Blue Moon: Mundy's Landing Book Two

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  He’s tanned and muscular, with tattoos. His jeans have holes in the knees. His hair is wavy and shaggy—not long, but collar-length. If he were wearing a collar.

  He’s nothing like Trib, not her type at all. She finds it hard to believe that he ever was. But back in high school, everyone thought he was cute—including you, Annabelle reminds herself. It’s not as if she was immune to his charms. Steve was fun-loving and easygoing, the life of the party embodied in loud music, fake ID, a souped-up car . . . she was flattered that he paid attention to a straight arrow like her.

  She watches him pause to drink from the hose. She doesn’t realize that Oliver, too, is watching until he says, “I don’t like him.”

  “That’s not a nice thing to say.”

  Oliver shrugs. “He’s not a nice guy.”

  “Why would you say that?”

  “Because he drank from the hose.”

  “So?”

  “So you’re not supposed to do that.”

  “No, you’re not supposed to do that.”

  “But he can?”

  “Grown-ups have different rules.”

  He considers that. “What happens to people who drink from the hose?”

  “You know what? I don’t know. It’s just one of those things my mom wouldn’t let me do when I was a little girl, so I passed the rule along to you. But I guess you can drink from the hose if you want to.”

  “I don’t want to,” Oliver says with a scowl, “and I don’t like him.”

  Hmm. Maybe he somehow found out that she and Steve used to date. Did Trib mention it to him? Or did Oliver hear her and Trib talking about him this morning?

  Well, not about Steve, exactly. But about the tiles.

  Rather than replace the missing squares in an effort to replicate the original pattern, as they’d discussed, Steve had removed them all on the first day.

  “I was never good at puzzles,” he told Annabelle, when he showed her, “and it would be too hard to match the exact shade. I’ll replace the whole border with new tiles, and I’ll give you a deal on the materials. Sound good?”

  “Sure,” she said, because what was she supposed to say?

  “That feels like a bait and switch,” Trib said that night when they surveyed the progress after he left.

  “It isn’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because it would have cost us more to pay him for the legwork and the time it would have taken to piece together the old pattern.”

  “Did he tell you that?”

  “No, it’s common sense. He’s not trying to take advantage of us, Trib.”

  “Why didn’t he at least dump the old tiles, then?” Trib asked, pointing at the ceramic squares that hadn’t cracked or crumbled, now heaped atop a drop cloth in the far corner of the room. “What are we supposed to do with all that?”

  “Maybe we can use them somewhere else in the house.”

  “Where?” He was grouchy.

  So was she. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll piece together a beautiful mosaic backsplash for the kitchen.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “I was being sarcastic, Trib.”

  He managed a smile. “Sorry. I just feel like this house is whipping our butts.”

  “It’ll be worth it when it’s done.”

  “Keep reminding me of that,” he said, and they trudged wearily up to bed, arm in arm.

  She’s barely seen him since. With Mundypalooza officially kicking off tomorrow, he’s been working late, putting together a special retrospective issue of the Tribune.

  Late last night, trying to stay awake until he came home, she’d puttered from room to room finding storage for their meager belongings. Their rented cottage might have been small, but its built-in storage made up for the Binghams’ lack of furniture. Unlike this massive house, it had had a linen closet, bedroom bookshelves and corner curios, closet cubbies, a medicine cabinet, and plenty of kitchen drawers. Here, the floors in otherwise empty rooms are littered with stuff.

  There are heaps of dirty laundry and clean, folded clothing and linens that won’t fit into meager drawer and shelf space. There are bundled old newspapers waiting to be recycled and much, much older newspapers destined to return to the Tribune office archives. There are moving boxes she wishes she hadn’t opened and boxes she doesn’t dare open because it will only mean finding a place to put everything.

  As she attempted to tackle it, Annabelle imagined that every little noise and flitting shadow signified someone lurking in the house. It was always only the wind, a passing car, a squirrel in the downspout . . .

  Still, strangers have been driving and walking by the house for days, blatantly stopping to stare. It’s unnerving.

  Now, she keeps an eye on the yard through the windows as she and Oliver look around the natatorium. Steve is alone out there. If he weren’t around, would she see someone watching the house from back there in the trees?

  Steve’s presence might unnerve Oliver, but Annabelle decides it might not be a bad thing to have a man hanging around the house during the day.

  “When will there be water in the pool again, Mom?”

  “Hmm?” She turns to see that he’s turned his attention to the pool itself. “I hope soon.”

  “How soon?”

  “Before the summer is over, for sure.” She describes what it will look like when it’s finished, but it’s hard even for her to imagine.

  Like the rest of the house, the natatorium is in disarray. Steve’s tools and supplies are everywhere. Two-by-fours are stacked on the floor, and large sheets of plywood lean against the wall, covering the mural.

  In addition to restoring the pool and the surrounding area, he offered to frame in a small shower stall and changing room in the far corner. The plumbing is already in place, and he assured her that it won’t be very complicated or expensive.

  “Famous last words,” said Trib, who threw up his hands in resignation when he heard about that last-minute addition.

  “What are these for, Mom?” Oliver crouches beside the pile of discarded tiles.

  “They used to be part of the border on the side of the pool, but we can’t use them there anymore.”

  “Can I have them?”

  “I guess so, sure. What do you want to do with them?”

  “I don’t know. They’re kind of cool.”

  “They are, aren’t they?”

  “They would make a good floor. Can I take them up to my room?”

  ”Sure,” she says, picking up an empty cardboard box—no shortage of those around—and hands it to him. “You can put them in here.”

  She stands watching him contentedly picking through the tiles. Funny how you never know what’s going to strike a child’s fancy.

  The door opens, and Steve walks in. She’s glad to see that his shirt is back on. “Hey, Annabelle. And is this your son?”

  “This is Oliver. Oliver, this is Mr. Reed.”

  “You can call me Steve.”

  “Oliver, stand up and use your manners.” Terrific, she sounds just like Kim talking to Catherine.

  “Nah, it’s okay,” Steve says quickly. “I guarantee you don’t want to shake my hand right now, buddy. I’m pretty grubby. Looks like you’re having fun with those tiles, though, right?”

  Oliver says nothing.

  “Mr. Reed is talking to you, Oliver.”

  He looks up. “What?”

  “No big deal. Listen, Annie, I’ve got to get out of here. The wife is waiting for me, and it ain’t pretty when I’m late.”

  Annabelle has never met the woman he married, nor does she remember her name. He only refers to her as “the wife.” She remembers that she isn’t from here, and they don’t live here now—they’re across the river near Kingston.

  “Thanks for everything,” she says. “I’ll see you tomorrow?”

  “Bright and early. Have a great night.”

  He leaves with a wave, and a moment later, she hears him pulling ou
t of the driveway.

  “Why does he call you Annie?” Oliver asks, without looking up from the tiles.

  “You know . . . for short. Like sometimes I call you Ollie.”

  “Not anymore. When I was little.”

  “Right. And a lot of people called me Annie, back when I was a kid. I knew him then, so . . . that’s what he calls me.”

  “You knew Dad, too. He doesn’t call you that.”

  “No. He’s not big on nicknames. For other people, anyway,” she adds. “Probably because he was stuck with one himself.”

  “I like Trib. I don’t like Annie,” Oliver decides.

  Right. He doesn’t like it, and he doesn’t like Steve. Point taken.

  Oliver goes back to sorting tiles, and Annabelle wanders across the room, stepping around a ladder and a bag of cement.

  She’s gravitating toward the stone angel, she realizes. She’d all but forgotten it, but now she finds herself curious all over again.

  Up close, she can see the meticulously sculpted details. The angel has long corkscrew curls, high cheekbones, arched brows, and an exceptionally full lower lip. This must be a replica of some famous statue, because its features look vaguely familiar to Annabelle.

  She runs her hand along the base, admiring the realistic curve of the bare foot and wondering, again, how it came to be here. It’s an odd thing to find in a room like this, much more suited to a garden. Or, yes, a graveyard.

  As Annabelle starts to turn away, she notices that something is etched at the base of the statue. She leans in for a closer look, but it’s hard to make out without her reading glasses.

  “Mom!” Oliver’s voice interrupts as she squints at the series of letters and numbers. “It’s too heavy!”

  Turning, she sees that he’s struggling to lift the box filled with tiles.

  “I’ll help you,” she says. “Just a second.”

  “What are you looking at?”

  “I’m trying to see what this says, but the print is too small.”

  “I think you need glasses.”

  She does. Her aging eyes are getting worse by the day, but optometrists aren’t covered by Trib’s meager health insurance policy. Nor are psychiatrists. Oliver’s Dr. Seton costs them three hundred dollars an hour out of pocket. Her deteriorating eyesight is the least of their medical worries.

  “Can you help me, Oliver?”

  He dutifully comes over, giving a wide berth to the empty pool. Bending over the base of the statue, he reads, “Z . . . D . . . P . . . 3 . . . 31 . . . 04 . . . 7 . . . 7 . . . 16. What does that mean?”

  “Good question. Is that all it says?”

  “Uh huh. But there are dots after the letters and slashes between the numbers, like initials and dates.”

  “Can you read the numbers again with the slashes?”

  He does, informing her that there’s also a hyphen between the two sets of numbers, “Just like on Grandpa Charlie’s grave.”

  Then . . . are they birth and death dates?

  If so, whose?

  And where—

  “Is it a gravestone?” Oliver asks worriedly, taking a step back.

  “No, of course not.”

  “But it has dates. If it’s not a gravestone, then what is it?”

  Good question.

  “It’s just a memorial marker. You know, like the one down by the water where the first settlers landed.”

  “Oh.” Oliver looks at it again. “So it must be for something that happened from March 31, 2004, to July 7, 2016, and—hey, wait a minute. The . . . what do you call the statue carver guy?”

  “The sculptor?”

  “Yeah, the sculptor must have made a mistake, because this is only June.”

  He’s right. And then it hits her: July 7, 2016, may not have happened yet, but July 7, 1916, has. That was the eve of July 8, 1916—the date the second Sleeping Beauty corpse turned up, right in this very house.

  Holmes’s Case Notes

  It has long been public knowledge that the line written on the notes S.B.K. left beneath the Sleeping Beauties’ pillows came from a William Carlos Williams poem.

  I don’t believe that anyone investigating the case in 1916—or in years since—ever grasped just how significant a puzzle piece it was. But any detective worth his salt will examine every aspect of the case, and that is precisely what I did. The poem—rather, poetry—became a key factor that allowed me to confirm S.B.K.’s identity, though I had long had my suspicions.

  The Williams poem was entitled “Peace on Earth,” published in his collection called The Tempers in the fall of 1913. A century later, I found the book still sitting on a shelf, overlooked and perhaps untouched by anyone but S.B.K. throughout the interim. I imagined that it had been handed to me from behind the veil.

  I analyzed the poem stanza by stanza, then line by line, then word for word. I came to realize that in a twist on the title, “Peace on Earth” is not a joyful or gentle missive about gossamer angels trumpeting goodwill toward men. Rather, it’s about a great unrest teeming in the heavens. It’s about Orion, the hunter, and the three sister stars at his belt. It’s an astronomical diatribe.

  On another shelf sat Alice Meynell’s Poems of the War. Beneath that, a row of carefully preserved and yet well-thumbed issues of Poetry Magazine, dating back to its inaugural issue in 1912. The collection ended abruptly with the volume published the precise month of S.B.K.’s death—among its poets, a young man named Ernest M. Hemingway, too green to have been listed on the cover.

  I painstakingly searched them all, and found that by far the most dog-eared issue was, quite tellingly, published in June 1916. One page was folded over to a poem entitled “The Dead Child” by Madison Cawein. The following four lines had been lightly underlined in pencil:

  The sunlight went. And then they fell asleep,

  And lay beneath one covering white and deep.

  Now all at once the garden wakes to light.

  And still the child sleeps on clasped close in the night.

  Chapter 9

  Sipping the day’s third cup of tea as she strolls along sun-splashed Market Street, Sully doubts that the weather can possibly be this lovely back home in the city. She’s been completely unplugged here—hasn’t even bothered to charge her cell phone—so she doesn’t know about the forecast or anything else that’s going on back home. But one thing is certain: a sunny, breezy, eighty-degree morning feels different in a bucolic village than it does in midtown Manhattan.

  She feels different here, having spent the past couple of days trying to forget that she even has another life. A life that’s perpetually in jeopardy, when you really think about it.

  So don’t. Just be in the moment. Isn’t that the whole point of this vacation?

  Ah, yes. And the moment is picture perfect.

  The heat and humidity that gripped Mundy’s Landing over the weekend are long gone. Last night, the temperature dipped down below sixty. Sully kept the windows open, just as she has every night here. She still isn’t sleeping soundly through the night, but at least she hasn’t had nightmares about Manik Bhandari, and she hasn’t woken up with a headache.

  Life—this life—is good.

  Even the tea is good: whole leaf jasmine, brewed at the Gingersnap Sweet Shop around the corner. She also bought a dozen chocolate chip and peanut butter cookies displayed on trays in the glass case. The girl behind the counter put a couple of extras into the box.

  “We always throw in a gingersnap or two,” she said with a smile.

  Gingersnap—that made Sully think of Barnes.

  She wonders how he’s making out at his island resort. He probably is making out, with his coconut bra hula babe or some vacationing billionairess. He’ll want to tell her all about it when they get back. He’ll want to hear all about her trip, too—mostly so that he can tell her all the reasons he doesn’t like small towns, and she shouldn’t, either.

  Yet she can’t help but miss the man. That’s what happens when
you spend nearly all your waking hours with someone. It isn’t healthy. Nothing about her daily existence back home is healthy.

  If I lived here, things would be different, she thinks as she arrives at the brick opera house facing the Common. Transformed into an art house movie theater, it’s showing a film that opened a couple of months ago in the city, but still.

  See, Barnes? There’s culture here.

  The Mundy’s Landing Police Department is located in the theater’s basement, which isn’t underground. Rather, it sits a few steps below the sidewalk, with full-sized windows, just like the first-floor apartments in the brownstones back home.

  Sully looked at one of those the last time her landlord raised her rent. It was a surprisingly affordable studio with high ceilings, parquet floors, and a fireplace. But there were bars on the windows, and she felt as though she was in jail even before Barnes vetoed the place. Naturally, he’d come with her to see it, and naturally, he informed her that it wasn’t safe, bars or no bars.

  “You can’t live on the ground floor in this neighborhood.”

  “This neighborhood is up and coming.”

  “When it’s up-and-come, we’ll talk. Until then, it’s down-and-out—and out of the question.”

  He was right, and Sully remains stuck with her sky-high—in every way—concrete cell.

  If she moved up here, she could sleep in a gingerbread cottage every night, with screens instead of bars on the windows. And she could work in this spacious, light-filled police station with hardwood floors and the kind of wooden furniture that you polish, as opposed to the kind that you try to keep from wobbling by sticking folded gum wrappers and bottle caps under the shortest leg.

  She’d also be able to see Lieutenant Nick Colonomos every day.

  He stopped by on Sunday afternoon to bring her a bottle of wine and say a quick hello. On Monday, she visited him here—another quick hello, as he was busy. Yesterday, she didn’t get to see him at all. She stopped by—twice—but he wasn’t here. She only came because he’d told her on Monday not to be a stranger.

  “I know you’re busy this week, though.”