The settlers really were, as Braden pointed out, dropping like flies as the winter wore on. From mid-January into early February, people were dying daily.
Dying . . . and being butchered and eaten.
Lost in thought about Jane’s fate, she walks down the empty ground-level hallway past darkened offices, storage rooms, and labs. Pushing through the door to the parking lot, she blinks into the midday sun, looking for her car.
Unable to find it in the glare, she feels around in her bag for her prescription sunglasses and swaps them with her regular glasses.
Somehow, she still doesn’t see her car among the few that are parked here.
For a wild moment, she imagines that it’s been stolen.
Then she remembers—it’s back in the parking lot behind her apartment. She’d been so absorbed by Jane’s plight that she’d forgotten Braden had driven her over here this morning, and she’d assumed they’d leave together.
Now what? During the school year, buses make a regular loop from campus to surrounding shopping centers and student housing complexes. They don’t run in summer, and as she told Mick Mundy, there are no cabs.
Terrific.
Does Braden even realize she’s stranded here?
Will he be in touch when he does?
He’ll probably just assume she has a way to get home on her own.
She might as well go grab some lunch before she begins the long, lonely walk home in the heat.
Hearing sirens yowling through the streets of Mundy’s Landing on this warm, sunlit afternoon, the hangman experiences a twinge of regret.
Shame it had to be this way. Such a waste of time, and energy, and, oh yes, a life . . . if you’re the kind of person who believes that every human life has value.
Unconvinced of that, the hangman is nonetheless uneasy recalling the mighty struggle that unfolded in the shadows beneath the historic maple.
Not everyone goes to his or her death in a resigned and dignified manner, as James and Eliza Mundy did. Then again, they weren’t caught off guard. They knew it was coming. No one had to wrestle with them in an effort to inject a drug meant to make it all easier, on them and on their executioner.
Last night, the needle found its mark, dispensing medication to render the victim unconscious.
The hangman wasted no time fixing the noose and tightening it. Within a few minutes, the deed was done.
Now, it seems, the deed has been discovered.
Hearing the commotion, the residents of The Heights must suspect that this matter is far more serious than another fender bender at the corner of Fulton and Prospect, a false alarm at the savings and loan, underage kids drinking in the gazebo . . .
Surely they’re flashing back to last summer’s tragic events, and those of the winter before. Surely they’ve witnessed enough drama over the past eighteen months to sense that another catastrophic event is unfolding.
How much more heartache, they must wonder, can the village endure?
They must believe that Mundy’s Landing has seen far more than its share of violence, as last summer’s Tribune editorial claimed.
How easily, and conveniently, they’ve forgotten that their little village wasn’t founded in peace and harmony. That its founding fathers literally consumed each other, sipped human blood, ripped flesh from bone. And then, when the long nightmare was over—should have been over—three children were forced to witness their parents’ public murder.
Does it matter, in the end, whether justice was served?
Vengeance begets vengeance just as violence begets violence.
This, then, is their legacy.
Theirs, and mine.
Letter
Oswald Mundy
Boarder
162 Academy Street
Poughkeepsie, New York
August 9, 1894
Dear Oswald,
Enclosed please find the sum of one thousand dollars.
It is not a loan, but a gift.
I wish you all the best, and I stand firm in my request that you not return to my home, or to Mundy’s Landing.
Sincerely,
Horace J. Mundy
68 Prospect Street
Mundy’s Landing, New York
Chapter 11
Emerging from the hedgerow horror to the Dapplebrook’s now cordoned-off front yard, Sully sees that the crowd on the street has grown. There’s another squad car now, and an ambulance, both parked with red dome lights twirling in silence.
Roy’s pickup truck is conspicuously missing. She looked for it parked on the driveway with the guests’ cars and it wasn’t there. Nor is it on the street. A quick phone call to the Holiday Inn on Colonial Highway revealed that it isn’t in the parking lot there, either.
So where’s the truck, and how did he get here?
A scenario pops into her head—Roy parks blocks away, creeps over in the dead of night to see if he can find Emerson, and . . .
Either he didn’t find her, or he did, and saw something that upset him enough to take his own life.
Or . . .
Or Emerson Mundy lied.
She’s the last person Sully wants to suspect. But emotions aside, it makes sense. The vast majority of homicide victims are killed by someone they knew. Roy Nowak was, presumably, a stranger in town—to everyone but his fiancé.
He’d driven thousands of miles to find her even though she’d asked him to stay away. He had scratches all over his arms. Where did they come from?
And why hadn’t Emerson wanted him here?
Because something had happened between them—something physical—before she left? She’d said he isn’t violent, yet there was no mistaking the fear in her eyes.
Back up. Look at it from a different angle. Roy as victim, Emerson as suspect.
All right. Say she’s lying. Is it possible that she’s traveling with another man?
She ate alone last night, and didn’t mention a companion this morning, when Sully told her about Roy. There was no mistaking the haunted vulnerability in her eyes, the way she looked over her shoulder as they walked back from the café . . .
Not just for Roy.
What if he wasn’t the only one watching Emerson? What if he’d crossed paths here with someone who had a vested interest in keeping her safe?
I have to talk to her, right away.
Officer Johansen has sequestered the witnesses on the porch of the inn, well away from curious onlookers now lining the sidewalk. Sully checks to see if Emerson is among them. There’s no sign of her, but she was going to stop at the historical society to visit with Ora.
Sully ducks under the police tape, heading in that direction.
“Hey, Sully!” a neighbor calls from the sidewalk.
“What’s going on?” someone shouts. “Is it another Sleeping Beauty?”
She ignores the questions, spotting another ambulance parked a few doors down.
“Hey, guys, we’ve got a DOA and we’re waiting for the ME,” she calls to the paramedics positioning a stretcher. “You don’t have to—”
Then she sees that the stretcher isn’t intended for the victim at the inn. It’s already occupied by someone whose identity is made obvious by the tuft of white hair against the sheet.
Ora Abrams.
For an illogical instant, Sully imagines that the old woman, too, was found in a noose, the handiwork of an evil hangman who’d worked his way along the block in the dead of night.
What if it was—
Speak—think—of the devil.
Emerson Mundy emerges from the mansion, accompanied by a third medic. Visibly shaken by whatever is going on with Ora, she does a startled double take at the scene in front of the inn—crime team, squad cars, a crowd . . .
She looks around wildly before she spots Sully. There it is again—the same vulnerability, fear, wariness. She’s looking for Roy, or for . . .
“What’s going on?” she calls as Sully hurries toward her.
“I was about t
o ask you the same thing. What happened to Ora?”
“I was visiting with her, and when she heard someone screaming, she fainted.”
“Is she all right?”
“She hit her head.” A medic slams the ambulance doors closed after the stretcher. “Still out cold. What the hell is going on over there? I heard—”
“Investigating an incident on the property,” Sully cuts him off. “It’s under control.”
“Can you lock up here, Sully?”
“I looked around for her keys,” Emerson tells her, “But I couldn’t find them.”
“Know anyone who might have a set?” the medic asks.
“Rowan Mundy. I’ll call her. Just go. Take good care of Miss Abrams.”
She and Emerson stand in silence, watching the ambulance depart with a fresh wail of sirens.
Then Emerson turns to Sully. “What happened at the inn? What kind of incident? Those screams . . . it sounded like Nancy. Was it?”
“Why don’t we go inside?” Sully leads her past a few unkempt perennials poking from an untilled bed with all the cheer of leftover funeral flowers.
The interior is dim. Last winter, Sully placed timer devices on several first- and second-floor lamps—a simple and effective burglar buster, she told Ora. But the lights won’t come on until this evening, so she flips an overhead switch.
“Did something happen to Nancy?” Emerson asks as Sully closes the door behind them.
“Not Nancy.”
“Then who?”
Sully hesitates.
Every house in The Heights seems to have a ticking grandfather clock presiding over the entry. She’s always found them elegant. This one strikes her as ominous, the atmosphere so suffocating that she fights the urge to throw open the tall windows. Frightened of prowlers, Ora refuses to sacrifice her perceived safety for fresh air, even on the warmest summer days.
“You might want to sit down, Emerson.”
“I’m not eighty years old. I’m not going to faint, I promise. Whatever it is . . .”
Sully gestures at a bench.
Glancing at it, then back at her, Emerson is stoic. “How bad can it be? I barely know anyone here, and I’ve already lost my dad, unless . . .”
Wide-eyed, as if something awful has just occurred to her, she sinks onto the bench. “Is it about my mother? Did you already find her? Is she—”
“It’s not your mother. It’s Roy.”
“Roy?”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“When I left California. Why?”
“You said he was calling and texting. When did you last hear from him?”
“Last night. He texted, but I didn’t—”
“Can I see, please?”
Shaken, Emerson pulls her phone from her pocket and hands it over to Sully, who scans the one-sided list of messages.
RU in NY yet?
Where RU?
Hope UR OK?
The final one arrived just after eleven o’clock last night.
“Did he come looking for me? Did he hurt Nancy?”
“No, Nancy is okay. But she found him. I’m so sorry to tell you this, but Roy died.”
“What?”
Breaking tragic news is the worst part of her job. No matter how many times you do it, you can’t completely detach. At least, she can’t.
She does compartmentalize, of course. You have to. You can’t survive this job if you absorb the agony of every life that shatters before your eyes. But she isn’t a robot. She empathizes with the people for whom her presence, and her words, will forever after mark a grim turning point, even when the loss isn’t a complete shock.
When a loved one has gone missing, people are often anticipating bad news, and some almost seem to welcome acknowledgment of what they’ve long suspected.
Even so, there’s no easy way to accept confirmation of a death, any more than there’s an easy way to deliver it.
In a case like Emerson’s, when the deceased has been estranged, or the relationship complicated for whatever reason, you might expect the person to react with less raw emotion, or even with an underlying measure of relief. But in Sully’s experience, most broken relationships are accompanied by a subconscious need for resolution. Just . . .
Not this kind of resolution.
Emerson buries her head in her hands, quietly crying.
Sully wants to put a comforting arm around her shoulder, but if Roy didn’t commit suicide, then Emerson isn’t just the bereaved. She’s a suspect.
Sully steps into the small powder room under the stairs to look for tissues. There are none, and an empty cardboard tube sits on the toilet paper roller.
Her phone stirs her pocket with another text.
Barnes again.
Where RU?
Ah, irony. It’s identical to one of the texts Roy sent Emerson. Sully, too, opts to ignore it—for now, anyway. She puts away her phone and moves on toward the kitchen in search of a napkin or paper towel.
It’s been a while since she ventured past the door marked Private. When Ora calls her to the house, it’s usually because she believes someone is trying to steal the personal belongings kept in her third-floor quarters. Sully leaves her in her room and goes through the motions of a thorough search below, but there’s no need to comb the house from top to bottom. Ora takes her at her word, and has peace of mind to sleep through another night.
Today, the moment she sets foot into the kitchen, the smell hits her, along with a wave of guilt. How long, she wonders as she stops short and looks around in dismay, has Ora been living this way?
Pressing her nose and mouth against her shoulder the way she does when she’s protecting herself from the stench of a rotting corpse, she spies a roll of paper towels on the counter. She hurries across the room to unspool a length and returns with it to the front hall, where she hands it over to Emerson without comment.
“How?” she asks, looking up, her eyes flooded with questions and tears.
“It looks like he took his own life.”
The news brings a fresh wave of tears, and she presses the paper towels to her face, sobbing something that sounds like “Not him, too.”
Sully gives her a moment to compose herself, thoughts spinning wildly.
“Did you lose someone else to suicide?”
“My father.”
“Oh no. I’m so sorry.”
“He’d been sick, and he just couldn’t take it anymore, so he . . . he hung himself.”
The last two words drop like bricks.
Hung himself?
Again, Sully’s phone vibrates with a text.
Again, she ignores it, not bothering to see whether it’s from Barnes again. Even if it isn’t, it’s not more important than this.
Emerson clears her throat, hard. “I never put the news out there in public, but word gets out.”
“I’m sorry. I had no idea,” Sully murmurs, trying to figure out where this fits into the scenario she’d begun to work through her mind. It doesn’t.
“I don’t like to talk about it. It’s not easy to find out that the man you thought you knew . . . Well, I guess I didn’t know him so well after all.”
Is she talking about her father, or Roy?
Maybe both.
Despite everything, despite ignoring the texts, Sully finds herself thinking of Barnes. He has nothing to do with this. Yet he might as well have appeared in front of her, conjured by the phrase “the man you thought you knew.”
“Sorry. I just can’t get my head around this.” Emerson, who has radiated emotional and physical strength from the moment Sully met her, seems small and fragile, tears flowing.
“I understand. Deep breaths.”
She watches Emerson inhale, exhale.
Inhale, exhale.
“We need to notify his family. They’re in New York?”
“I guess. Yes.”
“Do you have any contact information for them?”
“No.”
“His mother’s name, maybe?”
“It’s not the same as his. She’s been married a few times. I don’t know. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay, we’ll find her. Just breathe.”
Inhale.
Exhale.
“How did he do it? Was there a note?”
Sully hesitates. “Yes.”
“What did it say?”
If this turns out to be a homicide, then that piece of paper is evidence.
“Sully?”
“I’m sorry, it just . . . I can’t discuss this yet.”
“The note? Was it . . .” Emerson’s hands clasp over her mouth, and she asks through her trembling fingers, “Was it hangman?”
Stunned, Sully backtracks through the last few moments of their conversation. Had she inadvertently said what she was trying not to reveal?
Of course she hadn’t. She’d been careful.
As possibilities fast forward through her brain, her phone rings. It might be Colonomos, or something related to the investigation.
Nope. Barnes.
She apologizes to Emerson and answers the call with a curt “What?”
“Where are you?”
“On the job.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m talking to you, aren’t I? I mean, I was talking to you. Later, Barnes!” She disconnects the call and apologizes again.
“Who’s Barnes?”
She ignores the question. “You asked if the note was about hangman. Why would it be?”
“Sorry. It wouldn’t be. I just had this crazy thought.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You would think . . .” She pauses, makes a little choking sound. “I mean, he was leaving me alone in the world, and all he left me was a little piece of paper with a hangman on it.”
Sully is too astonished to speak.
“There are things a parent should know to say, you know? Even just good-bye or I love you would have been meaningful. Especially after my mother left me. Yes, she left us—but he was her husband. Marriages fall apart. But I was her own flesh and blood. She chose to abandon me without warning, without a good-bye, and he hated her for it—and then he went and did the same exact thing.”
“Your father. You’re talking about your father.”
Bone White Page 21