Mercifully, the taut rope snaps Elizabeth Mundy’s fragile neck, killing her instantly. But James has the brawny build of a man who has spent his thirty-three years enduring long hours of physical labor. His muscular neck sustains the fall and he is left to slowly strangle at the end of the rope, his body contorting with the spasmic efforts to breathe.
His agonizing gasps render the assemblage mute in collective horror. They had turned out to the promise of entertainment, only to bear witness to a grotesque scene that would forever after haunt their nightmares. They scuttle away until only the hangmen and the Mundy siblings remain beside the scaffold.
Her sturdy little body wracked with silent sobs, Priscilla buries her face against Jeremiah’s chest, dampening his shirt with her tears. He holds her fast against him, refusing to budge his gaze from their father until at last his struggle has ended.
He watches until his parents’ bodies are cut down and hauled away for unceremonious burial.
Only then does he turn away, allowing himself to slump against the broad, sturdy trunk of an ancient tree.
Priscilla looks up at him. “What is going to happen to us now?”
“We shall return to our home and never speak of this again. Not to outsiders, not even to each other, or to Charity. No matter what happens, Priscilla, for the rest of our lives . . .”
He takes a deep breath and looks around. Satisfied no one is in earshot, he repeats for his sister the words he had so foolishly blurted to their mother—the final message she hadn’t heard above the roar of the crowd. Nor, God willing, had anyone else.
“We shall never tell.”
Chapter 1
July 10, 2016
“We shall never tell.” Emerson Mundy looks up from the cell phone photo. “That’s what it looks like to me, but I’m not sure.”
“That’s what I thought.” Her father nods thoughtfully, removes his reading glasses, and puts them, along with his phone, back into his shirt pocket. “Now what should we have for lunch?”
“Wait a minute, Dad. For one thing, it’s nowhere near lunchtime yet, although it is time for you to take your pills, and I’ll go get them for you.”
“Pills. I’m sick of taking pills.”
“You’d be a lot sicker if you didn’t take them. And for another thing,” she goes on, “you can’t just show me this bizarre picture of some old handwriting, ask me what I think it says, and not explain what it is, or what it means.”
“I’m not sure what it means, but I can tell you what it is.” Jerry Mundy leans back in his worn leather recliner, grunting as he reaches a gnarled hand toward the footrest lever. “It’s a page from an old letter I found.”
Perched on the arm of his chair, Emerson gives him a chance to fumble for a few seconds before she gets up and stoops to press the lever for him. Up go his feet, swollen from congestive heart failure and clad in the new Australian sheepskin-lined slippers she’d given him for his eightieth birthday last week.
“Snazzy,” he said when he unwrapped them. “I’ll be a hit with all the old gals down at the center.”
“Well, they’re slippers, Dad, so you won’t want to wear them out of the house.”
“Then I’ll just have to have the old gals over to the house to admire them, won’t I.”
They both laughed, knowing that would never happen. Jerry Mundy might still get out from time to time to play cards at the senior citizen center, but he’s never been one to host female visitors—or anyone, really. It’s just been the two of them under this craftsman bungalow roof for as long as Emerson can remember, and that covers about three decades, back to a time before her mother left.
“So this old letter, Dad,” she says, picking up his empty coffee mug and the newspaper he’d been reading this morning. “Where did you find it?”
“With my parents’ things.”
“I thought all their stuff was way back in the crawl space.”
“It is.”
“Please tell me you didn’t climb in there today.”
“I didn’t.” He shakes his head. “Not today. I climbed in there last night.”
“Oh, Dad.” Emerson reaches out and covers his hand—weathered, still tanned from the sunshine of summers past, but not this one—with her own. “The doctor said you need to take it easy.”
“I am taking it easy. Sitting around reading old letters, maybe snapping a picture or two so that I can magnify them on my phone . . . that’s easy.”
She sighs. “Tell me more about the letter.”
“It was written over three hundred years ago, which is another reason I took pictures of it instead of carrying it around. It’s so fragile that part of it crumbled into dust when I unfolded it.”
“Who wrote it?”
“One of our ancestors, apparently. Did you happen to catch the late news on TV last night?”
She shakes her head. She’d been out on a date and hadn’t gotten back until the wee hours. Not because they were having a fantastic time, but because the movie was interminable and her date, Tony, had coaxed her into stopping off for an even more interminable nightcap afterward. He’d probably have tried to talk his way into more than a good night kiss at the door, too, if this was her own apartment and not her father’s house, with her father conveniently snoring in his chair a few feet from the door.
First dates—ugh. First, and in Tony’s case, last.
“One of our ancestors was on the news last night?” she asks her father.
“Not exactly. Remember Mundy’s Landing?”
Intrigued, she nods. Located on the opposite end of the country, the village is perched along the eastern bank of the Hudson River about halfway between Albany and New York City.
She’d first heard of it in elementary school, during a lesson on Colonial America. A small group of English men, women and children settled there in 1665. The subsequent winter was so harsh that the river froze, stranding their sorely-needed supply ship in the New York harbor. All but five of them starved to death. When the ship finally arrived after the thaw, the only settlers left alive were a young couple, James and Elizabeth Mundy, and their three children. They had survived by cannibalizing their neighbors’ flesh.
The couple swore they only ate those who had already died, but the aghast newcomers—God-fearing, well-fed and unable to fathom such wretched butchery—accused them of murder. They were swiftly convicted and hanged, leaving their children to fend for themselves.
Always a bookworm, Emerson was at that time obsessed with tales about orphans: Anne of Green Gables, The Secret Garden, The Witch of Blackbird Pond . . .
The Mundy children seemed, to her, like characters in one of her favorite books. Surrounded by hostile, vengeful strangers, they had not only survived, but thrived. When the village was incorporated nearly a century later, it was named after their illustrious Mundy offspring.
“Do you think we’re related to them?” she’d asked her father back then. She knew he didn’t like to talk about the past, but there was no one else she could ask. Her paternal grandparents passed away before she was born.
“It’s a common last name,” he said briefly, “and my father’s family came from Ireland, not England.”
That was that. She eventually forgot about Mundy’s Landing, much as the rest of the world had largely overlooked it for centuries, other than an occasional paragraph in colonial history textbooks.
But something else had happened there. Something Emerson didn’t learn about in elementary school.
In the summer of 1916, three horrified local families each awakened to find the bloodied corpse of a young female stranger tucked into an empty bed. The girls were never identified, their murderer never caught. The notorious Sleeping Beauty Murders faded into history until the 1990s, when the local Historical Society invited armchair sleuths to visit and attempt to solve the cold case for a token reward. It’s become an annual event, and the still-unclaimed reward has grown substantially. These days, so many people descend on the
village for what is now a weeklong affair unofficially dubbed Mundypalooza.
“What about Mundy’s Landing?” she asks her father.
“It’s been all over the news. You haven’t seen?”
“Yes, the Today Show did a segment about it last week. This month is the hundredth anniversary of the murders, so they—”
“No, that’s not what I’m talking about.” Jerry gestures for the newspaper she’s holding.
She hands it over, and he opens it and folds it back to show her a headline. It’s not front page news, but close.
COPYCAT KILLER UNMASKED; HISTORIC CRIMES SOLVED
She scans the lead and looks up at her father, wide-eyed. “I didn’t know about this, no. What does it have to do with the letter you found?”
“It got me thinking about whether we might have ties to this place after all.”
“I asked you about it years ago and you said we didn’t, because our ancestors were Irish,” she reminds him, knowing his memory isn’t as reliable as it used to be.
But his eyes, when they meet hers, are sharp. “Oh, I know what I said.”
“You mean it wasn’t true?”
“It wasn’t a lie, but my father didn’t know much about his family at all. He was estranged from his parents and he never wanted to talk about the past.”
That trait must run in the family, she thinks, though she didn’t inherit it herself. As a history teacher, she loves to talk about the past. A faded, centuries-old letter is right up her alley, and her father knows it.
“My mother’s family was Irish,” he tells her, “and I think my father just assumed his was, too.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“Well, maybe he just wanted to be, and pretended to be, because he had no idea where he came from and he had no way of finding out.”
“That’s bizarre.”
“That he didn’t know for sure?”
“That, and the fact that he didn’t care to find out. And he did have a way. He could have asked his parents.”
“If he was speaking to them. But he wasn’t.”
“That was his choice. And to never even tell you or your mom why he’d had that falling out with them in the first place . . .”
“He always said some things are better left buried in the past, where they belong. I respected that.”
And so should you.
The unspoken message is loud and clear, and she wishes she’d kept her mouth shut. Here he is, finally willing to discuss where they came from and perhaps fill in some of the sketchy family history, and she had to go and critique the dysfunctional relationships. She doesn’t expect him to go on with his story, but for some reason, he does.
“Anyway, last night, when I saw Mundy’s Landing on the news, it made me wonder about my family. The Mundy side. We never even knew my grandfather had died, but when my grandmother passed away, my father got a letter from a lawyer back east saying he’d inherited their house and everything in it.”
“So they never wrote him out of their will?”
“I guess not.”
“Did he go back there?” she asks, picturing her grandfather, filled with regret, making the sad journey back to his empty childhood home.“No, he said he never wanted to set foot in that house again. He just wanted to sell it, so he had the lawyer hire someone to empty it. Everything that had any value was sold at an estate sale, and the rest was sent to my father. I was just a kid at the time, but I remember being struck that an entire lifetime could amount to nothing more than one cardboard box.”
“What did your father do with it?”
“Stashed it in the attic. As far as I know, he never even opened it. I found it still sealed with packing tape when he and mom passed away, and I dumped it into our crawl space with everything else from their house.”
“Well, your parents’ lives amounted to a lot more than one cardboard box,” Emerson says. The crawl space, tucked beneath the roof upstairs, is crammed with her grandparents’ belongings and God knows what else.
“I never did get around to going through any of it.”
“Until last night?”
“Yes, but just that one box from my father’s childhood home.”
“Still sealed. I wonder why he didn’t just throw it away.”
“I think there was a part of him, deep down, that couldn’t let go. I guess that’s true of all of us,” he adds, and she knows he’s thinking of her mother.
Emerson was barely four years old when she left them—just walked out the door one day and never came back. Never looked back. Not a visit, a phone call, a birthday card . . .
Nothing. One day here, the next, gone.
Emerson has no idea what kind of mother she was before she left. Probably a competent one. If she hadn’t been, she probably would have left much sooner, or Dad would have kicked her out. Yes, and Emerson would probably have unpleasant memories of her.
Other than fleeting snippets, she has just one solid recollection. She remembers contentedly lying on the floor, chin propped in her hands, watching a beautiful blond woman put on makeup. They were in an alcove off the master bedroom that her mother called her dressing room, and she had a movie star vanity with light bulbs all around the mirror. She was telling Emerson about Hollywood celebrities, talking about them as if they were her friends—especially one guy, John.
Did her mother leave her husband and child to be with him, whoever he was? By the time she grew old enough to speculate about that, she didn’t dare ask her father for the whole truth. Not then, and not now. They haven’t spoken of her mother in years, and she’s pretty certain there are no traces of her left in the house, even in the crawl space.
Years ago, Emerson asked to see a picture of her—preferably one that showed her mother holding her as a baby, or of her parents together.
Maybe she wanted evidence that she and her father had been loved; that the woman had once been normal—a proud new mother, a happy bride.
Or was it the opposite? Was she hoping to glimpse a hint that her mother was never normal? Maybe she wanted to confirm that people—normal people—don’t just wake up one morning and choose to abandon their loved ones. That there was always something off about her mother: a telltale gleam in the eye, or a faraway expression—some warning sign her father had overlooked. One Emerson herself would be able to recognize, should she ever be tempted to let someone into her own life.
But there were no images of her mother to slip into a frame, or deface with angry black ink, or simply commit to memory. Exhibit A: Untrustworthy.
Sure, there had been plenty of photos, her father had admitted unapologetically. He’d gotten rid of everything.
There are plenty of pictures of her and Dad, though. Exhibit B: Trustworthy.
Dad holding her hand on her first day of kindergarten, Dad leading her in an awkward waltz at a father-daughter middle school dance, Dad posing with her at high school graduation.
“Go. You have to go,” he said with a tremulous smile on the tear-splashed day she left for college, before he pushed her out the door. “You have a life to live, Emmie. I’ll be fine.”
He was right. She did have to go, she did have a life to live, and he was fine.
For a long time, he was fine.
She left L.A. for Cal State Fullerton, where she quickly bounced back from her homesickness, even spending a semester abroad. She got her Masters at Berkeley and landed a teaching job in the Bay area. She never did come home again, not to live. But every holiday, many weekends, and for two whole months every summer, she makes the six hour drive down to Silver Lake to stay with her father.
It used to be because she needed him, craving that connection to the only family she has in the world. Lately, though, it’s increasingly because he needs her.
He pretends that he doesn’t. He still wants her to believe that he’s just fine without her, able to take care of himself and the house, able to drive and climb stairs and yes, raise the damned footrest on his chai
r.
The truth is, he’s failing fast. But he’s too proud to admit it, so she lets him go through the motions. Then, without comment, she does the things he can’t do, and he lets her.
“You should have asked me to help you get that box, Dad,” she says, shaking her head.
“You’re afraid of the crawl space.”
“Only because there are spiders in it.”
“There was one spider, Emmie. About twenty-five years ago. I’m pretty sure he’s gone.”
“He was a freakishly huge and hairy mutant monster spider, Dad,” she protests with a grin. “Listen, I have to go grab your pills for you.”
“Wait a minute. First let me tell you what I found in that box.”
“You’re stalling.”
“You’re curious,” he returns. “Admit it.”
“I’m curious. What did you find?”
“Old pictures, some notebooks, greeting cards and postcards, and papers.”
“Letters?”
“Letters, documents, newspaper clippings. It’s going to take me months to go through it all and read everything. But that one packet did catch my eye, because I could see at a glance that it was much older than everything else.”
“Over three hundred years old, you said?”
“Yes. And as far as I can tell, it seems to have been written by someone who lived in Mundy’s Landing.”
“One of our ancestors?”
“Could be.”
So maybe they’re descended from those heroic Mundy orphans after all.
“What does the rest of the letter say?”
“I’ll show it to you. It’s upstairs. I put it away for safekeeping.” He makes a move as if he’s about to stand up.
“I’ll get it, Dad. But first, I need to go get your medicine.”
This time, he doesn’t argue. His breathing seems a little shallow when she returns from the kitchen with a glass of water and medication. When she arrived in June and realized there were too many pills left in the orange prescription bottles in the kitchen, he admitted to occasionally forgetting a dose or two. Alarmed, she bought a plastic compartmentalized box that holds a week’s worth of pills doled into day parts. He grudgingly admitted that was a good idea, but drew the line at setting his cell phone timer as she’d suggested. She keeps track of the timing herself, but worries about what will happen when she goes back home at the end of the summer.
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