Bad Moon (Kat Campbell Mysteries)

by Ritter, Todd

  The only other furnishings in the room were a hospital-regulation bed, complete with side guards, and a flat-screen television that had been muted. On the TV was a nature documentary showing dolphins frolicking among silvery schools of fish.

  “I’ve found he responds to the colors,” Becky said. “He couldn’t care less about the sound.”

  Kat stepped tentatively into the room. She could see Lee’s face now, pale and alarmingly gaunt. His skin, as thin and translucent as wax paper, clung to his skull, and the veins on his forehead protruded so much that Kat could make out their colors—muted reds and blues that pointed upward to a shock of ivory hair.

  “Mr. Santangelo? I’m Chief Campbell with the Perry Hollow police.”

  Lee didn’t respond, forcing her to edge around the easy chair and block his view of the television. Not that Lee seemed to mind. He wasn’t really focused on the screen. Instead, he seemed to be looking beyond it, staring out at some other world only he could see.

  Alzheimer’s, Kat guessed, and Mr. Santangelo had been eaten away by it. When she touched his hand, Lee’s eyes snapped to life. Confused pupils took in the sight of her, trying in vain to process who she was and what she was doing there. His jaw dropped open and he emitted a gurgling noise as he tried to form words. The best he could come up with was, “Beck.”

  His wife swept into the room. “I’m here, dear. This is Chief Campbell. You knew her father, James. He was the police chief, too.”

  “Beck,” Lee said again.

  Kat backed away from him, uncertain of her next move. Her plan had been to ask Lee what he was doing the night of July 20, 1969, and, more important, who he was doing it with. That plan was now shot to hell. Even if Lee could remember that night, there was no way he’d be able to tell her about it.

  “He was diagnosed five years ago,” Becky said. “It’s all been downhill from there. He used to have good days. But not anymore.”

  Kat’s reply, a meek “I’m so sorry,” did nothing to appease Mrs. Santangelo.

  “Now you know our little secret,” she said. “Few people do, so I would appreciate your discretion.”

  Kat nodded quickly. “Of course.”

  They left the room, meeting up with Eric, who waited just outside the door. Clustered on the landing, Kat said, “Mrs. Santangelo, I need to ask you a few things about what your husband was doing on the night Charlie Olmstead vanished.”

  “I already told you,” Becky said. “He was here.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure?”

  They were on the staircase now, descending in single file. Becky, who brought up the rear, stopped at the halfway point. “What are you implying?”

  Kat wasn’t implying anything. She was coming right out with it. “We’re pretty sure there was someone else here with him that night.”

  Becky lifted her head a little higher as she resumed her descent down the stairs. At the bottom, she marched to the front door and held it open for them.

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t care to discuss this anymore.”

  Eric stepped forward, trying to do damage control. “I know this is hard to talk about. But if there was someone else with him, we really need to know about it. Maybe she saw something unusual. Something that would help us find out what happened to my brother.”

  “Lee was alone that night.” Becky remained by the door, still trying to force them out. “I said it then, I say it now, and I’ll keep saying it until the day I die.”

  “I understand you wanting to preserve your husband’s legacy,” Kat said. “It’s not our goal to tarnish it. We just want to talk to the person he was having the affair with.”

  Affair. She hadn’t intended to utter the word that until now had gone unspoken. But she did, and it practically hung in the air like cigar smoke.

  “How dare you!” Becky said, seething. “You barge into my home and violate my privacy. Then you have the gall to accuse my husband, who served his country in so many ways, of something as tawdry as infidelity.”

  “But my mother said she saw someone upstairs,” Eric said. “A woman.”

  “I know what your mother said. She told anyone who would listen that my husband was screwing around behind my back. But I said nothing, even when she went to the police. Lord knows, I could have said plenty about her. Everyone on this street knew she was crazy.”

  “Don’t talk about my mother like that,” Eric warned.

  “I’m only telling the truth. Your father tried to act like nothing was going on, but we could hear them, Lee and I. The yelling. The fighting. It was no wonder your brother was here all the time. He couldn’t stand to be around your mother.”

  Her words, however angry, had the ring of truth. Kat remembered Owen Peale talking about how mad and distant Ken and Maggie Olmstead had seemed, sniping over who was to blame for Charlie’s disappearance. She thought of that single, mysterious word that seemed to sum up everything that was wrong between them—bathtub.

  Eric sensed it, too, and moved toward the open door. Becky blocked him.

  “I’m not finished,” she said. “Do you want to know what made her like that?”

  Eric’s reply was a firm, “No.”

  That didn’t stop Mrs. Santangelo, who poked an outstretched finger into Eric’s chest. “It was you. Everything was fine until you were born. And then something in your mother just snapped.”

  Eric grabbed her hand, wrapping his fingers over her knuckles. Becky gasped. Kat did, too, and for a moment she thought Eric was going to crush the woman’s fingers with his grip. He was strong enough to do it. He looked angry enough, too.

  “I don’t care what you say about my family. What matters to me is that you’re hiding something, Mrs. Santangelo. And I won’t rest until I find out what it is.”

  He released her hand, walked out the door, and crossed the front lawn. Once he reached the street, he kept walking, moving with purpose toward the heart of town. Kat wanted to follow him. She felt as if it was her duty. But from his quickening gait, she knew Eric needed to be left alone.

  The visit, she realized, had been fruitless. Now it was too late to ask any more questions. Too much had been said already. That left Kat with no recourse but to leave as well. On her way out, she slipped past Becky Santangelo, who—for the first time that morning—had been stunned into silence.

  THIRTEEN

  Eric struggled for breath as he entered Oak Knoll Cemetery. His anger had manifested itself in uncontrollable heaves that he felt deep down in his lungs. The anger was so strong it threatened to suffocate him. Yet he continued to walk, gasping loudly as he marched among the rows of graves.

  Once he reached his mother’s headstone, he bent at the waist and took a series of deep, slow breaths. Each one calmed him down a notch. After about a dozen, his emotions were under control and he was able to stand upright once more.

  “That bitch,” he muttered.

  Unlike Kat, he hadn’t expected good things to come from the visit to the Santangelo residence. There had to have been a good reason, after all, for the decades-long feud between them and his mother. He just didn’t realize how strong those emotions still were until Becky unleashed her tirade about his mother.

  “That lying bitch.”

  Even as he cursed, Eric knew Becky Santangelo was only partly to blame for his anger. After all, she was only speaking the truth.

  That realization had hit him when she jabbed her finger into his chest. Feeling its meager pressure against his skin, Eric knew she wasn’t lying. His mother had been crazy—from grief, from loneliness, from the past. That’s what fueled his anger. Although Mrs. Santangelo was a worthy target of his wrath, Eric knew he was really just mad at himself. For making excuses to himself about his mother’s erratic behavior. For writing it off as eccentricity. And most damning of all, for leaving her alone to fall deeper into behavior she couldn’t control.

  Shame heated his cheeks as he thought about the night he l
eft Perry Hollow. The plan had been in the works for several months. He had been accepted to NYU, although his mother had insisted Penn State was all she could afford. Eric fooled her into thinking he was fine with that. But secretly, he had already informed NYU of his intention to enroll there. Through furtive calls at pay phones and letters stolen from the mailbox, he wrangled as much financial aid as possible. He found a summer job at the New York Public Library through the friend of a cousin of a friend. He even went so far as to rent a room sight unseen until he was able to move into student housing in the fall.

  The goal was to slip out the night after graduation. He would hitch a ride to the bus station in Mercerville and then let Greyhound shuttle him into Manhattan. There he would spend the summer toiling away in anonymity, far away from Perry Hollow. He told himself he wanted a fresh start in a new location, that he wanted to be known as Eric Olmstead and not as just the kid whose brother fell over the falls all those years ago.

  That much was true. But the main reason he had to get away was because he couldn’t stand to live with his mother anymore. Not under the same roof, with all that silence.

  Whenever he looked back on his childhood, which wasn’t often, Eric thought of the suffocating silence that seemed to hang over everything. Silent dinners. Silent birthdays. Silent Christmas mornings where the only noise was the slow tearing of paper as Eric unwrapped his few gifts. He wanted a place with nonstop noise. He wanted to be lulled to sleep by the sound of police sirens and taxis honking and drunks shouting in the streets.

  The only thing that interrupted his plans was a pretty girl named Kat Campbell. He had seen her around school—a freshman who already seemed bored by the daily cliques and gossip of high school life. While she was attractive in a fresh-scrubbed, girl-next-door kind of way, Eric had been taken by her innate toughness. He noticed how she went out of her way to befriend the outcasts and how she never showed fear in front of anyone. Not teachers. Or the principal. Or the senior with dorky glasses reading Raymond Chandler when everyone else acted too cool to read at all.

  When they did connect, it was sudden and explosive. Eric went from being intrigued by her to liking her to loving her. Very swiftly, his clandestine plans started to change. Two months into his relationship with Kat, he started to rethink the wisdom of spending the summer before his freshman year in a strange city surrounded by people he didn’t know. After three months, he wondered if Penn State was a better choice. It was a good school, after all. Plus, it was closer to home, which meant he’d be closer to Kat.

  The day before graduation, he had come home from a particularly great date with Kat. They had gone to the movies—Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, of all things—and then made out for a long time in his car outside the theater.

  Too long, as it turned out.

  His mother was waiting up for him. She sat on the couch, surrounded by open envelopes. His correspondence with NYU littered the coffee table. His mother had discovered every last bit of it. In tearful shrieks, she accused him of wanting to abandon her, just like his father. Eric assured her that was no longer the plan. He hugged her. He told her he’d never go anywhere, that he’d always be there for her.

  He was lying.

  While his mother clung to him, her tears soaking his T-shirt, Eric knew he had to get away as fast as he could. If he didn’t, it would always be like that, with his mother clinging to him, trying in vain to make him always stay her little boy. And Charlie’s ghost would always be there, an unseen, unmentioned entity who flourished in the suffocating silence of the house.

  The next day Eric barely paid attention to his graduation ceremony. He was too busy mentally going over all the things he had to do that night. He accepted his diploma with a smile. He posed for photos with it afterward. He hugged his mother, kissed her cheek, and promised he’d be a responsible young adult at the party that was soon to follow.

  The party was when Eric realized that in order to escape his mother, he’d have to leave Kat, too. He also knew it would break her heart. It certainly shattered his. Yet he pretended there was nothing wrong. He danced. He drank. He sat on a rock at the edge of the lake with his girlfriend, knowing that in the morning, she would most likely hate him. That was when he told her he loved her. He didn’t know how she’d respond. He didn’t know if she felt the same way. But he needed to say it, if only to provide Kat with one last, happy memory before all the bad ones about him came her way.

  Later that night he enacted his plan. Soon he was in New York City, going to school there and eventually deciding to live there. He scrawled most of his first novel on yellow legal pads in a coffee shop down the street from his first apartment. He got married. He got divorced. He wrote more books. He hit the bestseller list. He accumulated a lot of money and a fair amount of fame.

  Through it all, he slowly repaired his relationship with his mother. It took some time—years, actually—but it was worth it. She forgave him. He forgave her. And when she needed him in the last weeks of her life, he was there.

  After her death, he was still there, trying to fulfill her last wish. With Kat’s help, to boot. Eric moved past his mother’s grave to the patch of grass next to it. Kneeling, he saw the grave marker Kat discovered earlier that morning. He placed an open hand on the ground in front of it. Something was under there. There had to be.

  Running his palm over the grass, Eric’s thoughts drifted to his other neighbor. He hadn’t told Kat about seeing Glenn Stewart burying something during the night. He didn’t want to sound like his mother, spouting another conspiracy theory to a doubting cop. Plus, since Kat had literally caught him with his pants down, it was the last thing on his mind that morning. But now that it was back in his thoughts, he realized his neighbor had no earthly reason to be out in the middle of a storm that bad, shovel in hand. It seemed especially strange when Eric considered how much of a recluse Mr. Stewart was.

  The only reason he could think of was that circumstances beyond his control had forced Glenn to go outside. After all, he had seen them heading to the falls the previous day. He most likely heard them, too, talking about Charlie, about his disappearance, about what could have happened all those years ago.

  Despite having made a fortune writing about them, Eric wasn’t a big believer in suspicion or conspiracies. He generally took people at face value, unlike Mitch Gracey, whose motto was “Never believe anything you hear.” It had appeared in the first Gracey mystery and ultimately became a line in all of them. Fans would be disappointed if it didn’t.

  Yet when he thought about his neighbors, Gracey’s worldview started to make sense. Clearly, Becky Santangelo hadn’t given them the whole truth. She was hiding more than just her gray hair and crow’s-feet. Eric now suspected Mr. Stewart was covering something up as well. Evidence of some sort, perhaps. Maybe something he had kept all those years, for reasons unknown. But now that he knew Kat and Nick were digging into his brother’s disappearance, he had to get rid of it.

  Eric stood and placed a hand on his mother’s headstone.

  Like Glenn Stewart the night before, he bowed his head.

  Then he vowed to find out everything his neighbors were hiding.

  FOURTEEN

  Tony Vasquez moved too damn fast. Nick could barely keep up with him as they walked the perimeter of the park across the street from the Kepner household. Gripping his cane so tightly his knuckles were white, he tried his best. But each step Tony took required two from him just to cover the same amount of ground.

  “Can you slow down a little?”

  Instead, Tony came to a complete stop. “A year ago, it was me trying to keep up with you.”

  “A year ago, I also had a real knee.”

  Lieutenant Vasquez—Nick still felt weird just thinking it—resumed walking, although at a slower pace. For that, Nick was grateful. Adding to his gratitude was the fact that Tony was sharing information with him, which Nick knew was against the rules under the Gloria Ambrose regime.

  “Sorry if I’m
going too fast,” he said. “But we’re short on time here.”

  “Why?”

  “You’ve seen the news. You know what’s happening tomorrow. Gloria is worried that whoever took those boys will strike again.”

  “And you?” Nick asked.

  “I think it’s better to be safe than sorry. So that’s why I’m here.”

  “What did you find out from Sophie Kepner?”

  “Mrs. Kepner—a nice woman, by the way; very helpful—was home the day Dennis disappeared. It was mid-November, chilly but sunny. Dennis came home from school and said he wanted to run out to the park to play with some friends. Sophie Kepner told me she wasn’t going to let him. She knew he had homework and thought he should do that before going outside. Dennis told her he didn’t have any, which turned out to be a lie.”

  According to Tony, it was a lie that cost the boy his life. His mother relented and Dennis hurried outside. From the living-room window, Sophie Kepner watched him cross the street and enter the park.

  “It was the last time she ever saw him,” Tony said.

  They were at the gazebo, on their way to the duck pond. Nick looked to the street, taking in a reverse view from the one he had seen when he first arrived. He saw his car parked at the curb and the Kepner household. A few doors down, the woman with the baby still sat on the stoop, watching the morning slowly transform into afternoon.

  “Around what time did all of this occur?”

  “Three thirty,” Tony said. “Maybe a little after.”

  “Did anyone see Dennis after that?”

  “The police report was pretty thorough. They asked everyone up and down the block. Only his mother saw Dennis enter the park. No one saw him leave.”

  Tony had already looked at the police file on Dennis Kepner. Of course. By this point, the new lieutenant probably had copies of all the reports about all of the boys. Nick really was playing catch-up.