Blood Red (36 page)

“You've got to help me, Detective. Please. I need to find my son . . . He disappeared, and they think . . .” She pauses, closing her eyes just for a moment, trying to collect her thoughts.

Mick. She has to find Mick.

“Your son disappeared?” The detective is solemn, but there's a little twinkle in her eye. “Can you describe him?”

“He's six-­two, lanky, with green eyes and red hair . . .”

“Red hair? I'm kind of partial to that. Hmm, let me see what I can find out.” The detective steps closer to the door and calls, “Hey, Barnes? Can you come in here now? And bring your pal?”

A moment later, a large black man steps through the front door, his arm around Mick.

Rowan closes her eyes, this time in silent, thankful prayer. Then her boy is there, hugging her.

“He got here just as we did,” Detective Leary tells Rowan. “He heard you scream and he was running toward the house but my partner Detective Barnes here stopped him so that he wouldn't get hurt.”

“What happened?” Mick asks, over and over as the paramedics rush Noreen out the door on a stretcher. “What happened?”

Rowan just shakes her head, spinning, spinning . . .

She has a feeling that it will be a long time before she can answer that question.

Right now—­as long as she has her boy back safely, and her sister is in good hands, there's only one other thing that matters.

On her feet at last, she steps away from the bedlam, through the doorway into her study.

She dials Jake's number. This time when it goes into voice mail, she'll leave him a message. She'll just say . . . she'll say . . .

What the hell are you going to say?

But it doesn't go into voice mail.

“Jake? You answered. I've been . . . trying to call you.”

“Yeah. I've been in a meeting, but now I'm out. I saw that you called a few times. Listen, I can't talk about this right—­”

“It's not that. It's something else. It's . . .”

“What?”

She looks around, spinning on the Gravitron. Spinning, spinning, and it's all a blur: Mick, the detectives, Casey, the blood . . .

“Rowan?”

“Can you come home? I . . .” Her voice cracks. Dammit.

“I'm in Saratoga.”

“I know, but . . . something happened, and . . .” She swallows a sob. “I need you, Jake.”

“What happened? Is it Mick? Is he okay? Are you okay?” Concern nudges the anger from his voice.

The spinning slows.

Her gaze settles on a framed photo of herself and Jake on her desk. Arm in arm, smiling, wearing jeans and holding shovels: the day they planted the oak tree to replace the one felled by the storm.

She hesitates.

No more lies.

“We're . . . not exactly okay. Not right now. We just . . . we need you home. Please.”

“What happened? What's wrong?”

“Please, Jake . . .” Her voice breaks. “Please just come home.”

“Okay, I'm on my way.” Before he hangs up, Jake adds two last words: “Love you.”

At last, the world stops spinning. The ground is solid beneath her feet once more.

“I love you, too.”

 

From the
Mundy's Landing Tribune

Front Page

December 24, 2015

Local Teen Remains Missing

As the holidays close in, the search goes on for Brianna Marie Armbruster, 17, of Prospect Street in Mundy's Landing, in the wake of her suspected abduction by Kurt Walker over two weeks ago.

Speaking through Police Chief Ronald Calhoun, Brianna's parents, Charles and Michelle Armbruster, expressed fervent hope that their daughter will be found alive and offered gratitude to local law enforcement for continuing in their tireless efforts to locate her.

Walker, who remains in serious condition at Mid-­Hudson Regional Hospital recovering from a gunshot wound, has refused to cooperate with the investigation. He has been charged with the murder of his stepfather, Richard Walker of Weehawken, New Jersey. Other charges are pending following the NYPD announcement yesterday that preliminary DNA evidence found in his van has been linked to Ms. Armbruster along with several missing women.

Speaking on behalf of the Walker family, which has gone into seclusion at his home in Venice, Florida, Robert Belinke issued the following statement: “Richard Walker's sons Derek and Liam and daughter, Erin, express their sorrow and concern for the families whose lives have been impacted by recent events involving their brother, Kurt Walker. They request privacy at this time to grieve the loss of their father.”

 

Epilogue

Christmas Eve

B
eyond the kitchen windows, fat white snowflakes drift from a gray morning sky. The air is fragrant with the freshly cut Frasier fir tree in the living room, and Rowan hums along with the carols playing in the background as she kneels in front of an open drawer, rummaging through the contents.

They must be here someplace . . .

Except, they're not.

She crawls to the next drawer and begins searching it, looking for the set of tin cookie cutters she kept when she and Noreen cleaned out their parents' house. She uses them every December, but this year, things have been so crazy that she hasn't gotten around to the holiday baking yet.

School was in session right through yesterday, and every spare moment she wasn't working was spent in survival mode. Having endured the darkest month of her life, she's finally,
finally
certain that both her marriage and her sister are going to make it.

Noreen is in the hospital right here in Mundy's Landing. Yesterday, her condition was upgraded at last and she was moved out of the ICU. It's going to be a long road to recovery, though, in more ways than one.

A few days ago, Kevin told Rowan privately that he and Noreen had been planning to separate after the holidays. She was stunned.

“So she didn't tell you?”

“No.”

“The kids don't even know yet. We were waiting until Sean came back from Europe.”

Sean is home now, but all four of Noreen's kids are so shaken by their mother's injuries that the news of an impending separation will have to wait.

Rowan was initially hoping that her sister and brother-­in-­law might be able to work it out, but it isn't looking likely. Kevin had spent the first few days at his wife's bedside, but now that she's pulled through the worst, he hasn't been as vigilant. He's working at the OR tomorrow, Christmas Day, but Rowan's nephew and nieces are coming to spend the holidays in Mundy's Landing. They'll be here later today.

The full house, with Braden and Katie both home as well, will be good for Mick. He's been seeing a therapist since that awful day, shaken by what happened to Brianna Armbruster.

Every time Rowan thinks of what almost happened to her own family—­and what
did
happen—­she wonders how life can ever be normal again.

But they're all still alive, still here . . .

Jake is still here—­and he's promised he's not going anywhere.

Their first days together after his return from Saratoga were consumed by the crisis at hand. Noreen's life was hanging in the balance. Rowan and Jake didn't talk about what had happened between them until she was stabilized. They're still processing it all with the help of a marriage counselor. But Jake has forgiven her, and they're going to get through this.

She closes the drawer, drags a chair across the kitchen, and climbs onto it to reach the cupboard above the stove. Those cookie cutters must be here someplace . . .

“What are you doing up there?”

Jolted by the voice behind her, she shifts her position. The chair wobbles, tilts, and she falls . . .

Right into Jake's strong arms.

She laughs. “Good catch.”

“What were you looking for?”

“Cookie cutters. I thought I'd bake some cookies,” she says, and regrets it when pain shadows his eyes like a cloud crossing the sun. She'd told him a few details about the burnt cookies, and Rick.

“I'm sorry, Jake. What a stupid idea.”

“Climbing on chairs without a net?” He smiles faintly.

“Baking cookies. It was a spur-­of-­the-­moment thing, and I should have known better. Why don't I ever stop to think things through?”

But Jake is shaking his head. “You do think things through—­the things that count. It wasn't a stupid idea. It's Christmas. You always bake cookies for Christmas.”

“I know, but—­”

“Look, I don't think we should spend the rest of our lives tiptoeing around things that might remind us of what happened. It's over. We're healing. We're moving on. Right?”

“Right.” She smiles, and he smiles, and the light is back in his eyes.

“Oh, and by the way,” he says, “You're under the mistletoe, so . . .”

“What? I'm not under the mistletoe.”

He lifts his hand and dangles a plastic sprig of green over their heads. “You are now.”

“Hey, where'd you get that?”

“It was in the pocket of my sweatshirt when I put it on. I have no idea how it got there.”

She knows how. He'd let her wear the sweatshirt to warm up the morning they were in the attic getting the boxes of Christmas decorations. She'd been so worried he'd discover her secret.

But Jake is right. It's over. They're moving on.

And
they're under the mistletoe.

 

Don't miss the next thrilling book in the

Mundy's Landing trilogy from

New York Times bestselling author

WENDY CORSI STAUB!

B
LUE
M
OON

Coming Summer 2016

 

Prologue

Sunday, October 25, 2015

Mundy's Landing, New York

A
s the real estate agent slows the car in front of 46 Bridge Street, Annabelle Bingham, seated in the leather passenger's seat, might as well be seeing the place for the first time.

She'd literally grown up right around the corner, but she'd never imagined she might actually live under that mansard roof, in the shadow of the century-old unsolved crime that had unfolded beneath it.

“Here we are,” the Realtor, Lynda Carlotta announces. “It really is magnificent, isn't it?”

Against a gloomy Sunday morning sky, the Second Empire Victorian presides over neighboring stucco bungalows and pastel Queen Anne cottages with the aplomb of a grand dame crashing a coffee klatch.

“Magnificent isn't exactly the word that springs to my mind.” That comes from Trib, Annabelle's husband, whose lanky form is folded into the seat behind them.

For the past few days, they've taken turns talking each other into—and out of—coming to see this place. They're running out of options. Local real estate prices have skyrocketed, unlike the Binghams' income. The only homes in their price range are small, undesirable fixer-uppers across town by the highway. They saw seven such properties yesterday and another this morning, a forlorn little seventies ranch that smelled of must and mothballs.
Eau d'old man
, according to Trib.

Lynda smiles at him in the rearview mirror. “I'm not quite the professional wordsmith you are. I'm sure you can come up with a more creative adjective.”

Annabelle can think of one. She's been trying to keep it out of her head, but everything—even the tolling steeple bells from nearby Holy Angels Church—seems to serve as a grim reminder.

“Gargantuan,” pronounces the back seat wordsmith. “That's one way to describe it.”

Murder House
, Annabelle thinks. That's another.

“There's certainly plenty of room for a large family here,” Lynda points out cheerily.

Optimism might be her strong suit, but tact is not. There are plenty of families that don't care to grow larger; many, for one heartbreaking reason or another, that couldn't expand even if they wanted to; and still others, like the Binghams, whose numbers are sadly dwindling.

Annabelle and Trib are only children, as is their own son. As of this past summer, all four of their parents are gone. Trib's father, the last to pass away, left them the small inheritance that led directly to this long-awaited house-hunt.

They've outgrown the gardener's cottage they've been renting since their newlywed days, and have been longing for more space. But this?

This is crazy. This is way too much house for three people.

Lynda, whose strong suit is also not intuition—waxes on. “There are fourteen rooms, including the third-floor ballroom and servants' quarters, and over thirty-five hundred square feet of living space—although I have to check the listing sheet, so don't quote me on it.”

That, Annabelle has noticed, is one of her favorite catch phrases.
Don't quote me on it.

“Is she saying it because you're a reporter?” she'd asked Trib after their first outing with Lynda. “Does she think you're working on an article that's going to blow the lid off . . . I don't know, sump pump function?”

He laughed. “That's headline fodder if I ever heard it.”

Lynda starts to pull the Lexus into the rutted driveway. After a few bumps, she thinks better of it and backs out onto the street. “Let's start out front so that we can get the full curb appeal, shall we?”

They shall.

Parked at the curb, they gaze at 46 Bridge Street.

Gargantuan—yes, there's no disputing that.

The house looms, with a full third story tucked behind the mansard's scalloped slate shingles. Its grillwork crest mirrors the pronged black iron fence encircling the property. A square cupola rises from the flat roof, its arched cornices perched atop paired windows like the meticulously sculpted, perpetually raised eyebrows of a proper aristocratic lady.

Fittingly, the house—rather, the events that transpired within its plaster walls—raised many an eyebrow a hundred years ago.

“Would you mind handing me that file from the seat back there, Charles?” Lynda asks Trib, who had been born Charles Bingham IV.

As one of several Charlies at Mundy's Landing Elementary School, he was rechristened “Trib,” courtesy of his family's longtime ownership of the
Mundy's Landing Tribune
. The childhood nickname stuck with him and proved prophetic: he took over as editor and publisher after his dad retired a decade ago.

But Lynda wouldn't know that. She's relatively new here, having moved to Mundy's Landing sometime in the last decade.

Annabelle and Trib had been born here at the tail end of their hometown's midcentury boom years and had watched it succumb to economic decline.

Lynda wouldn't remember the era when the grand mansions in The Heights had fallen into shabby disrepair and shuttered storefronts lined the Common. She'd missed the dawning renaissance as they reopened, one by one, to form the bustling business district that exists today.

“Let's see . . . I was wrong,” she says, consulting the file Trib passes to the front seat. “The house is only 3300 square feet.”

Can we quote you on it?
Annabelle wants to ask.

“I can't imagine what it cost to heat this place last winter,” Trib comments, “with all those below-zero days we had.”

“You'll see here that there's a fairly new furnace.” Lynda hands them each a sheet of paper. “Much more energy efficient than you'll find in most old houses in the neighborhood.”

Annabelle looks over the list of specs, noting that the “new” furnace was installed about fifteen years ago, around the turn of this century. The wiring and plumbing most likely date to the turn of the last one.

There are two parlors, seven bedrooms, three bathrooms, two porches, an eat-in kitchen, and the aforementioned ballroom, plus the only privately owned indoor pool in town. Some potential buyers might view that as a burden rather than the luxury it is for Annabelle, a lifelong daily lap swimmer.

Still, the house lacks plenty of key items on her wish list. There's a ramshackle detached garage instead of the two-car garage she and Trib covet. There is no master suite with a bathroom. The lot is relatively small, like many in this historic neighborhood. It's probably too shady for a vegetable garden like the one Annabelle happily tends where they live now.

“You're never going to find exactly what you want,” Lynda has been reminding her and Trib from day one. “You have to compromise.”

They're trying, searching for a home that will fit a happy medium—literally. Not too big, not too small, not too old, not too new, not too expensive, not a rock-bottom fixer-upper . . .

Goldilocks syndrome
—another of Lynda's catchphrases.

This house may be too old and too big, but it isn't too expensive despite being located in The Heights, a tree-lined enclave adjacent to the village common.

“Since you both grew up here, I don't have to tell you about how wonderful this neighborhood is,” Lynda says, as the three of them step out of the car and approach the tall iron gate. “Have either of you ever been inside the house?”

“I trick-or-treated at the door when I was a kid,” Annabelle says. “That's the closest I ever got.”

Trib shakes his head. “I never even bothered to trick-or-treat here. Old Lady Purcell—that's what everyone called her, because she was ancient even back then—never gave out good candy. Her nephew was the one who went out and got it for her, and he was a real cheapskate.”

Maybe, but Lester Purcell isn't being much of a cheapskate now.

He'd inherited this house upon the death of his great-aunt Augusta, who died over a year ago, reportedly in the same room where she'd been born back in 1910. He could have sold it to the Historical Society for well above market value, but he refused to entertain a longstanding preemptive offer from the curator, Ora Abrams.

“I'm not going to cash in on a tragedy like everyone else around here,” he grumbled, adamantly opposed to having his ancestral home exploited for its role in the notorious unsolved Sleeping Beauty case.

Murder House—that's what everyone in Mundy's Landing has called this place and two other homes in The Heights, for as long as Annabelle can remember.

Back in the summer of 1916, 46 Bridge Street was the second home to gain notoriety as a crime scene. The first had been a gambrel-roofed fieldstone Dutch Manor house just around the corner at 65 Prospect Street; the third, a granite Beaux Arts mansion at 19 Schuyler Place.

The series of grisly crimes unfurled in the relentless glare of both a brutal heat wave and the Sestercentennial Celebration, marking 250 years since Mundy's Landing had been founded.

As far as anyone knows, no actual murder took place inside the three houses. But what had happened was profoundly disturbing, especially for the people living there at the time.

From late June through mid-July of 1916, several days and several blocks apart, three local families awakened to find the corpse of a young female stranger tucked into a spare bed under their roof.

The girls' throats had been neatly slit ear to ear. The investigation determined that they hadn't died where they lay, nor in the immediate vicinity. No, they had been transported to the houses by someone who was never caught, someone whose motive remains utterly inexplicable to this day.

Ghastly death portraits were printed in newspapers across the country in the futile hope that someone might recognize a sister, daughter, niece. In the end, their unidentified remains were buried in the graveyard behind Holy Angels Catholic Church in The Heights.

The residents of the Murder Houses lived out their lives without further incident, most right here in Mundy's Landing, and some, like Augusta Purcell, in the very homes where the terrible events had transpired.

Is Annabelle really willing to move into a Murder House?

A year ago, she'd have said no way.

This morning, when she and Trib and their son Oliver were crashing into porcelain fixtures and each other in their tiny bathroom, she'd have said yes, absolutely.

Now, staring up at the lofty bracketed eaves, ornately carved balustrades, and curve-topped couplets of tall, narrow windows, all framed against a blood red foliage canopy and an oppressive sky . . .

I don't know. I just don't know.

A brisk wind stirs overhead boughs. They creak and groan, as does the gate when Lynda pushes it open. The sound is straight out of a horror movie. A chill slips down Annabelle's spine, and she shoves her hands deep into the pockets of her corduroy barn coat.

The brick walkway between the gate and the house is strewn with damp fallen leaves. For all she knows, someone raked just yesterday. It is that time of year, and an overnight storm brought down a fresh barrage of past-peak foliage.

Yet the grounds exude the same forlorn, abandoned atmosphere as the house itself. It's the only one on the block that lacks pumpkins on the porch steps and political signs posted in the yard.

Election day looms, with a heated mayoral race that reflects the pervasive Insider versus Outsider mentality. Most residents of The Heights visibly support the incumbent John Elsworth Ransom, whose roots extend to the first settlers of Mundy's Landing. Support for his opponent, a real estate developer named Dean Cochran, is stronger on the other side of town, particularly in Mundy Estates, the upscale townhouse complex he built and now calls home.

A
Ransom for Mayor
poster isn't all that's conspicuously missing from the leaf-blanketed yard. There's no For Sale sign, either.

Noting its absence, Trib asks Lynda—not entirely tongue-in-cheek—if she's sure it's on the market.

“Oh, it is. But Lester prefers to avoid actively soliciting the ‘ghouls'—not the Halloween kind, if you know what I mean.”

They do. Plenty of locals use that word to describe the tourists who descend upon the town every summer in an effort to solve the cold case.

Trib turns to Annabelle. “That's something we'd have to deal with if we bought this place.”

“You're right. We'd be inundated with curiosity seekers. I don't think I want to—”

“Just in the summer, though,” Lynda cuts in quickly, “and even then, it's not a big deal.”

Trib raises an eyebrow. “I wouldn't say that Mundy­palooza isn't a ‘big deal.' Especially this coming year.”

Mundypalooza is the colloquial name for Ora's annual Historical Society Fundraiser, which has taken place ever since 1991. That's when, in conjunction with the seventy-fifth anniversary of the cold case, Ora extended a public invitation:
Can You Solve the Sleeping Beauty Murders?

She hoped the event would draw enough attendees to put a dent in the nonprofit's efforts to move from their unceremonious digs in the library basement. It exceeded her wildest dreams: before the decade was over, the Society purchased the elegant Conroy-Fitch mansion on Prospect Street.

These days, the nonprofit organization turns a hefty profit, even offering an as-yet unclaimed reward to anyone who can unmask the killer. The dollar amount has substantially increased with every passing year, along with the size of the crowd and media attention.

With next summer marking the twenty-fifth annual Historical Society fundraiser and the hundredth anniversary of the murders, there's bound to be more hype than ever. People and press will be poking around the Murder Houses, invading their residents' privacy.

“Let's just walk through the house before you rule anything out,” Lynda tells them. “A comparable house at any other address in this neighborhood would sell for at least six figures more. I'd hate to have someone snatch this out from under you.”