Blue Moon

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  Annabelle opens the car trunk and runs a hand through her short dark hair, feeling sweat begin to trickle at her forehead. This is typical June weather in the Hudson Valley, warm and sunny with a slight breeze whispering through abundant foliage of ancient trees.

  Checking her watch as she reaches for the groceries, she notes that Oliver will be home from school soon. He’s had half days all week, and tomorrow he’ll just go in for an hour to get his report card.

  She hurriedly carries several grocery bags to the house, juggling them to unlock the door. The large, narrow, and old-fashioned key is conspicuously different from the others on her key ring. Lester claimed this is the only key his aunt had to this door, so Trib can’t even get in when it’s locked. They tried to have it duplicated, but it’s obsolete, according to the locksmith they consulted.

  “I can’t duplicate it. You’re going to have to replace the whole lock. But you really need to rekey all the other exterior locks, too, for security.”

  Annabelle and Trib looked at each other. “How much will that be?” she asked, already anticipating the answer.

  Too much.

  That locksmith, too, was relegated to the someday list—way down at the bottom. Despite its brushes with violence, Mundy’s Landing prides itself on being the kind of small town where no one ever locks their doors.

  Except most of the time, we do.

  She steps into an enclosed service porch, where there are two additional doors. One leads to the kitchen, the other to the indoor pool—both of which entail far more somedays than they can possibly accomplish in this lifetime on their budget and do-it-yourself schedule.

  “Do you think it’s too much house?” they’d asked each other when they first considered making an offer, and again, repeatedly, when they were preparing to move in.

  The answer was always clear—of course it’s too much house for three people. But their perspective varied depending on the day and the amount of time they’d spent rolling fresh paint across acres of walls and ceilings. In some moments, they were certain they were making a huge mistake; in others, they were convinced that too much house is preferable to too little house.

  Still, sometimes—like right now—I don’t know how I feel about it.

  She steps into the kitchen and, as always, catches a faint whiff of cat. Even now, strays show up on the steps expecting to be fed. Both Annabelle and Trib grew up with pets and wouldn’t mind adopting one, but Oliver is skittish around even the friendliest furry creatures.

  Stepping around stacks of moving boxes that have yet to be unpacked nearly a month after the move, she wedges the bags into a skimpy patch of counter space. Then she walks through the hushed rooms to open the front door for Oliver.

  Most of the time, the place feels cozy and homey despite its vast size. But once in a while—like right now—she has a vaguely uneasy feeling about living here.

  After the closing, Trib brought home yellowed editions of 1916 papers from the Tribune archives. She pored over articles pertaining to what happened under this roof.

  It was a warm July morning—a few days after the Fourth—when Florence Purcell discovered the dead girl eerily tucked into a vacant bed upstairs. That was the second of the three corpses that turned up in Mundy’s Landing during that frightening time.

  As Annabelle reaches out to give the old-fashioned lock a clockwise turn, she imagines the many hands that have touched it. Primarily Augusta’s over the past couple of decades, to be sure. But on a summer night a century ago, Augusta’s mother turned this brass lever counterclockwise and assumed that her children would thus be safe within these walls.

  And they were safe, Annabelle reminds herself. It isn’t as though someone broke in during the night and slaughtered them all in their beds. The Purcell family wasn’t physically harmed. But surely they suffered the psychological consequences for a long time afterward. Probably for the rest of their lives.

  A large studio portrait of the family hangs in the historical society. Annabelle walked past it countless times without paying much attention, but after moving into the house, she revisited the image online, wanting to familiarize herself with the people who once lived here.

  Taken in 1915 against a staged foliage backdrop, it depicts a classic pose of the era. Augusta stands between her seated parents, and her baby brother, Frederick, is cradled on her mother’s lap. All of them, even the baby, focus solemnly on the camera.

  Five-year-old Augusta is a pretty child, with corkscrew curls topped by a big, loopy hair bow. She wears a sailor middy, white tights, and shiny black shoes. Her hand rests on her father’s shoulder.

  George is handsome and dignified in a shirt and tie, his suit coat neatly buttoned over a waistcoat. His dark hair is parted in the middle and combed back, and his eyes stare from behind small, wire-rimmed glasses.

  Florence is impressively dressed. Her long skirt matches a smart tailored jacket cinched with a belt at the waist. A white lace blouse frames her attractive face, and her pale hair is upswept beneath an elaborate hat, its brim decorated in flowers and ribbon. Her right hand clutches the white-gowned baby. Her left is pressed to her heart, alongside a delicate scallop-edged locket on a long chain.

  Annabelle thinks of them, of their lives here, as she touches the carved mahogany newel post at the foot of the stairs. Soon after moving in, she’d noticed that the knob’s fluid scrolls and looping ribbons are interrupted by a deep, linear score about two inches long. She runs her fingertips along the scarred wood, gazing up at the shadowy second-floor hallway.

  Did he wait, on that fateful night, for the family to retire before slipping up the stairs? Who was he, the deranged intruder who violated this house with his presence, with his gruesome cargo? Who was she, the young girl whose throat had been neatly slit from ear to ear? Why had she been killed? Where had she been killed? Why had she been left here, posed in such a macabre way? Why had this house, this family been chosen?

  According to the Tribune, those were the questions bandied over porch railings and backyard fences like tennis balls on the courts at the newly built Valley Cove Electric Pleasure Park off Colonial Highway. Surely those same questions roamed Florence Purcell’s mind as she lay awake in a dark, neighboring bedroom on nights that followed the incident. Surely she, like everyone else in Mundy’s Landing, wondered what if . . . ?

  What if he comes back?

  He did, once. To 19 Schuyler Place; not here.

  And then . . .

  Never again.

  He simply disappeared, along with the oppressive heat that had suffocated the village for weeks. A fresh season blew in from the west. Lush greenery changed fleetingly to golden red and orange before succumbing to a dry, dead brown, scattered on bracing river gusts. The old year turned; the new brought harsh winter snows and violent spring storms until summer loomed once more, and villagers reconnected over fences and porch railings.

  By then, the country had been dragged into the raging global conflict and the new Selective Service Act required all men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-one to register for the draft. Concern over the eerie events of last summer gave way to more pressing threats. Yet still the unsettling memory remained, as indelibly etched on the communal consciousness as the jagged scratch on the newel post.

  A sudden clicking sound reverberates just a few feet from Annabelle’s ear, startling her. She gasps and whirls around, expecting to see . . .

  Someone.

  But it’s just the grandfather clock, preparing to play the Westminster Quarters.

  With a black walnut longcase, mercury pendulum, and hand-painted roman numerals on an ivory face, the clock rises against the stair wall where it’s stood since the house was built. Lester Purcell offered it to Annabelle and Trib, along with a monstrous vintage telescope and the player piano in the front parlor, as if he were bestowing a tremendous favor. Clearly, though, he had no use for the antique monstrosities in his Florida condo.

  “Do you know what it would
cost him to have these things shipped a thousand miles?” Trib grumbled. “We should just say no.”

  But Annabelle was nostalgic. Her childhood home, like many in The Heights, had housed an upright piano, and she’d taken lessons as a girl. She decided she might like to play again, or teach Oliver.

  The telescope, perched in the cupola on top of the house, still works, and the grandfather clock suits this house better than their own furniture. Most of it is plenty timeworn, but not retro-cool or antique. Just old.

  So they kept the telescope. They kept the piano, with its crumbling paper rolls stashed in the bench and keys badly in need of tuning. They kept the clock, its chimes now tolling a reminder that Oliver will be here any second, and the melting ice cream needs to be resuscitated.

  She stashes it in the ice-crusted freezer. Then she heads into the storm porch and stops short.

  The back door is slightly ajar.

  Did she leave it that way?

  She must have. Right?

  Right.

  She opens it, closes it firmly, and goes down the steps through sun-speckled shade toward the open trunk of the car. She can hear the clock’s final chime through the open window screens. Songbirds trill high overhead. A lawnmower hums on a distant block.

  Somewhere nearby, a twig snaps.

  About to reach for the last couple of grocery bags in the trunk, Annabelle pauses. She looks past the pair of cheap aluminum lawn chairs perched on the cracked concrete apron beside the carriage house—a makeshift patio, she and Trib joked when they sat there the other night for as long as Oliver—and the mosquitoes—would let them.

  The sound came from the rear thicket of overgrown shrubs and trees. Probably another stray cat, she thinks. They keep coming around, looking for Augusta and a kibble handout.

  But as she looks at the foliage, she realizes it isn’t a cat at all.

  A human silhouette is distinctly visible among the trees.

  She blinks, but it’s still there.

  What do I do?

  “Mom? I’m home! Mom?”

  Oliver. He’s calling to her from inside the house.

  She grabs the bags, slams the trunk, and hurries toward the back door, shooting an uneasy glance over her shoulder when she reaches it.

  The shadow is gone.

  Inside the house, she locks the back door, drops the groceries on the counter, and finds Oliver in the front hall. He’s putting his backpack and a brimming tote bag on the built-in bench, right where she’d imagined him doing just that the day they’d looked at the house . . .

  Back when it was still Murder House, and not home.

  “We cleaned out our lockers. Look at all this stuff I found!”

  She smiles and ruffles his hair. “Terrific. Why don’t you take it into the kitchen and go through it while I put away the groceries and make lunch?”

  Agreeable, he heads toward the back of the house. She starts after him and then hesitates, thinking of the shadow that had come and gone in the yard.

  Whoever was lurking there might have realized he’d been spotted, or slipped away at the sound of her son’s voice, or . . .

  Or she imagined it in the first place.

  Or perhaps it was a ghost.

  “Do you think the place is haunted?” Trib asked her just the other night, when she tried to describe the uneasiness she sometimes experiences when she’s alone here during the day. “I read about a resident ghost in one of the old newspaper accounts of the murders.”

  “You know I don’t believe in that stuff.”

  No, and he doesn’t, either. They’re both much too pragmatic for that.

  “I thought you might have changed your mind.”

  She hasn’t. But sometimes—like right now—a restless spirit is the lesser of the evils that might lurk under this roof. Standing utterly still, she pictures an imaginary prowler warily doing the same, hovering in one of the shadowy rooms branching off from the hall.

  For a century, the weird facts surrounding the Sleeping Beauty murders have been ingrained in the lore of this town, kept alive in the memories of earlier generations and by the historical society. Maybe ghosts don’t inhabit the house, but it’s certainly haunted by a collective awareness that lingers among the living heirs to the strange and sorrowful legend.

  Yes, and maybe Annabelle was wrong to think that a Murder House can ever truly become a home.

  Either way . . . we’re stuck with it.

  In this town where no one ever locks their doors, she gives the antique knob a firm counterclockwise turn.

  From the Sleeping Beauty Killer’s Diary

  August 2, 1893

  Father has always told me, in a rather accusatory fashion, that I was born during a total eclipse of the sun. Given the dramatic circumstances of my birth, I have always supposed he might have imagined, or at the very least exaggerated, that fact.

  Whilst roaming the fairground today, I discovered that he did not. Among the educational displays, I came upon astonishing photographic evidence depicting the sun on the date—perhaps at the very moment—of my birth, having been virtually obliterated by the moon. That in turn led me to seek astronomical exhibits, scattered as they are throughout the great expanse of the fair. I concluded my visit in the North Gallery of the Manufacturers Building, where I encountered various telescopic instruments.

  As I watched a splendid full moon rising through a magnified lens, I found myself questioning the future Father has prescribed for me. Now that I have grasped the world that lies beyond my little village, wouldn’t it be grand to explore the rest of the universe?

  I have, like the tormented man in W. B. Yeats’s poem, dreamed of Faeryland, and I have found it here, in the White City—

  Where people love beside star-laden seas;

  How Time may never mar their faery vows

  Under the woven roofs of quicken boughs:

  The singing shook him out of his new ease.

  And thus, I fear my wistfulness is slowly transforming into fury at the thought of dutifully returning home to Father and Mundy’s Landing.

  Chapter 2

  Friday, June 24

  Early morning mist hugs the sleeping village as Holmes drives through the quiet streets and out onto Colonial Highway toward the river. He parks, as always, in the Price Chopper lot at the Mundy’s Crossing Shopping Plaza. The store is open twenty-four hours, so even predawn, his SUV won’t arouse suspicion.

  Nor will he, dressed for an early hike, wearing cargo pants and carrying a backpack. If, however, anyone glimpsed the items he’s stashed inside the pack and his pockets—well, then they’d certainly be curious, if not downright suspicious.

  But he encounters no one as he treks the mile along the highway to his destination. It would be simpler and faster to have parked down by the water and gone over via the kayak he keeps stashed in the back of his SUV. But at this hour, there are too many fishermen out on the river. They all know each other, and some might know Holmes, too. They’ll realize he doesn’t belong there with them, and they’ll wonder why he’d want to visit this godforsaken patch of land.

  Years ago, a traveling carnival set up here for a few days every summer. Local families descended to ride the rides, play games of chance, and eat grease-slicked, sugar-sticky fair food. But those days are long gone. The spot is now visited only by woodland creatures and by Holmes.

  That isn’t his real name, but it’s the one the world will know when this is over. For now, he keeps his secret identity carefully masked as he goes about his daily business, just as his historic counterpart did.

  As a late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century true crime aficionado, Holmes has long been captivated by S.B.K., as he refers to the Sleeping Beauty Killer in his notes. For himself, he chose a pseudonym that honors a trio of famous Holmeses who lived during that era.

  The first, Cornelius Holmes, was the mayor of Mundy’s Landing during S.B.K.’s reign of terror.

  Both other Holmeses were mythical.<
br />
  One is Sherlock Holmes, the fictional literary hero created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, arguably the world’s most famous detective.

  The other is H.H. Holmes, America’s first documented serial killer, the lethal alter ego of an inconspicuous man named Herman Mudgett.

  Perhaps S.B.K. crossed paths with H.H., who hunted his victims amid the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. S.B.K. was there in August of that year, according to a notice printed in the Mundy’s Landing Tribune noting “the intrepid traveler’s safe return to our warm fold, ruddy from the prairie sun and bearing adventurous tales.”

  Imagine—just imagine!—if Sherlock and H.H. had matched wits to solve the S.B.K. case in some alternate universe where fact meets fiction.

  Ah, well, in this universe, past meets present. Detective meets predator. The legendary Sherlock and the murderous H.H. have melded into one cunning creature. Mundy’s Landing’s arrogant new mayor Cochran will soon find himself in his predecessor Mayor Holmes’s shoes, as an eerily familiar crime spree unfolds in The Heights . . .

  Thanks to me. I’ll be the most famous Holmes of all.

  As he scuffles over familiar ground with his flashlight, he hears the faint, mournful toll of a foghorn somewhere downriver. The first songbird’s trill joins the steady hum of insects lurking in tall grasses. Glancing over his shoulder, he notes faint shreds of pink tainting the blue-black eastern sky.

  Just few days past the solstice, dawn comes early, at 5:21 a.m.

  On June 30, the sun will rise at 5:24 a.m.

  On July 8, at 5:28 a.m.

  July 14, at 5:33 a.m.

  For Holmes, as for S.B.K., time is as crucial as place.

  Before the summer of 1916, this pastoral swath of riverfront land was nearly as overlooked as it is now. Located at the end of the streetcar line, its small picnic grove was obscure to all but a smattering of locals.