Bone White

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  “What was your father’s name?”

  “Jerry Mundy.”

  “With a G or a J?”

  “J. It was Jerome.”

  “I’ll see what I can come up with using his name and hers and the address, if you can text it to me. And you said she left before your fourth birthday? When was that?”

  “I was born on New Year’s Day in 1980. When my father told me she was gone, I was sitting on the floor by the Christmas tree playing with my new Cabbage Patch doll. Remember those?”

  “Yes. Never had one, but my cousins wanted them and they were impossible to get—Christmas of ’83, right? My dad was a cop, and he was on the job at a toy store riot when a shipment came in.”

  “All I knew when I got mine was that Santa left a cute little doll on Christmas morning, and my mom left right after that. Kind of felt like he swapped them out.”

  “Well, someone must have loved you very much to get ahold of that doll for you that year,” Sully tells her. “I’m going to see what I can find out.”

  “I could never afford to pay—”

  “You wouldn’t be paying me. It’s a favor for a friend.”

  “But—you barely know me, and . . .” She shakes her head. “That kind of generosity—I’m just shocked that you’d do that for me.”

  “It’s not a big deal, truly. Sometimes I really miss this part of the job.”

  “I guess people don’t go missing very often around here.”

  A shadow crosses Sully’s face, and Emerson wishes she could take back the comment.

  Last summer. The copycat. The Sleeping Beauties.

  And before that, Brianna Armbruster.

  “Sorry. I forgot.”

  “I wish everyone around here could forget, too. Sometimes I think this town is scarred forever.”

  “Scars heal.”

  “Not all of them.” Sully touches her forehead, looking pensive again. Then she asks, “Let’s get back to Roy. How much do you know about his past?”

  “I know the basics—where he came from, where he went to school, that kind of thing.”

  “In other words, you know what he told you.”

  “Yes.”

  “I think it would be a good idea if I did some checking into his background, too. Just to make sure he doesn’t have a history of . . . trouble.”

  Sully’s cell phone rings, and she juggles the coffee and sandwiches into one hand as she pulls the phone from her pocket with an apology to Emerson.

  She follows that with a brusque “Sorry, I’ll be there in two minutes,” to the caller.

  Hanging up, she looks at Emerson. “I know I said I’d introduce you to Ora Abrams, but I’ve got a friend waiting for me, so . . .”

  “So you didn’t switch over to coffee after all?”

  “No, and I’m not eating both these sandwiches. But keep that to yourself, okay? Around here, people talk—and I’d rather they didn’t talk about me.”

  Emerson nods. That’s her private business.

  And my mother and Roy are mine.

  Now Sully is going to dig into the past and turn up God knows what.

  But you can handle anything life throws at you, just like your ancestors did. Jeremiah, James, Elizabeth . . .

  Sure. Just look how things turned out for them.

  In the ladies’ room down the hall from the lab, Savannah splashes cold water on her face and presses a wad of scratchy brown paper towels against her eyes.

  Unfortunately, it fails to erase the evidence that she’s been crying.

  Staring at her puffy-eyed self in the mirror above the sink, she’s grateful the building is quiet today. There’s no one around to ask her what’s wrong, or offer unsolicited advice or judgment upon hearing she’s upset over someone she hasn’t known even twenty-four hours.

  Maybe it isn’t even about her disappointment in him, but in herself. She ignored her better judgment, took a stupid risk, and almost believed, when he stuck around this morning, that he was interested in more than a physical connection.

  If only she’d followed the lab rules instead of bringing him to work this morning.

  If only she’d followed her own rules instead of bringing him back from the bar to her apartment.

  If only Ora Abrams hadn’t shown up with her skull until after Savannah had made a real connection with Braden, the complicated kind that takes more effort to dissolve than walking out the door.

  If only, if only . . .

  Oh well. Braden Mundy isn’t in the market for a ghoul friend.

  It’s one thing to mention that you’re studying forensic anthropology, and another to let him see you in action. Next time, she’ll keep dead people out of the relationship until a man has gotten to know her for who—as opposed to what—she is. And she sure as hell won’t sleep with him on the first date.

  She’s lucky she emerged relatively unscathed. The vast majority of one-night stands end as this one did. Yet with her chosen field comes innate awareness that some end in violence courtesy of sexual predators, or worse, disguised as Mr. Nice Guys.

  Back in the lab, greeted by Jane Doe’s murdered skull, she tells herself that she should never have let a stranger into her past, her lab, her head, her bed . . .

  Brows furrowed, she opens her laptop and scans her files for her human behavioral genetics course materials.

  It takes her a few minutes to find what she’s looking for—there, under the heading “Murder Gene.”

  According to her notes, a genetic mutation can impact neurotransmitters such as serotonin, causing an imbalance that can, in some people, lead to an inability to control violent behavior.

  There’s documented evidence, too, that psychopathic impulses might be inherited due to irregularities in areas of the cerebral cortex that generate empathy.

  She reads through a series of case studies about cold-blooded killers who were, according to the research Tomas cited, predisposed at birth to become violent criminals.

  Unsettled, she sets aside her laptop and looks again at the skull on the table.

  Yes, maybe she should be glad—at least until she discovers more about what happened to Jane—that Braden Mundy has left the building.

  Letter

  2nd February 1676

  Dearest Jeremiah,

  Much has happened in the six months since we bade farewell.

  I pray this letter finds you safely passing the winter at the home of the Widow Ames’s brother in New York. Perhaps by the time you have received these pages, the warm spring breezes will have brought a thaw, and you shall be preparing to make the return voyage with a fine wife in tow.

  If you have not found a bride in New York, I daresay Dorcas Dowling will be pleased. She still fancies you and mentions you often. She is becoming quite tiresome. Yet I am tolerant, and remain so very grateful to Master Dowling for allowing me to board with their family in your absence.

  Goody Dowling has been so very kind, as always. I shall never forget that she alone took pity upon our tormented sister Charity after Mother and Father were lost, when it seemed as though all others here would have preferred that we, too, mount the gallows.

  Though harsh snows and brutal cold have been pervasive this winter, I have scarcely noticed, warmed by the tender companionship of Mr. Ransom’s eldest son, Benjamin. He took it upon himself to escort me to Sunday services in your absence, and our friendship has blossomed. He has asked for my hand in marriage. I ask, in turn, for your blessing.

  With affection,

  Your sister,

  Priscilla Mundy

  Chapter 9

  Still enveloped in the fog that chased her home last night, Ora slept away the entire morning. It’s a good thing there’s no Mundypalooza this summer. Last year at this time, she’d have had to rise before the sun to greet the long line of visitors already stretching from the front door and down the sidewalk.

  Today, her cat leaped upon the bed at 5:45 as usual, purring and tapping Ora’s face with a fat orange pa
w. Time for breakfast. The message was clear; Ora’s head was not.

  “In a few minutes,” she crooned, and drifted back into a dream where Papa was waiting.

  He was so handsome, wearing his favorite camel hair sport coat, his hair neatly combed, healthy and smiling and young . . .

  Well, Papa was always young on the outside. It was his brain that aged, much faster than his body. Early onset Alzheimer’s disease, they call it these days. Back then, they called it other things.

  Senile . . .

  Bonkers . . .

  Losing your marbles . . .

  But dream Papa’s brilliant mind was intact, and he held her on his sturdy lap and told her wonderful stories about the olden days, and her mother.

  “You can’t possibly remember her,” Papa and Great-Aunt Etta used to say. “You were too little when she died.”

  For a long time, Ora was certain she could remember. But when she got older, she realized that sometimes, stories of the past can be so vivid that you feel as though you were really there.

  Just like dreams.

  Her cat, Briar Rose, woke her several more times this morning, no longer purring, green eyes fixed on Ora’s in an accusatory glare. It isn’t like Ora to ignore her, but she just couldn’t seem to make her old bones obey her brain’s—and, more surprisingly, her cat’s—commands to get moving.

  She wanted to see Papa again, and he was there.

  Briar Rose disappeared, and Ora woke on her own to find that it was growing late. Eight o’clock . . .

  Then nine . . . ten . . .

  Still the dream beckoned her. Only when she heard the steeple bells at Holy Angels clanging the noon hour did she regain consciousness. A few minutes later, the grandfather clock two stories below chimed twelve times.

  For years, she tweaked the pendulum in an effort to regulate the hour, but finally gave up. A clock that’s always a little behind the current time seems fitting for this house, and her life.

  At last, Ora has managed to rouse herself, yet she can’t seem to function properly. It’s as if someone came in the night to swaddle her brain, and body, too, in a thick blanket.

  Maybe she has a bit of a hangover. In the winter months, she occasionally enjoys a nip of brandy to warm her before bed. Perhaps she got the season mixed up last evening. It happens from time to time. Though she doesn’t recall a nightcap . . .

  But then, she doesn’t remember driving home, either.

  Nor does she remember opening the secret drawer beneath her bookshelf to remove several of Aunt Etta’s precious artifacts, but there they are, scattered about the room.

  Heading into the bathroom, she tells herself that she’ll put it all away just as soon as she’s washed and dressed.

  Emerging a short time later, still trying not to fret about the holes in her memory, she descends the first flight from her private quarters. As always, she stops for a rest on the maroon velvet bench in the wide second-floor hall. Today, especially weary, she lingers a little longer than usual, thinking about Papa.

  Not the virile, vibrant man she’d seen in her dreams. Rather, the man as he’d been when she last saw him alive. A man whose thick head of hair rose above his forehead like a cockatoo’s crest; a man who strolled downtown one snowy morning wearing the camel hair sport coat with only boxer shorts and a pair of antique spats over bare feet.

  That version of her father argued with friends who weren’t really there, and seemed not to see or hear those who were. He conjured senseless missions that entailed endlessly wandering the house, and if he could escape, the neighborhood as well. He occasionally forgot Ora’s name, and eventually his own.

  You’ve never forgotten your name, Ora assures herself. And you don’t imagine things. Just because no one else has seen the intruders around the mansion . . .

  Well, of course they’re really there.

  Last summer’s traumatic violation remains so vivid that she probably shouldn’t worry so much about losing her memory, and her mind. Then again, she sometimes wonders if her close call with the copycat killer caused her problems in the first place.

  Years ago, the first Dr. Duncan theorized that Papa’s car accident triggered his illness.

  “Most times, dementia comes on so gradually that even the patient isn’t aware anything is amiss,” he told Ora one day in his office, behind closed doors as Papa conversed with Rip Van Winkle in the empty examination room next door. “But occasionally, we see a precipitating factor.”

  Tormented by the other driver’s violent death, Papa had been wheelchair bound with both legs in casts for the duration of that winter and most of the spring. He’d intended to use the convalescence for reading, researching, and writing, but instead sat staring out the window at the bleak landscape, brooding as his true self slipped away and an erratic stranger crept into his broken body.

  Unsettled, Ora positions her cane and heaves herself off the velvet bench to continue her journey to the kitchen.

  There, she opens a small can of Fancy Feast Chicken Hearts & Liver and spoons it onto a bone china saucer sprigged with purple pansies. “Rosie? I know you’re hungry! Rosie?”

  Briar Rose usually comes running, regardless of her mood, when she hears the top pop from a can of food. Today, she’s holding a grudge.

  “I don’t blame you, my dear,” Ora warbles. “My behavior was inexcusable.”

  She leaves the saucer on the counter, not wanting to put it on the floor until the kitty presents herself. Otherwise, the food will draw mice or ants, both of which have recently made their presence known in the kitchen.

  In summers past, the constant parade of Mundypalooza visitors inspired Ora to be meticulous about keeping the place clean, and she always had plenty of volunteers to help. Now that she’s alone so much of the time, so weary and forgetful, it’s all she can do to sponge spills and crumbs from the counter.

  She isn’t hungry, but she supposes she must eat, so she opens the refrigerator to find the tuna salad left over from yesterday’s lunch. Pushing things around as she looks for the familiar yellow Tupperware container, she counts . . . three, four, five half-full containers of orange juice!

  How strange.

  Even stranger, she recalls buying milk for her coffee the other day, but she doesn’t see it. The lemons she keeps for her tea are also missing, although she does see a lime in the crisper.

  Upon closer examination, she realizes that it is, indeed, a lemon gone green with mold.

  Nose wrinkled in distaste, she’s about to take it out and throw it away when she spies the tuna. Leaving the lemon for later, she closes the fridge, sets the container on the counter, and opens the breadbox. How curious. No bread, but there’s a carton of milk lying on its side.

  “If I didn’t know better,” she tells the still invisible Briar Rose, “I’d think you were playing tricks on me.”

  Does she know better?

  Of course. A cat can’t do such a thing.

  Perhaps one of the volunteers . . .

  But there are no volunteers this summer. Mundypalooza is history.

  “Everything is history,” Papa loved to say. “Even the future, if you wait long enough.”

  Papa.

  With an uneasy twinge, Ora picks up the carton. It’s warm, and the expiration date is a few weeks old.

  Someone is playing tricks on her. It isn’t Briar Rose. And it isn’t a ghost. Ora doesn’t believe in such things, even living here.

  She carries the milk over to the trash can in the corner and wedges it in, pushing down on the lid to keep it there. One of these days, she’ll need to take the garbage outside to the Dumpster. She hasn’t done that in quite some time. Every so often, she thinks it should be starting to stink, but so far, she hasn’t smelled a thing.

  Returning to the task at hand, she decides that one doesn’t need bread in order to make a tuna sandwich. One can use crackers.

  But when she takes the box of saltines from the cupboard, a confetti of shredded cardboard, crack
er dust, and mouse droppings rains onto the countertop. Oh dear. They’ve gnawed the bottom corner from the box.

  It’s a shame Briar Rose hasn’t been much of a mouser since Ora invited her into the house a few years back.

  Before that, she belonged to Augusta Purcell, who lived out her life in the Murder House over at 46 Bridge Street. The proverbial crazy old cat lady, Augusta collected pets and strays, frustrating the neighbors as well as the local rescue shelter, which doesn’t advocate letting cats roam to dine from garbage cans and the rodent population.

  Ora, too, found the band of felines a nuisance, with one exception.

  Briar Rose, she’s convinced, is directly descended from Marmalade, the orange kitten Augusta had owned as a child in 1916. Present in the house when the Sleeping Beauty’s corpse was discovered, Marmalade is mentioned in historic news accounts about the case.

  Ora always provided her with celebrity treatment, showering her with doorstop kibble. In return, Rosie would bestow an occasional rodent carcass on the back porch mat.

  When Ora heard that Augusta had passed on, she added Briar Rose to her private collection, so to speak, in much the same way Aunt Etta always helped herself to important artifacts.

  Like her late great-aunt, she doesn’t feel guilty about it. Rosie is much better off here than she was on Augusta’s watch. It’s just a pity that regular meals served on fine china have destroyed her appetite for rodents.

  “Rosie, you aren’t earning your keep! I might as well put mousetraps on my shopping list.”

  A bleat of sound reverberates through the house, but it isn’t the indignant meow Ora anticipated.

  It takes her a moment to recognize the doorbell.

  She always unlocks the front entrance first thing in the morning so that museum visitors can walk right in. Discombobulated when she finally made it downstairs today, she forgot all about it.

  “I’m coming! Don’t go away!” Grabbing her walking stick, she hurries to the foyer eager to greet her visitor—or preferably, visitors. It’s been much too quiet around here.