Bone White

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  “But I thought you said her mother’s name was Deirdre?”

  “It was. She wouldn’t be the first teenager to show up at the E.R. in labor and give birth under an assumed name. She was alone.”

  “No husband?”

  “No husband, no ID, no insurance. Walked in off the street. Things were different back then. They admitted her, they released her. In between, she had a baby and she paid her bill.”

  “With cash?”

  “A check. It was good.”

  “What was the name on the account?”

  “Jerry Mundy. No red flags. Gerry. Jerry.”

  She mulls it over. “This is crazy.”

  “Come on. Round peg in a round hole. Why are you trying to make it square?”

  “Because it eliminates my prime suspect in a murder. Maybe two murders.”

  “You’re sure you’re looking at homicide?”

  “Not a hundred percent, but . . . my gut is telling me yes.”

  “Okay, well then now you can stop wasting your time on a dead end and start looking elsewhere.”

  She looks back over the notes she’d just crossed out, making sure everything is still legible. “Any idea where?”

  “Maybe. Let’s back up again. Deirdre went missing from Philadelphia in the summer of 1979, five months before Emily Mundy was born.”

  “Holy crap.”

  “Yeah. I found her in the missing persons database.”

  Hearing a text come in on her phone, Sully tells Barnes to hang on a minute. She lowers it to see a message from the medical examiner’s office.

  DOA ready for ID.

  Terrific.

  She responds with a thumbs-up emoticon and goes back to her phone call.

  “So, Barnes, you’re saying Deirdre Davies was a pregnant fifteen-year-old who ran away to California in the summer of ’79, had a baby girl named Emily on New Year’s, and the baby later became Emerson, and . . .” She does the math and wrinkles her nose. “Deirdre was the teenage bride to a guy who would have been . . . um, forty when Emerson was born? Ick.”

  “No, that’s not what I’m saying. She didn’t marry Jerry Mundy. She was a Mundy.”

  “Wait, what? I thought you said she was a Davies.”

  “That’s her middle name, not her maiden name. Actually, it’s her mother Lilith’s maiden name. The Davies are a prominent Main Line family. Lilith Davies married Arthur Horace Mundy Jr. in 1957.”

  “Arthur Horace Mundy Jr.?” Sully writes furiously on her pad. “So he’s connected to Mundy’s Landing.”

  “Yes. Their wedding was written up in the New York Times, and it mentions that the groom’s grandfather was the famed financier Horace J. Mundy. The bride and groom were both twenty-two, right out of Princeton. Oh, and the family was big on nicknames. The bride’s was Lili, the groom’s was Artie. Deirdre was their youngest child. Maybe they called her D. D.—her initials.”

  “But this means Jerry Mundy . . .” Sully is too flabbergasted to continue.

  Barnes says it for her. “Jerry wasn’t Deirdre’s husband. He was her cousin.”

  Jake Mundy looks to be in his late forties or early fifties. Handsome, with dark hair graying at the temples and a nice smile. He’s wearing a dress shirt, top button unfastened and knot of his tie loosened.

  Emerson searches for some physical similarity on his face, and finds none.

  Yet despite the discrepancy in her lineage, one thing is certain: she, too, is a Mundy, descended from Jeremiah just as Jake is. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have inherited the letter that reveals the truth about the early settlers . . .

  Or, more importantly, the heterochromia.

  If, say, she’d been adopted as an infant, odds would be astronomically stacked against her possessing the same rare genetic aberration that runs in this family.

  Emerson shakes the hand he offers, hoping he can’t feel hers tremble in his grasp, or the wobble in her voice as she apologizes for being late.

  “No worries. We’re pretty informal, and we never eat before eight, even when we’re aiming at five. Come on in.”

  “I wasn’t sure where to park—I didn’t realize you were having more company, so I’m kind of blocking the driveway.”

  “That’s not more company. Just me, Ro, and the kids. If anyone needs to get out, believe me, they’ll let you know about it, loud and clear.”

  Relieved, Emerson shoves her car keys into the pocket of her jeans and steps inside.

  The home might once have been as grand as the Dapplebrook Inn and the Conroy-Fitch mansion, but it’s far more comfortable. The lower steps of the elegant staircase are stacked with things that obviously need to be carried up—a book, a stack of folded towels, a couple of plastic supermarket bags, a six-pack of toilet tissue. A dog’s chew toy bone is half buried beneath the Oriental area rug, and its fringed border is bedraggled as if it, too, has been chewed. A sweatshirt hangs by its hood from the newel post. A basset hound noses a pair of oversized basketball sneakers that are lying just inside the front door.

  That explains the faint smell of dog and locker room that mingles with a delicious savory aroma wafting in the air.

  “Sorry about the mess. Careful, don’t trip,” Jake kicks them aside and yells, “Mick? Come down here and get your shoes out of the front hall before Doofus eats one again!”

  No response.

  “Kids.” Jake shakes his head, untying his tie and draping it, too, over the newel post. “I’m sure he’s plugged into headphones. If I really need to be heard, I have to go up there, or text, crazy as that seems. But sometimes, yelling makes me feel better, you know?”

  “I do know. I’m a teacher,” she says, pushing her sunglasses up on her head.

  “Just like Rowan. No wonder she likes you so much. She—well, we’re definitely related,” he interrupts himself to say, peering at her face.

  Her heart skips a beat. “How do you know?”

  “You have the Mundy eyes—one blue, one gray, just like Jeremiah Mundy. My grandfather told me about that when I was little. The trait died out in our branch of the family, but not in yours.”

  So Ora was right about the heterochromia.

  What about everything else?

  “Come on into the kitchen. Rowan’s busy cooking.”

  She is indeed. Pots bubble on the stove, the oven timer is beeping, and a steaming, foil-covered pan sits on the granite-topped island in the center of the large room. A pile of corn on the cob, some peeled, some not, waits on the counter beside a heap of husks and silks.

  “Welcome!” Rowan turns away from the sink and dries her hands on her cut-off shorts. Her feet are bare, and she’s changed into a sleeveless orange T-shirt that clashes with her coloring and reads—quite aptly, Emerson decides—Life Is Good.

  Rowan resets the stove timer, gives Emerson a quick hug, and asks if she drinks white, red, or beer.

  “Oh . . . um . . .”

  “Or water,” Rowan adds, “if you’re a teetotaler. I bought a big thing of iced tea this afternoon, but the kids wiped it out already.”

  “Better that than the beer.” Jake opens the fridge.

  “Don’t count on it. I bought a twelve-pack of Coronas and there are nine left.”

  “Let’s just hope the culprit was legal age.” Her husband pulls out a bottle of beer and offers it to Emerson. “Or would you rather have wine?”

  “Whatever’s easiest.”

  “I’ll have wine.” Rowan shoves strands of sweat-dampened red hair away from her flushed face. “It’s too hot for red, so make it white. Anything but chardonnay.”

  Her husband pokes through the fridge. “Riesling?”

  “Anything but Riesling and chardonnay.”

  He pulls out another bottle. “Pinot grigio.”

  “Anything but pinot grigio, Riesling, and—”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Of course.” Rowan laughs, lifting a lid to stir something on the stove. “Emerson, is pinot grigio okay?”
/>
  “Sure.” She’s not much of a drinker, and she wants to keep her wits about her, especially tonight. But she goes with the flow, as if she’s used to dropping by people’s homes for dinner, hanging out in kitchens like this, filled with clutter and food and banter and life. As if she’s just one of the family . . .

  I am. I’m a Mundy. My eyes prove it.

  Jake opens a drawer. “Where’s the good corkscrew?”

  “Haven’t seen it. Use the bad one.”

  “Is this the bad one?” He holds one up.

  “That’s the one that doesn’t work.”

  “Why do we have it?”

  “In case we lose the other ones. Did you feed the babies, by the way?”

  “I’m allergic, remember?”

  “You don’t have to bury your nose in their fur, just—forget it. You open the wine. I’ll feed them.” She grabs a can of food from the cupboard, pops the top, dumps it into a bowl, and heads out the back door.

  “They’re not babies,” Jake tells Emerson as he twists the metal spiral into the wine bottle. “A stray cat had kittens under the porch. Want one?”

  “I’m allergic, too.”

  They smile at each other. Emerson watches his muscular forearms strain until the cork pops out, and she imagines what it would be like to be married to a man like him—easygoing, capable, handsome . . .

  So different from Roy.

  But Roy is gone. Nausea rolls into her gut.

  Did he think about her in his last moments, clinging to his ideal of the marriage they could have had . . .

  Remembering his questions, and his scrutiny, she reminds herself that it’s over. No one will ever look at her that way again.

  Rowan breezes back in. “Those kittens really are adorable. I wish—”

  “Don’t even think about it,” Jake says.

  Listening to them tease each other about kids and kittens, Emerson feels a nagging sense of foreboding, as if it’s not really over. As if any second now, someone is going to pounce.

  “Hey!” Jake is on his tiptoes in front of a high, glass-fronted cupboard filled with stemware. “We have Mallomars?”

  “So that’s where I stashed them! I knew I had one more box around here somewhere. I know it sounds bad, hiding food from my kids,” Rowan tells Emerson.

  “And your husband,” Jake puts in.

  “And my husband, but they’re eating us out of house and home this summer.”

  “That’s because we have twice as many as we were counting on with Sean here and Braden back after all.”

  “More the merrier.” With a shrug, Rowan grabs her wineglass and holds it out in a toast. “On that note . . . welcome to the family, Emerson.”

  “You still there?”

  “Yeah,” Sully tells Barnes, “I’m still here.”

  Still here, clutching the phone to her ear, sitting on a bench on the Common, watching a young man toss a Frisbee to a puppy that should be on a leash, and a group of kids splashing in the nearby fountain posted with a No Wading sign. In the center of the fountain is a statue of Horace J. Mundy, Emerson’s great-grandfather . . . on her maternal side?

  “Talk to me,” Barnes says.

  “I’m just . . . I can’t believe Emerson’s parents were cousins.”

  “There’s no father listed on the birth certificate. Maybe it wasn’t Jerry. Could have been some kid in Philly. She was about four months’ pregnant when she took off.”

  “Then who is Jerry, exactly? Sorry, I’m just trying to get my head around this.”

  “Jerry would be the great-grandson of Horace J’s crazy brother Oswald Mundy,” Barnes explains. “Deirdre was his cousin Artie’s daughter. Artie was a few years older than Jerry, born in 1935.”

  “So you’re saying that Jerry might not have been Emerson’s father, or even her stepfather? He wasn’t romantically involved with Deirdre?”

  “That, I don’t know. Maybe he was more like an uncle.”

  “That makes sense. He took in his cousin’s runaway pregnant daughter . . .”

  “And apparently never bothered to call Artie to say Deirdre was safe.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. Her parents were looking for her throughout the early eighties, offering a huge reward. They said she wanted to be an actress and thought she might have run off to Hollywood. According to the case files and the newspapers, they almost seemed to expect her body to turn up in California.”

  “And that was . . .” She looks back over the scribblings. “December 27, 1983. How did she die?”

  “Ready for this? Strangled. Her body was killed elsewhere and found on the shoulder of a canyon road, rope ligature around the neck.”

  Welcome to the family.

  Rowan Mundy’s toast warms Emerson like a morning sunbeam. So does the cautious sip of tart white wine.

  Rowan sets her glass aside and goes back to dinner prep. “Get busy, Jake, or it’ll be midnight before we get this food on the table.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time.” He puts down the beer bottle and asks Emerson, “So, how are we related?”

  “I’m . . . not sure.” She isn’t ready yet to tell him about the discrepancy in her lineage. Better to first see what he has to say. “I was hoping you could tell me.”

  “Ever seen a complete family tree?”

  She shakes her head. “Have you?”

  “My grandfather made one years ago. Nothing elaborate, just a penciled chart on a sheet of notebook paper. But I remember finding it when I was a kid, stuck in the old family Bible.”

  “I’d love to see it.”

  “Is it with your grandfather’s old photo albums?” Rowan asks him.

  “No, my mother has it in Texas. I texted Liza earlier when you said Emerson was coming over. She promised to scan it and send it—the family tree, not the Bible,” he adds with that ready grin.

  Rowan explains to Emerson that Liza is Jake’s sister, who lives in Houston. Their mother moved down there, too, a few years ago, after Jake’s father passed away. “She’s kind of losing it, and we worry about her. That reminds me—I called the hospital to see what I could find out about Ora.”

  “How is she? Is she conscious?”

  “All they’d say was that she’s been admitted. They couldn’t release any information over the phone. I’m going to go over there after dinner.”

  “Can she have visitors?”

  “I have connections if she can’t. My friend Zoe is a nurse there, and her shift starts at seven on weekdays. Do you want to come along?”

  If she tells them about Roy, and the morgue, they’ll have questions. Jake will be sidetracked from his mission to show her the family tree.

  But if she doesn’t mention it and they find out later—of course they’ll find out later—they might think she has something to hide.

  Better to be honest, she decides, and opens her mouth.

  Before she can say a word, the stove timer goes off, and Rowan shouts, “Doofus! No!”

  Neither of those things has anything to do with the other, or with Emerson, who swallows back the news about Roy.

  “He’s got a clump of corn silk! Come on, boy. That’s not good for you!”

  “Who says it’s not good for him?”

  “The vet!”

  “The vet said cobs aren’t good for him. I’m sure the rest is fine.”

  “We don’t know that, Jake! Help me get it out of his mouth!”

  Amid the marital argument, repetitive beeping, jangling dog tags, and growls from Doofus, they wrestle him for the soggy clump of green and brown.

  “Got it!” Rowan holds it up, triumphant.

  Doofus barks and makes a jump for it.

  “Sit!” The dog ignores Jake’s command. Jake grabs his collar and escorts him into the next room.

  Rowan turns off the stove timer, gathers the corn, and begins dropping the ears into the pot of boiling water.

  “Sorry about all that, Emerson. I was hoping tonight was going
to be perfect, but this is pretty much the way things go around here. When you meet my kids they’ll be bickering, and I’m sure any second now the dog will barf up corn silk or someone’s shoe—or there will be corn silk barf in someone’s shoe.”

  “Why don’t you let me give you a hand? Can I stir something, or make something, or . . .”

  Rowan gratefully accepts the offer, and she pushes aside her guilt over not mentioning Roy.

  Rowan hands her a whisk and small bowl and sets out bottles of oil, vinegar, and soy sauce. “If you can just throw together the dressing for the Asian salad, that would be great. I’ll get more soy sauce. That’s not enough.”

  “Um . . . is there a recipe?”

  “Somewhere, but just wing it. I always do.”

  Emerson rarely cooks, and when she does, she follows step-by-step instructions.

  She splashes some oil into the bowl, wonders if it’s too much, decides it’s too little, and adds some more. She looks over to see if Rowan is watching her in horror, but she’s dragging a stool over to the cupboard.

  “I’m probably going to regret this,” she says as she climbs up, and begins to rummage around. “But I know I bought another bottle of soy sauce a few weeks ago.”

  “Why would you regret buying soy sauce?”

  “I mean, I’ll regret looking for the soy sauce. You know how sometimes, you need that one thing that’s stashed way in the back, but you can’t get to it without everything else tumbling out? Or does that only happen to me?”

  “It happens to everyone. Believe me.”

  Footsteps creak down the stairs, and Jake reappears in the kitchen. He’s changed into blue plaid shorts, a polo shirt, and flip-flops.

  “Ro, the natives are getting restless. Well, two of them. One says he hasn’t eaten in ‘days,’ and the other says she has a date so hurry up.”

  “What about the third native?”

  “Asleep. Think he’s the one who drank the three Coronas?”

  “Could be. He was upset when he got home from that interview.” She shrugs, climbing off the stool sans soy sauce. “And he stayed over at his friend’s house. I’m sure they were up all night.”