Bone White

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  She weighs her words. “The way I look at it, someone has to piece things together for the victims and their families.”

  “Piece things together?”

  “What?”

  “You know . . .” He gestures at the skull, making an attempt to smile. “Forget it. My stab at gallows humor. I was referring to the fact that the rest of her is out there somewhere, but . . . I guess stab is a poor choice of words, too.”

  For a long moment, they stand there staring down at Jane.

  Savannah detaches herself from the human beings whose remains enter this lab, but some cases are easier than others. You’d think that this one wouldn’t feel personal—an unidentified young woman who’s been dead for centuries.

  Braden pulls his car keys from his pocket. “I should go. You have work to do.” He doesn’t meet her gaze.

  She shouldn’t be surprised, should she? She was expecting this. It’s probably for the best. He doesn’t belong here, in the lab, in her life. He doesn’t get her.

  Still, she makes a feeble protest.

  “We were going to go get pizza.”

  Extra cheese, and pepperoni, and mushrooms . . .

  “Yeah,” he says. “I kind of lost my appetite. Another time, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  He looks at her, puts his hands on her shoulders, and leans over to kiss her forehead. “I’ll text you later.”

  “Sure,” she says again, and watches him go, wondering whether she’ll hear from him, wondering whether she wants to.

  Valley Roasters is crowded, as always. Too crowded for Sully to bring up the guy last night as she and Emerson wait for their orders at the counter, shoulder to shoulder with the rest of the world.

  She spots a familiar red head and points out Rowan Mundy, sipping an iced tea and checking her phone at a table for two in the corner.

  “You didn’t tell her I was coming?” Emerson asks.

  “I didn’t have a chance, but it’s fine.”

  “I should probably go. I just wanted to give you back your book and say a quick hello.”

  “You can’t leave before you meet your cousin.”

  A smile lights Emerson’s eyes. In the dim light last evening, Sully didn’t notice that one is a piercing, January blue, the other a November slush-gray. Seeing her again today, she noticed it right away.

  Heterochromia is the kind of rare physical condition that makes Sully’s job a little easier. Witnesses who cross paths with a missing person or a suspect later tend to remember someone whose irises are two different colors.

  “Sally?” The pretty brunette behind the counter peers at the Sharpie scribbling on a paper cup. “Sally?”

  Seeing a tea bag tag and string poking from beneath the plastic lid, Sully reaches for it, grinning. “That’s me.”

  “Oh hey, Sully.” She hands over the cup and gestures at the boy taking orders behind the register. “Sorry. Theo’s new. I guess he doesn’t know you.”

  “I’m not that new. I know her,” Theo protests. “That’s a U. It says Sully.”

  “Sure it does.” The girl picks up another waiting cup, squints at it, and calls. “Um, Edifice?”

  “I’m going to guess that’s her.” Laughing, Sully points to Emerson. “We just call her Eddie.”

  They head over to the crowded seating area, where Rowan smiles and waves. Fresh from her elementary school classroom, she’s wearing a summery floral print dress. Sully, who shares her coloring, wonders how she managed to find splashy shades of pink that somehow don’t clash with her hair and freckles.

  “I’m free!” Rowan calls, and several people nearby turn to look at her.

  “Don’t mind her, she just got out of jail,” a middle-aged man at the next table announces with a grin.

  Rowan returns it good-naturedly. “You know it, Joe.”

  “I assume you’re here to arrest her again, Sully.”

  “Not this time,” she tells Joe. “Rowan somehow always manages to cover her trail.”

  “The trick is to stay one step ahead of her.”

  “I’ll try to remember that. Emerson, this is Rowan Mundy, and these nice people”—she gestures at the man and his female companion—“are Joe and Sonia Goodall.”

  “Hey, I’m a nice person, too,” Rowan protests.

  Joe Goodall teases her again, then asks Emerson where she’s from.

  “California.”

  “Oh! Then you must be a Mundy,” Sonia Goodall comments.

  “I am. How did you know?”

  “She knows everything.”

  Sonia swats her husband’s arm. “Don’t listen to Joe. He makes me sound like a busybody.”

  “If the shoe fits, hon . . .”

  A second swat is less playful. “Cut it out, hon. Anyway, Emerson, someone mentioned you at my last garden club meeting.”

  “Was it Nancy Vandergraaf?” Rowan asks. “Because she’s the one who told me that one of Jake’s relatives was coming to town from San Francisco.”

  “I don’t think so. Nancy hasn’t been to a meeting in a while. Anyway, word travels fast around here. You’ll see.”

  Emerson smiles faintly. “I’m seeing.”

  The Goodalls go back to their coffee, and Rowan asks Emerson how, exactly, she’s related to Jake.

  “I have no idea. I’ve been doing some genealogy research, and it led me here. I just know that I’m descended from the first settlers.”

  “So is Jake. We’ll have to figure it out. Have a seat.”

  Looking around for a chair to borrow, Sully spots three teenagers at a table for four. She chats briefly with them, and exchanges greetings with a couple of other acquaintances.

  The muscle spasm in her back is gone, thanks to the pain medication. Unfortunately, it left her brain feeling slightly numb and cloudy. Or maybe that’s for the best, considering that Barnes is dragging her into his problems.

  “Wow, you know everyone in town,” Emerson comments as she rejoins the table. “Did you say you’ve only been here a year?”

  “Not even, but I pretty much knew everyone in town my first day.”

  “That’s great.”

  “Sometimes it is,” Rowan says, “and sometimes it isn’t. Mundy’s Landing can feel a little suffocating if you’re not used to it.”

  “You must be, though,” Emerson says, “if you’ve lived here all your life?”

  “Not all of it. Jake and I were down in the New York suburbs for a while.”

  “Why would you ever even leave?”

  “The suburbs?”

  “No, here. I mean, it’s so . . . you know. It just seems like a great place to live.”

  “It is, unless you’re young and looking for excitement. Just ask my oldest son. Anyway, Jake and I moved back after we had all our kids.”

  “How many do you have?”

  Rowan laughs at Emerson’s wide-eyed question. “Three. But when they’re all home, it feels like a lot more. My nephew is staying with us this summer, and all the kids’ friends are around. Plus, we have the dog, and a stray cat just had kittens under our porch that my daughter thinks are now ours, so . . .”

  “And here you just said you were free.” Sully peels the lid off her cup to fish out the tea bag.

  “I know, what was I thinking?” Rowan shakes her head. “The kittens are free, by the way. Want one?”

  “Um, for the tenth time, no thanks.”

  “Sorry. Forgot I already asked.” Rowan turns to Emerson. “Kitten? They’re super cute.”

  “I’m sure they are, but I’m allergic.”

  “So is my husband. Guess it runs in the family. Not that my kids care if Dad is clogged and congested and crippled with sneezes for the next . . . how long do kittens live?”

  “Twenty years, if you take care of them,” calls an older woman seated in a nearby chair. “You need to set up household barriers, and tell Jake to see an ENT and look into allergy shots so the kids can keep their kitties.”

  Rowan thanks her for
the suggestion, then turns back to them, rolling her eyes. “Shots and barriers? That’ll be the day.”

  “So how old are they?” Emerson asks.

  “About ten days.”

  “I meant your kids.”

  When Emerson smiles, Sully thinks, she’s truly lovely. But she doesn’t smile often enough. She seems troubled.

  Does that have anything to do with the man Sully encountered last night?

  I have to tell her. If some guy showed up in town to surprise me, I’d want to know.

  Some guy like Barnes?

  “Braden is twenty-two,” Rowan is telling Emerson. “He just graduated from Dartmouth. Kind of going through a rough time—he thought he was moving to Boston with a great job, but that fell through so he’s back home for now. My daughter, Katie, just finished her sophomore year at Cornell. She has an internship this summer and I’ve barely seen her. And then there’s Mick. He just got out of high school by the skin of his teeth.”

  “With a little help from me.” That comes from Joe Goodall at the next table.

  “Hey, are you eavesdropping again?”

  “Not on purpose, Ro. Close quarters. So don’t go saying anything nasty about me.”

  “I never badmouth anyone. Unless they deserve it,” she amends, seeing his dubious look. “Some people . . .”

  “Watch it, there, Ms. Mundy. The walls have ears.”

  “Don’t I know it.” Turning back to Emerson, Rowan tells her Joe is the local high school principal. “He’s always been in Mick’s corner, even when that wasn’t exactly a great place to be. And he made sure he graduated.”

  “And now he’s going to college.” Sully pats Rowan’s hand. “You did good, Mom.”

  “Team effort. Jake and I pulled a few strings to get him into Hadley, just like my parents did for me. I just hope he makes the most of this opportunity. He doesn’t always.”

  “He’s been through a lot. You all have.” Sully thinks of the cold December day when she and Barnes arrived at Rowan’s house out at Riverview Road to find a 10–31—a crime in progress, and a bloody one at that.

  She asks Rowan how her sister Noreen’s most recent surgery went.

  “Really well this time. She’s getting around just fine now. In fact, the other night, the nurse called to ask if I’d seen her, because they couldn’t find her. It turned out she’d decided to go out for a walk.”

  “Is she supposed to do that?”

  “Nope.” Rowan smiles, but Sully sees through it, and asks how Noreen’s son Sean is doing.

  This time, the reply is an uncharacteristically curt “He’s fine.”

  On that fateful December day, her nephew was an honors student at Notre Dame, returning from his fall semester in Paris. He was the perfect kid with a perfect life that had shattered in his absence.

  It would have been disturbing enough for anyone to discover that his parents’ seemingly solid marriage had dissolved. But on top of the news that the Chapmans were separating, their son came home to a family tragedy. His mother, Rowan’s sister Noreen, had barely survived the brutal attack at his aunt’s house.

  Once a beautiful and brilliant attorney who capably mothered four overachieving children in a luxurious Long Island home, Noreen Chapman now resides in a Hudson Valley rehabilitation hospital. She’s making a slow physical recovery, but her mental condition is deteriorating. She’ll never be the same.

  Nor will Sean.

  In the aftermath of the attack, his three younger sisters’ lives resumed a level of normalcy at home with their surgeon father. Sean took off his spring semester to be with his mother. Last fall, he returned to Notre Dame and failed every class. Given a second chance, he spent the spring loafing around South Bend.

  Though Rowan didn’t share much detail about his time there, it was plain to Sully that he’d gotten into some kind of trouble. No longer welcome in his father’s house, the long-haired, grungy young man staying with the Mundys is clearly troubled. Sean bears little resemblance to the clean-cut, well-scrubbed scholar Sully had met at his mother’s bedside eighteen months earlier.

  Green eyes shadowed, Rowan changes the subject. “How about you, Emerson? Do you have kids, a husband . . . ?”

  “No kids. No husband . . . yet.” Emerson holds up her left hand, where the engagement ring sparkles. “We haven’t set a wedding date.”

  “Congratulations,” Rowan says, smiling.

  “Is your fiancé here with you?” Sully asks.

  “Here?”

  “Yes, here in town.”

  “No. Why?”

  “Because I met someone last night who said he’d come here from California to see you.”

  “What?” Emerson’s high-pitched question draws stares. “Where?”

  Sully tells her about the encounter and describes him. Clearly, Emerson doesn’t welcome the news that he’d asked if she was traveling alone.

  “That’s Roy. Did you say that I was?”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  At least, not about that.

  Why did she have to mention they’d met at the Dapplebrook Inn? Ordinarily, she’d be more prudent about sharing information with a stranger. But she was tired last night, preoccupied with Barnes’s sudden arrival. Her guard was down—unlike Emerson’s. Spotting a telltale wariness in those unusual blue and gray eyes of hers, Sully asks, “Are you having problems with him?”

  “I’m not sure.” Emerson exhales, gazing at her cup that may or may not say Edifice.

  Sully thinks of her favorite aunt, Ida, who was fun-loving and bubbly before she married her second husband, a man Sully will never consider her uncle. He doesn’t beat Ida, but he controls her so completely that no one in the family has seen her alone in years.

  She often looks just like Emerson does now—worried, and cagey.

  “Are you afraid of Roy?”

  “No.”

  “That’s not very convincing.”

  “Maybe I am a little afraid. But really, I just wish I knew what he was doing here.”

  “He told us he wanted to surprise you, and I—”

  “Wait, us?”

  Sully nods. “Twyla and me. She works at Dunkin’ Donuts.”

  Rowan, who’d been checking her phone, looks up. “You mean Twyla Block?”

  “Katie’s friend? Yes.”

  “How do you know her?”

  “I met her at your house on New Year’s Eve.”

  “Every kid in town was at that party, but she and Katie aren’t really friends.”

  “I thought she said she was related, too.”

  “She probably did, and we probably are, somewhere back in the Mundy family tree. She and Katie played together when they were really little, but Twyla was one of those girls who . . .” She shakes her head. “I had her in my classroom, and I’ve seen other kids like her—the ones who latch on to their friends and smother them. Know what I mean?”

  Sully nods. Growing up, she’d transferred into an all-girls parochial school at eleven. Surrounded by inseparable pairs, thieves-thick threesomes, and clubby quartets established in kindergarten, Sully was miserably alone. The uniform added insult to injury: a tartan skirt with a scarlet Saint Brendan’s sweater and necktie that clashed with her hair.

  One day, her nun-assigned reading partner asked her to share a lunch table. The invitation morphed into regular after school playdates—which no one ever called playdates back then—and sleepovers every weekend.

  Sully no longer remembers the other girl’s name—probably Mary-something. Saint Brendan’s was an army of Mary Beths and Mary Anns and Mary Claires. No one else’s hair was red, or curly, or cut above their shoulders.

  Yet one day, Sully’s only friend showed up with her blond hair dyed pinker than Frenchy’s in Grease, puffy with corkscrew curls.

  “I did it myself,” Mary-something whispered over their shared Oxford Junior Reader, and Sully heard the other girls snickering. “My mother wouldn’t let me cut it, but I slept on her spo
nge rollers. Isn’t it righteous? Now we look like twins.”

  God, no. They didn’t. And righteous was Sully’s own personal catchphrase back then, one that the Saint Brendan’s girls didn’t quite grasp and weren’t yet using—until that moment.

  “She’s such a copycat,” she heard someone say later from behind a bathroom stall. She eavesdropped in horror on a discussion of Mary-something’s long history of smothering, imitating, and eventually alienating every friend she’d ever had.

  That day, she feigned a stomachache, went to the nurse, and got sent home before lunch. She didn’t answer the phone when it rang incessantly after school, glad her father was at work and her mother out buying Jell-O and soda crackers for her sick daughter. She took the phone off the hook and smothered its rapid bleating with a pillow until it stopped. By that time, her stomach really did hurt.

  Lost in the memory of the awkward end to her childhood friendship, she half listens as Rowan describes a similar situation between her daughter Katie and Twyla Block.

  Emerson has fallen silent, toying with a straw wrapper.

  Sully thinks about Barnes. If he hadn’t shown up here last night, she never would have been in Dunkin’ Donuts blabbing about the Dapplebrook Inn.

  She clears her throat. “Emerson, I have to tell you something.”

  “What is it?”

  “I mentioned that you were at the Dapplebrook. I’m sorry.”

  “To Roy? He asked you where I was staying?”

  “Not exactly.” She thinks back over the conversation. “Twyla was doing most of the talking.”

  Rowan says, “That’s not surprising. She can be a chatterbox.”

  “I guess I didn’t say you were staying there,” Sully tells Emerson. “Just that I’d met you there.”

  “But how did he even know you knew me?”

  Barnes. It’s all his fault.

  The illogical answer thunks around in Sully’s head like a sneaker in a dryer.

  “I’m sorry, I wasn’t really thinking when I said it. But if he’s dangerous, you need to let me know. I’m a police officer.”

  “And a damned good one,” Rowan says. “She saved my life, and my son’s and my sister’s.”

  Watching Emerson Mundy digest that information, Sully can guess what she’s thinking.