Blood Red Read online

  “Oh, you must have this mixed up with the high school’s haunted hallway fund-­raiser, Mrs. Hicks. That’s on Halloween, and I wouldn’t dream of exposing my class to—­”

  “No, I’m talking about the historical society. The murders.”

  “Which murders?” That time, Rowan wasn’t playing dumb. Mundy’s Landing is famous for not one, but two notorious murder cases.

  The first unfolded in the mid-­seventeenth century, when Jake’s ancestors James and Elizabeth Mundy were executed on the gallows for butchering and cannibalizing their fellow colonists. Their only son, Jeremiah Mundy, and his offspring lived such exemplary lives that the town was later named in their honor.

  Mundy’s Landing itself wasn’t quite so fortunate in terms of redemption and reputation. Precisely two and a half centuries after the hangings, the so-­called Sleeping Beauty murders marked one of the eeriest unsolved crime sprees in American history. The young female victims, whose identities were never known, were lain to rest beneath white granite markers simply etched with the year 1916 and the word Angel.

  Those are the murders to which Bari Hicks was referring. “I heard the museum has bloody clothing on display, and the murder weapon, and a disembodied skull. Do you really think it’s necessary to—­?”

  “There’s no skull,” Rowan quickly assured her, though she’d heard that rumor all her life, “and it isn’t the actual murder weapon, it’s just an antique razor blade someone’s grandfather donated as an example, and the bloody clothing is only exhibited in the summer during . . .”

  She couldn’t quite bring herself to call the event Mundypalooza, the flippant popular term for the annual historical society–sponsored fund-­raiser that draws crime buffs, reporters, tourists, and plain old fruitcakes from all over the globe.

  “. . . the convention,” she chose to say instead, and hastily added, “We’re only visiting the Colonial Christmas exhibit on our field trip. I promise Amanda will love it. All the kids do.”

  Bari aired her frustrations in a public letter to the Mundy’s Landing Tribune, expecting to rally the villagers in protest. Today, Rowan convinced her to come along as a chaperone so that she can experience the long-­standing tradition firsthand—­and, ostensibly, protect her daughter from the evils of Mundy’s Landing. It seemed like the easiest way to avoid additional Monday morning stress, but she regrets it already.

  Now, winding toward home, she blinks against the glare of sinking autumn sun at every westbound curve. Lowering the visor doesn’t help at all.

  She worries about Mick.

  In about ten minutes, her youngest son will be getting off the late bus after varsity basketball practice. Even if he’s not plugged into his iPod—­despite her warnings about the dangers of walking or jogging along the road wearing headphones—­he’ll have his head in the clouds as usual.

  At this time of year, the angle of the late day sun is blinding. What if a car comes careening up the hill and doesn’t see him until it’s too late?

  Long gone are Rowan’s days of waiting in the minivan at the bus stop on Highland Road, a busy north-­south thoroughfare. Even on stormy afternoons—­there are plenty of those in Mundy’s Landing—­Mick insists on walking home up Riverview Road, just as his older siblings did when they were in high school.

  I’ll walk Doofus, she decides as she brakes at the curbside mailbox in front of their gabled Queen Anne Victorian perched on the bluff above the Hudson.

  Doofus the aging basset hound was originally Rufus, but earned his current name when it became evident that he wasn’t exactly the smartest canine in the world.

  Rowan ordinarily lets him out into the yard when she gets home after a long day, but Doofus—­although increasingly lazy—­might welcome some exercise, and she can use it herself.

  She bought a tasteless but slimming couscous salad for lunch today, courtesy of Wholesome & Hearty, the school district’s new lunch program. But then someone left a plate of cookies in the teachers’ break room after lunch and one of her students brought in birthday cupcakes. Plus there’s still half an apple pie in the fridge at home, leftover from Thanksgiving dinner.

  There was a time when Rowan could gobble anything she felt like eating and never gain an ounce. Those days, too, are long gone. According to her doctor, she needs to exercise nearly an hour a day at her age just to keep her weight the same. And the hair colorist who’s been hiding her gray for a few years now recently told her that her natural red shade was making her “mature” skin look sallow, and that the long hair she’d had all her life was too “weighty.”

  “I think you should try a short, youthful cut and go a few shades lighter, maybe a biscuit blond with honey highlights and caramel lowlights. What do you think?”

  “I think biscuits and honey and caramel sound like something I’d want to eat right now if I didn’t have to run ten miles to work off the extra calories,” Rowan said with a sigh of resignation.

  She finally agreed to the new hairstyle right before Thanksgiving. It got mixed reviews at home. Jake and Katie liked it; Braden, who resents change of any sort, did not; Mick informed her that now her hair wouldn’t clash with the bright orange hoodie—­emblazoned with a black tiger, Mundy’s Landing High School mascot—­that she wore to all his home basketball games.

  “I never minded clashing,” she said.

  “I do. Can I dye my hair, too?”

  “Nope. It’s what makes you you.”

  “Isn’t it what made you you, too?”

  Yes, and whenever she catches sight of her reflection, she feels as though she’s dwelling in a stranger’s body.

  Back at work today, her colleagues complimented her, her students questioned her, and the janitor told her she looks hot—­which might be inappropriate, but as the forty-­seven-­year-­old mother of three nearly grown kids, she’ll take it.

  She gets out of the car, goes around to grab the mail out of the box, and finds that it’s full of catalogs. No surprise on this first Monday of the official holiday shopping season. Given the stack of bills that are also in the box, plus the two college tuition payments coming due for next semester, the catalogs will go straight into the recycling bin.

  Money has been tight lately, and Jake is worried about his job as a regional sales manager amid rumors that his company might be bought out.

  Lead us not into temptation, she thinks, tossing the heap of mail—­which also includes a red envelope addressed to the family in her older sister Noreen’s perfect handwriting, and a small package addressed to her—­onto the passenger’s seat.

  As she pulls into the driveway and around back, she sees that there’s garbage strewn by the back steps. The latch on top of the can snapped off when they overfilled it on Thanksgiving. Jake tried to pick up a new one the next day, but the strip malls on Colonial Highway were so jammed with Black Friday shoppers that he couldn’t get near any of them.

  As Rowan stoops to pick up a gnawed turkey carcass and wads of soggy paper towels discarded by woodland creatures, she tries to imagine Noreen doing the same.

  Nope. It would never happen. Noreen, a busy Long Island attorney, runs her household—­her life—­without glitches.

  As Rowan lets herself into the house and tosses the mail onto the cluttered counter in the butler’s pantry, she marvels that her sister manages to send Christmas cards at all, let alone ahead of the masses. Yet somehow, she even hand-­addresses the envelopes, rather than use those typed labels you can so easily print out year after year.

  Rowan knows without opening this year’s card that it’ll have a photo of the svelte and lovely Noreen, her handsome trauma surgeon husband, and their four gorgeous kids, all color-­coordinated in khaki and red or navy and white. Inside, there will be a handwritten note and the signature of each family member scrawled in red or green Sharpie.

  Noreen has always managed to do so much and m
ake it look so easy . . .

  Which drives someone like me absolutely crazy. Which is why, when I was a kid, I didn’t even bother to try to follow in her footsteps.

  She’s so caught up in the familiar combination of envy and longing for her sister that she doesn’t think twice about the package that came for her. She tosses it aside with the rest of the mail and takes her medication—­the first thing she does every morning, and again every afternoon when she walks in the door.

  It wasn’t until Mick was diagnosed with ADHD back in elementary school that Rowan learned that it was hereditary.

  With this disability, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, the doctor told her, leading her to recognize similar symptoms in herself.

  It was as if a puzzle piece she hadn’t even realized was missing had suddenly dropped into place to complete a long-­frustrating jigsaw.

  If only someone—­her parents, her teachers, her doctors—­had figured it out when she was Mick’s age. Now she understands why she spent so much of her childhood in trouble—­academically, behaviorally—­and why she so often felt restlessly uncomfortable in her own skin, even as an adult.

  Things aren’t perfect now—­far from it—­but at least she’s more in control of her life, with better focus and the ability to quell her impulsive tendencies. Most of the time, anyway.

  After swallowing the pill, she walks the dog down to the bus stop and returns with a grumbling Mick.

  “Where’s all the turkey?” he asks, poking his stubbly auburn head—­exactly the same shade as her own—­into the fridge.

  “I tossed it last night.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because it was old, Mick. You can’t eat leftovers after a few days.”

  “You didn’t toss the pie.” He pulls out the dish.

  “Pie isn’t poultry. That’s still good.”

  She watches her son put the whole thing into the microwave and punch the quick start button, then open the freezer.

  So much for Rowan’s dessert plans. Oh well. She can’t afford to indulge, and Mick can. Half a pie smothered in Vanilla Bean Häagen-­Dazs is nothing more than a light afternoon snack for a famished, lanky sixteen-­year-­old athlete who begins every morning with a three-­mile run.

  The stack of mail still sits on the granite counter in the butler’s pantry by the back door, along with her tote bag and the usual household clutter plus additional clutter accumulated over Thanksgiving: clean platters that need to go back to the dining room, a bread basket filled with cloth napkins that have to be washed, bottles of open and unopened Beaujolais . . .

  She should get busy cleaning it up. She should do a lot of things. As always, now that the medication has begun to take hold again, it all seems more manageable.

  After returning the platters and napkins to the built-­in cabinets in the dining room, she asks Mick, “What time do you have to be at work?” Three nights a week, he’s a busboy at Marrana’s Trattoria in town.

  “Five-­thirty.”

  “I need you to do me a favor while you’re there. Can you please get me a gift certificate for twenty-­five dollars?” She pulls the cash from her wallet and hands it to him.

  “Who’s it for?”

  “Marlena, the library aide. I pulled her name for the Secret Santa.”

  He looks at her as if she’s speaking a foreign language. “I don’t even know what that means.”

  “You know . . . or maybe you don’t know. Secret Santa is something we do every year at work—­we pick names and then we have to anonymously surprise the person with a little treat every day next week—­”

  “I don’t really think a gift certificate counts as a treat, Mom. How about cookies or something?”

  “No, the gift certificate is for the big gift on Friday.”

  “Big? You’d better do fifty bucks, then. Twenty-­five seems cheap.”

  “The limit is twenty-­five, big spender.” She grins, shaking her head. “So, how much homework do you have?”

  “Not a lot.”

  Same question every night; same answer. The truth is, he usually has a lot of homework, and it doesn’t always get done.

  “Look on the bright side,” Jake says, whenever she frets that even with an early diagnosis, academic accommodations, and medication, Mick has shortchanged himself. “We won’t be paying Ivy League tuition when it’s his turn.”

  “No, we’ll just be supporting him for the rest of his life.”

  “It might be the other way around. He’s an enterprising kid. Maybe he’ll invent a billion-­dollar video game.”

  Maybe. Or maybe he’ll turn himself around academically, find his way into a decent college, make something of himself . . .

  You did, she reminds herself. And if Mom and Dad were still alive, they’d still be reminding you they weren’t so sure that was ever going to happen.

  “Did you get your grade back yet on the English test?”

  “Which test?”

  As if he doesn’t know. She’d spent two hours helping him study for it last Monday night. “The one on literary devices.”

  “Oh. That test. Nope.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yep. So stop looking at me like a detective who thinks the witness is lying.” He flashes her a grin. “See? I know what a metaphor is. I bet I got an A-­plus on that test.”

  “I hate to break it to you, kiddo, but that’s not a metaphor. It’s a simile.”

  “That’s what I meant.” Mick settles on a stool with the pile of mail, looking for something to leaf through while he eats, which will take all of two minutes.

  “What’s this?” He holds up the brown parcel addressed to Rowan.

  “Probably something I ordered for you for Christmas. Don’t open it.”

  “Is it the keys to my new car? Because don’t forget, I’m taking my road test in less than a month.”

  “It is not”—­she plucks the package from his hand—­ “the keys to your new car because there will be no new car.”

  “Then what am I going to drive?”

  “You can share the minivan with me. And you already have the keys to that, so you’re all set. Here—­” She gives him the red envelope. “You can open Aunt Noreen’s Christmas card.”

  “Bet you anything they made Goliath wear those stupid reindeer antlers again.” Goliath is a German shepherd whose dignity is compromised, as far as Rowan’s kids are concerned, by a costume every Christmas and Halloween.

  “Don’t worry, Doofus,” Mick says, patting the dog, who lies on the hardwood floor at the base of his stool, hoping to catch a stray crumb with little effort. “We’d never do anything like that to you if we had a Christmas card picture.”

  “He wouldn’t know he had a costume on if we zipped him into a horse suit and hitched him to a buggy,” Rowan points out. “Plus we do have a Christmas card picture. I mean, we have had one.”

  “When?”

  “Back in the old days.”

  “When?” Classic Mick, persisting to demonstrate that he, as the youngest kid in the family, has suffered some slight, real or imagined.

  It rarely works on Rowan, who as the lastborn of Kate and Jonathan Carmichael’s four children is all too familiar with that technique.

  “Back when we lived in Westchester,” she tells Mick. She distinctly remembers having to cancel a family portrait shoot repeatedly to accommodate Jake’s schedule. He was working in the city then, never home.

  “Before I was born doesn’t count, Mom.”

  “We had a few after you were born.”

  “We did not.”

  “Sure we did.” Did we?

  It’s a wonder they even found time to conceive Mick back then, let alone take a family photo.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Maybe not,”
she concedes. “After we moved here, I probably didn’t send cards. But God knows we have plenty of family pictures. They’re just not portraits.” Her favorites—­and there are many—­are framed, cluttered on tabletops and hanging along the stairs in a hodgepodge gallery.

  “That’s not the same thing.”

  “You poor, poor neglected little working mom’s son.”

  “Stop.” He squirms away from her exaggerated sympathetic hug.

  “But I feel so sorry for you!”

  “Yeah, right.”

  She shrugs. Her mother never wasted much time feeling guilty for being a working mom, and she tries not to, either.

  She used to be a stay-­at-­home mom. Giving it up hasn’t always been easy, but she’s never questioned that it was the right decision for her family, or her marriage.

  Mick was three when she resumed the teaching career she’d launched back when she and Jake were newlyweds. She could have waited to go back until the kids were older if they’d stayed in the New York City suburbs and Jake had stuck with the higher-­paying advertising sales job that kept him away for weeks at a time. But that would have been tempting fate, because . . .

  She doesn’t like to think back to those days. Things were so different. She and Jake were different ­people then: different from each other; different from the way they are now.

  He quit his job and they sold the house and moved back to their hometown. The cost of living is much lower in Mundy’s Landing than it had been in Westchester County, allowing Jake to take a lower-­paying, less glamorous job as a sales rep in Albany. He was promoted within the first year, but they still couldn’t make ends meet on one salary. She had to work, too.

  “Oh geez! Poor Goliath!” Mick waves the Christmas card at her.

  “Antlers?” she guesses.

  “Worse. An elf hat. A whole elf costume. Look at this!”

  Rowan takes in the sight of a humiliated-­looking German shepherd decked out in green felt and red pom-­poms alongside her sister’s picture-­perfect family. “Poor Goliath,” she agrees. “But everyone else looks great. I miss them. Maybe we should try to get together for Christmas.”