Bone White

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  How lovely it would be to see a tour van parked at the curb, or perhaps a yellow bus filled with children, although . . .

  Is school out for summer?

  She seems to have lost track of the seasons again, but no matter. It will be splendid to have the museum filled with people, just like old times.

  Reaching to turn the burnished bronze lock, she’s startled to see Great-Aunt Etta’s hand attached to her own arm. Arthritic, blue-veined, and liver-spotted, it’s familiar: the very hand Ora clasped through the long days and nights back in 1956, before her aunt drew her last breath.

  Oh my. Has she become delusional?

  Of course not. Her arm hasn’t gone and sprouted Aunt Etta’s hand. She herself is in her eighties now, so that must be her own appendage, withered with age.

  That deduction brings only momentary comfort.

  Who, she wonders, will hold this hand when it’s Ora’s turn to depart this world?

  Such morbid thoughts for someone who has plenty of living left to do!

  She stretches on a smile and throws open the door, prepared to greet a traveling family, a group of boisterous children . . .

  Alas, a lone woman stands on the doorstep. She’s brunette, tall and slender, casually dressed and wearing sunglasses.

  “Yes? May I help you?”

  “Yes, I . . .” The woman looks from Ora to the museum hours posted on the door to her wristwatch. “Sorry, I thought you would be . . . are you . . . is this . . .”

  “This is the Mundy’s Landing Historical Society, and I’m Miss Aurora Abrams.” Yes. She is the curator, and this is her home, and it’s her duty to share its treasures with the public.

  “Are you open?”

  “We are indeed. Do come in.”

  Do come in . . .

  She may not have sprouted Great-Aunt Etta’s body parts, but she sounds just like her.

  Perhaps she always has. When you’re raised by an elderly spinster—particularly one who embraced a bygone era as she did—you aren’t always hip to the latest slang. Or whatever it is that kids are saying these days, or said then. She wouldn’t have known.

  They teased Ora, back in her school days. They laughed at the way she talked, the way she wore her hair, even the way she dressed. All the girls wore dresses and skirts back then, but Ora’s were somehow wrong—too frilly, too short when they should have been long, too long when they should have been short. She didn’t have dungarees and gym shoes for play. She couldn’t wear lipstick. She couldn’t listen to music, other than Papa’s ragtime piano records. Great-Aunt Etta had countless rules, and Ora followed them all. No wonder she spent so much time lost in books about the past. She was living in it.

  And you loved it, she reminds herself, ushering her visitor into the hall. You still do.

  Funny. She spent so many years longing to go back in time, yearning to relive days she’d never lived. Great-Aunt Etta and Papa shared memories so vivid she felt as though they were hers, as well.

  “Why did I have to be born in modern times?” she once asked Papa, who laughed heartily.

  “I used to ask Aunt Etta the same question.”

  “But you weren’t!”

  “I thought I was. One day, you’ll have a child who thinks you were born in the good old days.”

  And so she was. Only there is no child. No family. No one left but Ora, all alone in a big empty house that doesn’t belong to her.

  Most days, she feels as at home in the old Conroy-Fitch mansion as she does in her own body. But when she finds herself missing her childhood and family or fearing what her future might hold, familiarity takes flight. Just as she occasionally seems to be inhabiting someone else’s body, she sometimes feels as though she’s been buried alive in a stranger’s mausoleum.

  A lovely mausoleum of carved woodwork and marble, guarded by a massive grandfather clock. She stares at it across the foyer’s mosaic tiled floor, watching the pendulum sway in time with her heartbeat, ticking away the moments until . . .

  “This is beautiful.”

  Hearing a voice behind her, she whirls around to see a woman standing there.

  Again, she reminds herself that there are no such things as ghosts. Then who is the woman?

  Maybe she isn’t really here. Maybe Ora swiveled too quickly, and it made her dizzy, and . . . and . . .

  But why would she have swiveled in the first place, unless she’d heard a voice?

  For a terrible moment, she considers Papa and Rip Van Winkle.

  Then she notes that the person standing before her certainly seems real. An imaginary person wouldn’t waste time quietly looking around the room the way this woman is. Papa’s delusions behaved in a much more interesting, and often disruptive, manner, rousing him into animated conversation.

  This isn’t like that. This almost seems like . . .

  Her thoughts whirl until—Yes! Yes, of course!—the truth is ejected.

  She’s a visitor. She rang the bell. You invited her in.

  “I love the way that window is painting a rainbow on the stairway.” The woman gestures at the staircase, an ornate half spiral that rises to a wide second-floor balcony facing an exquisite crystal chandelier.

  “A rainbow,” Ora echoes, following her gaze to the hexagonal stained glass pane that casts a fluid, vibrant spectrum across the well-worn oak landing.

  “Do you live here, Ms. Abrams?”

  The question seems to come from miles away. Disoriented, still dizzy, Ora repositions her walking stick for better support.

  It doesn’t seem to help. Perhaps the room really is listing. Old houses settle. This one might be settling right now, all at once.

  The visitor seems oblivious, though, asking, “Ms. Abrams? Do you live here?”

  She clears her throat. “I . . . I . . .”

  “Oh my goodness, are you all right?” The woman clasps Ora’s upper arms in both her hands. “You look like you’re going to pass out.”

  Ora wants to tell her not to be ridiculous. She’s never been the sort of woman who faints.

  “We come from much sturdier stock,” Great-Aunt Etta would say. “We can take care of ourselves, and each other, and everyone else.”

  “Ms. Abrams?”

  No. Miss.

  When Ora opens her mouth to correct her, the right word comes out of it, but it’s unexpectedly framed by two others.

  “I . . . miss . . . him.”

  The woman stares at her. “Who? Who do you miss?”

  Papa.

  Overcome with longing, Ora cannot speak. Tears trickle down her cheeks.

  It’s been so long since she’s seen him—the way he used to be, erudite, clever, logical . . .

  The way he was in her dream this morning.

  Oh, I want to go back to sleep.

  I want to sleep and sleep, and never wake up. I want to . . .

  The harsh word jangles into her brain like a cartoon alarm clock.

  She does not want to die. Goodness, no. She has far too many things left to do, another mystery to solve . . .

  For years, she’s been leading museum tours through the colonial exhibit, telling visitors about the starving first settlers, the survival cannibalism, the execution. She shows them the cast-iron pot where James and Elizabeth Mundy were presumed to have cooked their stews of human flesh, points out the faded trial transcripts under glass, and discusses various relics archaeologists unearthed on the settlement site: buttons and jewelry, tools, coins, pottery.

  Inevitably, when Ora asks for questions at the end of a tour, someone asks whether the Mundys really did commit the crimes for which they were convicted.

  “Did they kill the other settlers so that they could eat them?” People—especially children, who are fascinated with blood and gore—want to know. “Or did they just eat the ones who had already died?”

  Ora always responds with a well-rehearsed shrug and line: “The truth has been lost in the mists of time.”

  The dramatic statement seems
to satisfy her visitors.

  As for Ora herself . . .

  “I need to call her right away!” she blurts.

  “Call whom?” her visitor asks, looking startled.

  “Savannah Ivers.”

  “Is she a friend of yours?”

  “She has my skull.”

  “Your . . . skull?”

  “Yes, and she may have been trying to reach me while I was asleep.”

  The visitor digests this, then suggests, “Why don’t you lie down for a minute? Is there a couch in the next room where you can—”

  “No!”

  “No couch?”

  “There is, but I don’t want to lie down.” Ora moves toward the kitchen, trailed by the woman. “I want to eat. I was just making myself some breakfast.”

  “Breakfast? Have you not eaten yet today?”

  “No. I was so tired from the drive last night that I slept most of the day away.”

  They’ve reached the swinging door marked Private. Ora pushes it open a crack, hoping she left it fit for company, and is startled to see it in disarray.

  “Oh dear,” she says, stepping around a stained, sodden wad of paper towels on the floor. “The place has been ransacked again.”

  Cabinet doors are open. Dirty dishes overflow from the sink onto the counter. The garbage she thought she’d left tidily in the can seems to have fallen out onto the linoleum, along with a couple of potatoes that must have rolled off the counter.

  She bends to retrieve them. They’re spongy, nubby with sprouted eyes, skin tinted green in some spots, growing blackish white mold in others.

  No reason to waste perfectly good food, Aunt Etta would say. Just peel it all away, and the potatoes will be good as new.

  Setting them on the counter, Ora spies the pretty white china plate sprigged with purple flowers. Ah, her lunch. It doesn’t look very appetizing, but she’s famished.

  Remembering her manners, she asks her guest, “Would you like some tuna salad? There’s enough for both of us if you don’t have a big appetite.”

  “No, thank you.” Her tone is polite, but her eyes are on Ora like searchlights, one gray, the other blue. How very unusual. She reminds Ora of someone.

  “Um . . . did you say that’s tuna salad?”

  Ora nods, browsing the past, sorting through the faces she used to know. They far outnumber the ones she knows now, even if you don’t count the historical figures who mingle with very real acquaintances in her mind’s eye.

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “Yes, I do love tuna fish. I was going to make a sandwich, but someone has stolen the bread, and . . . I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name, dear.”

  “I don’t think I told you. It’s Emerson.”

  “Lovely to meet you.” She extends a hand. “I am Miss Ora Abrams.”

  “Yes, I . . . I know.”

  Ora smiles, pleased. Back in her Mundypalooza days, she was often interviewed by the press, and recognized by strangers. How nice to know that her stellar reputation is intact even now that the hullabaloo has died away.

  “Did you say someone stole your bread, Miss Abrams?”

  “I’m afraid so. Ever since the break-in last summer . . .” She shudders, remembering the frightful night she awakened to glass shattering. “Well, that was very different. But I remain on the lookout for criminal activity. And now, look. Look at my kitchen.”

  “Have you called the police?”

  “Oh yes. I call all the time.”

  “And what do they do?”

  “Investigate,” she says, spotting something crawling underfoot.

  She lifts her black oxford to stomp on it with a satisfying crunch, and explains, “Those sugar ants are everywhere at this time of year, and they’re enormous, and so fast. Most mornings I’m up before the sun, and you should see them try to get away when I turn on the kitchen light.”

  Her visitor makes a strange sound. “Are you feeling faint, Miss—or is it Mrs. Emerson?”

  “Emerson is my first name. My last name is Mundy.”

  Mundy!

  The word jolts Ora like a defibrillator zap. No wonder she seemed so familiar. Ora has never met her, but she’s seen those eyes many times before, in a manner of speaking.

  She sets aside the plate of tuna salad, her appetite vanishing like fleet-footed insects into a shadowy crevice. “I should have known you were a Mundy the moment I saw you. You look just like Artie.”

  “Like who?”

  “Artie—his full name was Arthur H. Mundy, of course, same as his father. Heterochromia runs very prominently through every generation of your family, going all the way back to your ancestor Elizabeth Mundy. She’s the one who was executed here back in—”

  “Sixteen sixty-six. I didn’t realize that her eyes . . .”

  “One blue. One gray.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “It’s well documented. If you read the trial transcripts—they’re on exhibit upstairs—you’ll see that it was used as evidence against her. Back in Puritan times, any physical aberration was considered a sign of mental imbalance or even worse, wickedness.”

  Now she sounds more like Papa than Aunt Etta. Papa, delivering a brilliant lecture back in the days before the accident.

  Warming to her subject, she goes on, “In 1665, the very year Elizabeth and her family sailed away from England, an English doctor named Thomas Jameson published a beauty manual called ‘Artificial Embellishments,’ and made specific reference to ‘a crooked body.’ You can imagine that Elizabeth’s unconventional appearance didn’t help matters when she was accused of murder.”

  “That’s terrifying—an innocent person condemned to death for what she looked like.”

  Ora shrugs. “Well, in Elizabeth’s case, it wasn’t just for that. But death sentences were doled out for plenty of questionable reasons during that era. The Salem witch trials took place not long after your ancestors were executed.”

  “Twenty-seven years after.”

  “Yes, it was . . . 1693.” She nods, pleased with her guest and with herself now that the world—along with Ora’s own memory and math skills—seems sharp once more. “Very impressive. Not everyone knows that fact off the top of her head.”

  “I’m a history teacher.”

  “A history teacher and a Mundy?”

  “Yes, and I was hoping you could tell me about my family.”

  “Do sit down. I’ll make us a cup of tea. What is that you’d like to know?”

  “Everything.”

  Ora beams. “You’ve come to the right place.”

  Seated across her small kitchen table from Barnes, Sully watches him finish the last bite of the ham and cheese sandwich.

  She’d been surprised when he texted her at Valley Roasters to ask when she’d be home.

  Everything OK? she wrote back, and he responded that he was just hungry.

  For all he knew, he was interrupting her on a date.

  A part of her wanted to believe that was the point. Romantic sabotage is far more appealing a prospect than the always self-sufficient Barnes holed up in her apartment like a famished, hunted fugitive.

  Fresh from her conversation with Emerson, Sully was already wary when she came through the door. She found Barnes, back against the wall, hand on his gun, poised for a sneak attack.

  “Only me,” she said breezily. “Who were you expecting?”

  “Only you.”

  Yeah, sure. She let it go then.

  Now she watches Barnes sip the coffee and make a face.

  “Not good?” she asks in surprise. Last summer, he said the brew at Valley Roasters was acceptable—the highest compliment he’d offer anything in Mundy’s Landing.

  “Not hot. But it’s okay.” He leans back and chews the plastic stirrer, legs crossed under the table, bare foot tapping the air.

  “When did you start smoking again?”

  “Who says I’m smoking again?”

  “Either you’re be
ing a decent houseguest and not lighting up in here because you know I hate it, or you’re out of cigarettes.”

  “What are you, some kind of detective?”

  “Not a very good one, because I don’t have a clue what the hell’s going on with you.”

  No comment.

  Through the open screen, she can hear the squeals of children playing in a backyard pool.

  “Marco Polo,” she says. “They never get sick of it.”

  “What?”

  “The game.”

  “Game?”

  “You’re a million miles away. Last summer, we heard kids playing Marco Polo all day, every day, in the pool. Remember?”

  He shrugs.

  Sully leans forward, rests her chin on her clasped hands, and levels a look at him. “What’s going on? You have to tell me. Seriously.”

  A pause, and then, “I did something stupid.”

  She sighs. “Oh, Barnes. Do you know how many great comebacks I have for that? It kills me to waste this opportunity. Kills me. But if we’re playing this straight . . . are we playing this straight?”

  He nods.

  “Bummer. What stupid thing did you do? And I swear if this involves a woman . . .”

  Another pause. “It doesn’t.”

  “Good.”

  Still, he hesitates, drinking more coffee, avoiding eye contact. Not his style.

  Outside the window, a loud splash and delighted laughter.

  “Marco!”

  A children’s chorus of “Polo.”

  More splashing, more laughter.

  Oh, to be a kid again. But she’d settle for a few years ago, before Mundy’s Landing and Manik Bhandari and burnout, when she was still fulfilled by New York and being on the job with Barnes, and Barnes was his old self.

  “You’ve got to tell me,” she says. “Just tear off the damned bandage. It’s the only way.”

  He takes a deep breath and looks at her like a bungee jumper double-checking the harness before leaping from a precipice.

  “It happened a long time ago. Before we met.”

  “So it was . . . when did we meet? Ninety-eight?”

  “Ninety-nine. But this happened back in ’87. I was right out of the academy, working a case with Stef.”

  Now retired, Frank DeStefano was Barnes’s first partner, a barrel-chested old-timer. “Before or after he saved your life?”