I just hope she didn’t endanger mine.
Letter
15th August 1675
Dearest Brother Jeremiah,
Scarcely two days have passed since you left me our little settlement. I know not when a southbound messenger might make his way here, but I shall have this letter prepared to post so that my apology may reach you in haste.
I do regret, dear Jeremiah, the harsh words we shared on the eve of your departure. I was distraught that you have chosen to desert me here, even if just until the spring, and set off with strangers for a distant city. We have protected each other all our lives. Without you, I am vulnerable.
Yet I am content to stay within the confines of this population. I have no desire to explore the lands beyond. I was not tempted, as you were, by the Dutch traders who entertained us with vibrant accounts of the pleasures to be experienced in New York.
I know that you long for a proper education and a selection of eligible young women to court, and that you have felt isolated here in the northern wild. I do not share your yearning, for this is the only home I have ever known. Though I was a mere child of seven when we left London with Mother and Father and sister Charity, I remember not the city we left behind, nor the journey across the sea.
I do recall the day we sailed into the New York harbor, and our brief wanderings before we continued the journey upriver. I recall muddy streets teeming with strangers and livestock, rife with stench and vermin. I knew then that I never wished to return, and I expected that you would share my sentiments.
I perceived a betrayal when you, my brother, accepted our visitors’ invitation to accompany them on their journey downriver. I selfishly feared for my own well-being, and turned deaf ear upon your parting assurances that all will be well, and that you will return in the late spring. I felt, in that moment, that you alone should understand the perils I might face without you in the months ahead. I feared that I might go mad when the snows begin to fall, bringing cruel reminders of the winter so long ago, with no one to comfort me in the night. No one who knows the terrible secret we alone share.
However, now that I have grown accustomed to the idea, I have come to accept my plight. I am safely settled in the Goody Dowling’s home, and they are all pleased to have me here. Dorcas, in particular, has said she has always longed for a sister. I suspect that she longs for a husband as well, and she is wistful when she speaks of your decision to venture beyond our humble population in your search for a wife.
Worry not about my safety, Jeremiah. As you stated, our settlement is much larger and stronger than it was in its infancy. We are fortified to outlast the stormy months ahead, just as we have every winter since that dreadful first.
I shall miss you. No other being in this world can comprehend the horrors we endured, nor the drastic measures our parents took so that we all might survive. Dear sister Charity could not bear it. But you and I are hardier souls. Until your return, we must each bear the terrible truth alone. I promise that I shall not, in your absence, unburden our secret upon another person, and I pray that you will not, either.
I wish you well as you devote the months ahead to furthering your education and finding a suitable wife who will wear the gimmal ring Mother intended for your bride.
Do you remember that Mother wore it daily to remind her of her mother and sister and England? When word came that both grandmother and Aunt Felicity had died of the plague, she sobbed for the first time that I could ever recall. I feel that I share a bit of that mournful desolation now, dear Jeremiah, for with you gone, I feel quite alone in the world.
I shall look forward to welcoming you home in the springtime.
With affection,
Your sister,
Priscilla Mundy
Chapter 8
“It was great meeting you, Rowan.” Emerson reaches out to shake her hand, but Rowan embraces her.
“You too. I’ll check with Jake and be in touch later about dinner.”
“That would be nice, but no pressure.”
“I think tonight would be good. We have plans tomorrow night, and weekends are always crazy in our house. You come, too, Sully.”
“What?” She looks up from typing a text on her phone.
“Dinner tonight. Our house. I’ll make the Sully Salad.”
“There’s a salad named after you?” Emerson asks.
“It’s this Asian salad she loves. I make it whenever she comes over, but last time someone in my house had eaten the ingredients.”
“You really think ramen and peanut butter are going to last with three college kids around?” Sully’s smile seems a little forced, and she quickly looks down again at her phone. Someone had texted her when they were back at the table, and after checking it, she announced she had to get going.
“Four college kids, with my nephew,” Rowan corrects her. “And I’m stopping at Price Chopper on the way home, so this time, I’ll lock up the ramen and peanut butter.”
“Thanks, but I think I have to take a rain check.”
“Working tonight?”
“No, just tied up.”
“Hot date?”
“Who,” Sully asks, “would I be dating?”
“I thought maybe Nick Colonomos finally—”
“Oh please. If it hasn’t happened by now, it’s not going to happen.”
Rowan turns back to Emerson and explains, “Nick is pretty much the only eligible bachelor in town, and Sully is—”
“Sully is not the only eligible bachelorette,” says Sully. “He’s not interested.”
“You never know. He’s the one who recruited you for the job.”
“Yes, for the job. Not to marry him and bear his children—which, for the record, if he were asking, I wouldn’t be interested in doing, no matter how beautiful those babies would be. And it’s not just because he’s a cop.”
“Sully has a lot of rules, and one is that she doesn’t date cops,” Rowan tells Emerson. “But that would change if Nick hit on her.”
“Hello—I’m right here.” Sully waves. “I can hear you.”
“You hear, but you never listen.”
“No, you never listen, Rowan. I’m perfectly happy on my own. I don’t need a man in my life.”
“Whatever you say.”
Emerson marvels that they’ve barely known each other a year. The way they banter, you’d think they were lifelong friends. Envying Sully’s easygoing relationships with the locals, she wonders if she, too, would be welcomed into the fold if she were to move here.
“Jake can tell you more about the family tonight,” Rowan tells her, “although he’s not the expert. You really need to go see Ora Abrams at the historical society.”
“Do you think she’s there now?”
“She’s always there. In fact, I’ve been meaning to check in on her for days. If you go, tell her I’ll come by soon.”
Rowan heads for the door, and Sully puts her phone back into her pocket. “I’ll introduce you to Ora on the way back up Prospect, Emerson, if you want to wait for me. I just need to grab a couple of sandwiches to go.”
“A couple?”
“I’m starved. My cupboards and fridge are bare, and I don’t even have college kids to blame.”
Now that it’s lunchtime, the café is even busier. Emerson leans against the brick wall to wait, watching Sully slip into the line at the counter and chat with two businessmen in front of her, and then with an older woman behind her.
Emerson takes in the crowd: women in sandals and skirts or pumps and hose, men in dress shirts and khakis, and a few in suits and ties. Even the few who are alone seem to be engaged in conversation. Scrubs-clad medical workers gossip among themselves, as do overdressed teenage girls who seem conspicuously aware of the teenage boys checking them out. A jumpsuited mechanic stirs coffee with an oil-stained hand, conversing with construction site guys wearing hard hats and orange vests. At a nearby table, a priest is lunching and laughing with an elderly couple.
; If Emerson lived here, she wouldn’t be alone.
But you wanted to be alone, remember?
Roy wasn’t the only one who reached out after her father died. Colleagues invited her to lunch, to dinner, to the movies. They meant well, particularly the ones who’d also lost a parent and said they knew how she felt.
They didn’t, and not just because most still had one parent living, or a wide circle of family and friends. Many were married, and nearly all had at least one sibling to share the burden of grief, and the memories.
When they met, Roy already had a plane ticket to New York for Thanksgiving with his mother. He invited her to come, but she wasn’t ready for that. He offered to stay, but she talked him out of it.
“You shouldn’t be alone,” he said.
Thinking he might be right, she accepted a fellow teacher’s invitation to Thanksgiving dinner. It was Norman Rockwellian: flowers, candles, and wedding china in a wallpapered dining room, cousins squeezed in on folding chairs, a rousing Trivial Pursuit game after pumpkin pie.
Emerson compared it to Thanksgivings past: a wobbly kitchen table, Stove Top stuffing, and a couple of broiled supermarket drumsticks. Those holidays for two never felt right, yet neither did the picture-perfect version with someone else’s family.
“Sorry about that!” Sully is back, with a white paper bag and a hot cup. “I didn’t think it was going to take so long, or I’d have told you to go ahead.”
“It’s fine. I’m not in a rush.”
As they head out, Sully nearly crashes into a lanky man in glasses about to step into the café. “Trib! I almost spilled coffee all over you.”
“You mean you’re finally coming over to the dark side?”
“I was born on the dark side.”
“No, I meant the coffee. I thought you were a tea drinker.”
“Good catch. If you ever get tired of the newspaper business, you’d make a good detective.” Sully turns to Emerson. “This is Trib Bingham, the editor of the Mundy’s Landing Tribune.”
She knows who he is. He lives at 46 Bridge Street with Annabelle and their son, Oliver, and probably more than his own share of nightmares.
“Trib, this is Emerson Mundy. She’s here visiting from California.”
As they shake hands and make small talk, Emerson wonders about the coffee. And two sandwiches, for such a small person?
Out on the street in the sunshine, Sully falls into a preoccupied silence. Maybe she, too, has secrets.
They cross the brick-paved street and cut through the Commons. No sign of webs on the broad lawn now. The spiders are there, though, lurking among blades of grass like enemy soldiers in a jungle.
Beneath a tree, a young couple unloads the contents of a wicker hamper onto a colorful patchwork quilt.
“How charming—a picnic,” Emerson comments.
“Fifty bucks’ worth of charming. The Market on Market sells packaged picnics to go. You order online and pick it up at lunchtime.”
“That seems reasonable. I bet the blanket and basket are worth at least that much.”
“The fifty is for the food, and you leave another fifty as a deposit for the setup. When you return everything, you get it back.” She smiles at Emerson’s expression. “Sorry to burst your bubble. Charming doesn’t come cheap. But at least things are more peaceful around here now. Last summer during Mundypalooza, this place was a zoo and the traffic around the square was gridlocked. See that corner? We had an officer there every day directing traffic.”
Emerson follows her gesture to the intersection of Prospect and Fulton, where a single car is braking for a flashing red light. No police officer now. She glances over her shoulder, scanning the street behind them.
Sully catches her. “You okay?”
“Just achy.” She reaches back to rub the spot between her shoulder blades. “Yesterday was tough—lugging heavy bags through airports, the long drive in all that traffic, and I didn’t sleep very well, so . . .”
Sully isn’t buying that for a second. “You’re looking for him, aren’t you?”
“Roy?” She hesitates. Is now the time to admit that it isn’t just Roy?
“I know this is none of my business, but I don’t like this,” Sully says. “The man is your fiancé, and you look terrified.”
“It’s just, I’m not used to always having someone around, and sometimes, I need space, and Roy doesn’t always like to give it to me. That makes me want to pull away, and then he . . . holds on even tighter.”
“Is he violent?”
“No, it’s not like that. He’s just . . . possessive. Or maybe it’s obsessive.”
“Maybe both. I know he’s your fiancé, but following someone across the country is extreme. A romantic gesture would be one thing, but something tells me you’re not seeing it that way. How long have you been engaged?”
“Since Valentine’s Day. We met last September.”
“So you haven’t known him long.”
“Well, it was the beginning of September,” she clarifies, as if a few weeks make a significant difference.
“How does your family feel about him?”
“They—he never knew Roy. My father, I mean. I met him right after my dad, uh, passed away.”
“I’m so sorry. That’s tough.”
“Yeah.” She wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. “I know I’m acting like a big baby. Pushing forty, and I still feel like Daddy’s little girl.”
“Losing a parent is tough no matter how old you are. How about the rest of your family? Your mom? Siblings?”
“No siblings. No Mom. I mean, I had one, but she walked out on us right before my fourth birthday and never looked back. Not a visit, a phone call, a birthday card . . .
“I’m sorry. Where is she now?”
Emerson pauses, wondering how to answer that, and decides on a shrug—for now.
“Ever tried to find her?”
“My father would never have wanted me to do that.”
“Your father isn’t here anymore, sweetie,” Sully points out.
“Yeah. I, um . . .” She clears her throat. “I used to think she might try to find me, but then, the older I got, the more I realized, you know . . . that she never bothered, because she’d have found me right where she left me.”
“So you still live in the same house?”
“My father did, until . . . he died there, in the house, last summer.”
Died, as if he just closed his eyes one day and went to sleep.
That isn’t how it happened. A fist clenches her heart.
“Have you sold it?”
She’s trying to sell the house, trying to keep strolling down the street as if nothing’s wrong, trying to keep breathing around the familiar strangling sensation in her chest. Trying, trying, trying to move on.
“I . . . the house . . . I listed it last winter.”
It’s going to be a hard sell, even in this hot market—and not just because it needs a heap of TLC. Clearly, the Realtor knew what happened there last July, and potential buyers might have heard as well.
She looks over her shoulder again as they cross to the opposite sidewalk and turn down Prospect Street.
Sully looks, too. “It’s okay. He isn’t there.”
“It . . . it isn’t just him.”
“What? What do you mean?”
Emerson closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. “Sometimes, I see someone who looks like her. I mean, who looks like I think she might look now. Like, last summer, when my father was first sick in the hospital, I’d see this nurse and I’d think . . .” She shakes her head. “This sounds insane.”
“You’d think it was your mother?”
“Yes. Like she was there, not just watching him—us—but watching over us. I got this vibe . . . but then if she saw that I’d spotted her, she’d always sort of duck away.”
Sully nods. “It happens.”
“What happens?”
“I was with the NYPD Missing Persons Squ
ad before I came here. It’s not uncommon for families to think they’ve caught a glimpse of a missing loved one from a distance—or to actually see them.”
“You mean . . .”
“I mean, sometimes, people who leave willingly do come back from time to time, for whatever reason—not to reconnect, but just to check in, sight unseen.”
“So you’re saying it really might have been her.”
“Maybe. Is that the only place it ever happened? In the hospital?”
“No, there were other times—a few times before that, over the years—and then a lot more often after, when I got back to Oakland. But I was grieving, and it was a tough time, so I figured . . . anyway, Roy said the same thing.”
“He said what?”
“When I told him I thought I’d seen my mother hanging around, he told me I was crazy. He said it was the grief, and I was seeing what I wanted to see. But lately, something changed with him, and . . . I started to feel like he was getting paranoid.”
“How so?”
“I’d catch him checking the rearview mirror when we were driving, or, you know, looking over his shoulder . . .”
“Like you’ve been doing here, today.”
“Yes. I thought maybe he’d seen her, too.” She looks up, into Sully’s eyes. “Do you think she’s been around all this time, keeping an eye on things? Especially now that . . . my dad is gone?”
“I don’t know. Do you want me to see what I can find out about her? I have access to certain resources that might help figure out where she is. Closure might be healthy, after all you’ve been through. What’s her name?”
“I’m not sure. I called her Didi.”
“So that’s a nickname you had for her? Or it’s a shortened version of her given name?”
“I have no idea. Maybe it’s her initials. D. D.”
“Your father never told you?”
“He didn’t like to talk about her.”
“That’s not surprising, but he must have had some documentation somewhere.”
“Not in the house. He got rid of everything years ago. I went through the whole house after he died”—this time, she manages not to stumble over the innocuous word—“and there wasn’t a trace of my mother.”
Bone White Page 15