Bone White

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  “Here,” the bride slurs, “you can even wear my veil.” She plunks the headband on his head. He scowls, and Braden takes the photo, then hands the phone back to the bachelorette brigade, who embark on a ladies’ room excursion.

  “You know,” Braden says, turning back to Savannah, “when you were late tonight, I thought you were standing me up. I’m really glad you didn’t.”

  “Sorry about that. I had a meeting that ran long.”

  “A meeting? At night?”

  “Yes, some crazy old lady from the historical society wants to pay me a boatload of money to do something for her.”

  “You mean Ora Abrams?”

  “You know her?”

  “All my life.”

  “So you’re . . . wait, are you from Mundy’s Landing?”

  “Where else would I be from, with a last name like Mundy?”

  “Your last name is Mundy?”

  “Didn’t my brother tell you that when you met him?”

  “He didn’t tell me anything, except that you were coming to get him. Oh, and that your mom would be upset if she knew he had a dead battery again.”

  “That’s so Mick.” Braden shakes his head. “I’ve got my own stuff to worry about, and all I’ve done since I got back home is bail out that kid.”

  “Back home from where?”

  “New Hampshire.”

  “Why were you in New Hampshire?”

  “College. I just graduated in May with a degree in history. I had a job lined up with a museum in Boston. But they lost their funding at the end of April and the position was eliminated so . . . back to square one, and back home.”

  “That stinks.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t feel too sorry for my cousin,” Sean the bartender pipes up. “He’s got an Ivy League degree, so I’m sure he’ll find something.”

  Ivy League plus New Hampshire equals . . .

  “Dartmouth? And you two are cousins? So you grew up together?”

  “Dartmouth, and we’re cousins, but we didn’t grow up together,” Braden tells her.

  “But we did,” Trevor pipes up.

  “You’re a cousin, too?”

  “No, Trevor and I graduated high school together,” Braden says.

  “But who knows? Maybe we’re related somewhere back in the family tree. A lot of people around here are connected, right, Bray?”

  He shrugs. “Small towns. All I know for sure is that Sean and I are cousins.”

  “Roommates, too, right now,” Sean says with a mirthless laugh. “Aunt Ro is letting me stay for the summer. She used to be a black sheep, like me. But she turned out all right, so maybe there’s hope for me.”

  Savannah finds herself feeling sorry for him, even relating to him on some level, beyond the Paris connection. If Braden’s charmed home life—despite the job snafu—has made her acutely aware of all that’s missing in her own, his cousin must feel the same way.

  With a lull in the drink demands, Sean pops open a beer for himself, gulps it, and looks at them.

  Rather, at her.

  “So what’s your name?”

  “Savannah.”

  “Never been there.”

  “Neither have I.”

  “Yeah? Then why is it your name?”

  “Savannah is my father’s hometown. I guess my mother thought that if she named me after it, he might like me.” She lifts her glass to her lips, and adds before she sips, “Didn’t work.”

  “Know the feeling.”

  “Not fun, is it?”

  “Hell, no. But here’s to hanging in there.” He lifts his bottle, and she clinks her glass against it.

  She isn’t flirting with Sean. She just wants to make him feel better about his own situation, and she needs to let Braden know that they come from different worlds, in case it matters to him.

  He’s focused on his cousin, eyes narrowed. “Come on, Sean, your dad isn’t such a bad guy.”

  “You’re the only one who thinks that.”

  “Everyone makes mistakes. He loves you. Give him a chance.”

  “That works both ways.”

  “He’s given you plenty of chances.”

  “And every time I talk to him, he lists all the ways I’m letting him down.”

  “He’s just disappointed that you didn’t stick it out at Notre Dame.”

  “Yeah, well . . . that makes one of us.” Sean shrugs. “College isn’t for me.”

  “It was for you before—”

  “Don’t go there. Okay? Just don’t. Please.”

  “Sorry. I just hate to see you—”

  “Stop.” Sean drains his beer, plunks down the bottle, and busies himself wiping down the bar, chewing, chewing, chewing a plastic stirrer.

  The woman seated beside Savannah rises, throws down a twenty and heads for the door, calling, “Later, guys,” as if she’d been hanging out with them—or anyone at all.

  “See you, Kim.” Sean swoops in for the cash and her empty glass like a seagull on a French fry.

  “Do you know who that was?” Braden asks Savannah.

  “Is she an actress or something?” A number of celebrities live here in the Hudson Valley, but she never recognizes any of them.

  “No, that’s Kim Winston. Her daughter Catherine was involved in that mess last summer.”

  “The copycat killer thing?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wow. It must be hard to get your life together after something like that.”

  “I feel sorry for her. They were a nice family. Now her marriage is over and she’s a single mom, trying to get back on track. People talk, you know? They say she drinks too much, and she gets around, and she’s looking for a new husband—”

  Sean leans in. “All true. Can you blame her? Take it from me—you don’t go through what she did and then get on with life as usual.”

  Braden toys with his glass, tight-lipped, as a man takes Kim’s vacated seat.

  “Hey, Dutch Kill Phil,” Sean greets him. “Want another one?”

  “Why not. My name’s Roy, by the way.”

  “Roy doesn’t rhyme with what you’re drinking, so . . .” Sean shrugs. “You know. I like to give my customers nicknames.”

  Even if the customers don’t appreciate them.

  Savannah glances at the man, the one who followed her in to the bar, wearing the red shirt. He’s looking at Sean like a mosquito he can’t decide whether to wave away, or squash flat.

  “Hey, Roy, don’t worry, we have a nickname for him, too,” Braden says. “It’s Buzz Kill Bill.”

  Trevor snickers. Sean does not.

  “Lousy nickname for a bartender.” Roy looks down at his cell phone as if it just alerted him with a call or text.

  Savannah can see that it didn’t. He’s just looking at a map that was already open on the screen. Again, she notices the red scars on his arms. His nails are bitten all the way down, with raw-looking scars where the fingertips probably bled.

  Sean mixes the Dutch Kill cocktail using three different liqueurs, a lemon, a hand of fresh ginger, and a grater. After disappearing into the kitchen to grab another ingredient, he finishes the drink, and hands it over.

  The bachelorettes have returned at last to order another round of shots, continue their futile flirtation with Trevor, and take more group photos and selfies.

  Savannah looks at Braden, sipping his beer, staring into space. He’s probably wishing they hadn’t come here. Or maybe he’s wishing he hadn’t asked her out in the first place.

  When he finally glances her way, she offers a faint smile. “So. Alone at last.”

  “Around here? Don’t count on it.”

  “I heard that,” Trevor says.

  “You hear everything. Everyone hears everything. That’s the problem with this place.”

  “Or the beauty of it,” Trevor says. “It’s all in how you look at things. Come on, Mundy. You used to be a glass-half-full kind of guy.”

  Braden picks up his dri
nk and gives Trevor a pointed stare as he drains it, then sets down the empty glass.

  “Well played, my friend,” Trevor says. “Well played.”

  Braden turns to Savannah. “I’d say we should get out of here and go somewhere else, except . . . there is nowhere else.”

  “That’s okay, this is fine.”

  “Not really. This place is killing me.”

  “The Windmill?”

  “This town. Being back here, living at home . . . I wasn’t supposed to be here this long. I should be in Boston right now with a great job, friends, a place of my own . . .”

  “Sorry. That stinks.”

  “Yeah.” He rests his chin on his knuckles and looks at her. “So.”

  “So.”

  “So Ora Abrams has a boatload of money, huh?”

  “And a three-hundred-and-fifty-year-old skull.”

  “I’ve heard.”

  Good. She wasn’t supposed to mention the skull to anyone, but a wine-fueled need to reconnect with Braden undermined her discretion.

  “You heard she gave me the skull?”

  “Wait, she gave it to you?”

  Oops. “You said you heard.”

  “I meant, everyone in town knows Ora has a skull that was dug up out at the first colony, but she never talks about it. I can’t believe she just handed it over to you.”

  “Not to keep. She wants me to take a look at it.”

  “Why?”

  “You know I’m studying forensic anthropology at Hadley, right?”

  “Right, but what is it that you’re supposed to be looking for?”

  Savannah stall-sips her wine. She shouldn’t have said anything in the first place, but now that she has, she might as well tell him the rest. There isn’t much, and anyway, what’s the big deal? The others don’t seem to be eavesdropping at the moment, caught up in discussing a controversial play in the televised baseball game.

  “Ora wants to know who Jane Doe was,” Savannah explains in a low voice, “and whether she was murdered by . . .”

  Only then does it occur to her that he’s a Mundy.

  Maybe it is a big deal. To him. To some.

  “Murdered by my ancestors, the cannibals?” he asks.

  “Does that bother you?”

  “Nah. It’s not like I knew them, right? I have enough real problems to worry about. Who doesn’t? No one in their right mind gives a crap about a murder that happened in 1666.”

  “Ora Abrams does.”

  “Yeah, well . . . like I said . . . no one in their right mind.” Seeing her expression, he says, “Hey, you’re the one who called her crazy.”

  “I know . . . but maybe eccentric is a better word.”

  He thrums his fingertips on the bar. “All I know is that she hired me to do some yard work around the grounds last week, and she kept calling me Asa.”

  “What’s a sa?”

  He laughs. “You’re adorable, you know that?”

  Maybe she should find the comment insulting, coming from a guy with an Ivy League degree. But he stops thrumming and gives her hand an affectionate squeeze, explaining, “I meant the name. Asa.”

  “Asa? I never heard it before. Why would Ora call you that?”

  “I guess she thought I was my dad—Asa is his real first name, but everyone in the world calls him Jake.”

  “Except Ora?”

  “She usually calls him Jake, too. I must have corrected her ten or twelve times. And she had this strange look in her eyes. I told my mom someone should check in on her. She doesn’t have any family and my mom kind of looks out for her.”

  “Did she check in?” she asks, noting that he hasn’t let go of her hand. She doesn’t want him to, enjoying the sturdy warmth of his grasp.

  “Not yet. She’s a teacher and the end of the school year is busy, and my aunt’s been . . . uh, sick. That’s pretty much why Sean is staying with us for a while, so, you know . . . my mom kind of has her hands full right now trying to help everyone. Enough about this stuff. It’s depressing. What were we talking about?”

  Ora’s skull. Not exactly more cheerful.

  Savannah changes the subject, asking him about Dartmouth, and his job hunt, and where he wants to live.

  His answer to that last question is flippant. “Anywhere but here.”

  “Why?”

  “Because people my age don’t stick around.”

  “I’m here.”

  “Not for good, though.”

  “Who knows? I don’t really have a long-term plan.”

  “How about a short-term one?”

  “What do you mean?”

  He leans in, his breath whispering against her ear. “You want to go somewhere else?”

  “I thought there was nowhere else?”

  “Well, I can’t ask you to come to my place, unless you like parents, dogs, kids . . .”

  “Sounds great.”

  She means it sincerely, but Braden rolls his eyes, interpreting sarcasm. “Do you have a place?”

  “I do.”

  “Can we go there?”

  She hesitates, considering it. This might be the beginning of something great, or it might be a huge mistake. Only one way to find out.

  “Sure,” she says. “Why not.”

  Mundy’s Landing sleeps beneath a black dome hung with glittering stars and moon. Summer air, heavy with honeysuckle and roses, stirs with an occasional ripple of wind off the river and, at precisely 3:27, the long whistle and rattling rush of a passing freight train.

  The hangman, wearing a dark hood with eyeholes, waits in the shadow of a ten-foot-tall rose of Sharon hedge along the Dapplebrook Inn’s western wall. Rooted a good three feet from the foundation, the leafy bank creates a dim corridor stretching from the mansion’s back mud porch to the massive maple tree in the front corner.

  At this late hour, standing in this spot, the hangman is concealed from the street, the yard, and the driveway. Even if someone were to peer out through a first-floor window from a darkened room, the sills are about seven feet off the ground. They’d have to lean in to see straight down into the leafy crevice. Not likely, unless they’re searching for a lurking intruder.

  Mundy’s Landing has seen its share in recent years, but no one is anticipating more violence. Guests staying at the inn tonight aren’t trying to solve a hundred-year-old murder case. They’re ordinary vacationers, or perhaps business travelers.

  Outsiders . . . all but one.

  Lamplight glows in the Jekyll Suite’s corner window, infiltrating the dense maple limbs directly overhead. It burns valiantly as a settler’s campfire fending off bitter cold, a pitch black forest, a feral wolf pack.

  It burns like flames stoked to boil a nourishing human stew.

  The hangman swallows hard, stomach churning, holding a length of rope coiled as tightly as the garden hose that hangs from a pretty wrought-iron bracket by the porch.

  Starvation can do appalling things to a person—not just physically, but mentally.

  If ordinary people in ordinary circumstances become short-fused when they’re deprived of just one meal, imagine what it was like for the settlers of Mundy’s Landing.

  One end of the rope is already slung over a sturdy branch high overhead, the other end looped into a noose like the one that sent James and Elizabeth Mundy to their doom.

  They’d long since cheated the Grim Reaper, narrowly escaping London’s plague to make a death-defying ocean voyage to a strange, hostile land. Surely they believed they’d survived the worst, only to endure six months fending off feral forest predators and hostile Native Americans. Then came the barrage of fierce winter storms and agonizing starvation.

  How far did they go to save themselves, and their children?

  How far would anyone go?

  The truth gnaws, ferocious, cruel as human teeth on human flesh.

  Day after day that winter, storms howled through the Hudson Valley and snow piled up as if bent on burying the settlers alive. Day after end
less day, young Jeremiah dug his way out the door to swing an axe into wood that fed the fire, and James Mundy butchered their neighbors’ corpses, and Elizabeth stirred the grisly porridge.

  How could they?

  How could she?

  Did hunger consume her ability to reason, her sense of morality and human decency? Was she left with only a desperate need to feed herself and her family, some primal urge fed by maternal instinct, self-preservation . . .

  Murderous rage?

  Oh, Elizabeth. I know what you did.

  Three and a half centuries ago, she made a terrible choice and met her fate at the end of the noose, and now—

  The hangman hears a sound.

  Footsteps, out on the street. Purposeful footsteps, drawing closer, closer, closer . . .

  Rustling boughs. A whisper.

  “Hey, are you there?”

  “Yes,” the hangman says softly, gloved hands tightening on the coil of rope. “I’m here.”

  Letter

  Mr. Horace J. Mundy

  68 Prospect Street

  Mundy’s Landing, New York

  November 29, 1928

  Dear Mr. Mundy:

  Several weeks ago, I recognized your name and photograph in the New York Times alongside our newly elected governor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. You do not know me, but on this Thanksgiving Day, I ask you to accept my gratitude for the greatest blessing in my life.

  Sixteen years have passed since my sister, brothers and I left England with our parents, traveling in steerage on board the Titanic. Though I was only seven years old, I clearly remember that before the ship left Southampton, my brother Bobby’s boarding documents were briefly confused with those of a first-class passenger who shared his name.

  That young man, as you may have guessed, was your son Robert Mundy. He later came to our quarters deep in the bowels of the ship to meet my brother. He said he wanted to shake his namesake’s hand. He did just that, as we all looked on in awe. I can see him now, in jovial spirits, a handsome young man with most unusual eyes—one blue, the other gray.

  Later, when the ship struck the iceberg, the crew awakened the first-class passengers and told them to go out on the deck in their life vests. When your son Robert Mundy got there, he realized that no one had bothered to alert the steerage. He came down, banging on doors all the way. We shall never know how many lives he saved.