Blue Moon: Mundy's Landing Book Two

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Blue Moon: Mundy's Landing Book Two Page 28

by Wendy Corsi Staub


  Within the file containing the original autopsy reports and medical examiner’s photos, Sully finds a clue at last.

  “Barnes. Look at this autopsy report. One of the victims was significantly younger than the others. The other two had recently finished growing and they had one or more wisdom teeth.”

  “Meaning they were anywhere from seventeen to their early twenties. What about the third?”

  Sully taps the report, shaking her head. “Barely in puberty, and her second molars were just erupting. She was a kid, Barnes. Probably about twelve years old.”

  In the pocket of a room that has—presumably—been unoccupied for over a century, Annabelle expertly wedges her utility blade between the window frame and bottom sash, fused by a dried riverbed of yellowed paint. Oliver stands at her side watching as she attempts to free this final sticky strip of the second-to-last window in the second-to-last room on the third floor. They started in the large ballroom and worked their way to this small warren of bedrooms at the rear of the house.

  One by one, they’ve opened every window, allowing the warm June day, scented by a neighbor’s newly mown grass, to spill into the space. Annabelle imagined a simultaneous release of the stagnant air trapped here, steeped in the Purcell family’s somber legacy.

  “This is a tiny bedroom,” Oliver observes as she slices the blade down through the crack to open it. “I can’t believe two servants had to sleep in here.”

  “Two or maybe three,” she reminds him.

  He’s been asking endless questions about the way things used to be in the “olden days”—long before her time, she felt compelled to point out several times, grinning.

  This productive mother-and-son afternoon seems to have been a much-needed balm for both of them, even if the conversation made it hard for her to entirely forget about the Purcell family and the Sleeping Beauties. Not that she discussed any of that with Oliver, who seems to be warming up to this old house at last.

  “Ready?” he asks as she carefully removes the blade and steps back.

  “Go ahead.”

  He gives the bottom sash an upward tug, then a hard shove, and another, until it slowly groans a few inches past the top panes.

  Warm, verdant air flows in through the open space above the sill. Annabelle inhales deeply, envisioning the last of the contaminated indoor air rushing out, diffused in the waning afternoon breeze.

  “Good job.” Smiling, she holds out her fist to bump his outstretched one.

  “Dad’s going to be really happy when he finds out you fixed all these windows,” he decides as they head down the hall to the final maids’ room

  “You mean we fixed all the windows. We make a good team.”

  “What are we going to do after this?”

  She checks her watch. “In about five minutes, I have to jump into the shower to get ready to go out tonight. You and Catherine are going to have a great time, though, while we’re gone.”

  He looks pensive.

  Time to change the subject. She opens the door to the last room. “Wow, this one is the tiniest of all! Look, Oliver!”

  He peers over her shoulder. “Are you sure it was a bedroom? There’s not even room for a bed or any stuff.”

  “Beds were smaller back then. People were smaller, too, for that matter. And they certainly didn’t have much stuff.”

  “I feel bad for them, don’t you?”

  She nods, glad for his empathy and for his interest in history.

  He pokes around as she sets to work on the room’s lone window, cutting through the dried paint all around the sash.

  “I don’t think this was a bedroom after all, Mom.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because there’s a lock on the outside of the door.”

  “Really?” she asks absently, scraping away the last bit of old paint.

  “I bet they used this room for storage. I bet they did have some stuff. And they put it in here so to keep it safe, like from older sisters and everything.”

  “Mmm, could be.”

  “Want to see the lock?”

  “Sure.” Finished with the window, she turns to see that he’s in the hallway, inspecting the door frame. She takes a quick peek at the large, sturdy old-fashioned slide bolt fastened to the outside of the door, and then a quicker peek at her watch.

  “Why don’t you go ahead and open that window, Oliver? Then we’ll be done up here.”

  He goes over and gives it a tug. Shoves. Strains. “It’s stuck.”

  “Here, let me.”

  “No, I’ll do it.”

  She lets him try again, to no avail. He finally allows her to help, but she, too, struggles. It won’t budge.

  Perplexed, she steps back to look at it, and hears Steve, way downstairs, calling her name.

  She sticks her head into the hall. “We’re up here!”

  “I just wanted to tell you I’m heading out. There’s wet grout, so be careful if you go in there.”

  “Wait, Steve, can you come up for a second?”

  Her son sighs heavily behind her, still not a fan of the man.

  “Shh, I just want him to help us with this,” she hisses. “He’s stronger than the two of us put together.”

  Oliver grumbles a denial as Steve’s steel-toed boots ascend two flights and cross the hardwood parquet floor of the ballroom.

  Annabelle beckons him down the hall through the open doorway.

  “This is some place,” he says, with a low whistle and shake of his head. “I bet they threw some killer parties up here.”

  Cringing at his word choice, she explains what they’ve been doing and asks if he can open the stuck window.

  “No problem,” Steve says, relishing his he-man status. He asks them to step back and gives the window a little push, as if expecting it to slide effortlessly open. Within moments, he, too, is struggling with it. He asks for the utility blade and works it around the edges just as Annabelle did, but that doesn’t help.

  “It’s okay.” She checks her watch again. Trib will be home soon, and she has to get ready. “I’ll have my husband take a look.”

  “But I don’t understand why it’s—oh!”

  “What?”

  “There are security pins, see?” Steve points to the spot where the double hung windows meet. Just above the sash of the lower window, inside the jamb where it would slide upward, someone drilled a pair of holes and inserted metal pins. Discolored with age and about the diameter of a thumb, they jut a few inches from the casing on either side, resting flush against the top of the lower sash to keep it in place.

  “These are in here good and tight,” Steve says, examining them. “If I had a pry tool, I could get them out for you.”

  “Why are they even there?” Oliver asks, alongside Annabelle, peering over Steve’s shoulder on tiptoe.

  “Good old-fashioned security measure. The pins keep the windows from being opened. You see them in a lot of old houses. You didn’t find them in any of the other windows?”

  “No,” Annabelle says. “Just here.”

  “This was a storage room,” Oliver adds, forgetting to dislike Steve for a minute. “They used it to protect their stuff, right, Mom?”

  “From their older sisters, apparently,” she says with a grin.

  “Sisters can be a pain,” Steve agrees, smiling beneath his backward baseball cap.

  “The door’s got a cool lock and I think Connor needs to get one for his room when he gets back from camp.”

  “Where’s the lock?” Steve asks, looking at the door.

  “Oh the other side. Want to see?”

  “Sure.”

  Annabelle trails the two of them to the hall to reexamine the ornately carved antique hardware affixed to the door. Oliver closes it and demonstrates how the bar slides into the metal groove on the frame. As she stares at it, Annabelle is struck by something she didn’t notice before.

  “That’s not a lock,” Steve tells Oliver. “It’s a bolt.”

&
nbsp; “What’s the difference?”

  “A lock has a key, but anyone can open a bolt. Even a sister. The weird thing is . . . it’s on the wrong side of the door.”

  “That’s exactly what I was just thinking.” Annabelle frowns.

  There’s only one reason you’d put a bolt on the outside of a door: to lock someone inside. Between that and the window pegs, she can’t help but wonder if the room was used as some sort of . . . cell?

  She doesn’t voice the thought aloud, but she can tell Steve is thinking the same thing as he looks from the lock to the window, and then at her.

  He shrugs. “To each his own, I guess. Listen, I have to go. I’ll be back tomorrow. Remind me to see if I can pry those prongs out of the window so you can open it. Bye, guys.”

  He disappears down the hall, crosses the ballroom, and heads down the steps.

  “Can we go down the servants’ stairs like you said, Mom?” Oliver asks as she stands staring from the lock to the window pins, lost in thought.

  “Sure, come on.”

  She opens the door across the hall to the shadowy back stairway. It descends to a landing with a door to the second floor and then on down to the kitchen, allowing the servants to come and go without disturbing the family or their guests. She’d told Oliver about it while they were working on the windows,

  Now, however, he takes one look at the steep, cobwebby space and pulls back with a shudder. “I don’t want to go down there.”

  Frankly, she doesn’t, either. But now that he’s seen it, the last thing she wants is for him to envision it as some sort of foreboding dungeon waiting to swallow him. She feels around on the wall for a light switch. There isn’t one, just as there are no switches, lights, or even electrical outlets here in the servants’ quarters. Nor are there window screens as there are in the ballroom and throughout the rest of the house.

  That confirms what she’d already suspected: that this part of the house was never updated. It’s been basically sealed off like Ora Abrams’s time capsule, apparently frozen in time ever since the servants left around the turn of the century.

  “Mom? Can we go down the regular stairs?” Oliver asks.

  “Sure.” She firmly closes the door on the back stair, and, once again, on the past.

  Sully’s shoulders ache from sitting hunched at the metal table in the case files room, and her eyes burn from straining to make out faded, old-fashioned notes. But she and Barnes have uncovered a second important clue in the Sleeping Beauties murders.

  All three victims were killed by a barber’s razor slicing straight across beneath the jawbone in a calculated, methodic cut. They’d died quickly.

  On two corpses, those slashes were the only wounds.

  But on the youngest victim, there were several deep gashes in the torso—classic overkill.

  Poor little thing, Sully thinks, staring at her face in the post-mortem photos. She thinks of Manik Bhandari, who died crying for his father, and wonders if this child did the same thing.

  Trying to shake the ugly thought, she tells Barnes, “He must have known her. She must have mattered to him.”

  “Or she was a surrogate for someone who did. I can’t believe no one ever caught this.”

  “It was the dawn of criminology. Profiling wasn’t a sophisticated science—if it even existed at that point.”

  “I mean in recent years.”

  “These aren’t public files. We’re lucky we have access.”

  “You and your smooth talk and your bakery cookies.” He shakes his head. “I’m impressed.”

  “Hold the applause, Barnes. We haven’t figured out who she was, or how he knew her, or who he was. And I hate to say it, but we should leave soon to get ready for the gala. I just want to double-check one more thing.”

  “What is it?”

  “The date on this report for the order of his victims. Was the youngest one first, second, or third?”

  He rubs the stubble on his chin. “I’m guessing the first. He killed her in a rage, then killed two more as surrogates.”

  She back flips through the report and her eyes widen. “Guess again.”

  “Third. Practice makes perfect. He realized that the younger and more vulnerable his victims were, the easier it would be for him.”

  “Wrong.”

  “She was the second victim?”

  Sully nods. “She was the one found at 46 Bridge Street on July eighth.”

  Despite having endured a long day on the heels of a sleepless night, Holmes effortlessly covers the last bit of terrain on the way to the little stone icehouse. He isn’t dressed for hiking, nor is he carrying a backpack. He wasn’t even planning on visiting his Beauties until the weekend, and in fact meant to head home to grab some much-needed sleep.

  But his morning adventure at the historical society left him oddly invigorated, and he sailed through his usual obligations fueled by adrenaline and coffee.

  He glances over both shoulders as he unlocks the padlocked door to the icehouse.

  Inside, he inspects the spot where he killed Juanita Contreras and is pleased to see that not a drop of blood mars the floor.

  He tugs open the trapdoor and turns on his flashlight.

  Indigo Selena Edmonds stares up at him. Her eyes are large and frightened, her face gaunt.

  “Hello there. I brought you a little gift.”

  He turns to retrieve the ladder. He lowers it into the hole and climbs down. As he moves his foot from the bottom rung to the floor, it encounters . . . something.

  A large bundle of rags lie at the base of the ladder.

  This makes no sense. Where did it come from?

  Turning to question the girls, he sees that Indi is staring down at it, her face frozen in horror. And Kathryn . . .

  Kathryn’s shackles are empty.

  Reality dawns.

  Holmes bends over to roll the bundle of rags.

  It’s Kathryn, stiff and cold.

  He can see at a glance that she damaged her wrists so violently in the process of working herself out of the shackles that she severed an artery and bled out through the open wounds.

  He opens his mouth, and a guttural cry comes out.

  “Noooo!” he howls. “Nooooooo!”

  From the Sleeping Beauty Killer’s Diary

  June 29, 1916

  I must do something.

  I must.

  The refrain marches through my aching head as ominously as German armies through Europe, heedlessly trampling tendrils of reason and fleeting wisps of drowsiness. There is no longer refuge even in sleep because there is no sleep. I reach often for my books, hoping the written word might temporarily quell the ones in my brain.

  In the wee hours this morning, as I lay restlessly with a newly published volume by a poet named Robert Frost, I was captured by the opening line of a poem entitled “The Road Not Taken.”

  Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.

  Leafing back twenty-three years to the first entry in this journal, I marvel at my precocious precognition that my own road would diverge not in a yellow wood, but in a gleaming White City.

  In Chicago, I was tempted to turn my back upon obligation and bravely charge along a new path: to study astronomy and poetry, to explore the world beyond the confines inflicted upon me.

  Instead, I dutifully returned to Father and Mundy’s Landing, my astronomical aspirations and poetic fervor relegated to mere hobby.

  Having lived with the regret—and the consequences—of that choice, I have reached another fork in the road. This time, I am determined that cowardice will not prevent me from seizing opportunity that may not come again, for as the poet wrote:

  And both that morning equally lay

  In leaves no step had trodden black.

  Oh, I kept the first for another day!

  Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

  I doubted if I should ever come back.

  I must do something.

  I must DO SOMETHING.


  I MUST DO SOMETHING!

  Chapter 18

  In the bedroom, Annabelle painstakingly pulls her new black cocktail dress over her head, careful not to muss her hair or makeup. She’s kept things simple—lipstick, a bit of mascara, some styling gel in her hair before she blew it dry after her shower. But as Trib swapped places with her in the bathroom, he told her she looks beautiful.

  The dress swishes around her bare legs as she crosses to her jewelry box to find her grandmother’s pearl earrings and necklace. She’s worn them only twice before: on her wedding day, and to her mother’s funeral. Both events were fraught with tense emotion. So, as it turns out, is this one.

  She can’t shake the thought of that third-floor room with the window fastened closed and the door bolted from the outside. Was the bolt added after the servants had vacated the house? Were they sent away because the Purcell family had something to hide? Why did Florence Purcell live out her life in an asylum? What dark secrets did Augusta and her brother Frederick keep over the years?

  When Trib got home from work, she and Oliver had escorted him upstairs to show him their handiwork.

  “Great job getting all the windows open,” he said.

  “All but one, Dad.” Oliver led the way to the small room at the end of the hall and shared his storage room theory. Annabelle caught Trib’s eye as he noticed that the sliding bolt was on the wrong side of the door. She saw that he, too, was unsettled by it.

  Back on the second floor, with Oliver out of earshot, he suggested, “Maybe it was meant to keep children from getting into something dangerous. Guns, or booze—maybe the parents were bootleggers.”

  “The lock is right above the doorknob,” she pointed out. “It would have been placed much higher, out of arm’s reach for a child, if that was the case. I think someone was locked in that room.”

  “Maybe it was an animal.”

  “Why the bolt? Animal paws can’t open closed doors.”

  “Some can.”

  She gave him a dubious look.

  “Okay, then maybe there was a fire escape leading up to that window years ago, and they didn’t want anyone climbing up and getting into the house that way.”

 

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