Blood Red

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  Coach Ronald Calhoun told the Tribune, “These kids played hard and I’m proud of each and every one of them.”

  Chapter 15

  After waiting around near Brianna’s locker again this morning, Mick was forced to give up when the first bell rang.

  She must be really sick, he decides as he sits through English class, chin in hand, staring absently at the teacher.

  He’s not feeling so great himself today, having remembered to take his medicine but forgotten, once again, to eat something with it.

  He’d better grab a banana from the cafeteria when he goes to retrieve the gift box from behind the bags of prunes in the lunchroom. Operation Secret Santa will have to wait until Brianna’s back in school.

  When the bell rings, he heads swiftly down the hall to make the detour to the cafeteria before his next class. Above the noise of chatter and slamming locker doors, Mrs. Dunlop, the principal’s secretary, is talking on the PA system.

  “Will the following students please report to the main office immediately . . .”

  As she begins naming names, all of them female, Mick recognizes that they’re close friends of Brianna’s.

  Both his heart and his feet pick up their pace. The cafeteria is quiet and empty other than Denise, one of the workers, who’s putting milk cartons into the refrigerated case near the register.

  “Hi, Mick,” she says, looking up. “What’s going on?”

  “I just wanted to see if I could grab a healthy snack.”

  “You know we’re not open till fourth period.”

  “I know, but . . . I missed breakfast this morning. Please?” Mick offers her his most charming smile, when it’s the last thing he feels like doing.

  Denise, who graduated from Mundy’s Landing High School back in the eighties with Mick’s dad, shakes her hairnetted head but smiles back. “Go ahead and grab something,” she says, “and I’ll bill it to your account when I open the register.”

  “Thanks.”

  “No problem. Tell your parents I said hello.”

  His stomach is churning but he bypasses the bananas, making a beeline for the prune display.

  The gift box isn’t there.

  Frowning, he roots around trying to find it, but it’s definitely gone. Realizing Denise is watching him, he grabs a bag of prunes just as the bell rings signaling the start of next period. He shows it to her, saying, “I’ll take this. Bill me for a banana, too, okay? I grabbed one yesterday when no one was here. Thanks, Denise.”

  “No problem. Now get moving.” As he heads for the hall, he hears her laugh and repeat, “Get moving. Hah! Good one.”

  Mick is too concerned about Brianna and the missing gift to be mortified.

  Passing the bulletin board in the empty hallway, he pauses to lift the Toys for Tots flyer, intending to remove the written clue he’d left there for Brianna.

  It, too, is missing.

  Since he’s already late for class, he detours past a few other spots where he planted notes, only to find that all have been removed.

  Even more disturbing: through the glass window of the main office, he can see a pair of uniformed police officers along with several of Brianna’s friends—­all of whom are crying.

  After spending the night combing case files, Sully got home at four in the morning to find that her upstairs neighbor was apparently spending the night at her boyfriend’s because her teenage son—­an avid drummer—­was having a party. And the insomniac old man downstairs was blasting his television so loudly that she could hear every word of Life Begins for Andy Hardy on Turner Classic Movies.

  Reminded of her father, who had been a big fan of old movies and Mickey Rooney, she downed a shot of Irish whiskey, crawled into bed, and managed to sleep soundly until nine. She’d have kept right on sleeping if she hadn’t been awakened by a call from Barnes, reporting that a teenage girl had gone missing up in the Hudson Valley and she might have crossed paths with their redhead stalker.

  Maybe. But probably not. Brianna Armbruster is younger than the other victims, still living at home with her parents. She vanished on a sunny morning, not on the heels of a catastrophic storm.

  When small-­town teenage girls go missing, the vast majority of them disappeared voluntarily. Often, they’ve had a fight with their parents or boyfriend, or they’re simply in the mood for a change of scenery or searching for some big-­city excitement.

  Still, she lived on the Hudson River just up the Taconic Parkway from New York, and she’s an attractive girl whose most striking feature is her long red hair.

  At that news, Sully bounded out of bed and jumped into the shower. Now she’s juggling rest stop tea and a bagel in the passenger’s seat as Stockton follows the foggy gray ribbon of highway stretching along the Hudson River with the Catskill Mountains looming to the west. They’re well aware that the trail is fairly cold by now. The girl had likely been missing for hours before anyone realized she was gone. No one had seen her since she’d gone to bed on Monday night.

  “Those poor parents.” Sully shakes her head. “Can you imagine the guilt?”

  “I can. That’s why I’ve never had kids. It doesn’t mix with this job.”

  Both Armbrusters are successful professionals, with demanding state government careers in Albany. They’d assumed when they left for work yesterday morning that their daughter was out jogging, as was her early morning habit.

  “At least they’re both cleared as suspects,” Barnes points out. “That saves everyone a whole lotta extra anguish.”

  Yes, the ­couple’s solid alibis spared them the unique hell Sully and Stockton have encountered many times in the past. Parents often fall under the umbrella of suspicion in a child’s disappearance, and it’s a challenge to stride the fine line between compassion and skepticism when investigating a case like that.

  “It’s just incredible that in this age of overcommunication, the system failed so spectacularly,” Sully says with a sigh, giving up on the bagel and shoving the remains into Barnes’s coffee cup parked in the console.

  “Hey!”

  “It’s empty. This is garbage.”

  “I thought you were starved.”

  “I was. But even I have to draw the line somewhere. Like I said, that’s garbage. You can’t get a good bagel north of the George Washington Bridge.”

  She brushes the crumbs from her hands and pulls out her notes, going over the facts of the case.

  When Brianna didn’t show up at school yesterday morning, the attendance office assumed she was out sick and followed procedure, which was to leave a message at the house to confirm the absence. No one was home.

  After school, her younger brother was wearing gaming headphones and parked in front of the Xbox console in his room, too engrossed to notice that his sister hadn’t come home as usual. When the parents arrived later that night, they found nothing amiss and assumed their daughter had come and gone to her waitressing job. It turned out she’d never arrived there, either, but when the restaurant called looking for her, the twelve-­year-­old video game junkie never heard the phone ring.

  “The thing that gets me is that the parents never checked their voice mail when they got home,” Barnes comments, shaking his head.

  “I don’t bother to do that very often, either,” Sully tells him. “If ­people want to reach me, they call my cell. Lately, only the telemarketers bother calling my landline.”

  “But you don’t have kids.”

  “True. But I can imagine these ­people are probably like every other working parent we’ve ever met. Overextended, overwhelmed, overtired from a long day, long commute . . .”

  “You’re right. And they really didn’t have any reason to think anything was wrong until they realized their daughter hadn’t come home from work.”

  She nods. It was well past ten o’clock when the Armbrusters began t
o worry, belatedly discovering the messages from the school and the restaurant. They panicked and called the police.

  The village is small enough that the police chief lives a few blocks away and was once their daughter’s soccer coach. He wasted no time in ruling out a runaway scenario. That conclusion seems based not just on assumption and emotion but on intuition, and Sully has been in this business long enough to respect that.

  “If our perp is escalating,” she muses, “then he’s not holding off until he has a weather-­related reason to travel farther from home. He either found himself up here for a different reason, or he singled out the girl because she crossed his path somewhere else and he hunted her down.”

  “Maybe online. Hey, what’s the exit number? These mountains are messing with the GPS signal.”

  She quickly opens a search engine on her phone and Googles the name of the village, Mundy’s Landing.

  “That’s why it sounded familiar,” she says, more to herself than Barnes.

  “What? Why?”

  “It’s that town where they have that big murder festival every summer.”

  “Murder festival? What?”

  “Unofficially known as Mundypalooza,” she reads off her phone. “Crime buffs gather from around the world in an attempt to solve the Sleeping Beauty murders of 1916.”

  “Oh, right.” Barnes nods. “That’s the case where ­people were waking up in the morning to find dead girls in their beds. It doesn’t get much creepier than that.”

  “No, it doesn’t. Do you think what happened to this Armbruster girl has anything to do with it? Maybe it’s a copycat killer. Next summer is the hundredth anniversary of the murders and the three-­hundred-­fiftieth anniversary of the town, and they’re already gearing up for a media circus.”

  “I wouldn’t put that past some sicko. But at least this girl hasn’t turned up dead in someone else’s bed. She’s just disappeared.”

  “I know.” Sully stares past him at mountains cloaked in somber gray. “Let’s just pray she doesn’t turn up bald and shrink-­wrapped.”

  “Mr. Walker? I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  Kurt looks up to see a middle-­aged man standing over him. Everything about him is puffy: curly blond hair, navy down jacket, even his face and breath, both of which bear the florid evidence of boozy nights.

  He lowers himself into the seat opposite Kurt. They’re in a small office just off the building lobby, where the first cops on the scene escorted Kurt to get him away from his stepfather’s dead body.

  That was almost an hour ago. He has no idea who summoned the police. Most likely one of the third-­floor neighbors called in response to his screams. Or maybe the doorman heard the commotion from two floors below.

  Still huffing a little and mopping his brow with a handkerchief, the man in the chair introduces himself as Detective Lindgren with the local police force. Kurt wonders whether he’s sweaty and out of breath from the exertion of taking an elevator and walking a few yards, or if the bloodbath upstairs got to him.

  “Can I get you anything?” the man asks. “Glass of water?”

  “No, thank you.”

  One of the cops had asked him the same thing, and so did the doorman. It happened when his mother died, as well. Why, he wonders, do ­people assume that proximity to death is accompanied by great thirst?

  “I need to tell my brothers and my sister what happened,” he tells Detective Lindgren.

  “Are they close by?”

  “One is. I’ll go tell him in person. I’m going to have to call the younger two. They’re away in college. They’re going to have to make travel arrangements, and . . .” He looks at his watch. “They’ll want to come right away. Today.”

  “I understand. I just have a few questions for you, if you feel like you can answer them right now? I know this is a terrible time but the sooner we get this out of the way, the better.”

  He inhales and exhales shakily, nodding. “I’ll answer them if I can.”

  “Thank you. When was the last time you saw your father?”

  “I don’t know . . . it’s been a while.”

  “Why did you come over here this morning?”

  “To check on him. None of us had heard from him since . . . I don’t know, Monday, I guess.”

  “None of us . . .”

  “Me, my brother, my half sister and half brother. And my dad’s friend, Bob—­he’s in Florida. We were all worried.”

  “So he was your stepfather, correct?”

  “Yes, but he adopted me and my brother when he married our mother.”

  “When was that?”

  “Twenty years ago last summer. I was six, and my brother was four.”

  “And your father’s friend Bob—­who is he?”

  “Bob Belinke. He lives in Florida.”

  The detective wants more information, including Bob’s contact information.

  As Kurt answers the questions, he realizes his mouth is dry. Now he wants the glass of water, but if he asks for it, the cop might think it’s an attempt to distract his line of questioning.

  Why is he questioning me anyway?

  Rick committed suicide. He slit his wrists and he left a note, just like Mom. There can’t possibly be any question about that . . . can there?

  “What about your father?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your biological father.”

  “What about him?” Kurt presses his hands against his cheeks, suddenly exhausted. “I haven’t seen him in at least ten or fifteen years.”

  “His name?”

  Why does that even matter here? What the hell is going on?

  He answers the question: “It was Kurt. Kurt Clark.”

  “Same as yours.”

  “My name is Kurt Walker.” Now, anyway. But even as a child, long before Rick came along, he resented being named after his deadbeat dad. His mother and brother called him by any number of nicknames that evolved from God only knows where—­Cookie, Kiddo, Buddy, KitKat . . .

  “And you’re estranged from your biological father?”

  “We all are.”

  “All?”

  “Me and my brother . . . and my mom was, too, before she died.”

  “And she took her own life, just as your stepfather did?”

  “Yes.” He finally manages to swallow. Hard. Remembering. “Exactly the same way. Exactly. She slit her wrists with a razor. Rick’s razor.”

  The moment Ora Abrams told Rowan the snowflake was a piece of Victorian mourning jewelry and made of human hair—­red hair—­she knew it had to be from Rick. She has no idea how he got it to her classroom doorknob, but there isn’t a doubt in her mind that he managed.

  “I’ve always had a thing for redheads,” he’d said on Saturday.

  Not only that, but he’d remembered her passion for the Victorian era.

  This is creepy. He’s gone too far. She’s got to talk to Noreen about it. Maybe there’s some legal action she can take against him.

  That would mean Jake will have to be told, but she was already prepared to tell him tonight anyway. She owes him the truth, even if it is fourteen years late in coming.

  As Ora steers the group from the front parlor to the back, Rowan whispers to one of the chaperones that she has to step outside for a moment. The kids will be so engrossed in the array of antiques beneath the tree—­tin soldiers and porcelain dolls, a rocking horse and an elaborate little theater complete with puppets—­that they’ll never notice she’s gone.

  Out on the porch, she sees that snow has begun swirling in the air. A police car is parked down the street with its red lights flashing. The officer behind the wheel has his window open and is talking to a pair of pedestrians.

  They must still be looking for the missing girl. Rowan had temporarily forgotten
all about that. Now, well aware that it’s most likely one of her former students, she feels a renewed sense of concern. What if the girl didn’t just take off to visit her college boyfriend? What if . . .

  No. Rowan shakes her head, pulling her cell phone from her pocket. One crisis at a time.

  Waiting the few seconds for her phone to power up so that she can call Noreen, she gingerly unpins the brooch from her coat.

  This isn’t a crisis. But it’s just as disturbing to think that it’s made from someone’s hair as it is to imagine Rick Walker violating her professional space the way he’s violated—­

  Her phone buzzes to life and she sees that a text came in a little while ago.

  Speak of the devil. It’s from Rick.

  It’s about damned time.

  As she reads it, her anger gives way to a new wave of concern.

  We have to talk. I’m driving up there this afternoon. I’ll text you when I get there.

  Mick shouldn’t have bothered going to class after seeing Brianna’s friends crying in the office.

  He should have marched right in there and demanded that someone tell him what’s going on. Instead, his feet went on autopilot and carried him to the next classroom on his daily schedule. All he has to show for it now is a failing grade on a quiz that was handed back, a late slip that needs to be signed by his first-­period teacher in order to avoid detention, and a pounding headache courtesy of staring unflinchingly at the teacher for the past forty-­four minutes.

  Brianna must be sicker than he thought. Maybe she has some kind of horribly contagious disease, or—­God forbid—­cancer.

  Whatever it is, he’s certain she can get through it, and he’ll be with her every step of the way.

  The moment the bell rings, he rushes out into the hall and heads toward the office, intending to burst in and demand some answers. Halfway there, his friend Van flags him down.

  “Mick . . . did you hear?”

  “Hear what?”