Bone White

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  “No, Carlton!”

  “Vincenza, get out of there!”

  “Stop splashing, Montgomery!”

  Emerson walks on past, as amused by the mother-child splash match as she is by the lofty names that burden Mundy’s Landing’s pint-sized citizens.

  “Your mother wanted to name you Emily,” her father once told her, after Didi was gone. “But I insisted on Emerson.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s better.”

  The answer was insufficient, but she lived with it, like everything else.

  Valley Roasters, at 37 Market Street, occupies the first floor of a plate-glass storefront on the square, and has—like most other East Coast cafés Emerson has visited—a West Coast café vibe.

  Ella Fitzgerald croons in the background. Couches and easy chairs mingle with round café tables beneath high tin ceilings and low-hanging pendants that cast ambient light. Behind bakery case glass, doily-topped trays display an impressive assortment of muffins, scones, and pastries. The air is singed with burnt toast. Anywhere else, the char might assault one’s nostrils; here it wafts in a pleasant potpourri of freshly ground beans and hot brew.

  She looks for Sullivan Leary in the large crowd that—unlike Emerson herself—so obviously belongs here.

  The baristas are without exception in their late teens or early twenties, wearing perfunctory smiles as they take orders, relaying them behind the scenes in rapid-fire staccato shorthand. Businesspeople in dress slacks check their phones while waiting for their to-go. At the tables, earnest types type Great American Novels on laptops. Yoga moms converse on couches, sipping frothy dairy-free, gluten-free, sugar-free, fat-free hot beverages that at steep prices are anything but free.

  There’s a palpable camaraderie among them—even the silent, solo patrons. They populate this café, this town, like the Hollywood extras she used to see shooting on-location shoots back in LA. Central casting at its finest, and she’s wandered onto the wrong set.

  She should go. She doesn’t belong here.

  Bitter disappointment clogs her throat.

  It’s no big deal—really, it isn’t.

  But she can’t help it. She so wanted . . .

  Everything. A friend, a family, a home . . .

  Sure. Coming right up, along with your latte and scone. Did you want that to go?

  Oh, I’m staying.

  No. She’s not.

  Turning toward the door, she sees a familiar face.

  “Hi, Emerson.” Sullivan Leary grins at her. “Glad you made it. Sorry I’m late.”

  Savannah places the skull on the tall laboratory table.

  Braden, perched on a stool beside her, leans in to look. “So that’s Jane Doe?”

  “That’s Jane Doe. Only we can just call her Jane, like Ora does.”

  “Nice to meet you, Jane.”

  “I’m sure she’d shake your hand, if she had one.”

  He raises an eyebrow, and she offers an unapologetic shrug.

  “Gallows humor. Comes with the territory.”

  She turns her attention back to the table. But she’s conscious of Braden’s eyes on her, and of all the reasons why he shouldn’t be here right now. In fact, she can’t think of any reasons why he should, other than that he spent the night in her bed. A good portion of the morning, too, so far, giving her a much later start than she intended.

  As she trains a bright LED light to get a better look at the remains, she hears his phone vibrate with a text.

  “My mother. Again.”

  “Everything okay?”

  “She’s wondering where I am, even though I texted her last night that I was staying with a friend, and I texted her this morning that I was still with the friend.”

  “Did she ask which friend?”

  “Yep.” He grins. “You’re John, my rich college buddy who has a summer place in Rhinebeck.”

  “In that case”—she reaches for the sliding calipers with a blue-gloved hand—“we should head over to my estate after this and see if the household staff can whip up some lunch while we take a dip in the pool.”

  “Great idea. Or we can slum it and go out for pizza at Marrana’s. Mick works there. He can thank you for helping him yesterday by putting extra-extra cheese and pepperoni on our pie.”

  “And extra-extra-extra mushrooms?”

  “Hungry?”

  “Famished. We forgot about breakfast.”

  “Yeah, but it was worth it.”

  Smiling, she begins measuring the skull, jotting the results on a yellow pad as Braden finishes his text.

  “There. That should hold off my mom for a while.” He shoves his phone back into the pocket of the same jeans he was wearing last night. “Sometimes she forgets that I’m twenty-two.”

  “Because you’re living at home.”

  “True. If I were hundreds of miles away, she wouldn’t forget that.”

  No—but she might forget you.

  Then again, his mother seems nothing like Savannah’s mother. Most aren’t.

  “If I don’t find a job and get a place of my own,” he says, “she’s going to drive me crazy. They all are.”

  “All?”

  “My parents, my brother and sister, my cousin, the whole damned family. Even the dog. He keeps hiding my underwear. Only mine. Hey, don’t laugh. I’m serious. I’m wearing my brother’s boxers.”

  “Day-old boxers at this point.”

  “Also worth it.”

  Smiling, Savannah bends over the table again, imagining parents who ask too many questions, siblings who need endless favors, and even an underwear-stealing dog so stupid, as Braden told her, that they’d long ago changed his name from Rufus to Doofus.

  She never had a life like that. She always thought she’d create it for herself one day. She and Jackson used to talk about getting married, settling down in a big old house in a small town, having a bunch of kids . . .

  “What are you looking for, exactly?” Braden’s question startles her.

  Oh. Wait. He’s referring to the skull, not her hopes and dreams for her future.

  “I’m trying to determine what happened to Jane.”

  “You mean the cause of death?”

  “Blunt force trauma to the skull, see?” She indicates the gaping hole in the cranium. “Now I need to figure out whether it was accidental.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Lots of ways.” She leans in, examining the wound. “I look at the location, wound pattern, internal staining . . .”

  “How’d a nice girl like you get involved in gory stuff like this?”

  Uh-oh. Here we go. Here comes the part when he decides you’re a weirdo.

  “My mom,” she tells him.

  “She’s a forensic anthropologist?”

  “No, she never went to college. She works in a hospital lab, and every night when she gets home, she watches TV.”

  No need to elaborate that basic cable was one of the few luxuries in their lives, or that her mother has always paid far more attention to the television than to her daughter.

  “CSI was her favorite show. So, you know . . . I thought it was fascinating.”

  That’s true, but she also thought that she and her mother might have more in common if she, too, worked in a lab. Or that her mother might notice her more if she were like the characters she admired so much on TV. Smart, in control, always finding the answers—always answers to be had.

  Not so in real life. It took her a while to figure that out.

  “Do you miss her?”

  “My mother?” She focuses again on the skull, and the calipers that have been poised over the same spot for too long. “Sometimes.”

  In truth, Savannah doesn’t miss her at all, and is pretty sure it’s mutual. On rare occasions when holidays close the dorms and she’s forced home, her mother seems to resent the disruption. Ironic, considering that her daily routine still consists only of work, an overindulgence in food and television, and not enough sleep.
Savannah interferes with none of it, and is always relieved to get back to Hadley.

  “What about the rest of your family?” Braden asks. “Your dad? Brothers and sisters?”

  Her dad lived fifteen minutes and a world away when she was growing up. He worked menial jobs to make court-ordered child support payments for Savannah and the other kids he’d had with other women, half siblings she’d never even met—her choice, and theirs, and her father’s.

  But sisters . . . ?

  She thinks of Jackson’s twin, Cher.

  When Jackson was killed, she was an unmarried, unemployed high school dropout, carrying the nephew her brother couldn’t wait to meet. She planned to name him Kanye, after the rap star.

  “This kid is going to be a great musician, too,” Jackson had told Savannah. “I can tell.”

  “He’s not even born yet.”

  “But he’s got great rhythm when he kicks. You watch. Little Kanye will live up to his name and be a superstar.”

  Savannah didn’t point out that Little Kanye’s mother hadn’t lived up to her own iconic name. Bearing no resemblance to the star for whom she’d been named, Cher was blond, though not naturally, and fat even when she wasn’t eight months’ pregnant.

  One day a few weeks after Jackson’s death, Cher lumbered down the block to find Savannah sitting outside, absently watching greasy-haired, dirty-elbowed neighborhood kids blowing up bottle rockets in the street.

  “I heard you’re not going to college after all,” she said, heaving her huge self down on the concrete steps. “How come?”

  “Because it doesn’t matter anymore.”

  Who cared if she let go of that dream, and the scholarships that went with it? Not Savannah, not then. And certainly not her mother, ever.

  A bottle rocket exploded too close for comfort, and Cher’s arms flew to protect her belly.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” she shrieked at the kids in the street, then turned back to Savannah as if nothing had happened. “Why doesn’t it matter?”

  “Because he’s gone. Nothing matters.”

  “That’s a shitty reason to stay. There ain’t nothing for you here now. Get out like you’re s’posed to. I wish you could take me with you. Both of us,” she added, and gave her swollen stomach a loving pat.

  The baby, who was named after his late uncle instead of after Cher’s favorite musician, was born the day before Savannah left for Hadley.

  She got to hold him in a hospital room that smelled of body odor and vegetable soup.

  “I’m going to visit you every chance I get,” she crooned, stroking his square, red little face with a gentle fingertip, “and tell you all about your uncle.”

  She broke the promise.

  “No big deal,” Cher wrote back a year or so later, when Savannah sent a guilty text message on the anniversary of his death. She added that “Jacky” was almost big enough to wear the Hadley T-shirt Savannah had sent her first week on campus.

  By now, he’ll have long grown out of it. By now, they’re probably calling him Jack. By now, he would have been, should have been, calling her Auntie Savannah.

  Braden clears his throat. “So, uh . . . I take it you’re not big on talking about your family. Forget it. What are you seeing?”

  She’s seeing a little boy and a man she’ll never know, and a future she wasn’t meant to have.

  But Braden is talking about Jane—another life cut short by violent death.

  “I’m not finding anything indicating that she fell.”

  “Like what?”

  “A V-shaped pattern in the wound from hitting a hard corner,” she says, writing down measurements and adjusting the light. “Or a weblike network indicating a wide, flat point of impact.”

  “The ground?”

  “The ground, the floor . . .” She turns over the skull, adjusts the light again, and peers at the underside. “And if she’d fallen, the internal staining from the bleeding and pressure would be much bigger and more spread out than it is here.”

  “So it wasn’t an accident?”

  She shakes her head, pointing to multiple trauma points.

  “Someone hit her hard, at least three times, with something long and thin.”

  “Holy crap. Like with . . . what? A broom handle or something?”

  “Heavier. If I had to guess, probably an iron tool—maybe a fireplace poker, something like that. The hit point is narrow, see?”

  He comes over and leans in, standing so close behind her that his breath stirs the wisps of hair that have escaped the hairpins she hastily repositioned before they left her apartment.

  Is that what Jane experienced a moment before the first blow struck the back of her head? Was she aware that someone had come up behind her? Someone she knew, or at least, thought she knew?

  There were no strangers lurking in the settlement at the time she died. Only twenty-five, maybe thirty settlers had traveled together from England to find themselves cut off from the rest of the world. The quintessential locked room mystery, except . . .

  Savannah briskly moves away from Braden, stepping around to the opposite side of the table as if she needs a different angle to examine the skull.

  All these years, historians speculated that James and Elizabeth Mundy were, like the Salem witches, victims of Puritan vengeance in an era when crime and sin were intertwined, defined by the eyes of the beholder, and punishable by death.

  What if they were guilty as charged?

  If so, then what if, as Tomas, her genetics professor, once lectured, there really is a “murder gene”?

  The theory is that certain genetic variants are linked to violent mental illness. Tomas cited plenty of case studies to support it.

  “Do you think she suffered?”

  Savannah looks up sharply, wondering, perhaps illogically, if Braden wants the girl to have suffered. His expression is suitably somber.

  “No, she didn’t. Not for very long, anyway.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Bleeding to death from a head wound would leave significant staining. You can’t survive losing more than about fifty percent of your blood, but it takes a long time to drain. As you bleed out, your blood pressure drops and the bleeding slows as the heart rate slows.”

  “Like opening a faucet in an old house. In our house, anyway. When you run the water for a while, the water pressure drops.”

  “It’s actually more like a garden hose. As the tank drains, the flow slows and the water pools. Cutting a major artery is like unkinking the hose—it speeds up the death and limits the internal cranial staining.”

  “So . . . you’re saying someone cut her artery after she was knocked out with the poker?”

  “Yes. See this?” She points to the mandible, noting that there are only a few teeth.

  “The jawbone?”

  “The nick on the jawbone.” She rests a gloved fingertip beside the barely visible groove. “It’s hard to find unless you know what to look for.”

  “What is it?”

  “A mark from the blade that sliced her throat.”

  He looks up, startled by the brutality of it.

  “She was murdered in cold blood?”

  “I think so.”

  He clears his throat. “By my ancestors. The cannibals.”

  “We have no way of knowing who did it.”

  “Yeah, well, they were the last men standing, you know? Who else could it have been?”

  She reaches for the envelope sitting on a nearby desk and unfolds the sheet of paper inside. It looks as though it was typed on an old-fashioned typewriter, with some of the letters slightly smudged or raised above the others.

  She hands it to Braden.

  “What’s this?”

  “A list of the English settlers who were living there that winter.”

  “You mean dying there.”

  “That, too. The murderer could have been anyone on this list.”

  “Why are most of the names crossed
out?”

  “Process of elimination to identify Jane. The four that remain are females in the right age range—roughly fourteen to sixteen years old at time of death.”

  Tabitha Ransom, born 1650, died February 12, 1666

  Ann Dunn, born 1649, died January 29, 1666

  Anne Blake, born 1652, died February 21, 1666

  Verity Hall, born 1650, died February 3, 1666

  He studies the list. “Where did the dates come from?”

  “I guess someone was keeping track.”

  “So one of the crossed-out names belongs to the killer?”

  “I think so.”

  “And if you use process of elimination . . . I mean, a lot of these people were dead by January, and of the ones that remain—it’s not going to be a toddler, so . . .”

  “Right. You can rule out at least half these names based on age alone.”

  He looks at the list for a long time, then hands it back. “You’re going to tell Ora about this?”

  “That Jane was murdered? I have to.”

  “Terrific.”

  “Hey, I thought you didn’t care. You said you had other problems to worry about.”

  “I do. But when you look at her . . .” He shakes his head, gesturing at the skull. “She was a real person, you know?”

  “They’re all real people, Braden.” She gestures around the lab, at the skeletal remains and jars of specimens.

  “How the hell do you do this every day?”

  “I don’t necessarily do this every day.”

  “But how can you stand it? I mean, maybe you’ve never been through anything that would make you realize—”

  “Like what? Realize what?”

  “You know. I’ve been through some stuff . . . well, my family’s been through some stuff—and I guess that when you lose people in a violent way, it’s hard to—”

  “Everyone’s been through stuff, Braden.”

  How can she tell him that loss has made her even more dedicated to doing what she does? She can’t, unless she bares her soul about Jackson.

  Ah, the dead boyfriend. Now there’s a cheerful topic guaranteed to make him want to stick around.