Bone White

by Wendy Corsi Staub

“He needs to start keeping regular hours and sleeping when the rest of the world does.”

  “He will, when he finds a job.”

  “This wasn’t even something he wanted. He was a history major.”

  “He’ll take what he can get. Entry level in anything. This is a hard time in his life. When I was his age, I was miserable.”

  “Hey! When you were his age, you met me.”

  That results in more teasing banter, and then Rowan explains to Emerson that their older son, Braden, had a job interview in Hartford this afternoon.

  “He drove all the way there, and the guy talked to him for ten minutes and sent him packing. It doesn’t mean he didn’t get the job, but . . .”

  “Yes it does,” Jake says.

  “It probably does. I can’t find the soy sauce. But at least the whole world didn’t come raining down on our heads. That cabinet is a mess, and I really need to—” She breaks off and sniffs the air. “Is something burning?”

  “Is it dinner?” Jake asks.

  With a curse, Rowan spins toward the oven and yanks open the door. “Crap, crap, crap! I turned off the timer and forgot about the tenderloin.”

  She grabs potholders, pulls out a roasting pan, and sets it on the counter. Poking at the meat, she declares it perfect—and herself “crazy.”

  Jake turns back to Emerson with a little smile and shake of his head, as if the two of them are in on a private joke. Anyone can see that he’s crazy about his crazy wife, and who wouldn’t be?

  Rowan is wonderful. So is he. Longing to be a part of their lives, Emerson feels a lump rising in her throat. Why should she go back to California? There’s nothing there for her now. Why shouldn’t she just stay here in Mundy’s Landing forever?

  Welcome to the family . . .

  Jake waves a piece of paper at her. “My sister sent the family tree.”

  “Am I on it?” She tries to make the question light, but it comes out sounding like someone’s beaten it out of her.

  “You’re probably too young, but I bet your dad is.”

  “Can I see?”

  Rowan steps in. “I can finish the dressing. Why don’t you guys go look at that in my office?”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive. I’ve got everything in control here.”

  Emerson doubts that, but Jake is already on his way out of the room, and she follows, eager to see if the key to her past lies in his grandfather’s notes.

  “Don’t forget your wine.” Rowan hands it to her. “I’ll holler when dinner is ready. You can close the door so no one interrupts you.”

  Reminded that Sully might very well interrupt, summoning her to the morgue to view Roy’s body, Emerson impulsively does something she hopes she won’t later regret.

  It’s only for a little while, she tells herself as she turns off her cell phone. Just until I can find out the truth and figure out where I go from here.

  “Deirdre Mundy was strangled with a rope?” Sully is incredulous. “Don’t tell me there was a hangman note.”

  “Not mentioned in the case files. It took a while for LAPD to ID her—no central missing persons database back then.”

  “No DNA testing, either. They were sure the victim was Deirdre?”

  “She had one blue eye and one gray eye. That’s how they eventually made the connection.”

  “Like Emerson.” Sully jots it down.

  “Like Emerson. The parents, Artie and Lili, flew out west, confirmed the victim in the morgue was their daughter, and brought her home. She’s buried in the family plot in Philly, according to her obituary. Oh, and something else about that . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “The obit doesn’t mention she even had a daughter.”

  “You said they were wealthy society people. They probably didn’t want to publish something like that.”

  “Or they didn’t know about it.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “There’s no mention of a pregnancy in the missing persons case files. That’s not the kind of detail you keep from the police if you’re desperate to find your daughter. She found out she was pregnant and took off so that she wouldn’t have to tell her parents. Happens all the time.”

  “Maybe she really did leave Emerson and her father. Maybe she was killed the night she took off, and Jerry never knew what happened to her.”

  “That’s hard to believe. She was found a few miles from his house, decent neighborhood. It was big news.”

  “Maybe he missed it.”

  “Maybe. But he still never contacted Deirdre’s parents to tell them they had a granddaughter.”

  “And he never told Emerson about her family in Philadelphia. She told me her father was all she had.”

  “Except he possibly wasn’t her father.”

  “Except he told her he was,” Sully returns, writing notes, shaking her head sadly.

  She’d been thinking Emerson was lying, but it turns out everything Emerson herself believes about her past is a lie, right down to her own first name. Three homicides with a similar MO—strangulation by a noose—might indicate that the same person who killed her mother had resurfaced decades later to do the same to her father and fiancé.

  It’s an unlikely scenario, but one she has to consider.

  “For all we know, Didi Mundy wasn’t a runaway,” she muses. “Maybe she was abducted.”

  “I don’t know if I’d go that far. There were quite a few reports about a girl matching her description spotted in the bus terminal in Philly the night she disappeared, and a bus driver remembered that she took a Greyhound to the Port Authority in New York.”

  “Just like a gazillion other runaways. Okay, still . . . Jerry passed his dead cousin’s daughter off as his own. There’s a lot more to this story.”

  “You’re thinking what I’m thinking,” Barnes says.

  “I sure as hell am.”

  Could Jerry Mundy have killed Didi?

  “I don’t suppose you found possible solutions for that hangman puzzle that would tie this all together?” she asks Barnes.

  “You mean blank-blank-N-E words? Sorry. I’ll keep looking.”

  She thanks Barnes, hangs up, and prepares to call Emerson. She won’t tell her over the phone that her mother is dead and her father is, at the very least, not the man she thought he was. No, she’ll pick her up, take her to the morgue, and wait to break the news until after she’s identified Roy’s body.

  If her father and Roy—and her mother, too—were murdered, then her own life might be in danger.

  Who, Sully wonders as she dials the number, would have a reason to kill the people closest to her? Her mother, her father, her fiancé . . .

  Only when the phone rings right into voice mail does a terrible possibility enter her head.

  She hangs up without leaving a message.

  Letter

  4th December 1676

  Dear Jeremiah:

  In the wee hours this morning, as a harsh wind blew from the west and the season’s first snowfall blanketed our little village, I found myself weeping violently in our marital bed. My Benjamin begged me to tell him why.

  As I lay there in the dark, I could not unsee the gaunt, sunken faces of our parents and sister. Do you recall that Charity’s hair dropped out in clumps? That Father’s skin grew sallow, and Mother’s hands were rough and gnarled, no longer soft and gentle. Her fingers wasted into claws, even her thumb too thin to wear the gimmal ring she cherished.

  Do you remember how she sobbed the day she realized it had slipped from her skeletal hand and been lost? How we searched and searched the room in vain?

  ’Twas on that day, Jeremiah, that I believe our Mother slipped into madness.

  I am often able to put such dark thoughts from my mind. When you were here with me, I could purge my soul to your ears. Now you are gone, and I have borne the burden alone for too long.

  I now take pen to paper confess that I did this morning betray part of our secret to
Benjamin. While I did not dare reveal his brother’s role in our trials, nor that William had chosen a cowardly, frozen death, I told him of our parents’ terror as our grisly supply of human flesh ran low when the colony had dwindled to only seven of us.

  I told him Anne Blake became, in our parents’ eyes, our final hope—our last possible source of sustenance.

  I did not say that I am sure Anne’s life might have been spared, had his own brother not become suspicious of Father’s intent on the eve he visited to persuade him to nobly offer himself.

  If only William had volunteered to lay down his pitiful life to save us all. He was dying anyway. As a bachelor, he would leave no one to grieve. Instead, he took flight into the blizzard like a cowardly rabbit fleeing the hunter.

  Is it any wonder that Mother flew into a fury, knowing that William had surely perished alone in the wilderness? And for naught. His useless, frozen waste of flesh might have fed our family for a month, and your Anne might have been spared on that terrible night.

  As I reflect, Jeremiah, I cannot blame our parents’ actions. All those weeks, as our companions became stricken and died, we were provided with protein. When that supply had been exhausted, the only way we might live was for another to be sacrificed.

  Yet I can imagine the anguish you felt when Father commanded you to accompany him to the Barkers’ abode where Anne was staying. I pity you for the beating you received at your refusal.

  I told Benjamin of the blood that stained your clothing where the whip shredded the fabric to wound your tender flesh. I recounted your despair when your willingness to sacrifice yourself instead fell upon deaf ears. How could any of us have devoured the flesh of one of our own? For that reason, it had to be Anne.

  Even then, I could not bear the look in your eyes when Mother snatched up the blade and went along in your place.

  Hearing your anguished sobs, I convinced myself, and our sister, that you, too, had gone mad.

  Benjamin comforted me as I described how Mother and Father returned with their murdered bounty. Anne was a kind, gentle soul. She did not deserve to die. Yet, my husband now assures me, neither did we.

  I shall never forget the hideous moment when Mother made the dreadful discovery—that her own gimmal ring was on Anne’s finger. That you had given a servant girl our mother’s cherished heirloom, meant for your bride.

  I did not understand Mother’s anguish, whilst savagely butchering the girl’s flesh for the cauldron, when she saw the fetus. I did not understand, then, that it was your child growing in Anne’s womb. That the stew Mother made that day, the very nourishment that saved our lives, was of our own flesh after all.

  I remember that you refused to partake, that they held you down and forced you to swallow. For your own good, they said. If you did not eat, you would not live.

  I am thankful, Jeremiah, that you came to your senses and survived. ’Twas not long after that the snows abated, and Father was able to hunt and provide for us until the ship came.

  This is where I concluded the tale I told my husband. He bore it with great sorrow, and without judgment.

  No matter when or whether we meet again, or what happens to us in the years that lie before us, Jeremiah, I assure you that my Benjamin has given his word to carry our secret to the grave. We shall never tell.

  Your sister,

  Priscilla Mundy Ransom

  Chapter 16

  Rowan Mundy’s home office is off the foyer, a surprisingly orderly oasis tucked behind French doors.

  Jake closes the doors after them and turns on a couple of lamps. Though the sun is a long way from setting, its angle doesn’t reach through the room’s lace-curtained bay windows overlooking the shadowy front porch.

  “Sit down,” he tells Emerson, “and we’ll see what we have here.”

  Feeling as though her legs are about to give out, she sinks onto the nearest seat, an aptly named fainting couch. She sets her cell phone on an adjacent table, wanting to set down the glass of wine as well, but she doesn’t dare without a coaster. Instead she takes a sip, hoping it might settle her nerves.

  Jake sits in the cushioned leather desk chair, finds a pair of reading glasses in a drawer, and puts them on. Then he rolls the chair across the carpet, parks next to her, and holds the sheet of paper so that she can see it.

  “This is my grandfather, Asa Jacob Mundy II. His father was the first Asa Jacob, and I’m the fourth.”

  “You didn’t name either of your sons after you?”

  “Nah, they have enough problems,” he says with a smile. “My grandfather’s grandfather was Ezra Mundy, born in 1842.”

  So old Ora Abrams was right about that, too.

  “You said you’re descended from his brother, Aaron, right?”

  Emerson nods, following Jake’s forefinger as he traces it along the faded penciled lines. “Aaron had five children. Your last name is Mundy, so you were descended from one of his sons. He had three, but only two lived past childhood, Horace and Oswald.”

  Leaning in, she sees that Oswald is listed as having had a wife named Ramona—the teenage hired girl? He had one son, Donald Mundy, born in 1900, the same year of the marriage. Donald married his wife, Inez, in 1924, and had one child, a son named Jerry, born in 1940.

  There he is. At least he’s real—though there’s no record of her mother, or her own birth.

  “You’ve probably heard of Horace,” Jake is saying. “He was pretty famous, and pretty full of himself, my grandfather always said—sorry. No offense, in case he was your grandfather.”

  “I’m not sure if he was. You wouldn’t happen to know . . . did he by any chance have two different colored eyes?”

  “Yes, he did. My grandfather told me that. His own father, the first Asa Jacob, was born the same year as Horace, and they were first cousins. They played together as kids.”

  “What about Oswald, Horace’s brother? Did he have the same eyes?”

  “No. Only Horace. He was the charmed son, according to my grandfather, although he didn’t start out that way as a kid.”

  “What about Horace’s sons?”

  “He had three. Robert, Joseph, and Arthur, and they—”

  “No, which ones had it?”

  “Had what?”

  “Heterochromia. This.” She points at her own eyes.

  “Joseph did not. I met him once, when I was a little kid. He looked almost exactly like my grandfather. Same bright blue eyes. Those run in the family, too.”

  The man she knew as Jerry Mundy also had bright blue eyes.

  It means nothing, she reminds herself.

  “What about Robert?”

  “He went down on the Titanic long before my time.”

  “And Arthur? Did you ever meet him?”

  “No. My grandfather said he used to come to visit his father when Horace was still alive, but that was long before my time. I did meet his son Artie and his family, though. They came for a family reunion once, back in the late seventies. We have pictures of that day.”

  Emerson follows the lineage from Arthur Sr. to Arthur Jr., born in 1935.

  He had two children.

  His older daughter’s name was Deirdre.

  Deirdre . . .

  She can hear a faraway voice calling the name in her head.

  “Can I see the pictures?” she asks Jake, above the roar of blood pounding in her veins. “Please?”

  “Sure. Let me see if I can find them.”

  She watches him stand and walk over to the built-in bookshelves beside the fireplace.

  Deirdre . . .

  Can it be?

  “Here it is.” Jake walks toward her carrying a large album bound in burgundy leather. “This was my grandfather’s. The family reunion pictures are someplace in here.”

  “When was it? You said the 1970s?”

  “Late seventies—wait, it must have been 1979,” he says, setting the album on the desk and leafing through it. “That was the spring my high school baseball team went
to the championships, and my parents made me miss a game to be there. The reunion was in April. It was a hundred degrees out and humid, and they made us pose for pictures in every combination you can imagine. Individual families, generations of cousins, old people who didn’t even know their own names, let alone who they were sitting with . . .”

  He chuckles, shaking his head.

  Emerson stands behind him, looking over his shoulder at the blur of old photos encased on sturdy pages beneath clear plastic sheeting.

  “I was pissed off the whole day,” Jake recalls. “We saw my local cousins all the time, and I didn’t see the point in meeting a bunch of strangers who came in from out of town and were probably never going to come back. By the way, no one ever did—except you.”

  “Me? But I wasn’t . . . I wasn’t there. I wasn’t even born yet.”

  “No, but your family must have been invited. Everyone was. Oh, here we go. Look, there I am . . .”

  She leans in to see a glowering young man in a large group shot. ”Wow.” Jake lifts the plastic to remove the picture and examine it more closely, adjusting his reading glasses on his nose and holding it up to the desk lamp. “This could be my son Braden. People always say he looks like me, but I usually don’t see it.”

  Emerson hears him talking, but the words don’t register. She’s scanning the other photos on the page, searching, searching . . .

  There.

  Two faces jump out at her from a candid, so vividly familiar that the air is squashed from her body.

  They’re sitting in webbed lawn chairs under a tree—a young girl and a middle-aged man. He has long sideburns, but his blue eyes are unmistakable, and the girl . . .

  The girl . . .

  “Jake!” His name escapes her like a high-pitched cry for help. Maybe it is.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Who are they?”

  He looks at her, startled, and then down at the photo she’s pointing to.

  “Oh! I thought you were—”

  “Who are they?” she asks again, more urgently.

  “I don’t know. The names are probably on the back. Let’s see.” He sets aside the picture he was holding with maddening, painstaking care.