Bone White

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  My parents were not among them. Although your son personally escorted us onto the deck, there weren’t enough seats in the lifeboats. Robert insisted that we children and our mother take his place. But as he was helping my mother on board, an angry mob of first-class passengers intervened.

  I was allowed to stay, with my infant sister Mary, and my brothers Paddy and Bobby. Our mother was lost at sea along with my father, your son, and hundreds of other souls.

  We survived, though the years have not always been kind. Little Mary did not live long in the orphanage. Paddy was lost in the Spanish influenza epidemic, Bobby in the Great War. Yet I take comfort in knowing that he, too, was a hero, like your son Robert.

  Please accept my belated gratitude and condolences. May God bless you and your family all the days of your lives.

  Sincerely,

  Margaret Mundy Kramer

  Chapter 6

  “Good morning!”

  Hearing a cheery greeting as she descends the wide stairway just past 7 a.m., Emerson spots Nancy Vandergraaf at the desk, looking fashionable in a cotton candy pink Lilly Pulitzer shift emblazoned with splashy kelly green paisleys.

  “How did you sleep?”

  “Great,” Emerson lies.

  She dreams often, but usually forgets them upon waking. Last night’s nightmare startled her from sleep, and stayed with her through the remainder of the night. Even now, she can feel the rope tightening against her neck . . .

  No. Not your neck. And it was a terrible nightmare, but it’s over.

  Get moving.

  Moving on . . .

  Nancy gestures at her jogging shorts and sneakers. “Going out for a run?”

  “Yes.”

  “Careful. Wherever you go, it’s all downhill from here.”

  For a moment, confused, she wonders if she’s dreaming again. She looks down, expecting to see skirt folds, bound ankles and rough-hewn planks, and is reassured by her Nikes and polished hardwoods.

  “What do you mean?” she asks Nancy.

  “They don’t call this The Heights for nothing. You’re starting from the highest spot in town. The return trip could be more of a workout than you bargained for.”

  “I spent yesterday cooped up in a conference room, a plane, a car . . . I definitely could use a workout.”

  “Well, if you want some nice flat terrain with a lovely view, there’s a trail along the river out near Schaapskill Nature Preserve. It used to be an old rail track, but they paved it over for runners and bikers. It’s less than a mile away, straight west. Do you need directions?”

  “I’m sure I’ll find it.”

  “Breakfast goes until eleven, so come back hungry!”

  By eleven, she’ll be on her way to Valley Roasters to meet her first Mundy.

  She steps out into a beautiful morning. Prospect Street is quiet, its sidewalks and parallel rows of stately homes bathed in foliage-filtered sunlight. Cars are parked in most driveways and blue-bagged newspapers wait on porch steps. Butterflies flutter-browse picket fence cottage gardens, and a sprinkler’s ch-ch-ch joins chirping songbirds.

  Through an open window, a good-natured male voice calls for someone to wake up and get moving. A father trying to rouse a sleeping teenager, Emerson guesses as she jogs past.

  Get moving . . .

  Moving on . . .

  She follows the steep brick-paved street past the grand old historical society mansion, down into the business district.

  Here, too, the cozy town stirs to life. Delivery trucks idle in front of several nineteenth-century storefronts, doors open as drivers unload supplies. A man in a suit is using the sidewalk ATM beside the bank’s front door. A young woman writes tonight’s specials on an A-frame chalkboard in front of Marrana’s Trattoria, chatting with the stock boys arranging produce in outdoor bins at The Market on Market.

  Along the Commons, trailing pastel petunias spill like tie-die popcorn from terra-cotta buckets, and hot pink impatiens fill window boxes and bracketed hanging pots. Over at the police station, a ruler-straight row of scarlet geraniums stands sentry.

  The broad green is damp with dew. Clumps of white webbing dot the grass where spiders have overnighted.

  Spiders . . .

  She thinks of the crawl space in her father’s house, where she found the box containing the letter from Priscilla to Jeremiah. She left it safely zipped beneath the lining of her suitcase just in case someone—Nancy?—slips into the Jekyll Suite and goes through her things.

  We shall never tell . . .

  As is often the case, the thought of that ancient family secret leads her to a far more recent one. She thinks of her mother, buried so deeply by her memory—and by her father—that Emerson can barely remember what she looked like.

  Other than fleeting snippets, she has just one solid recollection.

  She remembers contentedly lying on the floor, chin propped in her hands, watching a beautiful blond woman put on makeup. They were in an alcove off the master bedroom that her mother called her dressing room. Seated at a movie star vanity with light bulbs all around the mirror, Didi gushed to Emerson about big-time Hollywood actors. She sounded like an infatuated teenager, calling them by their first names as if she knew them personally.

  Maybe she did, Emerson decided when she grew old enough to speculate. Maybe she left her husband and child to be with another man. But Emerson didn’t dare ask her father for the whole truth. Not in childhood, and not as an adult.

  All she wants, all she’s ever wanted, is the kind of ordinary life people take for granted. A real home, a real family, a sense of community . . .

  It’s here. This is where I belong. I never want to leave this place.

  On weekday mornings, Savannah wakes to the marimba tone of her cell phone alarm, perpetually set for seven-thirty.

  Today, she wakes to the sound of someone rummaging around, and to the smell of coffee—strange, as her coffee machine’s timer setting broke last year.

  Opening her eyes, she sees Braden Mundy standing at the fridge. His hair is damp and he’s naked from the waist up, wrapped in a blue bath towel. It’s the one she’s already used twice this week, and hung over the bathroom door to use again today. The rest are heaped in the bag of dirty laundry that’s been piling up for two weeks now.

  Every morning, she looks at it and tells herself she’ll get it done tonight. Every night, there are far more interesting things to do.

  Especially last night.

  Braden Mundy isn’t the first guy who’s spent the night with her since she arrived at Hadley, but he’s the first one she doesn’t want to kick out first thing the morning after. And this is the first time she doesn’t feel guilty when she thinks about Jackson, the love of her life.

  He was killed four years ago this week, the summer before her freshman year.

  He was handsome, with a wiry build and dark eyes and long lashes. So smart—not book smart, because he never had the chance to study much, but he knew a lot. Quick-witted. Everything about him was quick—the way he’d burst into a smile, or blow up in anger. The way he spoke, and moved, and drove . . .

  Yeah. He drove like he did everything else.

  Fast car driven by a devil-may-care eighteen-year-old on a hot summer night . . .

  When it happened, she was at Hadley orientation, being introduced to a new lifestyle that was never meant to involve Jackson. Core curriculum, residence halls, financial aid, study abroad . . .

  She received the devastating news while she was having breakfast with a rising senior who’d just returned from a semester in Paris. In the moment before her phone rang, Savannah was imagining herself eating chocolat beneath the Eiffel Tower in springtime.

  Only later did she realize that that she hadn’t even been picturing Jackson in France with her.

  Had she already known, on some level, that he would die young?

  Or had she already taken the first subconscious step away from him, toward the inevitable long-distance, different-wo
rlds breakup?

  Sometimes, she finds it oddly comforting to imagine that she’d have lost him sooner or later even if he hadn’t died—that this is how her life was meant to be, and tragedy hadn’t altered her path.

  Other times, she misses him terribly, and is certain she’ll never fall in love again.

  Maybe that’s not the case.

  She attempts to finger comb her tangled hair. It smells like last night—the bar, his aftershave.

  Braden turns and grins. “Hey.”

  “Hey.” She smiles back. “How long have you been up?”

  “I didn’t sleep much. But you were out like a light right after—”

  “Right,” she says, embarrassed. “Wine always knocks me out.”

  “Sure, sure. Blame it on the wine. Listen, I was going to make some breakfast, but you’re all out of . . .”

  “Everything? Yeah, I know. Help yourself to whatever you can find.”

  She’s still getting used to living on her own after four years in the dormitories. This studio apartment is a summer sublet in a dated stucco complex two miles from campus. In August, she’ll have to find another place to live. By then she should be able to afford something much nicer, thanks to Ora Abrams.

  Braden has gone back to rummaging through her refrigerator. “All I see is yogurt—and a little container of something goopy and red.”

  “Leftover sweet and sour sauce from Chinese takeout.”

  “That’s good. I was afraid it might be blood.”

  “Did you eat it?”

  “No. Is it blood?”

  “Why would it be blood?”

  “You know . . . for work.”

  “I’m not a vampire. I’m a forensic anthropologist.” She sits up, holding the quilt against her shoulders, feeling exposed nonetheless. “My work doesn’t involve storing blood in my home fridge. It usually doesn’t involve blood at all.”

  “Sorry. I don’t know much about it. Want to go out for breakfast? There’s a great diner over in Kingston, and then afterward, we can—”

  “Wait, Kingston? I mean, that sounds good, but I can’t—I have to get to the lab.”

  “Right. I guess I’m the only one who doesn’t have anything going on.”

  She wants to tell him to stop feeling sorry for himself. It can’t be easy to graduate from an Ivy League college with high expectations and find yourself living at home, jobless. But this is just a blip in what seems like an otherwise charmed life.

  “Are you going to look at Ora Abrams’s skull this morning?” he asks.

  “Yes.” It’s her first priority today, and not just because the woman is paying her more money than she’s ever earned, research grant included. She’s curious about Jane and wants to find out what happened to her, and who she was.

  “When are you leaving?”

  “As soon as I can get ready.” She looks around for the clothes she’d worn last night, hoping they’re in arm’s reach. They aren’t. Everything is strewn across the floor, evidence of their date’s passionate conclusion.

  “Can I come?” Braden asks.

  Technically, no. Visitors aren’t allowed.

  But she already bent the rules last night for Ora.

  And maybe it’s a good idea to show him what her work entails. Either it’ll scare him away, or it’ll dispel his assumptions.

  Besides, Muller is quiet at this time of year. The second summer session ended earlier in the week, and classes won’t begin again until August. Now the focus is on admissions tours and orientation sessions, and those events don’t bring prospective students anywhere near the inconveniently located basement anthropology lab. The main floor facilities are designated for other sciences, pre-med in the prime position.

  Chances are, no one will be around this morning when she swipes in the back door with her card key. Nor is it likely that anyone will stop by the lab to catch her entertaining a visitor on the job, or doing a job that isn’t exactly her job.

  “You can come for a while,” she decides. “Toss me that sweatshirt hanging over the doorknob, will you?”

  “This?” He grabs it. “Why?”

  “So that I don’t have to parade around naked.”

  He grins. “A naked parade sounds good to me.”

  “Toss the sweatshirt.”

  He does, but only after pretending to a couple of times, then dangling it just out of reach. If he were someone else, she might find the playfulness immature and maddening instead of irresistibly charming.

  Fifteen minutes later, she’s showered and ready for work, her damp hair pulled back in a bun. Reservations came raining down in the stream of hot water that washed away his scent, and she decided Braden had better not tag along after all.

  For one thing, she has a lot to do.

  For another, she wants to see him again. If they part ways now, nothing will get in the way of that. The more time they spend together, the stronger the chances that something might go wrong. Either she’ll say something stupid, or he’ll be turned off by her job, or he’ll turn out not to be the great guy he seems to be. He’ll move on to someone more suitable, someone with an Ivy League degree and no baggage and a career that doesn’t involve human remains.

  Stepping out of the bathroom dressed in her lab coat, glasses perched on her nose, she finds him lounging on her couch wearing last night’s rumpled clothes.

  He looks up from his phone. “You look hot.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Are you sure we have to leave right this second?” he asks, and his gaze travels from Savannah to her unmade bed, then back at her.

  She laughs. “Yes. I can’t—”

  He’s up off the couch to curtail her protest with a kiss, and she somehow allows him to propel her back to the bed.

  It feels right, but it’s wrong, she thinks as it all comes tumbling away—her lab coat, the pins in her hair, her resolve to go their separate ways.

  Reaching the stone markers on either side of the dirt road leading into Schaapskill Nature Preserve, Emerson slows to a trot, careful not to turn her foot on the rutted dirt lane.

  At a fork, a sign indicates that the paved riverfront trail is off to the right. She heads in the opposite direction, toward the original settlement site.

  Her sneakers crunch along the mulched path. It’s cooler here, shaded by dense woods. Bumblebees and butterflies nose an undergrowth of wildflowers.

  The breeze rippling the overhead boughs is somehow dank and floral, simultaneously dead and alive. She can’t see the river yet, but she can smell its muck and water and she can feel it: dark currents churning around her, within her.

  Rounding a bend, she spots a clearing ahead. Beyond a cluster of Canadian geese feeding in the field, an enormous oak tree shades the stone monument marking the spot where the first settlers lived—and died.

  Some more violently than others, she acknowledges, feeling her pulse pick up even as she slows her pace, approaching the spot as if she might stumble across something terrible, like . . .

  A gallows?

  Cannibal stew?

  As a California public school teacher, she’s well-acquainted with the ill-fated Donner Party’s experiences while snowbound during the winter of 1846–47. Her students are fascinated by the survivalist cannibalism details, and many focus on the topic for their Wagons West unit reports.

  Through them, Emerson has become privy to gruesome details—everything from how to butcher a human corpse to which organs provide the most efficient nutrition. One student, a young woman who was later hospitalized with an eating disorder, wrote vividly about the physiological stages of starvation. The account, complete with case studies, haunts Emerson to this day—especially here, and now, on the very spot where her ancestors endured epic suffering.

  James and Elizabeth were executed on a warm July day, probably very much like this one. The date is only a few weeks off.

  Did they climb a platform beneath this very tree? Did they feel the sun’s warmth b
eating down as they stood listening to the charges against them? Were their last gasps infused with this tincture of wild honeysuckle and marine life, rotting bark and leaves? Was their last glimpse of this world tall grass and wildlife, oak branches and a wide blue sky?

  There were people here that day, though. The hangman. Their three children—those brave Mundy orphans. And their fellow English settlers, the ones who couldn’t know what it was like here that winter. The ones who had condemned poor James and Elizabeth.

  Emerson stares at the well-fed flock, cloaked in drab browns and blacks, feathers ruffling, beady black eyes regarding her with suspicion.

  “They were my family,” she calls out. “My flesh and blood! My . . .”

  Flesh and blood.

  Flesh.

  Blood.

  Flesh . . .

  They ripped human flesh from bone of their brethren and roasted it over the fires of Hades!

  “They were starving! Their children were dying!” she protests to the phantom voice. “They did what they had to do!”

  Admit thy guilt!

  Trembling, she hugs herself, whispering, “They were starved, desperate . . .”

  She knows too well the hollow ache, not for food, perhaps, but for other things that are just as crucial—kinship, a shared home, someone to love, someone who loves you so deeply that they would die for you, kill for you.

  Guilty! Guilty!

  “Nooooooooooo!” The howl surges within her and spills over. Its force catapults her across the field toward the accusers, waving her arms, screaming a shrill, wordless scream. With a great squawking and flapping of wings, the creatures scatter to the heavens.

  Then Emerson is Emerson again. Panting hard, she watches peppery specks, mere geese again, disappear into the wide blue sky above oak branches that reach toward her like sturdy, outstretched arms.

  What is it about Barnes, Sully wonders as she awakens on a boulder of a couch, that whenever he’s around, she finds herself breaking her own rules?

  Rule #1: Don’t be quick to forgive someone who hasn’t given you the time of day.

  Broken.

  Rule #2: Never give up your bed for an overnight guest.