Blue Moon

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  Wealthy New Yorkers summered in the area, but rarely ventured from their grand Gilded Age estates. Urbanites who boarded trains seeking respite from their sweltering city apartments bypassed Mundy’s Landing, which lacked a depot.

  Then came June 1916. Valley Cove Electric Pleasure Park opened in the height of the golden amusement park era and drew people from miles around.

  If only I’d been alive to see it in all its splendor, Holmes thinks wistfully, imagining this spot teeming with men in straw boaters, women in shirtwaists, children everywhere, boys in knickers, and young girls in middies with hair ribbons.

  Was he really there?

  To some, the notion might seem like sheer lunacy. Yet the past—specifically 1916—lives so vividly in Holmes’s mind that the line between imagination and memory often blurs. When it does, Holmes perceives that reincarnation and time travel, every history buff’s fondest fantasies, are not only possible, but probable.

  He’s been visiting the abandoned Pleasure Park for well over a year now, and so far, he’s had it all to himself. Given its prime location near Colonial Highway’s growing commercial sprawl, it’s only a matter of time, he supposes, before the wildflowers and woodlands are paved over.

  But that won’t happen overnight. His secret is safe for now. The spot remains overlooked by developers, tourists, and history buffs. Even vintage amusement park enthusiasts focus on other regional historic parks, like Coney Island and Rye Playland, that are still open for business. Those who prefer exploring defunct sites can visit bigger, better ruins.

  You would think this location might attract the Mundypalooza crowd, many of whom consider themselves crime aficionados. Yet in their efforts to solve the case, they focus solely on the historical society and Murder Houses in The Heights. How can they be so oblivious, quite literally clueless, to this hallowed ground and its pivotal role in the “frightfulness”?

  Frightfulness—that’s how Holmes refers to it in his case notes. The vintage word would be unfamiliar to anyone lacking the highly evolved vocabulary in which he takes great pride. Translated from the German Schrecklichkeit, it was originally used during the Great War to reference the army’s terrorizing tactics toward civilians.

  How appropriately it describes the havoc S.B.K. wreaked upon Mundy’s Landing a century ago.

  Unbeknownst to the rest of the world, it all began in this spot.

  And so it shall begin again, Holmes thinks smugly, right here under their noses.

  Right here . . . with me.

  Annabelle awakens to a man-scream—the most blood-curdling kind, preternaturally high-pitched and hoarse.

  Trib.

  Trib is screaming.

  Her heart slams into her ribs.

  Why is Trib screaming?

  Something horrible must have happened to Oliver in the night. Dear God. Dear God.

  She bolts from the bed and rushes into the hall, bracing for the worst.

  But—there’s Oliver, safe, framed in the doorway of his bedroom, looking terrified. “What’s going on? Where’s Daddy?”

  “I’m not sure.” She rests a calming hand on his pajama-clad shoulder, seized by a new dread: that her husband stumbled across a dead schoolgirl tucked into bed in one of the spare bedrooms.

  “Trib?” She struggles to keep her voice steady. “Trib, where are you?”

  “In here,” he calls from behind the bathroom door.

  There is no bed in the bathroom; therefore, there can be no dead girl.

  And this is 2016, not 1916, and of course there is no dead girl—what the hell was she even thinking?

  “Trib? What’s going on in there?”

  “Nothing.”

  Hearing an audible curse and a muffled thump, she raps cautiously on the bathroom door, conscious of Oliver’s gaze. Without his glasses, he looks young and vulnerable.

  Even with his glasses, he looks young and vulnerable.

  Because he is.

  Diagnosed several years ago with generalized anxiety disorder, Oliver is plagued by irrational worries. Mundane activities others take in stride are monumental tasks for him, and ordinary days? Forget it.

  She can no longer remember, much less hope for, days free of sheer panic over activities other kids take in stride or even enjoy. She often feels as though she’s strolling through the park one moment and on a harrowing detour through a minefield the next, her child clinging to her for dear life.

  “Trib?” she asks, hearing another thump behind the bathroom door.

  “Everything’s okay,” he calls, not convincingly. “Go back to sleep.”

  “But what are you doing?”

  He jerks open the door. Like Oliver, he’s not wearing his glasses—he’s wearing nothing, in fact, but boxer shorts. He doesn’t look young or vulnerable; merely exasperated, waving a rolled-up magazine.

  “I was trying to kill a mouse.”

  “A mouse? That’s why you screamed?” Ordinarily, rodents make her shudder, but not today. Not when she was thinking of schoolgirl corpses.

  “You try not to scream with something furry crawling over your bare toes while you’re brushing your teeth.”

  “It crawled on your toes?” Oliver asks in dismay.

  “It did.”

  “But then you killed it, right?” Annabelle shoots Trib a pointed look—his cue to say yes, regardless of the truth.

  “Nope. I missed.”

  Missed his cue, missed the mouse. Terrific.

  “I’m afraid,” their son announces in a small voice.

  Annabelle steeples her hands and presses her fingertips into her forehead. It’s too early for this, and this—whatever this is . . . it’s just too much for a kid like Oliver.

  For his mom, too.

  “Dad, where did the mouse go?”

  “I don’t—” Trib breaks off, seeing the look on Annabelle’s face. He’d obviously intended to complete his sentence with know, but instead, he pats Oliver on the shoulder and continues smoothly, “—want you to worry about this.”

  I don’t want you to worry about this? Yeah, right, Annabelle thinks grimly. They never want him to worry about anything, do they? Yet Trib knows as well as she does that curtailing an anxiety attack once it’s begun is like attempting to intercept a torpedo with a butterfly net.

  “Oliver, the mouse is long gone. Right, Trib?”

  “Right. I scared the heck out of him with this.” He waves his weapon: a copy of Family Handyman. He’d subscribed when they bought the house, in full-on manly and capable mode—though he now appears to be feeling anything but.

  “You didn’t kill it?”

  “We don’t need to kill it. It ran away. It’s outside now. That’s—”

  “It’s going to come back!”

  At the telltale escalation in Oliver’s pitch, Annabelle and Trib exchange a glance; his apologetic, hers resigned. They’ve done this a thousand times before, and unless something changes drastically, they’ll do it a thousand times more. Occasionally, Trib defuses the panic attack; more often, she does. It all depends on which of them has more strength, time, and patience—not that those things are guaranteed tactics to see Oliver through a crisis.

  “I’ve got to get into the shower.” Trib shoots Annabelle the guilt-laced farewell glance of a soldier spared deployment while his buddy boards the copter to the battlefront, then quickly closes the door.

  She puts both hands on Oliver’s bony shoulders and turns him away from the bathroom. “Come on. The alarm won’t go off for another half hour, and I know you were up late last night watching the end of the Yankee game with Dad.”

  At eleven, she left the two of them eating ice cream and went up to bed. Now, she regrets not dragging Oliver along with her, regardless of the game in extra innings. Overtiredness always heightens his anxieties.

  Behind the bathroom door, the pipes groan. She tries not to resent Trib, stepping into a steamy shower, as Oliver clutches her arm. “I don’t want to go back to bed.”

 
; “It’s still early, and you need more sleep.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Well, I do,” she says reasonably, steering him down the hall to his room, “so how about if you just hang out in your bed until the alarm goes off?”

  “No, I don’t like it there.”

  “You don’t like your bed? But you picked it out. You said it was the greatest bed ever,” she reminds him, silently adding, and it had better be, since it cost us more than a mortgage payment.

  He’d long been asking them for a captain’s bed like his best friend Connor’s, built atop a wooden platform with storage underneath. Instead of just drawers, Oliver’s bed also has a deep cupboard.

  “This would’ve been good if I still played hide-and-seek!” he said.

  “You still can,” she reminded him.

  “Nah.” He never plays anything other than video games. Long gone are the days of hide-and-seek and board games.

  He and Trib once had a month-long Battleship tournament that ended abruptly when Oliver learned about the Lusitania in social studies.

  “I don’t like it,” he said, “because it makes me think of torpedoes and shipwrecks and that scares me.”

  “But you’re not going to sea,” Trib pointed out. “You’re playing a game. You’ve never even been on a boat.”

  There is no reasoning with Oliver’s anxiety. Battleship was history.

  Now, he tells Annabelle, “I like the bed. I just hate the room.”

  He’d chosen it as well, with far less enthusiasm. He’d waffled between a large room down the hall with a fireplace and window seat, and this much smaller one at the top of the stairs, across from their own.

  Trailing him between the two, roller and paint cans at the ready, Trib had tried to maintain a jovial attitude in an attempt to head off their son’s anxiety. But it grew more strained by the minute, and he finally forced a decision.

  “Come on, kiddo, enough is enough. We’re moving in tomorrow. You can always change to a different room if you don’t like it. There are plenty to choose from.”

  Oliver glumly decided upon the room next to theirs, as Annabelle had anticipated he would.

  “It’s more like home,” he said—meaning the rented cottage they’d left behind. “You’ll be able to hear me if I need you in the middle of the night.”

  “I’d hear you even if you were down the hall, sweetie,” she reminded him, though she could see that he was methodically counting the steps from his doorway to theirs. “And this is home now.”

  “It doesn’t feel like it.” Behind his glasses, his wide brown eyes—so like her own, and Trib’s—darted nervous glances around the hallway. He took it all in: burnished wallpaper, towering ceilings and amber light spilling from ornate sconces. “It feels like the library.”

  “You like the library.”

  “I don’t want to live there.”

  Fair enough. It’s a lovely old building, yet as a child, Annabelle always felt a little uneasy being there. Back then, the historical society was located in the basement. She’d visited its exhibit devoted to the Sleeping Beauty murders and she knew—all the kids in town knew—that the collection also included certain artifacts that weren’t on display. Gruesome items related to the crimes that occurred a century ago . . .

  In our own home.

  But we’ll eventually settle in and get past it, she assures herself as she escorts Oliver into his room, now painted a buttery shade of yellow with fresh white trim that matches his new bed.

  Before moving in on Memorial Day, they’d stripped the house of its smelly, claw-tattered draperies before realizing that the windows are much too tall for standard shades or curtains. Expensive custom treatments are just one more item on the massive to-do list. The windows remain bare in all but the bedrooms, where Trib installed temporary cheap vinyl shades that leave a wide gap above the sill.

  Beyond the wedge of exposed glass, Annabelle sees that it’s still dark outside. She fiddles with the toggle light switch on the wall, not yet accustomed to the old-fashioned fixtures.

  “There we go,” she says cheerily as the room brightens. “See? Look how cozy it is, Oliver.”

  His television, with the prized Xbox console, is on the dresser along with his video games and favorite books. All were neatly stacked when they moved in. Now the games are tossed haphazardly, the books untouched. There are plenty more stacked in the cupboard beneath the bed, along with outgrown toys he didn’t want to part with, and boxes filled with baseball cards. His wooden baseball bat is propped in the corner just inside the door, with his glove draped over the top. It’s been a while since he’s touched either.

  On the bed, the navy and turquoise patchwork quilt is entangled with the sheets. A pillow lies on the floor beside it, evidence of his hasty departure at Trib’s scream.

  Stupid mouse, she thinks, in lieu of stupid Trib.

  Sometimes it’s hard not to blame each other when their son’s anxiety disorder rears its ugly head to strain their otherwise solid marriage. They rarely argue about anything other than how to handle Oliver’s episodes amid their own frayed nerves. Those incidences have become more frequent since the move.

  Oliver doesn’t do well with change, to put it mildly. Or loss.

  Naturally, they’d consulted his longtime child psychiatrist, Dr. Seton, before the move. He reminded them that they wouldn’t be doing Oliver any favors by removing challenges from his life.

  “Even if you managed to accomplish that, the rest of the world won’t cooperate. He needs to learn to cope with adversity.”

  Once they’d made the decision to move, they did think twice about even looking at 46 Bridge Street. Remarkably, however, Oliver seems unbothered by its distant past. His fears tend to be quirkily specific, tied to the here and now. Plus, Connor Winston lives right down the street. That sealed the deal.

  “Connor thinks it’s cool that I’m going to be living in a Murder House,” he reported proudly. “He thinks I’m really brave. Don’t tell him I’m not,” he added, tugging Annabelle’s heart.

  He hides his condition from even his closest friends. How many birthday parties has he missed because his crippling fear of the dark means can’t see a movie or play laser tag? How many field trips has Annabelle chaperoned because he can’t venture beyond his comfort zone without her? How many times has the school nurse sent him home with a stomachache that fortuitously struck right before a school assembly or classroom presentation?

  But living in a Murder House? Ironically, he’s been okay with that. He did ask several questions about the historic crimes, seeking reassurance that the Sleeping Beauty Killer is no longer a threat.

  “Absolutely not,” Annabelle told him. “He’s probably been dead for at least fifty or sixty years now.”

  “But nobody even knows who he was, so how do you—”

  “It doesn’t matter who he was. It happened a hundred years ago. Whoever did it can’t possibly still be alive. You know that, right?”

  “Because he would have been old, like Grandpa Charlie?”

  “Much older. Grandpa wasn’t even born when it happened.”

  “And dead people can’t come back.”

  No, they can’t—something Annabelle would have done well to remember herself a few skittish minutes ago.

  She attempts to coax her son back into bed, but he grabs her arm like a toddler. Acute separation anxiety is part of his diagnosis. They’ve come a long way since he used to wrap himself around her, screeching, at the kindergarten bus stop . . . but not nearly far enough.

  “Do you want me to stay here with you for a few minutes?”

  “No, please, Mom . . . I don’t want to stay here.”

  “All right. You can get up. It’s fine.”

  “No, not that . . . I want to go home.”

  “You are home, Oli—”

  “No!” Tears fill his eyes. “I want our old house!”

  “I know you miss it, sweetheart, but—”

  “I
can’t stay here with mice!”

  “There were mice in the cottage, too.”

  “No, there weren’t.”

  Yes there were, but she and Trib made sure he never knew. They were experts at navigating around potential triggers in their old home.

  Life in the new one is fraught with uncertainty. Here, there are mice, stray cats, unfamiliar sounds, workmen, and deliverymen . . .

  Yes, and a shadowy visitor lurking in the backyard yesterday, she remembers uneasily. Her eyes may not be what they were, thanks to middle age, but she’s positive they weren’t playing tricks on her.

  If Oliver hadn’t been there, she’d have gone back outside to investigate. Instead, she busied herself putting away groceries, making lunch, sorting through a year’s worth of locker clutter, unpacking more boxes, returning phone calls. There were a million things to do, as always.

  Yet she couldn’t quite forget that someone had been boldly spying through the trees. She meant to tell Trib, but fell asleep before he came to bed—and woke up to his scream.

  I’ll mention it to him today, she decides.

  Right now, she has to ease Oliver’s mouse concerns.

  At least it wasn’t a prowler, she thinks wearily.

  Or a dead schoolgirl.

  In the predawn murkiness, Holmes’s flashlight beam picks up traces of the old trolley turnaround among the pervasive sumac plants. As always, he wonders what treasures—potential clues—might still lie scattered along the arc of rusted rail.

  Searching the area in broad daylight, he’s already unearthed a handful of antique buttons and coins, including his cherished 1916 buffalo nickel.

  It’s just an ordinary coin, as opposed to a rare double die 1916 version worth tens of thousands of dollars to collectors.

  To him, however, this one is priceless—well worth the rash he developed from brushing against the poisonous weeds.

  Buffalo nickels were date stamped in a vulnerable raised spot that tended to wear off very quickly once in circulation. Any coin with clearly legible numbers, like the one he found, couldn’t have been passed from hand to hand over a span of years, or even months.

  Clear as day, he can see that nickel tumbling, shiny and brand-new, from pocket or purse as someone stepped off the streetcar here that summer, the summer everything changed.