Combined with the others, the name will be complete.
A-N-N-E
We shall never tell, Priscilla vowed to her brother.
But she broke the promise. She did tell—and paid a terrible price.
Now, so will I.
Clinging to the papers, Emerson heaves herself into a fast, forward dive.
The last sound she hears is the front door banging open below, a voice shouting a name . . .
Not her own.
Not Anne’s.
“Savannah!”
Sully zooms back into town, replaying scenes as if she’s trying to dissect a murky art house film with a cast of characters whose plotlines intersect, but whose motivations are unclear.
Emerson Mundy . . .
Roy Nowak . . .
Jerry Mundy . . .
Ora Abrams . . .
Barnes.
Barnes doesn’t fit in anywhere, except . . .
He’s here, and on his way to the historical society.
Please, she prays. Please let him be all right, and please . . .
Please let him be the person I thought he was.
“Savannah!”
The sound breaks through the frantic buzzing in her ears and desperate croaking in her throat as the rope compresses her windpipe.
Sean.
He’s going to save her.
She isn’t going to die.
She hears him shouting, moving around her. She feels his arms encircling her legs, pushing her weight up, up, trying in vain to loosen the tension around her neck.
He’d have to loosen the knot around her neck, or cut her free. But the noose is beyond his reach, and he can’t see where the rope leads, trailing along the dim upstairs hallway.
There’s no way, no way, he can do this singlehandedly or go for help. Not in the time she has left.
Her lungs are on fire, and she can’t get any air, and her head is going to explode . . .
Cerebral anoxia.
Soon she’ll be lying, cold, on a steel table beneath bright lights. Someone in a lab coat will peer and poke and probe, noting the signs of asphyxial death, thinking about what to have for dinner, whether the car needs gas, how to pack for the weekend away . . .
Savannah will be just another lump of flesh and bone. Tagged and embalmed, mourned and buried, remembered and, inevitably, forgotten . . .
Unless someone else comes along to help Sean save her.
And no one is coming.
Rounding the corner onto Prospect Street, Sully sees an unfamiliar car parked at the curb in front of the historical society—driver’s-side door open, lights on, engine running.
The front door of the mansion is also wide open.
Sully screeches to a stop, jumps from the car and springs toward the steps.
What if this—all of this—was an elaborate ploy to smoke Barnes out of hiding? What if—
But the first thing she sees when she bursts through the door, weapon drawn, is Barnes.
Alive.
Barnes . . . saving a life.
He’s on his knees, performing CPR on a young woman, assisted by . . . Sean Chapman?
Sully takes it all in.
Rowan’s nephew.
A cell phone on the floor beside him, connected to a call on speaker.
“. . . on the way,” a voice is saying—emergency dispatch. “Continue the compressions . . .”
A chair in the middle of the room.
Several serrated kitchen knives on the floor around it.
Papers scattered—old, yellow pages, crumbling at the edges.
A length of rope, frayed at one end, a noose at the other.
Sirens approaching.
Sully looks up . . .
And there, hanging from a second noose high overhead, is Emerson Mundy.
Her head is turned at an unnatural angle, neck broken.
“Come on, Savannah,” Barnes says. “That’s it. That’s it, honey . . . come on . . .”
“Is she breathing?” Sean asks.
“She’s breathing. You saved her, kid.”
Sean bows his head with a sob, and Barnes looks up at Sully.
He’d risked his life for her.
If they know where I am, I’d already be dead. Or someone else would.
Yet he said it wasn’t Sully.
“Who else is there?” she’d asked.
“In my life? Besides you?”
He never had answered that question, only told her—how many times?—that it’s complicated.
There are always women, but for Barnes, those relationships aren’t complicated. He hasn’t been seriously involved with a woman since his divorce, unless his habits have changed since she last saw him. Maybe he’s fallen in love. It’s possible—anything is possible.
But—gut instinct again—Sully doesn’t feel like this has anything to do with a romantic relationship. It’s something else. Something with far higher stakes. Something connected to his past.
“You’ve been there,” he said earlier, in her kitchen, as he ate the sandwich she’d brought him, and tried to explain why he’d taken money from Perry Wayland at his partner’s urging. “You know how it is. Inner city cop. Us and them.”
Yeah, she’s been there. Young, new to the force, bonding with your fellow officers like soldiers in a war zone. You’re in it together, protecting people who don’t get what you do, don’t care, don’t respect or appreciate you. As cops, you’re all fighting on the same side. You defend each other because you’re the good guys.
And if the good guys make mistakes—hell, everyone makes mistakes—well, they’re still not the bad guys. You’ve got their backs, and they’ve got yours. They’re family.
“You okay, Gingersnap?”
Gingersnap.
There it is, at last.
He alone knows her well enough not to question her gut feeling about a case. He trusts her instincts, trusts her.
And she trusts him. Rookie or not, for Barnes, taking that money was out of character.
There’s more to his story. When this is over, she’s going to find out what it is. But for now . . .
“Yes,” she whispers around a lump in her throat. “I’m okay.”
Letter
25th December 1676
Dear Jeremiah:
It is with bitter tears and a heavy heart that I write to tell you that my husband Benjamin perished yesterday. He had gone before dawn to hunt a goose for Christmas dinner. When dusk came and he failed to return, several men went looking for him.
They found my beloved by the river, hanging from a noose in the very oak tree where our parents were executed. He surely did not die by his own hand. There were two sets of footsteps in the snow. Some unknown assailant came up from the river, took my husband’s life, and went back the way he had come.
Benjamin will never know the sweet secret I was going to share with him on this Christmas morn. Instead, I shall reveal it to you. I have a babe in my womb, and I know in my heart that it will be a son. I shall name him after the two men I have loved most dearly. One is lost forever. I only pray that the other might return, filled with forgiveness, to greet Benjamin Jeremiah when he is born in the springtime.
Your sister,
Priscilla Mundy Ransom
Epilogue
Sitting across the kitchen table from Barnes, Sully sips a cup of hot tea. Full leaf, properly brewed for her by Barnes while she was swinging through the Dunkin’ Donuts drive-through on her way home from the station.
The late night movie theater rush had come and gone. Twyla had long since gone home.
For Sully, for now, the investigation has concluded. The paperwork is completed. Savannah is stabilized in the hospital, Sean Chapman and Rowan keeping an anxious vigil.
Emerson Mundy lies in the morgue beside her dead fiancé.
They’ll probably never know for certain whether Emerson’s father killed her mother, whether he killed himself, or why—if he did not—Emerson would have.
T
hey can only guess.
It wasn’t difficult to uncover evidence of pedophilia in Jerry Mundy’s past. Several incidents, throughout his twenties and thirties, involved inappropriate behavior around young girls. He was arrested in California, served time as a repeat offender, and was released a few months before he attended the family reunion in Mundy’s Landing.
There were no incidents of molestation in the years after young Deirdre Mundy had moved in with him and given birth to a little girl.
Before leaving the station tonight, Sully made a difficult phone call to the recently widowed Arthur Mundy in Philadelphia. She informed him that his daughter had spent the final years of her life not on the streets, as had been presumed, but as a young mother.
“I have a granddaughter?” he asked incredulously.
A glimmer of connection to the daughter he’d lost, cruelly snuffed by Sully’s somber reply, and the news that his own cousin was responsible for the torment the family had endured.
Sully didn’t tell him the rest of Jerry Mundy’s story—a fact that turned up in his California records. In 1996, the state passed a law that mandated chemical castration, upon parole, for repeat sex offenders.
By then, Jerry had been staying out of trouble for years, living quietly—with his teenage daughter.
He voluntarily sought and subjected himself to chemical, and then surgical, castration. Perhaps his dalliance with his young cousin wasn’t the only incestuous relationship in his life. Perhaps he wanted to protect his daughter—from himself.
Perhaps Emerson was both victim and perpetrator, as so many are.
All victims of sexual abuse suffer guilt and shame.
A few also experience rage and suicidal tendencies.
There’s no disputing the tragic ending to this case. Emerson Mundy took her own life, and at least two others. But where, how, did it all begin?
In her childhood?
In her parents’ childhoods?
Or, as she might have believed, in 1666, when her ancestors James and Elizabeth Mundy murdered a servant girl?
It wasn’t hard to piece together the hangman puzzle after Sully had gathered and read the pages of the letter strewn across the foyer floor.
A-N-N-E
According to Sean, Ora Abrams had given her remains to Savannah Ivers. She’d come to the historical society with evidence corroborating what Priscilla Mundy wrote in her letter. Ora hadn’t lived to see the mystery solved.
Some mysteries never are.
Driving back through the quiet streets, Sully thought about what she wanted to say to Barnes. Knowing the words aren’t going to come easily, no matter how well rehearsed, she clears her throat and begins.
“I want you to know that—”
“Wait,” he cuts in. “Before you say anything, I need to tell you two things.”
“Well, I need to tell you three things.”
“Me first.”
“What happened to ladies first?”
“Show me a lady, and she can go first.”
She rolls her eyes, but is as relieved to hear the familiar quip now as she was earlier when he called her by her nickname.
“Go ahead, Barnes. Say it. What are your two things? I’m guessing one is ‘I told you so.’”
“What do you mean?”
“You always told me not to get caught up in emotion when I’m on a case. This time, I did. I kept trying to talk myself out of suspecting Emerson. I bought every lie she told me.”
“You weren’t the only one. And you have a huge heart, Gingersnap. Always have, always will.”
She smiles. “Is that one of the things you were going to tell me?”
“No. I was going to say thank you, and I’m sorry.”
“Dammit! Those are two of my things.”
He laughs. So does she.
Apologies and gratitude—mixed with a little attitude. All is right in the world.
“Before you tell me your third thing,” he says, “I owe you an explanation.”
“That’s okay. It can wait till tomorrow. I’ll make you some breakfast. Make that lunch,” she amends, glancing at her watch and trying to swallow a deep yawn. Maybe her third thing can wait until tomorrow, too.
“No, see, that’s the thing. I’m not sticking around. There’s an early bus back to the city, and I’m going to be on it.”
“I thought you were hiding.”
“More like running scared.”
“That doesn’t sound like you.”
“It didn’t feel like me. But tonight, I remembered . . . I know who I am. I know what to do. I have to go back to New York.”
“Is someone after you? Wayland? You don’t have to tell me if you don’t—”
“No, I do. Not the details—they can wait. Remember when I went to Cuba last fall?”
“With the reward money? What about it?”
“I ran into a familiar face down there.”
Her eyes widen. “Perry Wayland?”
He nods.
“That makes sense. Back in ’87, that’s one of the few places in the world he wouldn’t have expected to run into anyone he knew from back home.”
“Exactly. Now that diplomatic relations are restored and American tourists are showing up . . .”
“You showed up. Lucky him. So he lost everything in the stock market crash, faked his death, and left the country?”
“Not that straightforward. I’ll give you the short version. Back in college at Brown in the early seventies, Wayland got involved with a hippie chick. Well, not just a hippie chick. She was . . .”
Sully swallows another yawn. “Sorry.”
It isn’t that she’s not interested in his story. But exhaustion is catching up to her.
“It’s okay,” Barnes says, “it doesn’t matter about her. Key facts: She was mesmerizing. She was a doomsday conspiracist. Not marriage material for a blue-blooded kid from New York.”
“But Kirstie Billington was.”
“You remember her name.”
“Even when I’m exhausted, I’m a brilliant detective, Barnes. So he graduates and he marries Kirstie. What happens to the hippie chick?”
“Off the grid. Probably went to live in a cabin somewhere.”
“Or on an island?”
He nods. “She’d told Wayland to beware of certain signs that would mean the end was coming. Famine, plague, financial crisis . . .”
“Everything old is new again.” Sully sips her tea.
“Right. Back in 1987, you had headlines about starvation in Ethiopia, about AIDS, and then the stock market crashed . . .”
“Doomsday.”
“Wayland thought so. And he saw one way to salvation.”
“Hippie Chick saves the world?”
“Hippie Chick saves Wayland. To hell with the world, including his wife and kids. When Stef and I found him, he was waiting to meet up with her. Apparently, he did. They left the country, and that was the last anyone saw of them.”
“Until you spotted him in Cuba. And now he’s after you because you know about him?”
“It’s deeper than that. And it isn’t him. It’s her.”
“Hippie Chick?”
“Not just her. This is big, Sully. She’s powerful. It’s . . . a cult.”
Wide-eyed, she asks again, “They’re after you?”
“Not just me.”
“Not just you, not just her—I might be brilliant, but you’re losing me. What are we talking about, Barnes?”
“I told you there was a good reason I took the money that day.” He looks her in the eye. “It wasn’t for me. It wasn’t what you think.”
“I don’t even know what I think. Why did you take the money? What—who—was it for? Who are they after?”
“I have the one answer for all of those questions,” Barnes says. “My daughter.”
Sully gasps.
He nods. “Yeah. I never told you. I never told my ex. I never told anyone, except Stef.”
“You ha
ve a daughter?”
“Yes.”
“And they’re after her?
“Yes. She doesn’t know I exist. But they know she does.”
Sully reaches out and touches his hand. “What are you going to do?”
“Save her,” he says simply.
Sully nods. “I’ll help you.”
“I know where you are if I need you.”
“What about me? Will I know where you are?”
He swallows the last of his coffee without answering her question.
Sully watches him in silence.
He pushes back his chair, tosses his empty cup into the garbage, and looks back at her. “I never had time to change your sheets for you.”
“It’s okay. You can sleep in my bed again if this is your last night.”
“No way, Gingersnap. I’m not letting you sleep on the couch again.”
She walks over to him. Takes his hand. “Who said anything about the couch?”
Warily, wearily, they leave behind all the reasons they shouldn’t make their way to her bedroom together, accompanied only by the reason they should.
Sully’s third thing.
The one that comes after Thank you, and I’m sorry.
I love you.
Maybe she’ll never get to say it, or hear it back from him.
But at least she knows.
For now, that’s enough.
Acknowledgments
I express my gratitude to booksellers, librarians, and readers everywhere; to Megan Rutter and Stacy Amico Ruvio for patiently answering my questions about forensics and genetics; to Heather Graham Pozzessere for the title; to my editor, Lucia Macro; her assistant, Carolyn Coons; Liate Stehlik, Maria Silva, Shawn Nicholls, and countless others at HarperCollins who played a role in bringing this book to print; to my literary agent, Laura Blake Peterson, and my film agent, Holly Frederick, at Curtis Brown, Limited; to Carol Fitzgerald and the gang at Bookreporter; to Cissy, Degan, Celeste, and Susan at Writerspace; to Alison Gaylin and Greg Herren; to John Valeri; to Peter Meluso; to Mark Staub and Morgan Staub for the manuscript feedback and marketing support; to Brody Staub for putting Mundy’s Landing on the map again.
About the Author
Bone White Page 32