mirror on the wall opposite the door. In it, Annabelle sees their reflection: Lynda, a full head shorter even in heels, bookended by herself and Trib, who could pass for siblings. They’re similarly tall and lean, with almost the same shade of dark brown hair and light brown eyes—both attractive, if not in a head-turning way.

  Their eyes meet in the mirror, and he gives her a slight nod, as if to say, Yes, let’s keep going.

  “Just look at that mosaic tile floor!” Lynda exclaims. “And the moldings on those archways! And the woodwork on the grand staircase! We haven’t seen anything like this in any of the houses we’ve looked at, have we?”

  They agree that they haven’t, and of course wouldn’t expect to in their price point.

  Annabelle can picture twelve-year-old Oliver walking through those big doors after school, dropping his backpack on the built-in seat above the cast-iron radiator with a Mom? I’m home. As she runs her fingertips over the carved newel post, she envisions him sliding down the banister curving above.

  The long-dormant old house stirs to life as they move through it. One by one, doors creak open. Spaces beyond brighten courtesy of wall switches that aren’t dime-a-dozen rectangular plastic levers. These are period contraptions with buttons or brass toggles or pull-pendants dangling from thirteen-foot ceilings. Lynda presses, turns, pulls them all, chasing shadows from the rooms.

  Annabelle’s imagination strips away layers of faded velvet and brocade shrouding the tall windows. Her mind’s eye replaces Augusta’s dark, dusty furnishings with comfortable upholstery and modern electronics. Instead of mustiness and cat pee, she smells furniture polish, clean linens, savory supper on the stove. The ticking grandfather clock, dripping faucets, and Lynda’s chirpy monologue and tapping footsteps are overshadowed by the voices Annabelle loves best, echoing through the rooms in ordinary conversation: Mom, I’m home! What’s for dinner? I’m home! How was your day? I’m home . . .

  Yes, Annabelle realizes. This is it.

  This, at last, is home.

  PART I

  And the moon like a twisted torch

  Burned over one lonesome larch;

  She passed with never a sound.

  Three times had the circle traced,

  Three times had bent

  To the grave that the myrtle graced;

  Three times, then softly faced

  Homeward, and slowly went.

  —Madison Julius Cawein,

  “The Eve of All-Saints”

  Holmes’s Case Notes

  It took less than an hour to drive to Albany from Mundy’s Landing with no traffic. Just past midnight, I arrived in Albany and parked down the road from her house. I assumed she was long gone by then.

  She always takes the bus home from Wal-Mart after she finishes her shift at seven o’clock on Friday nights. It stops right there on the corner, a nice little perk in a low-income neighborhood that’s seen better days.

  Sometimes, when I was watching her through the windows, memorizing her routine, I would see her make dinner for herself and eat it alone at the kitchen table. Her stepfather, Tony, is long home from his factory job and parked in front of the television by then. They don’t talk much. I doubt he’ll miss her.

  Next, she always goes upstairs to try to make herself pretty. She isn’t. Her hair is an unnatural shade of yellow with dark roots. Her eyebrows are too thin; her eyeliner too thick. She dresses all wrong: snug tops tucked into equally snug pants or skirts with a fat wedge of belly spilling over at the waist.

  By nine o’clock, she leaves the house again. Snow, rain, it doesn’t matter: she goes on foot. She turned seventeen back on March 31, but I don’t believe she has a driver’s license. Or maybe her stepfather won’t allow her to drive his car. She can’t afford to buy one—a high school dropout working as a cashier.

  In the beginning, last summer and into the fall, I used to follow her to see where she went every night. It was never to a restaurant, a movie, or concert. None of that for her. She just visits friends in the neighborhood. She stays until two or three in the morning, and then walks home alone. Sometimes, I can tell that she’s overindulged in liquor and drugs by the way she weaves and sways back up the block in the dark.

  On any of those nights, it would have been easy, so very easy, to make my move. But it wasn’t time yet.

  I had to wait until today, May 21, when the moon was full. Full, and blue.

  Not true blue, of course. Certainly not blue in color. And not blue by modern astronomical calculations, which define a blue moon as a second full moon occurring within a single calendar month. By that definition, the blue moon that occurred last July was the first in three years, and there won’t be another of those until January 2018. But a hundred years ago, a blue moon was defined as the fourth full moon within a single season, as it is now.

  It was a marvelous sight in those hours before dawn, perched high above that dismal neighborhood. I was anxious to see her bathed in its light as she walked home. I waited for her as long as I could, until the moon faded into morning. But she never came. I had to drive back without her.

  I’ll return tonight.

  What if she doesn’t come? What will I do? Everything—everything I’ve worked for—depends on this girl. On this date. On this blue moon.

  Chapter 1

  Saturday, May 21, 2016

  Mundy’s Landing

  The moon hangs low in the blue-black night sky. Lying on her back on the hard ground, staring up at it, Indi realizes that it�
�s blue.

  She may have been flunking earth science—flunking everything, really—when she dropped out of high school. But this, she knows.

  There’s only one blue moon in all of 2016, and it’s tonight.

  “Blue moon . . . you saw me standing alone . . .” Her mother, Karen, used to sing to her when she was a little girl.

  She’d been named for the one beneath which she’d been born on March 31, 1999.

  Indigo Selena Edmonds.

  Indigo means blue.

  Selena means moon goddess.

  Edmonds is Tony’s last name.

  He’s not her father. He never even adopted her after he married her mother. He makes sure he reminds her of that every chance he gets. But they’re stuck together under the same roof, living separate lives that seemed miserable until tonight, when she was abducted by a stranger.

  I shouldn’t have gone out. I didn’t even go to work. Why did I go out?

  She’s been sick in bed for the last few days. Strep throat, probably. It’s going around. Several of her coworkers at Wal-Mart have had it lately, but she couldn’t afford to go to the doctor for antibiotics. Nor could she afford to miss her shift two days in a row. But by the time her friends texted tonight, she felt a little better. She got out of bed, fixed herself up, and headed out the door.

  She hadn’t even reached the corner when the dark SUV pulled up alongside her. The driver rolled down the window to ask for directions in a pleasant voice she hasn’t heard since.

  The next thing Indi knew, she was waking up in a puddle on the floor of a musty-smelling rowboat, her hands tightly bound behind her. The boat was bobbing, and she could hear the oars thumping and splashing in the water. She was so terrified it was going to capsize—she can’t swim—that she couldn’t even wonder how she’d gotten there.

  Now she’s back on dry land, flat on her back, panic threatening to overtake her.

  You can’t let that happen. You have to stay calm, she tells herself as she stares at the sky. Think about the moon.

  It can’t be a coincidence that it’s blue tonight, just as it was the night she was born. That’s a sign that she’s going to survive this . . . this . . . whatever is going on, here.

  The moon. Think about the moon.

  Its creamy, mottled surface reminds her of baby deer.

  They’re small. Sweet. So vulnerable.

  Helpless, really.

  They have big, soft, Disney eyes, and ears that stick out sideways, and . . .

  What else? What else?

  Their mothers protect them. Yes, when you come across a fawn, you can be sure a doe is nearby, even when you don’t see her. She hovers close to her baby, making sure nothing hap—

  “Get up!” The gruff command shatters Indi’s attempt to comfort herself.

  “Please. I’m so tired. I just—”

  The night sky sways away as rough hands grip her shoulders. She’s back on her feet, pushed from behind, again stumbling over rutted ground on a path through the dark woods.

  An owl hoots from an overhead bough, joined by the distinct yowl of a feline in heat. Indi thinks of other creatures that lurk in the forest, and dread slithers in, binding her in its clammy embrace.

  No. Think about the gentle deer, the fawns. What else about them?

  Think. Think.

  She’s never seen one before in real life. There are no deer, old or young, roaming the streets of Albany. Other creatures do, though. Dangerous predators, and Indi is the fawn: small, sweet, helpless.

  I want my mommy.

  The thought leaps through her brain and lingers, nosing at the periphery.

  Two years have passed since she lost her mother. But the woman who gave birth to her at sixteen was never Mommy. She insisted that Indi call her by her first name, Karen, so that she could pass her off as a little sister back when she was dating, before she met Tony.

  Forget Karen, forget Mommy, any mommy. Indi would give anything, anything, if Tony were here with her now.

  She’d never had much use for her lug of a stepfather, but she’d always assumed that since her late mother had loved him, he must have some redeeming characteristic.

  She’d never have guessed that the one thing she hates most about him—that he takes “no crap from nobody,” including his stepdaughter—would become the one thing she’d desperately need.

  Tony would get me out of here so fast that this . . . this . . . creature’s head would be spinning.

  “Come on, move it! Move!”

  “I’m . . . I’m trying.”

  The rocky terrain is tangled with vines that twine around Indi’s legs, bared to her thighs in a short skirt. Thick with the foreboding organic perfume of old leaves and mud, the very air she sucks into her lungs is a stark reminder that things die, that dead things are buried, dead people are buried . . .

  Am I going to die?

  A leafy rope snares one of her stiletto heels like a trap, turning her ankle sharply. She stumbles, falls forward.

  If only she could land in her sickbed and wake to find that this was all just a terrible nightmare, courtesy of feverish delirium.

  If only the earth would open and swallow her whole.

  It doesn’t. She hits the ground hard, her face slamming into an unforgiving layer of damp leaves, sticks, rocks. Something deep in her ankle pops with a residual explosion of nausea.

  “Get up!” the voice growls.

  She finds her own, small and tinny. “Please . . .”

  The plaintive appeal is greeted with laughter, cruel and guttural, and a sharp tug on her long hair. She’s yanked into the air like a limp, battered plaything dangling from a feral cat’s paw. Her feet fumble, stumble, find the ground at last.

  “Walk!”

  Her own slight weight on her ankle is too excruciating to bear. She’s down again, this time flat on her back.

  The full moon shines through branches that stretch above her like gnarled fingers. She wonders if it will be the last thing she ever sees.

  It isn’t.

  She’ll only wish it had been.

  Thursday, June 23

  Annabelle flips the turn signal and brakes for the stop sign at the brick-paved intersection of Fulton Avenue and Bridge Street, hoping the ice cream didn’t melt in the trunk. It’s been there much longer than she intended.

  Mundypalooza doesn’t even begin until next week, but traffic was already much heavier than usual as she ran her morning errands.

  This year marks the twenty-fifth annual historical society convention and the hundredth anniversary of the murders, along with the 1666 Founder’s Day gala officially dubbed ML350. Buzz has been building for months. Judging by the abundance of far-flung license plates in the crowded Price Chopper parking lot, people are willing to travel for days for a shot at cracking the case that has eluded professionals and amateurs for almost a century. The historical society even offers a significant reward—intended, of course, not to capture a dangerous criminal, but as an expensive publicity stunt. The dollar amount has substantially increased with every passing year, along with the size of the crowd and media attention.

  After buying groceries, Annabelle had to drive around the block several times looking for a parking spot near the dry cleaner’s, and again at the pharmacy. Then there was a fender bender at the busy corner of Prospect and Fulton, adding insult to injury with a lengthy detour around the perimeter of The Heights.

  But at last she’s home, and home is looking particularly lovely on this sunny, breezy morning. In the fluid, dappled shade of swaying maple boughs, with its clapboards and trim painted in muted sepia shades, the house looks like a vintage daguerreotype come to life.

  Little has changed since it was built in 1870. She knows, because there is a vintage daguerreotype of the house, framed and prominently hanging in the Mundy’s Landing Historical Society.

  She pulls into the driveway, efficiently avoiding the deepest ruts. Someday, they’ll repave it.

  Home ownership
, she and Trib have discovered, is accompanied by plenty of somedays.

  She parks around back beside the old carriage house that was listed as a detached garage—laughable, as a gaping root cellar is visible beneath the few rotting floorboards that are still in place. They wouldn’t dare walk in there, much less drive a car inside, even if it weren’t crammed with old books and magazines Lester was supposed to have removed before the closing.

  They opted not to press the point, as the process had already dragged on. They’d made their initial offer in early November, but Lester had already left for the Sarasota condo where he spends the winters. In no hurry to close, he was presumably holding out for more lucrative offers that never came, all the while refusing to entertain any from Ora Abrams over at the historical society.

  When he did at last accept the Binghams’ offer, he insisted on adding a restrictive covenant to the sales contract stating that they would use the house solely as their private residence. Their lawyer, Ralph Duvane, wasn’t thrilled, but at that point, they all just wanted the sale to go through.

  They finally closed on the property over a month ago. “The most expensive Mother’s Day gift you’re ever going to get,” Trib teased Annabelle as they signed the papers.

  “Darn. I had my heart set on a Tuscan villa for next year,” she quipped, and Ralph Duvane laughed along with Trib. Even the seller’s no-nonsense attorney cracked a brief smile, though the seller himself remained stoic.

  “Maybe Lester’s just grieving the loss of his aunt, or the house his ancestors built,” Annabelle told Trib later, when they were discussing how the man’s dour demeanor had cast a pall over the proceeding. “After all, it’s the end of an era for that family.”

  “Oh, come on. He’s been waiting for Augusta to die, and I bet she knew it. I don’t think they’d even spoken in years. I’m surprised she didn’t just leave everything to her cats.”

  Augusta was the quintessential small-town spinster whose many feline companions outranked and outlived her human loved ones, Lester aside—if he, as the least lovable guy in town, could even be included in that category.