Blood Red (28 page)

She was planning to take her sister's advice and tell him what happened fourteen years ago—­

“Fourteen years ago!” Noreen kept saying. “It's ancient history. Just get it out in the open, say you're sorry, show him the stupid snow globe, and move on.”

She made it sound so simple.

The reality is anything but.

I can't do this right now
, Rowan decides. If she does, it will blow up and envelop them both. They won't be able to deal with Mick, or . . . with anything.

Maybe it's an excuse.

Maybe it's a valid reason to wait to tell him until later, or tomorrow, or . . .

Maybe he doesn't need to know after all.

“Marrana's sounds good,” she tells him, noticing that the desk drawer where she stashed the snow globe is open slightly. She pushes it closed as she stands.

B
arnes went home to get some sleep an hour ago after extracting a promise from Sully that she'd do the same thing as soon as she finished her paperwork.

Now that it's done, however, instead of gathering her things and heading out into the night, she decides to spend a little more time searching the databases.

Having identified weather as a possible trigger or a draw that might have lured a transient killer, she and Barnes had identified several catastrophic storms over the past year. A few—­a category 2 Caribbean hurricane and a deadly Oklahoma tornado—­were likely beyond their perp's range. But she can't stop thinking about the massive Labor Day nor'easter.

All six New England states were affected, as was Long Island. There were no related homicides during that time frame, but they were searching a large area, both in population and in geography.

Wondering if they'd missed something earlier, Sully again combs the records for female slashing victims. This time, she finds one—­a Boston prostitute—­but she was brunette and of Asian descent, and doesn't fit the victimology. Anyway, her pimp was later arrested for the crime, had confessed, and is behind bars.

Turning her attention back to the missing persons files, Sully embarks on a state by state search, focusing on the areas that were hardest hit by the storm.

In Vermont, she hits pay dirt.

A female college senior in Burlington has been missing since September 11, four days after the storm passed through.

She had long red hair.

She'd grown up in New York City and lost her beloved godmother in the World Trade Center attacks. According to the case file, her friends reported that the anniversary always brought her down, but she'd been more depressed than usual this year because their sorority house had been without power for several days. Suicide had not been ruled out, though no evidence of that had ever turned up; nor had her body.

At the time she disappeared, much of storm-­ravaged Burlington was still flooded by Lake Champlain and littered with downed trees and power lines. The area was crawling with reporters, relief workers, repairmen, contractors, insurance inspectors . . .

Somewhere among them, Sully is now convinced, lurked a killer with a straight-­edged razor and a deadly obsession with redheads.

 

From the
Mundy's Landing Tribune
Archives

Police Blotter

March 28, 1984

A Mundy's Landing teen is safely back home after a massive search that began Tuesday evening when her parents reported her missing. Believing she was safely in her bedroom, they had noticed nothing amiss throughout the evening, but called police when they discovered the bedroom empty shortly after eleven o'clock. Following an extensive overnight search, the teen returned to her parents' home mid-­afternoon of her own accord. She stated that she had traveled out of state to a rock concert. Her identity is being withheld due to her age.

 

Chapter 14

D
ressing for the field trip on Wednesday morning, Rowan can hear Jake singing in the shower.

He wouldn't be doing that if she'd had the chance to tell him what she wanted to tell him last night.

Now who's a coward? she scolds herself as she pulls a red sweater over her white blouse and zips her feet into a pair of warm boots.

It hadn't taken much for Jake to sidetrack her efforts to bare her soul last night.

All he had to do was offer to take her out to dinner, and she dropped the whole plan.

As they drove over to Marrana's, she toyed with the idea of continuing the conversation over dinner and even momentarily convinced herself that it wasn't as big a deal as she'd made it out to be. As Noreen had pointed out, Jake isn't likely to walk out of their marriage over something that had happened fourteen years ago . . .

Is he?

Wasn't Noreen the one who'd acted as though Rowan might as well sew on a scarlet letter back when she first confessed to having kissed Rick?

It
is
a big deal.

She realized she couldn't tell him about it in a restaurant over dinner. It would have to wait.

Marrana's was jam-­packed last night, and short-­handed. Mick was single-­handedly bussing tables as the other busboy, Zach Willet, took orders.

“Did you get promoted?” Rowan asked him, surprised when he came over to wait on them.

“Nah, one of the waitresses didn't show up so they asked me to fill in. I've never done this before,” he added nervously.

“I'm sure you'll do a great job,” Jake said.

He was wrong.

Poor Zach fumbled their order and fumbled their plates—­dropping Rowan's soup and Jake's dessert.

“The only thing he hasn't figured out how to drop is the check,” Jake whispered after they'd sat waiting for it, yawning and trying to get Zach's attention.

When he finally brought it over, he apologized and said, “You don't have to tip me.”

“Poor kid,” Jake said to Rowan, pulling out his wallet as Zach hurried away.

“You're leaving him twenty percent, right?”

“Nope.”

She frowned and started to protest.

“I'm leaving him fifty percent.”

They smiled at each other, and she realized how much she loved him and how much she dreaded hurting him.

But she knew she had to do it, and she meant to, she really did . . .

As they drove Mick home from work, Rowan asked if he'd also been asked to pinch hit for the absent waitress.

“No, just Zach. I'm not good enough.”

“Is that what they said?” Jake asked.

“That's what I say.”

That evolved into a predictable and unpleasant conversation—­between Jake and Mick, anyway—­about taking pride in your work and being ambitious, which led to slammed car doors on the driveway and Mick stomping up the stairs to slam his bedroom door, too.

“We were supposed to talk about his schoolwork,” Jake protested to Rowan, who could only shrug helplessly.

They were supposed to talk about a lot of things.

He walked Doofus, and she pretended to be asleep when he came to bed.

Long after Jake really had drifted off, she lay awake thinking about the snow globe.

She knows what she has to do today. She has to talk to Rick, and she has to talk to Jake. She's not sure in which order.

He comes whistling into the bedroom with a towel wrapped around his waist.

“Is that a new skirt?” he asks, gesturing at the gray wool plaid one she has on.

“I've had it forever.”

“I like it.”

Oh, Jake. Why do you have to be so sweet today, of all days? Why can't you pick a fight with me the way you do with Mick?

“Thanks,” she murmurs, and heads for the hallway. “I've got to get going.”

“Firing up the griddle? Bacon and omelets again? I'll take extra cheese this time.”

“Jake! I told you, that was—­” Turning back, she sees that he's grinning.

“I was kidding. Have fun on your field trip, babe. Don't forget that I won't be home until really late.”

“I already forgot. Why?”

“The dinner.”

“Which dinner?”

“The one at Hattie's.”

Hattie's . . . ?

“You mean Hattie's in Saratoga Springs?”

“What other Hattie's is there?” he asks with a grin. Hattie's Chicken Shack is a Saratoga institution and one of their favorite places to eat whenever they get up that way for a long weekend—­which they haven't done in at least a few years.

“Today is the regional sales meeting,” he adds. “Remember?”

“Of course I remember. I just didn't know about Hattie's.”

“I told you about it the other day.”

Which other day?

The day I was sneaking around the city meeting Rick Walker for lunch?

I don't deserve Jake. And he deserves the truth. Tonight.

“Well—­good luck with the meeting, and have fun at your dinner.”

“Okay, I'll see you later. Love you,” he adds, because they always do.

“Love you, too,” she returns, and today she means it more than ever.

A
s the crow flies, Kurt's stepfather's Weehawken condo is less than a mile and a half from Kurt's Manhattan apartment. But it takes him nearly an hour to cover that distance in rush hour traffic, even though he's heading in the opposite direction of most commuters crossing the Hudson River.

He'd been surprised when his stepfather chose to stay in New Jersey after divorcing his mother.

“Why not the city?” he'd asked Rick the day he'd helped him move into a high-­rise located on the wrong side of the river, as far as Kurt was concerned.

“Too expensive.”

“Not everywhere.” He'd managed to find an affordable place a few years earlier, and so had his brother. Then again, they're both probably making more money than Rick is these days—­or has in years.

He'd always seemed content to stay at home with the kids and Mom had been fine with that scenario. After Kurt's sister, Erin, started preschool, Rick went back to work. But his income was a drop in the bucket compared to Mom's.

She didn't mind. As far as she was concerned, Rick Walker had been her knight in shining armor at a time in her life when she was on her own with two little boys. She loved him.

And so did we.

Kurt will never forget the sunny afternoon when he and his brother came home from school to find Mom waiting for them on the stoop. The last time that had happened, she broke the news that their father had disappeared. This time, Kurt—­then in first grade—­braced himself for another bombshell.

“Rick wants to marry me,” she said. “I won't say yes unless you guys want me to.”

They were momentarily dumbstruck.

Kurt managed to speak first. “Will he live with us?”

Mom smiled. “He sure will.”

“Can we call him Dad?”

“That's up to him. Should I say yes?”

Their answer to her was yes; Mom's answer to Rick was yes; Rick's answer to the dad question was yes.

He was the one who taught Kurt how to pitch a baseball and helped him with multiplication tables and made his lunch every day. He was the one who gave Kurt the Big Talk after the seventh-­grade biology teacher sent home a note to all the parents that the reproduction unit was looming. He was the one who sat in the passenger's seat on the New Jersey Turnpike after Kurt got his driving permit; the one who tied his bow tie for his senior prom; the one who taught him how to shave, using an old-­fashioned straight razor just like his own father had taught him.

“Those plastic safety razors are fine when you're in a hurry,” Rick said, as they looked at each other in the bathroom mirror, faces lathered in preparation for the lesson, “but real men use real razors.”

Kurt wanted to be a real man just like Rick, who wasn't his real father—­not biologically, anyway—­but was the only one who'd ever mattered.

His biological father did resurface a ­couple of times over the years, wanting to bond with him and his brother. But neither of them wanted anything to do with him, and neither did their mother.

She despised her first husband, but according to the suicide note she was clutching when she killed herself last November, she never stopped loving her second.

T
his morning's weather is as oppressive as yesterday's was luminous, with the threat of rain or snow hanging low in the sky beyond the turrets of the Mundy's Landing Historical Society.

Rowan stands beside the open doors of the yellow school bus parked at the curb in front of 62 Prospect Street, counting heads as her class files out onto the sidewalk.

The most important rule of a fourth-­grade field trip—­always count heads, always,
constantly
—­seems particularly important this morning. She's seen more police cars than usual around the village and Bari Hicks mentioned that they're looking for a high school girl who never came home last night. She didn't remember the name, but had heard that the girl had a boyfriend at a college somewhere in New England.

“I just hope she wasn't kidnapped.”

“Around here? I doubt that,” the other chaperone said.

“I'm betting she'll turn up safe and sound in a dorm room,” Rowan told them. The conversation unfolded well beyond earshot of her students, but Rowan wasn't about to confide that she herself had gone missing overnight back in her own high school days.

She'd climbed out a window and taken a joyride to a concert in Hartford with a ­couple of older friends. Prince—­Purple Rain. That was the concert. She remembers the set list began with “Let's Go Crazy” and the first encore was “I Would Die 4 U,” remembers that she sprayed her long permed hair purple, ratted it, and used a pair of violet tights as a headband, remembers everything except . . .

What the hell was I thinking?

She wasn't thinking. After the concert, no one was in any condition to drive home. They wound up at a party at some cabin, fell asleep at dawn, and arrived home the next evening to find search teams with dogs combing the woods surrounding Mundy's Landing.

She was grounded an entire summer for that stunt. That was the plan, anyway. Her mother died before she could see Rowan through the punishment, and although her father was too caught up in his grief to keep tabs on her, she didn't have the heart to resume her previous antics.

As certain as she is that today's missing girl will be found, and most likely grounded for life, she's not taking any chances with her students.

“. . . twenty-­three, twenty-­four.” Satisfied, she nods and holds up her arm, the signal for silence.

The excited chatter subsides, though not entirely. The kids are just too keyed up that it's finally their turn to embark on this local rite of passage, many of them having heard about it from older siblings and looked forward to it since kindergarten. Rowan gets that; she was once in their shoes.

Bari Hicks is on her cell phone, telling someone that she spent the “whole trip on the verge of vomiting . . . yes . . . yes, I'm serious! I know! But the teacher is giving me a dirty look so I have to run. I'll call you back in a few minutes.”

Rowan sighs inwardly before she addresses the group. It's going to be a long morning.

“Okay, listen up, ­people. Before we go inside, I just want to remind you what we talked about. Use your manners, pay attention, hands to yourselves, and if I see
any
of you with a cell phone or an iPod or anything that has a screen, what happens?”

“You confiscate it,” Amanda Hicks says.

“Confiscate!” Bari beams. “What a nice big word!”

Rather than pause to congratulate Amanda's literary skills, Rowan goes on talking, reminding the class of Miss Abrams's strict no-­electronics policy in order to preserve an authentic atmosphere. She demonstrates that she's turning off her own phone, instructs everyone to follow suit, and knows that half of them, including a certain chaperone, will ignore the rule.

“Okay, let's go, guys. Just be on your best behavior. Got it?”

“Got it,” most of them say in unison. The few who don't haven't got it and never will.

She marches the line up the wide steps of the stone building, with the three chaperones walking alongside them. Bari is, not surprisingly, only interested in interacting with her own daughter. The two of them are dressed identically in khakis and black North Face jackets, with ridiculously tiny matching purses slung from shoulder to opposite hip and clutched protectively close, in case someone tries to mug them between the bus and the steps.

Ora Abrams is framed in the doorway. She seemed elderly even back when Rowan was a girl, but always spry and lovely, with her snow white updo piled high above a pastel satin headband, making her look like a geriatric Cinderella.

She likes to say that history is her family business. Her father was a history professor at Hadley College and her great-­aunt Etta was the longtime curator of the historical society before Ora took over back in the 1950s.

“Well, who have we here? Is that Rowan Carmichael?” she asks.

Not exactly. That hasn't been her name in twenty years. But despite seeing her often, Ora is one of those hometown folks who will always think of her as one of the Carmichael kids. Rowan can see the kids' ears perk up:
Rowan Carmichael? Who might that be?

Realizing her mistake, Ora says, “I'm sorry! I meant Rowan Mundy! I mean
Mrs.
Mundy!”

Instant contradiction from—­who else?—­Amanda Hicks: “You mean,
Ms.
Mundy!”

“Yes, come in, come in,
Ms.
Mundy and . . . everyone.” Ora holds the door wide open so that they can crowd into the majestic foyer, with its ornately carved woodwork, hexagon-­shaped stained glass windows, and mosaic floor.