Bone White

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  “Yes.”

  “He left a note, with the game? Hangman?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you ever play it together? Did it have some special significance?”

  “Not at all. It means nothing to me.” Emerson inhales deeply and clamps her mouth shut, cheeks filled with air. Tilting her head back to stare at the delicate crystal chandelier high overhead, she holds her breath, maintains her composure.

  “Was there a word?” Sully struggles to keep her voice level, respectful. “In the diagram, I mean?”

  Emerson lowers her head to look at a Sully, allowing the air to escape her mouth on a burst of sorrow, frustration, anger . . .

  Typical emotions for someone whose loved one has taken his own life.

  Her father, and now Roy.

  “A word? Not really. I mean, there were spaces for four letters, but only one was filled in.”

  “What was it?”

  “An E. Why?”

  “Was there anything else?”

  “A little gallows with a stick figure hanging there, like it was saying, ‘You lose this game.’ And you know what? It’s true. I lost. Not just the game, but everything. Everyone.”

  As she speaks, Sully’s brain whirls like a lottery spinner, irrational thoughts bouncing through, refusing to settle.

  Four letters.

  A hanging victim.

  A stick figure on the gallows.

  Wait a minute. She’s overthinking this. The logical answer drops into place like a numbered ping-pong ball.

  You win.

  “You told Roy about it.” Of course she must have.

  “Told him about what?”

  “About your father’s note.”

  “No, I didn’t. Like I said, I met Roy afterward. He didn’t know him. I didn’t tell anyone.”

  “You mean your friends?”

  “I mean anyone. It was a slap in the face.”

  “What did the police say about it?”

  “About . . . ?”

  “About the hangman note!”

  “They didn’t know, either. After I found him, before I called them, I . . . you know. I put it away.”

  “So no one else knew about it.”

  “Right.”

  Wrong.

  Roy knew. He had to have known, because . . .

  If he didn’t know, then how could he have left the same peculiar note?

  Unless Emerson did this herself.

  Is she playing me?

  “Did you keep the note your father left?”

  “Yes.”

  “Could Roy have seen it?”

  “Roy? Why?”

  “Where is it? Do you have it here with you?”

  “Yes, it’s—Wait a minute.” The light dawns. “Why are you asking me so many questions about this?”

  “I can’t—”

  “Did Roy—did he leave a hangman note, too?”

  Sully can only stare at her, pity and an acrid splash of dread pooling with bile in her gut.

  Her hunger semi-sated by a parched chicken cutlet on a mayo-sodden roll, foggy brain revived by two cups of black coffee, Savannah exits the dining hall to find the quad equally deserted. A freshman orientation meeting is under way in Pritchard Hall, but it isn’t scheduled to let out until mid-afternoon.

  Now that she’s had some time to reconsider, her earlier fears about Braden Mundy and the murder gene seem almost ludicrous.

  Most guys—most people—would be spooked by human remains, let alone by remains that bear clear evidence of murder, and speculation that his own distant ancestors might have been responsible . . .

  Well, it hardly made for a romantic morning after. She can’t blame him for taking off, but he said he’d call. Maybe he will, and if he doesn’t . . .

  Live and learn.

  She follows the brick path toward the library on the opposite corner, housed in a stately brick box of a building with white-paned windows.

  Out of habit, she silences her phone as she steps through the tall double doors. There’s no security guard today at the threshold, where backpacks are searched on the way in and out. A lone student sits at the tall desk beyond, so engrossed in the book she’s reading that she doesn’t even glance up.

  The adjacent information desk is unmanned, but Savannah has a general idea what she’s looking for and where to find it.

  She makes her way across the vast seating area at the center of the main floor. Usually crowded with students rustling papers and exchanging stilted whispers, it’s hushed and empty today. The low lamps scattered along the wooden tables are unlit, as are the ones beside comfortable couches and chairs, and uncomfortable vintage study carrels.

  The space is open to a vaulted ceiling mural three stories above, where sunlight filters through tall windows. White spindled second- and third-floor balconies line the overhead perimeter, with a network of built-in book stacks branching away into the deep shadows beneath.

  Savannah heads for the stairwell at the back wall, vaguely remembering having seen a local history collection located in a dim corner somewhere above.

  After a bit of wandering, she finds it on the third floor behind a wall of glass. The lights are off, and the research librarian’s desk is empty. Trying the door, she finds it unlocked, and enters.

  The room is no-frills compared to the grandeur below, and smells musty. Maybe the research librarian is merely out to lunch, but Savannah doubts it. Lit by just a dim shaft of light falling through a window facing the taller building next door, the room has an air of neglect.

  She considers turning on the overhead fixture, but decides against it. No need to alert passersby to her presence. For all she knows this spot is off-limits at this time of year.

  Free-standing shelves lack the ornate moldings of those below, though at a glance, their contents appear to be far more valuable. She surveys rows of archival periodical boxes, microfiche cases, and fragile old volumes. Most appear not to have been disturbed for decades, perhaps even centuries. The sections are labeled on thin red plastic strips with raised white lettering, organized according to locale and time period.

  Zeroing in on the large area devoted to Mundy’s Landing, she sees that a significant part of the collection relates to the 1916 Sleeping Beauty murders. Another time, she’d pause to peruse it, but she might be kicked out of here at any moment.

  Instead, she finds the section marked Colonization: 1665–1700, and gets down to business.

  Emerson keeps her head down as Sully escorts her over from the historical society, past the gawkers and gossipers gathered on the sidewalk. The lovely grounds of the Dapplebrook Inn are beribboned in yellow tape like a macabre gift.

  Her father’s death last summer had unfolded far more subtly. If the neighbors even noticed the ambulance and police car in the driveway, they didn’t bother to check in to see if Dad was all right. No one came to the door afterward with food and sympathy.

  Things are different in Mundy’s Landing. People care.

  Or is it that here, people hear sirens and suspect the worst?

  “How are you doing? Hanging in there?” Sully touches her arm as they approach the front steps, and she nods, unable to muster a suitable response.

  She’d told Sully before that scars heal, but she could see that Sully didn’t believe it.

  Neither do I. Not now.

  So much has happened in such a short time that she has yet to grasp the full impact of what happened back there in Ora’s kitchen. Shocking revelations buzz around her brain like trapped hornets preparing to swarm and sting.

  She follows Sully across the slate veranda. Nancy is there, and so is the waiter from last night. They’re sitting at a table with a few others, a uniformed police officer standing over them. Emerson avoids meeting anyone’s gaze, wondering whether they know her connection to the dead man hanging in the tree.

  Sully opens the door and peers warily into the house, almost as if she’s expecting to find an intruder. Then, for th
e second time today, she escorts Emerson into an elegant entry hall where an antique clock ticks away the minutes in somber cadence.

  “Where’s your room?”

  “Second floor.”

  “Okay, let’s go.”

  Emerson leads her up the stairs, past the family photos of heroes and perhaps a scoundrel or two. She longs to pause and stare at Horace and Oswald. But black and white photos won’t verify Ora’s claim that Oswald’s eyes had been dark, and it was Horace who had one blue eye, and one gray.

  Emerson had always assumed her heterochromia came through her absent mother’s side of the family. She had no way of knowing that it was a Mundy trait stretching back centuries—one Jerry Mundy did not share.

  So he couldn’t have been her biological father. Her stomach roils with the betrayal from the man who’d raised her. Yet he wouldn’t be the first Mundy to keep a dark secret.

  We shall never tell . . .

  Was he even a Mundy?

  Her heart is pounding. Had the man she knew as Jerry Mundy stolen her real father’s identity, his life . . . his daughter?

  “Emerson?” Sully’s voice intrudes on her thoughts.

  They’ve reached the top of the stairs.

  “Sorry. This way.” She turns toward the Jekyll Suite at the far end of the hall, feeling as though she’s wading through quicksand in the dark. As she passes the grand portrait of Horace, she longs to pause and examine his eyes.

  Ora Abrams is a senile octogenarian. She could have imagined the heterochromia in Horace, along with other things. After all, she was talking as if he were alive, and she mistook Emerson for his daughter . . .

  Horace didn’t even have a daughter. He had three sons. Ora said two had heterochromia.

  Riddled with questions and an abominable array of possible answers, she fumbles in her pocket for the key to her suite.

  “Hanging in there?” Sully asks.

  Hanging in there . . .

  The phrase dangles in Emerson’s muddled brain, and she swallows a surge of inappropriate, hysterical laughter.

  “Emerson?”

  She manages a simple, and probably unconvincing, “Yes.”

  Nothing makes sense. She longs to lock herself away to sort through the facts.

  Later. After the commotion has died down and she can make her brain function properly once more.

  She unlocks the door and opens it.

  “Wait.” Sully touches her arm. “I’ll go first.”

  She takes a pair of gloves from her pocket and pulls them on, then keeps her right hand poised at her waist as she enters the room.

  Emerson recognizes the position. She’s prepared to pull out a weapon if need be.

  Does it mean she isn’t convinced Roy killed himself?

  Does she suspect he was murdered? That his killer might be hiding here? Maybe Emerson should tell her about last night—that she’d been spooked, trying to fall asleep. That she’d felt as though she wasn’t entirely alone in the suite, as though someone might be lurking.

  She watches from the doorway as Sully gives the rooms a quick check. Then she lingers at the window, looking out thoughtfully into the maple branches.

  “Did he hang himself from that tree?”

  The question startles Sully, and she turns as if she’d forgotten Emerson was there.

  “Never mind. He did. I can tell by the look on your face. Oh God.”

  “I’m sorry.” Sully reaches to pull down the shade to shield her from the ghastly sight of Roy’s corpse hanging from the tree.

  “You don’t have to do that. Before I came down to meet you and Rowan, I was sitting right there at the desk looking out. I didn’t see a thing. Just leaves.”

  Sully pulls down the shade anyway, with a bold snap that hangs in the air.

  Unnerved, Emerson looks around the room, making sure everything is just as she’d left it a few hours earlier. It’s so easy to imagine someone—Nancy Vandergraaf—here, rifling through her belongings, searching . . .

  But even if Nancy—or someone less unlikely—wanted to steal jewelry or electronics, she wouldn’t look inside the lining of the empty suitcase on the floor of the closet. Sure, she might feel her way along the fabric to see if anything bulky is tucked away. But she’d find nothing, and move on.

  Her fingers wouldn’t detect the hangman note, or the ancient letter, one of many Priscilla Mundy Ransom sent to her brother, Jeremiah Mundy. This is the most incriminating.

  Sully watches her open the suitcase and unzip the cloth lining. Slipping her hand into the seam, she leaves the old letter in place, but removes the hangman note and hands it over.

  Sully turns on a lamp and holds it to the light, intently focused.

  “You said Roy didn’t know about this note, but where did you keep it for all this time?”

  “In a drawer by my bed in my apartment back in Oakland.”

  “Could Roy have snooped through your things and found it?”

  “Not unless he somehow got in when I was gone. We don’t live together.”

  “He didn’t have a key?”

  “No. He wanted one after we got engaged, but . . .” She shakes her head. “I hadn’t gotten around to it yet. We mostly hung out at his place. Unless . . . I mean, he could have borrowed my key and copied it.”

  Sully’s eyes narrow. “Is that something you thought he might do?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. I mean, he’s not a criminal. He’s a teacher. I can’t imagine that he’d have . . .” She trails off, seeing the look on Sully’s face. “You think he would?”

  “I didn’t know him. But the way you described him—obsessive, jealous . . . and he wasn’t violent, you said? He never laid a hand on you, and you never laid a hand on him? Even in self-defense?”

  “No! Why—wait a minute.” Emerson lowers herself into a chair and places a hand beneath her left collarbone, feeling her heart racing along with her thoughts. “Even if Roy had come across that note in my apartment, he couldn’t have known what it was. Who’d look at a piece of paper with a hangman game on it and think it was a suicide note?”

  “Where was it when you found it?”

  “I told you. It was with my father.”

  “I know this is tough for you, but . . . where? Was it . . .”

  “You mean, was it clenched in his cold, dead hand?” The words are harsher than she’d intended.

  “I’m sorry, I—”

  “No, I’m sorry. It’s just that I’m still so angry at him, and . . .”

  And the anger has more to do with what she learned today than with what happened last year.

  But you have to be in this moment, not in that one. You have to tell Sully what she needs to know. Help her understand what happened to Roy.

  She takes a deep breath. “I found my father in his bedroom. The note was on the floor nearby. It was . . .” She closes her eyes, remembering the room, the house, her childhood.

  “Take your time. It’s okay.”

  “It was under a paperweight I gave him one Father’s Day. I made it myself, when I was a little girl. It was just a rock that I covered in red paint, but I thought it was shaped like a heart. My heart. That’s what it was supposed to be.”

  Her heart.

  Hard, deformed, with jagged edges.

  “I’m sorry.”

  She opens her eyes and sees Sully, sympathetic yet doggedly on task, holding up the note so that it faces her.

  “Look carefully. You’re sure your father is the one who wrote this?”

  “Who else would it have been?”

  Sully doesn’t answer the question, just waits for an answer to her own.

  Stomach churning, Emerson fears she might vomit as she studies the lined sheet of notebook paper.

  Scrawled in bold purple Sharpie, it’s a simple word diagram above a hanging stick figure.

  _ _ _ E

  “It’s not like it’s handwriting,” she finally says with a shrug. “I mean, anyone could have written it,
I guess. But it was there, with my father. That’s all I know for sure.”

  “Is there any word you can think of that has some significance and ends in an E and has four letters?”

  “No.”

  “Anything at all, a name, maybe?”

  She reaches back to rub the aching spot between her shoulders. “There’s nothing.”

  “What if the third letter was an N? Something, something, N-E. Does that make any sense?”

  “Off the top of my head? No. I mean . . . wait, why are you asking about an N?”

  Sully gives her a long, hard look, as if she’s trying to figure out whether she can trust her.

  Then she says, “An almost identical note was found on the tree where Roy hung himself. Hangman, but the third letter was an N.”

  Emerson sits quietly, allowing the news to sink in, before voicing the obvious. “My father couldn’t have written the note Roy left.”

  “No.”

  “Do you think Roy wrote the one I found with my father?”

  “Do you?”

  “Why would he . . . I just don’t get what you’re thinking.”

  “Are you sure?”

  No. She knows exactly what Sully is thinking. She doesn’t want to say it, but Sully isn’t going to be the one. Unaware that Emerson has already been dealt a harsh truth today, she’s trying to protect her from just that.

  This, she can handle.

  “If the same person wrote Roy’s note and my father’s note,” she says slowly, “then one of the suicides might not have been a suicide.”

  “One,” Sully agrees grimly, “or both.”

  Letter

  11th April 1676

  Dear Jeremiah,

  I received your letter, and your refusal to permit my marriage, with bitter disappointment. I beg you to reconsider your decision.

  Have you lost recollection of your pain when Mother and Father would not condone your affection for Anne Blake? Do you not recall the bitter consequences?

  I cannot fathom what my life would be without Benjamin. He is my reason for living. At last, I know what it is to deeply love another human being, to be willing to give my own life for his.

  Brother, I recall your uttering the same words when Father bade you to do what was necessary. I remember that you threw yourself at his knees, begging mercy for the woman you loved, asking that you be sacrificed so that she instead might live, that we all might feed upon your own flesh instead of hers. I was far too young to fathom then what you felt for her.