Blue Moon: Mundy's Landing Book Two

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  Home . . .

  She squeezes her eyes closed, not that it matters in the pitch black, and pretends that she’s lying in her own bed. She tries to ignore the dank chill in the air and the fiery ache in her twisted, shackled arms. In her fantasy, she’s just awakened on a warm summer morning, the kind of morning where your hair sticks to your forehead and neck, and your pajamas are damp, and you slept with the covers thrown back.

  Indi shivers, longing for warmth, longing for home . . .

  No, you are home. You are.

  Yes, she’s back in the duplex apartment she shares with her stepfather, Tony. She can hear him snoring through two closed doors and see the plastic glow-in-the-dark stars and moon—a full moon, sloppily painted in blue Day-Glo—stuck on the ceiling above her bed. She can hear the old box fan cranking away in the window. Its dusty plastic blades stir sticky air laced with hot asphalt from the highway below her bedroom window.

  They’re always paving at this time of year. Heavy machinery incessantly makes that beep . . . beep . . . beeping backing-up sound. It grates on her nerves, but not today. Today, it would be music to her ears.

  “Blue moon . . . you saw me standing alone . . .”

  Karen is singing to her.

  If only it were real.

  Please let it be real. Please, please . . .

  She opens her eyes to blackness.

  This is real: being imprisoned in some kind of underground bunker deep in the woods.

  For a long time, she was alone here. Then Juanita came, followed by Kathryn. Both had also been abducted by the man in the black SUV.

  When they showed up, one right after the other, Indi figured it, too, was a fantasy. Maybe all that time alone in the dark had taken its toll and she’d lost her mind.

  But she hadn’t. Not yet, anyway.

  “I want to go home, goddammit,” she whispers into the darkness.

  “I wish you wouldn’t do that.” A devout Christian, Juanita protests whenever Indi takes the name of the Lord in vain.

  Sometimes Indi apologizes. Today, she’s feeling prickly. “Yeah, well, I wish a lot of things.”

  Juanita says nothing to that.

  Kathryn, too, is silent. She’s probably out cold again.

  Younger, smaller, and frailer than Indi and Juanita, she’s fading fast. Whenever she loses consciousness, Indi worries that she might not wake up.

  “I hope I don’t. At least it’s a way out of this hellhole,” Kathryn told her a few hours—or was it a few days?—ago. It’s all just a blur of hunger and exhaustion, the dark and the cold. They aren’t wearing watches, and he took their phones away. He took everything except the clothes on their backs.

  If only Indi had been wearing a fleece jacket and jeans that night. What she wouldn’t give for a layer of protection against the clammy gloom and the creepy-crawly bugs and the metal restraints that gouge her wrists and ankles.

  Yet she told Kathryn, “Come on, you can’t give up. The police have to be looking for you, for all of us.”

  “They’re never going to find us here.”

  “She’s right,” Juanita said. “We’re buried alive.”

  “Alive, though,” Indi reminded them. “As long as we’re alive . . .”

  “We might as well be dead.”

  “How can you think that, Juanita?”

  “How can you not? Ask me to choose between heaven and hell . . . I’ll take heaven.”

  Maybe Indi would feel the same way if she were as devoutly Christian as Juanita. But she’s not even certain there’s an afterlife. And if there is . . .

  She’s not sure where she’s headed. Lately, she’s done some stuff that won’t guarantee her a fast pass through the Pearly Gates. She’s rung up beer for underage friends at the store, and she’s drunk too much of it later. She’s smoked cigarettes and worse.

  But one sin weighs far more heavily on her now: last year, she terminated an unwanted pregnancy because she didn’t want to end up like her mother. If Karen had done that, Indi wouldn’t be alive.

  Maybe she isn’t supposed to be. Maybe this is her punishment.

  She closes her eyes, not wanting to believe that. It wouldn’t be fair. She’s not a bad person. She was just stupid, and afraid.

  Juanita is sobbing loudly. She does that a lot, wailing to herself in Spanish.

  Indi doesn’t understand most of what she’s saying, but some of it sounds like prayer. She may have failed Spanish—not to mention moral goodness—but even she knows what Dios means.

  Dios doesn’t seem to be paying attention. They can pray all they want; they can screech and beg until they’re hoarse, and no one listens.

  “I can’t hear myself think!” their captor bellowed the last time he visited—maybe yesterday, maybe a week ago.

  Whenever they hear footsteps overhead, they start screaming, in case it’s a rescuer. It never is. The trapdoor opens, and it’s he. They can’t see him, but he can see them. He shines a blinding light into the hole. They can hear him muttering to himself as he tosses down food and water. Sometimes it rolls just beyond their reach, no matter how hard they strain. When that happens, they go without. He doesn’t care. He just closes the door and disappears again.

  Since Indi has been here, he’s lowered a ladder to climb down into the hole twice: once to deliver Juanita; again to deliver Kathryn.

  For a long time, she thought others might join them. Or that he was going to descend and do terrible things to them. You hear about depraved perverts who keep young girls imprisoned or sell them as sex slaves.

  But this isn’t like that.

  What is it?

  That’s the thing. It doesn’t make sense. He hasn’t raped them. And he can’t possibly be holding them for ransom, because the other girls’ families are even more impoverished than Tony is.

  He wants something else.

  Something, she fears, more ominous than anything she’ll allow her mind to conjure.

  She closes her eyes.

  I’m home . . . I’m home . . .

  Please, please let me go home . . .

  From the Sleeping Beauty Killer’s Diary

  August 14, 1893

  I have spent the vast majority of my time at the Exposition immersed in astronomical delights. Each time I visit the grounds, there is something new to discover, much like the universe beyond our earthly boundaries.

  As time grows short, I have made an effort to experience the fair’s most notable attractions, lest Father accuse me, upon my return, of having avoided the educational experience I’d promised to seek here.

  Father and the great Jules Verne would be glad to know that yesterday I visited, in quick succession, pavilions unique to each of forty-three states and territories and nearly two dozen countries. Hence, like a modern-day, breakneck Phileas Fogg, I traveled around the world in not eighty days but just one.

  This morning, wilting beneath the incessant Midwestern heat, I found refreshing respite in the waters of the natatorium.

  Later, within the brightly lit Electricity Building, I witnessed remarkable demonstrations of every appliance imaginable, projected to change the way we shall live our daily domestic lives in the distant future.

  Finally, as the blazing prairie sun set over the midway on this final night, I purchased a ticket to ride Mr. Ferris’s Great Wheel. I know what Father would say about my splurging fifty cents on such folly when the banks are failing and the nation’s economy is a shambles. But I had coins at the ready and I seized the opportunity that will become, as I see it, my last untethered moment for the foreseeable future.

  Having gaped at the engineering marvel with my feet firmly rooted on the dusty ground for days on end, I waited rather impatiently for my turn to soar. By the time I boarded a car, the sunset had given way to a delicate sliver of golden moon suspended in a dusky indigo sky.

  As the wheel carried me up, up, up into the heavens, my fellow passengers exclaimed over the view below. I must agree that the array of sparklin
g yellow lights against deep blue shadows of land and lake was indeed breathtaking. Yet as we arced over the top of the wheel, I was dumbfounded by what lay above and beyond.

  Arms outstretched, awash in the strange sensation that I would catapult into that twilight sky, I strained to pluck the moon for my pocket, a most fitting souvenir.

  Alas, too soon, I was whisked back down to earth, that golden crescent well beyond my grasp once more.

  Twilight sinks down from above us,

  Swiftly all the near is far:

  But first shining high above us

  Radiant is the evening star!

  Everything is drifting vaguely,

  Mist steals upwards to the height:

  And the still lake mirrors darkly

  Black abysses of the night.

  —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Chapter 4

  Stepping out onto the front porch, Annabelle nearly changes her mind about going to meet Oliver at the bus stop. The house may not be air-conditioned, and it seemed stuffy while she was trapped inside, but at least it’s shaded by trees and sturdily built enough to ward off the blazing midday heat. The world beyond is hot, bright, and preternaturally still. She wades down the steps through soupy air sonorous with cicadas and window air conditioners.

  She spent the morning poring over old news accounts of the historic crimes and keeping an eye out for Peeping Toms when she should have been doing other things. Laundry, cleaning, unpacking, searching for the elusive window fans . . .

  All that can wait. Right now, she needs to get out of the house; needs a distraction from her growing obsession with Florence Purcell, trespassers, and murdered schoolgirls.

  Glad she remembered to grab her sunglasses, she puts them on and feels them instantly slip lower on the sweat-slicked slope of her nose.

  Mundypalooza might be looming, but Bridge Street is deserted. Her flip-flops make a slapping sound against the concrete as she walks toward the corner. There’s not a car or pedestrian in sight, no joggers, dog walkers, or stroller-pushing moms. Even the elderly porch sitters have been driven indoors by uncomfortable weather.

  The bus stop is two blocks away, at the intersection of Fulton Avenue and Colonial Highway. She walks down every morning with Oliver, who balks at leaving the house alone. The only way to get him out the door is to go with him.

  Before the move, she always met him after school as well, since he was the only kid getting off at the old bus stop. But here in The Heights, he disembarks with a gaggle of neighborhood kids. By that time of day, in the swing of being away from home and Annabelle, he contentedly makes his way back to Bridge Street with his best friend, Connor Winston.

  Annabelle never worries. It’s broad daylight, the boys don’t have to cross the highway, and the neighborhood is as safe as it was when she was growing up here, with plenty of familiar faces out and about. Today, though, she feels uneasy at the thought of her child wandering the streets of Mundy’s Landing unsupervised, unprotected. As much as she tells herself she’s out here for her own sake—a change of scenery, a diversion, a breath of not-so-fresh air—she really just needs to shepherd her son safely home along streets once prowled by a predator.

  Somehow, it doesn’t matter that the murders took place a century ago, or that the victims were all female, and not even local residents. Today, it’s hitting too close to home.

  She rounds the corner.

  Perched on the Village Common and lined with storefronts, Fulton Avenue marks the border between The Heights and the business district. The Mundy’s Landing Tribune building is across the leafy green, tucked on a side lane off Market Street, so close to home that Trib could easily walk to and from the office. He never does, needing a car on hand so that he can dash to breaking news scenes.

  The subject of today’s front-page story, however, is literally a stone’s throw away: it’s about the intersection of Fulton Avenue and Prospect Street, which Annabelle is about to cross.

  Throughout her childhood, the crossing had just a two-way stop sign. That became a four-way stop with a crosswalk as a result of the increasing traffic brought on by Mundypalooza. Now there’s a traffic signal that flashes yellow most of the year and red during the hectic summer season.

  Nonetheless, people—almost exclusively out-of-towners—tend to either speed through the intersection or get distracted gaping at the historical society on the corner. The flashing red light is ignored or overlooked, resulting in an increasing number of near-pedestrian misses and fender benders at the spot, with the latest accident yesterday morning resulting in minor injuries.

  Prominent orange traffic cones and a cop have since been posted there for the duration of the visitor onslaught.

  Annabelle recognizes the young uniformed officer stationed on the opposite corner today. Ryan Greenlea is a local boy.

  Man, she corrects herself, taking in the badge, broad shoulders, blue visor, and aviator sunglasses. Just yesterday, he was a scrawny kid in a Cub Scout cap and thick wire-rimmed glasses. Little boys grow up quickly. But will Oliver? It’s hard to imagine him manly and capable.

  Officer Greenlea beckons her to cross the street.

  “I’m on my way to the bus stop,” she tells him, after they agree that it’s a hot one today. “It wasn’t so long ago that you were on the school bus yourself, was it?”

  His mouth quirks into a smile and he shrugs. “It seems like a lifetime ago to me.”

  “I bet it doesn’t to your mom,” she says, and makes a note to tell Trib that it’s happened: she’s officially become one of the old-timers who goes around town telling young people how quickly they’ve grown up and how time flies.

  She and Officer Greenlea tell each other to have a good day, and she starts to walk on, then turns back, remembering.

  “I just want to mention something.”

  But does she really?

  Too late to back off now. He’s waiting expectantly.

  “My husband and I bought the house at 46 Bridge.”

  He nods. He’s local. She doesn’t need to explain that it’s a Murder House. He gets it.

  “Yesterday afternoon, I found someone on the property.”

  “In the house?”

  “No. God, no.” She shudders at the thought. “I just glimpsed him in the trees behind the house. And this morning, a car stopped in front of the house and someone else was kind of . . .”

  “Spying?” he guesses when she trails off, and she nods.

  “I just thought I should mention it, because it’s that time of year, and I have a little boy, and it makes me nervous to have strangers hanging around watching the house. I mean, I get why they do it, but . . .” Hearing the rumble of large tires and a whoosh of brakes, she looks over her shoulder and spots the school bus.

  “Do you want to file a report?”

  “No, nothing happened. I just thought I should mention it. I’m sure it’s par for the course, living in one of . . . the houses.” She can’t bring herself to say the word murder.

  She glances again toward the bus, seeing the flashing lights go from yellow to red. Kids are bounding off. She doesn’t want Oliver to come walking up in the midst of this conversation.

  “I’ll mention it at the station. We’re stepping up patrol in The Heights anyway over the next few weeks, but if you see anything else suspicious or feel as though you might be in danger, don’t hesitate to call. We can have someone there in a matter of minutes. Sometimes even seconds,” he adds, and his mouth smiles, as does hers.

  But her eyes, masked behind the sunglasses, are wide.

  Danger?

  Does Officer Greenlea think there’s danger?

  Of course not, she assures herself. The danger came and went a hundred years ago. This is nothing more than a nuisance. She probably shouldn’t have mentioned it at all.

  As always, the precinct bustles with activity this afternoon. But the NYPD Missing Persons Squad is going to have to get along without Detective Sullivan Leary for the next t
wo weeks. Only one short stack of case paperwork stands between her and her summer vacation.

  As she reaches for the document, her cell phone rings for the fourth time in the past half hour.

  She groans. “Now what?”

  The first time it was her landlord; the second, her building’s maintenance supervisor; the third, the electrician who will be doing some long overdue work on her apartment while she’s away. Each call brought fresh aggravation.

  “Maybe it’s FDNY calling to say your place is on fire,” her partner, Detective Stockton Barnes, comments without looking up from his own paperwork.

  “You say that like it would be a bad thing.”

  “Yeah, what do you care? You’ve got someplace else to stay for the next few weeks.” He scribbles his signature on a report as she pulls her cell phone out of her pocket. “And if that doesn’t work out, what do I care? In about two minutes, I won’t be around to listen to you complain.”

  Barnes, too, is anxious to call it a day, though his upcoming vacation is as drastically different from hers as—well, everything else about the two of them.

  Sully is a petite, fair-skinned redhead with a quick temper and an affinity for the simple things in life: baseball, television, burgers, and beer. She likes to stay close to home. World traveler Stockton is a strapping, movie-star handsome African-American man with gregarious charm and a fairly extravagant lifestyle despite a cop’s salary.

  “Trust me, you wouldn’t hear me complaining if my place burned down,” Sully informs him, glancing down at her phone to see who’s calling. “Everything I care about is loaded into the trunk of my rental car, and—oh good.”

  “It’s not about the apartment?”

  “Nope. It’s Nick.”

  “The Knicks?”

  “You know who I mean.”

  “Saint Nick? Nick Nolte? Nick—”

  “Hi, Lieutenant Colonomos,” she says into her phone.

  “Please, call me Nick,” he reminds her, and she wastes a smug smile on the back of Barnes’s head.