Bone White

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  Colonomos needlessly checks for a pulse and shakes his head. “Must be someone staying here at the inn.”

  Spotting the aforementioned note on the tree trunk, Sully steps closer.

  A sheet of paper is stuck to the tree with a thumbtack. It’s small, about four by six, and lined, with ragged edges that indicate it was torn from a spiral notebook.

  She gapes at the crude lines, circles, and slashes drawn in a bold purple marker. A game, Trevor had said.

  “Suicide note?” Nick asks.

  “No. And I don’t think it’s a suicide, either.”

  “Why? What does it say?”

  “It says we’ve got our hands full, Lieutenant.”

  He’s beside her, looking over her shoulder at the paper. “What the hell is that?”

  “That,” Sully tells him, as a sick shiver runs through her, “is hangman.”

  The telltale nick of a blade on Jane Doe’s jawline isn’t the only disturbing evidence Savannah has discovered today.

  Though the girl couldn’t have been older than sixteen, she’s missing most of her teeth.

  In the days before toothbrushes, colonists who practiced oral hygiene—and not all of them did—would have used soft twigs to scrape away the plaque on their teeth and gums. Jane’s remaining teeth show no signs of decay that would cause a young person’s teeth to fall out, and Savannah can see faint scraping marks that indicate she took care of them.

  Calcium loss was the probable culprit.

  Given access to more of Jane’s remains, she’d likely find additional signs of calcium theft—osteoporosis in the vertebrae and pelvis. With just the skull, she’s left to theorize, but the evidence is strong that Jane’s story is even more tragic than being butchered to provide human flesh for starving neighbors.

  Strange—you can’t mourn a person you never met, let alone one who lived centuries ago. But when she imagines a young girl in the throes of starvation, being brutally murdered, her remains cooked and eaten—not just hers, but . . .

  During that era, significant tooth loss in such a young woman is a strong indicator of pregnancy. Nutrition was severely limited under the best of circumstances, particularly in a developing colony in the dead of winter. A fetus would have robbed its mother’s body of calcium anywhere it could be found.

  Wondering whether she’d already delivered a child upon her death, Savannah again refers to the list of settlers. Three babies had been born that summer and fall, but all were named and listed in tandem with their mothers, who were in their twenties and thirties. Sadly, the babies perished along with everyone else that winter—in one case, birth and death coming on the same day.

  Jane must have been pregnant when she died.

  Did she even realize?

  Did others?

  Could the pregnancy have had anything to do with her murder?

  Chilled by the thought, Savannah remembers that day last summer on the street. Bottle rockets, and Cher’s maternal instinct for the child in her womb.

  “I’m so sorry,” she whispers to Jane Doe. “For you, and for your unborn child.”

  A cockroach skitters from under the refrigerator and darts past the spot where Emerson kneels beside Ora, disappearing into a crack into the grimy shadows beneath the stove.

  “Ora? Can you hear me?”

  The old woman remains still, eyes closed, but she’s breathing.

  Her head is propped on a pillow Emerson had snatched from a velvet sofa in the next room. She strokes the wrinkled face with the dish towel she’d grabbed from a hook and dampened at the sink. It smells like a wet sock left for a week in a dark closet, but it was the nearest thing at hand, and she thought it might revive Miss Abrams.

  It did, for a few moments, but then she faded away again, and Emerson dialed 911.

  She listens to the sirens, unable to tell whether they’re heading here, or still part of the wailing entourage responding to the crisis unfolding down the block.

  The fat orange cat sits nearby, grooming its ears with a saliva-dampened paw, pausing to solemnly regard its stricken mistress, and then—with suspicion—Emerson.

  “It’s okay,” she tells the cat. “I’m trying to help her.”

  The cat stares at her, and then, satisfied, goes back to grooming.

  “Hang in there, Ora. Help is on the way.”

  How long has it been since her collapse?

  Five minutes? Ten?

  It happened moments after they heard those urgent screams outside.

  Before that, Ora had informed Emerson that she couldn’t have descended from Oswald Mundy.

  Heterochromia is passed from parent to child, and it appears in every generation.

  Is it true?

  Now isn’t the time to consider the implications, but Ora is stable, and help is on the way, and . . .

  She has to know. Now.

  She tosses aside the smelly towel and reaches into her pocket for her phone. Opening a browser window, she types in heterochromia and hits Enter.

  She doesn’t bother to scan the results, just clicks on the first link and searches for something that will prove that Ora Abrams’s senility has tainted her knowledge of genetics, if not history.

  She doesn’t find it.

  Ora was right.

  Blue-eyed Jerry Mundy could not have been her biological father.

  Sully spent a good chunk of her childhood at her grandparents’ apartment.

  If her grandfather wasn’t home, she and her grandmother sipped tea together and watched police dramas on television. When her grandfather was around, the TV stayed dark and silent. He didn’t consider those shows entertainment.

  A large-boned, flame-haired beat cop, he was known to everyone, including Sully, as Big Red. When Colly was busy in the kitchen, he taught Sully to play gin rummy and seven-card draw.

  “Not for money,” he’d assure his wife if she came buzzing around with criticism. “Just for bottle caps.”

  “Lord knows you’ve got enough of those,” Colly would huff, and Big Red would just sip from his ever-present bottle of beer and wink at his granddaughter.

  Per their secret agreement, every beer cap was worth a quarter. The more beer Big Red drank, the more Sully won. One profitable night, her grandmother heard her jangling away from the table and asked her to turn her pockets inside out.

  “Red!” Colly bellowed as quarters rolled across the worn linoleum, to the delight of her three cats. “It’s a sin to gamble with an eight-year-old!”

  That put an end to the card games, but not to Sully’s fun with her grandfather.

  The most interesting thing about Big Red—well, there were many interesting things, but Sully was particularly fascinated by his passion for language and literature. She’d never seen her own father, also a burly cop, pick up a book. Nor, for that matter, her mother, or Colly.

  Big Red’s appetite for books was so voracious that he’d read almanacs and romance novels and even some of Sully’s children’s books—any genre, as long as it wasn’t a detective novel. For him, crime fiction—like TV cop dramas—did not provide adequate escape from daily life.

  Big Red and Sully spent a lot of time sitting on the old chintz sofa in companionable silence, reading. Once in a while, they worked a crossword puzzle together, and they often played word games. Scrabble, Boggle . . .

  Hangman.

  That was the most fun, because all they needed was a pen and a pad of paper. There were no game pieces for the cats to dive-bomb and scatter. Hangman was portable. On nice days, they could play outside on the stoop, or even on the subway if Big Red had an errand to run.

  When Sully stayed overnight, she and Big Red had hangman tournaments into the wee hours. They never tired of trying to stump each other with unusual or long words for the other to guess. Once, Big Red turned the paper sideways and drew the gallows in the center, and across the top created a wide row of dashes, each representing a letter in his secret word.

  “Hey!” Sully counted the das
hes and accused him of cheating. “There aren’t any thirty-letter words in the dictionary!”

  “There’s one.”

  Pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism.

  Her little stick man was hanging from the gallows long before she figured it out, even though Big Red added eyes, nose, mouth, and a little hat to the stick man to allow her extra guesses.

  Now, she stares at a chilling version of the childhood game, affixed to a tree from which a real person hangs.

  Along the top is a partially solved word diagram:

  _ _ N _

  Beneath it is a crude depiction of a stick figure hanging from a gallows.

  Sully stares at it, half listening to Nick Colonomos’s cell phone conversation with Ron Calhoun, who’d left this morning for a golf trip to Lake George.

  Every suicide, no matter how obvious, is investigated as if it were a homicide. Thus, the chief must be informed, and the crime investigation team summoned. Sully doesn’t see them nearly as often here as she did the C.S.I. team in New York.

  After hanging a couple of large tarps to conceal the body from anyone out in the yard or inside the house, they began taking the measurements and photos that go along with an unattended death, careful not to disturb the evidence. Also on the scene are paramedics who’d arrived far too late to help the victim, whom they estimate to have been dead for ten to twelve hours. No longer needed here, they’ve lingered to talk baseball, barbecue sauce, and weekend weather with the forensics guys.

  All in a day’s work. No one seems concerned about the piece of paper tacked to the tree.

  Sully can’t seem to ignore the irrational, perhaps egotistical part of her brain that suspects the note was planted by a killer, perhaps for her own benefit.

  Who has she told about Big Red and the hangman tournaments?

  Barnes, of course. Barnes knows every detail of her life, far more than her ex-husband, who even if she’d told him probably wouldn’t remember her grandfather’s nickname, let alone their special games.

  She mentioned hangman at the Mundy home on New Year’s Eve, too. Rowan and Jake’s kids had a party, and she invited Sully and a few of the parents over to help supervise. Nancy Vandergraaf was there, as was her son Christian, whom Mick Mundy and their other friends call Van for short.

  The adults played Scrabble in an out-of-the-way corner. Though Sully drank her share of champagne that evening, she remembers talking about having played Scrabble with Big Red, and hangman, too.

  Was there a crazed killer at the party who might have overheard?

  That’s far-fetched. Sully can’t imagine that the high school and college kids were capable of anything more criminal than smuggling beer into the house—which they did. At that point, Jake Mundy confiscated car keys, Rowan headed upstairs to find bedding for a horde of unexpected overnighters, and Sully was left listening to a tipsy Nancy Vandergraaf badmouthing her ex-husband.

  Trevor was there, too—friends with Rowan’s oldest son, Braden.

  Now he and Nancy are both here.

  She tilts her head back, following the length of rope that climbs from the corpse’s neck into the leafy maple boughs. The other end is anchored to the garden hose spigot protruding from the house.

  “He’s not coming back.”

  She looks up, startled to see Nick standing beside her, phone in hand.

  “I’m sorry, what was that?”

  “I just hung up with Ron. Told him it looks like a suicide.”

  She nods, though not in complete agreement, looking again at the note.

  Did some twisted predator seize the game’s significance in her life? Is he trying to make a mockery of her precious childhood memories, by . . . by . . .

  By lynching a person to whom you have virtually no connection? Come on. That makes zero sense.

  This has nothing to do with you.

  But if it did, it wouldn’t be the first time she’d played a role in a murderous ritual.

  Eighteen months ago in Mundy’s Landing, a killer became fixated on her because she, like his victims, had red hair.

  “Detective?”

  She looks up at Nick.

  “You’re not convinced,” he says.

  “It’s just that note. I look at it, and I think—”

  “I know. I’m thinking the same thing.”

  “You are?”

  “There were notes under the Sleeping Beauties’ pillows.”

  She widens her eyes. She’d been focused on her own connections, but he’s right. The 1916 killer, and last summer’s copycat, had left the same cryptic handwritten message at every Murder House. Sleep safe till tomorrow—a line from a William Carlos Williams poem.

  “I mentioned it to Ron,” Nick goes on, “but he pointed out that a weird note at a death scene doesn’t mean homicide. This could just be a unique version of a suicide note. They aren’t always coherent, you know? You don’t kill yourself if you’re of sound mind.”

  She nods. She, too, has seen her share of missives left by people who have taken their own lives. Some are rambling accusations, some containing only pertinent information for survivors, and some consisting of only a few words—usually I’m sorry.

  “We need to look at the facts.”

  “Yes, but as a detective, you rely as much on instinct as on evidence.”

  “In this case, is your instinct—and mine, I’ll be honest—a knee-jerk reaction? See a note, assume murder. That doesn’t add up.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you know how rare a homicidal hanging is? Especially when you’re talking about a full-sized adult.” He gestures at the victim, engorged face frozen in horror, pupils dilated, black tongue protruding.

  Sully looks, too, and suppresses a shudder. She’s seen worse, but in most cases, she’d never known the victim alive.

  “It would be hard to hang someone this size,” she agrees, “but not impossible if you incapacitate the person first. And this is a partial hanging. You wouldn’t have to pull all that weight off the ground. All you’d have to do is get the ligature into place and tighten it until they asphyxiate.”

  “That’s true. The victim could have done it that way, too, though. Kneel and fall forward. I’ve seen it.”

  “So have I.”

  A pink rose of Sharon bloom lies in the dirt between the hedgerow and the foundation. The woody stem is jagged at the base, as if torn away. Several other twiggy blossoms dangle from the boughs above, broken but not severed.

  The ground around the spigot is thick with bark mulch. At a glance, it doesn’t appear to have been disturbed. But several gardening rakes and shovels are propped against the house a short distance away.

  “Someone could have smoothed over the mulch to cover evidence of a struggle,” she tells Nick.

  He looks at the ground, the snapped stem, the shrubs, and back at her.

  “And the victim could have bumped into those branches walking through here.” He indicates the forensics team. “They’ll be able to tell us more. But let’s go back to the note. I’ve never played hangman, so tell me about it. You said before it’s a four-letter word . . .”

  “Yes, and the third letter is N, see?” She points at it, not touching it though her hand is encased in the obligatory rubber glove. “The other three letters haven’t been guessed yet.”

  “I can think of a few four-letter words,” Nick mutters, “and none of them have an N in them.”

  “Maybe the next of kin know what it means.”

  “Right. You’re going to handle the notification, then?”

  “Yes, I’ll take care of it now.” Sully removes her gloves and shoves them into her pocket, taking a long last look at the dead man in the red shirt.

  Just hours after she saw him in Dunkin’ Donuts, Roy Nowak came to the Dapplebrook Inn and took his own life, or was murdered.

  What the hell happened in between?

  Savannah finds Ora’s number listed in her outgoing calls and hits redial, then listens to it ring . . . and
ring . . .

  Just as last night, it’s answered with an electronic click and the now-familiar measured enunciation of a recorded outgoing message.

  “Hello, you have reached the personal answering machine of Miss Ora Abrams at the Mundy’s Landing Historical Society. Do leave a message at the tone, and I shall return your call just as soon as I am able. Thank you. Good day.”

  Savannah can’t help but smile at the detailed instructions, wondering if this is, indeed, an actual answering machine and not voice mail. The lengthy beep certainly sounds like it.

  “Hello, Ms. Abrams, this is Savannah Ivers over at Hadley. I’m down in the lab with the cranial remains of your Jane Doe. I haven’t been able to identify her yet, but I have some . . . um, fairly shocking information to share with you. I’ll come by the historical society this evening to discuss it in person if you—”

  Interrupted by another loud beep, she frowns.

  Definitely an old-fashioned machine, the kind with limited storage. Her mother has one and it’s always cutting people off mid-sentence. She screens every call—Savannah suspects her own included. Whenever her mother doesn’t pick up, she pictures her sitting a few feet away from the phone, engrossed in a television program and ignoring the caller’s voice being broadcast through the room.

  Now she can’t leave Ora her number and tell her to call back and confirm this evening’s visit. Oh well. She’ll just try again later.

  After hanging up, she puts her gloves back on and places the skull into a cupboard for safekeeping. About to leave the list of settlers, too, she thinks better of it and tucks it into her bag. She takes out her keys, locks the cupboard, and locks the door to the lab behind her.

  Time to head home for lunch. Her stomach rumbles with hunger, still protesting the unfulfilled promise of Marrana’s pizza. She hasn’t had anything but coffee and wine in a good twenty-four hours.

  What was it like for poor Jane that bleak, barren winter? Had she, like the others, resorted to survivalist cannibalism in an effort to save herself and her unborn child?