Blood Red (14 page)

Even if Casey can't fight off the growing urge until it's time to deal with Rowan Mundy, nothing can happen so close to home again. Breaking the self-­imposed rule once was daring enough. Twice wouldn't be daring, it would be stupid; maybe even disastrous.

Having studied the methodology of the Sleeping Beauty Killer and other famously elusive and equally brilliant murderers, Casey is well aware that they managed to evade capture because they remained focused and methodical.

Ted Bundy started out that way, but then he sloppily escalated his crimes and failed to resist the allure of an entire sorority house filled with women. That disorganized spree proved to be his undoing.

It won't happen to me. I'm much stronger than he was, much smarter.

They'll never catch me. Never.

F
ive minutes late for noon Mass, Noreen steps out of her car and hurries through the wet snow toward Saint Ignatius by the Bay.

At least she made it this week. It's been a while—­was it October, maybe?—­since she's attended Mass.

Things have been too hectic at home.

Not that that's an acceptable excuse. Even when the kids were babies, or later when all four were playing sports, they almost always managed to get to church together as a family. Sometimes it took so much effort to get six ­people out the door on Sunday mornings—­five of them complaining—­that she'd wonder why she bothered to insist. But then they'd slip into their pew and that familiar sense of peace would settle over her, and she'd know it had been worthwhile.

These days, Noreen attends Mass alone, if at all. And when she does, she's not so sure that it's even worthwhile. Ever the respectable Catholic, she doesn't like to be reminded that she's committed mortal sins, or where those sins—­past and upcoming—­place her in the eyes of the church. But you can hardly forget that something is amiss when you're hurrying alone up the wide steps where you posed as a bride twenty-­three years ago—­and later, cradling four different babies in white christening gowns.

She remembers her father's initial distress when she told him that she wouldn't be getting married at Holy Angels in Mundy's Landing. He was more upset about that, at the time, than he was a year later when Rowan married a Protestant.

He eventually came around when Noreen explained that she didn't want to walk down the very aisle where her mother's casket had made its final journey.

“Last time I set foot in that church was the saddest day of my life, Dad. I don't want to get married there.”

How could he argue with that?

Of course, she didn't tell him that she also happened to prefer the aesthetic of this elegant brick structure overlooking the Long Island Sound to her hometown parish. Unlike the stone and stucco Protestant churches that preside over the Village Common, Holy Angels is a small clapboard structure perched like an afterthought on a side street in The Heights.

According to Rowan, who's still a member there, not much has changed at the old church over the years. Anyone who doesn't arrive half an hour early Christmas and Easter to get a spot in the pews still winds up sitting along the wall in folding chairs, or standing conspicuously in the aisles. The Carmichael family invariably stood, much to Noreen's humiliation. Rowan told her that the Mundy family now does the same, but it doesn't seem to bother her or her kids.

Nor does she seem to mind that the Holy Angels congregation is perpetually in fund-­raiser mode, always trying to replace or repair something: choir robes, hymnals, the notoriously leaky roof. When Rowan and Jake were married in the church on a rainy day—­which was supposedly good luck—­the flower arrangements had to be strategically placed on the altar to catch the drips from the ceiling, and the Communion host became as soggy as the bride's veil. That would never have happened here at the cathedral-­like Saint Ignatius, even if the weather hadn't been picture-­perfect on Noreen's wedding day.

Was that sunshine bad luck?
she wonders now, as she slips alone through the massive wooden doors into the church.

The congregation is standing, still singing the opening hymn. She hurries down the aisle toward the pew she and Kevin and the kids shared for years. But when she reaches it, she finds that it's already occupied.

This isn't the first Goldilocks moment she's had lately, and it's certainly the most benign.

Still, it stings to see that new family has taken over the pew: three adorable children and another baby on the way, a pretty mommy in a maternity dress, and a handsome daddy who efficiently slides his daughters over to make room for Noreen to sit on the end.

She forces a grateful smile, trying not to betray her resentment.

It's not their fault. They didn't do anything wrong.

Then again, neither did Noreen. She did nothing wrong, made superhuman efforts, in fact, to do everything right—­everything, dammit!—­and look how things have turned out for her.

Ire begins to simmer like lava, threatening to erupt in a bloodcurdling scream. Fighting it back, she reaches for a missal and opens it, blindly looking for today's readings.

“What page is it?” the younger of the little girls beside her asks loudly, talking to her older sister as they flip through their own missals.

“Shh!”

“But what page?”

“Here,” the big sister whispers, “give it to me.”

“No! I can do it myself!” the little one protests, turning the pages so determinedly that she tears one, only to be quietly reprimanded by her sister and her parents.

That's me and Rowan forty-­odd years ago.

Except these two girls, one blond and one brunette, look nothing alike, while Noreen and Rowan could have passed for twins. Identical on the outside, but oil and water within.

She thinks about her sister's phone call yesterday. In her message, she said something about liking the Christmas card. Was she being genuine? Or was it a veiled jibe?

No, she can't possibly know the truth just by looking at a card. Anyway, everything really was fine back when the photo was snapped. That was last summer, before Sean left for his semester in Europe, before things fell apart.

It was Noreen's deliberate decision to mail out the cards as though nothing had happened, and one she has yet to regret, even now.

Remorse simply isn't her style.

Then again, neither is avoidance. Isn't that what she's done where her sister is concerned?

I have to call her back.

What if she wants to spend Christmas together?

Chances are, she doesn't. Their approach to the holiday doesn't mesh much better than anything else about their lives. Rowan's family is so laid back and disorganized that the last time they shared a holiday, Noreen wound up serving Christmas brunch after sundown.

Her nephews and niece were as taken aback to discover that the Chapmans hadn't decorated their own tree as her own kids were to find out that their cousins had—­and enjoyed it.

“But ours is like the ‘before' version of the Charlie Brown Christmas tree compared to yours,” Rowan told Noreen with a grin. “Want to trade?”

“I'm sure it's beautiful.”

“It's not. It's scrawny and the trunk is so crooked it fell over twice and we lost all of the fragile ornaments.”

“Oh no.”

“That's what you get when you let the kids pick it out. But they made some new decorations after it fell. Remember how Mom used to have us make them when we were kids?” she added fondly. “We used cookie cutters to make the shapes out of cookie dough.”

“It was just flour, salt, and water.”

“No wonder it didn't taste very good.” She laughed. “Yours were always perfect, and you helped the boys so theirs were, too. Mine were a mess.”

“Only because you wouldn't let me help you.”

That was Rowan. She liked to do things her own way—­usually the hard way, and the wrong way. Funny how she seems to look back on her own difficult childhood as if it were idyllic, while Noreen, whose youth seemed unblemished as it unfolded, can clearly see the flaws in retrospect.

Given Rowan's penchant for trouble, Noreen would have predicted that her kid sister would wind up in a gutter somewhere, destitute, alone, and miserable. Too bad Mom didn't live to see her turn herself around. Then again, if she had lived, it probably never would have happened.

It wasn't until they were both grown women that Rowan revealed the reason she'd changed so drastically. “I promised Mom I'd behave,” she told Noreen on the long ago day when they'd met in Mundy's Landing to clean out their childhood home after Dad died. “She was always so worried about what I was up to.”

“Because you were always up to something.”

“Exactly. She was afraid of what might happen to me if she wasn't there to watch out for me. I had to promise her that I'd be okay. It was the only way to give her peace of mind.”

“She knew I'd have watched out for you, and so would the boys.”

“You all had your own lives by then. You and Danny were away in college, and Mitch was doing his residency in Chicago. It was just me and Dad living here after Mom died.”

“So you didn't think I'd be there for you?”

“I wasn't your problem,” Rowan said. “I had to grow up and learn how to be responsible for myself.”

“Well, I'm glad you did. Some ­people never do.”

Noreen refused to participate in guilt trips—­self-­inflicted, or otherwise. She'd devoted a good part of her youth to damage control on behalf of her sister, and often being mistaken for her, to the point where she'd joke about wanting to wear a badge that said, “Don't worry, I'm the good one.”

There were times, even in adulthood, when Noreen grew weary of her own prim, holier-­than-­thou façade. But she was playing her role, the one her family always expected of her; the one she expected—­still
expects
—­of herself.

And all you have to do is keep it up awhile longer. No one has to know that your life has unraveled until it's absolutely necessary—­and that includes Rowan.

 

From the
Mundy's Landing Tribune
Archives

Special Feature

January 18, 1992

Historical Society to Sponsor Second Annual Convention

The Mundy's Landing Historical Society may be unceremoniously housed in cramped quarters in the basement of the Elsworth Ransom Library on Fulton Avenue, but crime buffs worldwide have long believed its archives hold the key to one of the most notorious unsolved murder cases of the century.

During the steamy summer of 1916, as Mundy's Landing celebrated its sestercentennial with parades and pageantry, a serial killer was lurking. One by one, over a period of days, local families awakened to find the brutally slain corpses of young girls tucked into vacant beds in the house. In perhaps the eeriest twist of all, no one in the family—indeed, no one in town—recognized any of the victims.

Though the case was subsequently sensationalized in national headlines accompanied by composite sketches of the girls—dubbed “Sleeping Beauties”—they were never identified. Their unclaimed remains were buried in Holy Angels Cemetery, and the killings stopped just as abruptly as they'd begun. Local authorities chased a number of leads to dead ends. By the following year, as the United States entered World War I, the case faded from the public eye, though never entirely.

Theories have continued to abound over the decades, courtesy of armchair sleuths who have suspected everyone from Mundy's Landing's most illustrious citizens to a mysterious vagrant reportedly sighted in the area.

Last summer marked the seventy-fifth anniversary of the crimes, and Director Ora Abrams organized a historical society fund-raiser to commemorate the occasion. Her goal: to eventually move the non-profit museum into larger quarters.

“We just don't have room to permanently display most of what we have in the archives,” she told the
Tribune
from her tiny, windowless office. “But the library board agreed to let us use the upstairs conference rooms to create a special convention exhibit. We weren't certain it would draw attendance beyond our little village, but it did.”

Well beyond.

Last July's daylong event was a success. Several weeks later, in a confluence of events, an ABC News producer happened to be visiting friends at their summer home outside Mundy's Landing around the same time serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested in Milwaukee. Through her friends, the producer learned of the Sleeping Beauty case and visited the exhibit, where she met Ms. Abrams.

“She was absolutely fascinated by the story,” Ms. Abrams remembers, “and I wound up showing her some items from the private collection.”

While she wouldn't elaborate, those items are rumored to have included bloodstained clothing and a number of other artifacts deemed too sensitive or too gruesome for the permanent exhibit.

The producer later returned to the village with a correspondent and television crew from the newsmagazine program
20/20
. The Sleeping Beauty murders were included alongside Jack the Ripper and the Zodiac Killer in an unsolved crimes segment last fall.

According to Ms. Abrams, the resulting groundswell of interest has resulted in a drastic uptick in daily visitors at the historical society, leading her to make the fundraiser an annual event. “We see everyone from historians to detectives to even a true crime author researching a book about the case. We've given the public an unprecedented opportunity to try their hand at solving it.”

On New Year's Day, she issued a press release bearing the headline:
CAN YOU SOLVE THE
SLEEPING BEAUTY MURDERS?

Whether that's even possible remains to be seen, but providing access to relevant artifacts might shed additional light on the case and, at the very least, raise sorely needed funds.

Local residents who belong to Friends of the Museum can preview the special exhibit directly following the Independence Day parade and ceremonies in the Common on Thursday, July 2. It will be open to the general public July 3 through 5. Tickets can be purchased at the historical society beginning this week.