Bone White

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  The faint smell of last night’s wine and beer hangs in the air, and dust floats like golden glitter in late sunshine falling through the plate-glass window. Ellie is lighting votive candles on the tables as Jenna writes the specials on the chalkboard.

  Ellie winces as the chalk squeaks. “Do you have to keep making that sound?”

  “You mean this?” Jenna does it again, grinning.

  “You’re evil!”

  They have yet to notice Sully, standing just inside the door.

  She clears her throat. “Hello, ladies.”

  “Hi, Detective Leary. We’re, uh, not open yet,” Jenna tells her, lifting a bony, well-inked wrist to check her watch.

  “Don’t worry,” Sully says. “I’m not here to eat.”

  “Bartender’s not here yet.”

  “Not drinking, either,” she says, though she wouldn’t mind a stiff whiskey right now.

  And she does need to talk to whoever was bartending last night. First things first, though. “Has anyone turned in a lost cell phone?”

  “We find cell phones all the time,” Ellie reports, and winces as the chalk squeaks again.

  “Sorry! Accident, I swear!”

  “Yeah, sure.” Rolling her eyes at Jenna, Ellie tosses aside the lighter and walks toward the bar, beckoning Sully to follow.

  She crosses the room, for the first time noticing the finish on the wide-planked hardwood floors, and the rich red leather on the tall-backed barstools. The bar itself is nice, too—a carved, vintage piece with inlaid Italian marquetry, backlit mirrors, and glass shelves lined with liquor bottles and decanters.

  The place is always so jammed when Sully’s here, she’s never had a chance to get a good look at the backdrop.

  What are the odds that anyone working last night got a good look at Roy?

  Ellie takes an orange cardboard Nike shoebox from a shelf and plunks it onto the bar. “Here’s the lost and found.”

  Sully watches her rifle through the contents, pausing to try on a silver bangle, proclaiming it “Adorbs. What do you think, Jenna?”

  Her friend looks over. “I think that blond bitch who works at Tru Blu had that on last night. I’m sure she’ll notice if you go around wearing it.”

  “I wasn’t going to steal it. I was just admiring it.” Ellie puts it back with a mindful glance at Sully, takes a cell phone from the box, and holds it out. “Here you go. Is it yours?”

  Seeing that the device is nested in a pink and white striped case, her flash of optimism vanishes. “Not the one I’m looking for, but—”

  “Hey, that’s Amy Gusset’s,” Jenna says, and pulls her own phone from her pocket. “She was here last night for someone’s bachelorette party, and I saw her taking a ton of pictures with it. I’ll text her and tell her.”

  “How’s she supposed to get a text if she doesn’t have her phone?”

  “Some people can get them on laptops.”

  The pink and white phone dings with a text. Ellie looks at Jenna with a smirk. “It’s you. There’s no passcode on it. Want me to reply?”

  “Don’t be a wiseass.”

  “All right, ladies, I have a few more questions for you.” Sully shows them the photograph of Roy. “Ever seen him before?”

  They haven’t.

  “And you were both working last night?”

  They were.

  “But it was crazy-busy,” Jenna adds.

  “It’s always crazy-busy,” Ellie agrees, and takes another look at the photo. “Oh hey, is he the dude who hung himself over at the Dapplebrook?”

  “How did you know about that?”

  “My friend Trevor’s a waiter there. I saw him on my way over here a little while ago.”

  “Where?”

  “Just sitting on a bench over there, doing nothing.” She gestures at the plate-glass window.

  “Out on the Common?”

  “Yeah. He looked super upset. I asked him what was wrong, and he told me someone killed himself, which sucks. Trevor said he was supposed to work, but Nancy told him to go home because they can’t open the restaurant now. He was bummed because he really needs the money, you know?”

  “Wow, that does suck.” Jenna shakes her head. “Poor dude.”

  Sully isn’t sure whether she’s referring to Trevor or the dead man, but she’d guess it’s the former. She looks out the window, scanning the Common for Trevor, but there’s no sign of him now.

  “He was telling me that he’s super broke,” Ellie is saying, “and he can’t afford to pay his tuition for the fall unless he makes a lot more money.”

  “Where did you see him last night?” Sully asks, remembering that he’d waited on her at the Dapplebrook, and on Emerson Mundy, too.

  “He comes in here for a beer sometimes after work. He sits at the bar.”

  “Yeah, I saw him, too, when he got here,” Jenna says, “but I didn’t get a chance to talk to him.”

  Sully wonders whether Trevor’s path intersected with Roy’s. Maybe they got to talking. Maybe he’d asked Trevor about Emerson, and Trevor mentioned that she was staying at the Dapplebrook.

  She thinks about Trevor’s spider tattoo, and she tries not to wonder whether it’s an ominous indicator of a dark side, much darker than she’d suspected. It’s just a tattoo. Intellectually, she knows it means nothing. Does her trusty gut beg to differ?

  “Who else was working last night?” she asks, pen poised on paper.

  “Laura Vronsky and Sean Chapman were bartending. Sean was on till close, but I think Laura left at midnight. She should be back here any second.”

  “How about Sean?”

  “He doesn’t come on till nine.”

  Sully needs to talk to Rowan’s nephew before then, but she doesn’t want to drag Rowan into this—particularly with Emerson due at her house for dinner.

  “Can one of you give me a cell phone number for Sean?” she asks the women.

  “I have it right here.” Jenna checks her phone and reads it off to Sully, who dials it quickly.

  He answers on the second ring.

  “Sean, this is Detective Leary.”

  There’s a pause, and then, “Sully?”

  “Yes. Are you at your aunt and uncle’s house?”

  “No, I’m . . . with a friend. Why? Did something happen?” he adds, with the dread-laced inflection of someone who knows too well what it’s like to get a life-changing phone call.

  “Nothing like that. I’m down at the Windmill, and I was wondering if I could talk to you for a few minutes.”

  “Oh. Um, okay, sure. I’m on my way into town, so I’ll stop by there if you want.”

  She thanks him, hangs up, and looks back at the waitresses.

  “He’s on his way. Did you recognize anyone else in here last night?”

  “You’re kidding, right?” Ellie asks. “I mean, I recognized pretty much everyone.”

  “Can you give me some names? Start with the people you saw sitting at the bar, and—” She remembers something. “Can I please see that cell phone you found?”

  “You mean Amy’s?” Ellie takes it back out of the shoebox and hands it over.

  “Is Amy a friend of yours?”

  “Not really. I mean, I know her.”

  “I’m friends with her, sort of,” Jenna says. “She works at the mall in Kingston.”

  Sully half listens. This isn’t necessarily about Amy, or a group of young women celebrating someone’s bachelorette party.

  Her thumb is poised over the photos app. No, she shouldn’t search the phone without the owner’s consent or legal permission, but she isn’t tampering with it, and she isn’t looking for evidence, nor expecting to find any. This is gray area. An investigation.

  Mind made up, she opens the photo file. Jenna’s right—there are a ton of pictures. Sully is aware of the two women watching her as she scans through them, looking for Roy’s red shirt in the crowd. Most are of a group of partying girls, one of whom is wearing a headband with a little wh
ite bridal veil. She spots Trevor in one of the photos, scowling with the headband on his head. Rowan’s nephew Sean is visible in the background in many.

  She flips back through, enlarging each photo, and spots Rowan’s son Braden sitting at the bar next to Trevor in the background of one picture. There’s a woman sitting next to him, and . . .

  There.

  That’s Roy.

  He’s sitting on a bar stool next to the woman. Who is she? Are they together?

  Roy is looking down at a phone in his hand.

  Sully enlarges the photo until it’s a grainy blur, trying in vain to see what he’s looking at.

  She flips to the adjacent photos, but she still can’t tell. In one of them, though, she sees that Braden Mundy is holding hands with the woman seated next to Roy. She’s with him, then, and not with Roy.

  “Are you, um . . . done with that?”

  Sully looks up to see Jenna watching her with a pointed expression. Ellie, too.

  Before she can reply, her own phone rings.

  Barnes.

  She puts Amy’s back in the shoebox and hurries toward the door, wanting to answer it in private. “I’ll be back,” she tells the waitresses, and imagines them rolling their eyes at each other.

  “I found her,” Barnes’s voice greets her as she steps outside and across the street to the Common.

  “You found who?”

  “Come on, think about it. Who did you ask me to find?”

  Sully’s brain catches up to the conversation. “Emerson Mundy’s mother?”

  “You’re good. How’d you guess?”

  “Cut the bullshit,” she says, though a part of her welcomes it, evidence that Barnes is semi-back to normal. She plops herself down on a vacant bench and flips to a new page on her pad of paper, prepared to write down a name, an address. “What’s her name? And where is she?”

  Barnes gives her a one-word answer she should have expected, but doesn’t see coming.

  “Dead.”

  “I think I’ve got something,” Sean says.

  Savannah looks up from the hand-drawn map she’s been examining. Enshrouded in a transparent acid-free sleeve, it shows the layout of the first settlement. Each rectangle represents a dwelling and is labeled with a family name. The diagram was found among John and Tabitha Ransom’s belongings.

  So was the similarly protected document Sean is showing her. “This is a letter William Ransom wrote to his father on February 12, 1666.”

  “He died a few days later,” Savannah tells him—just one of the facts she’s committed to memory over the past few hours of intensive research.

  “Yeah, it sounds like he knew his time was about up. Read this.”

  He hands over the letter, along with the magnifying glass they’ve been passing back and forth in trying to glean information from the old papers. In some cases, the text is smudged or faded. In others, the unfamiliar syntax might as well be a foreign language one has studied, but not to fluency.

  Savannah reads the letter, then looks up at him.

  “What do you think?” he asks.

  “I think it’s pretty clear who Jane Doe was. I have to show this to Miss Abrams. I was planning to head over there tonight.”

  “I can drive you over there before I drop you off at home. I don’t have to be at work until nine.”

  “It’s out of the way for you, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, but I’d like to hear what she has to say, and . . .” He shrugs. “This is the first time in a while that I’ve thought about anything other than my own problems. Makes my life seem not so bad, you know?”

  She nods, feeling the same way, glad he’s coming along with her.

  Letter

  12th February 1666

  Dear Father,

  I am writing to tell you that our beloved John and his wife, Tabitha, have perished.

  One week has passed since my brother fell into a deep sleep from which he did not awaken. When the morn dawned, Tabitha was distraught upon discovering him, and grew frantic when she realized that our neighbors would soon feed upon her dead husband’s flesh as they have the others.

  Together, we wrapped him in muslin and carried him out of doors and a little ways away from our dwelling. I had not the strength to bury him even if the earth was not frozen solid, as it has been for many weeks. I scraped a long trench in the snow and gently lay my brother within, knowing he would soon be covered by falling snow, and they would not find his corpse.

  The following day, the storm abated and the Goody Mundy came ’round to offer us the last of the porridge she had concocted from the heart and liver of Verity Hall, who had succumbed just days ago.

  We refused the grisly brew as always, and she warned us that we will not survive unless we resort to nourishing ourselves with the remains of our departed friends, as the Mundy family has.

  She is right. Yet I shall remain strong, like my brother and his wife and the others who have stood strong against this sinful temptation, only to die and have their flesh devoured by those who will survive this miserable life only to find eternal condemnation hereafter.

  Goody Mundy reminded us that the others are all gone now, saying only we three remain, along with Anne Blake, the Dowlings’ young servant girl. Then, belatedly, she noted that John was not present in our small room. When we told her he had passed away, a strange glint came into her blue and gray eyes, and I believe I glimpsed Satan himself as she inquired greedily after his remains.

  When I boldly told her we had buried him so that he would never be found, she grew enraged and took her leave. Tabitha was quite fearful. I calmed her with this Bible verse from Jeremiah 19:9.

  “And I will cause them to eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and they shall eat every one the flesh of his friend in the siege . . .”

  Goody Mundy has not returned, though her husband and son have been by to check on us. We have assured them, through the closed door, that we are quite alive, but have not let them in.

  Tabitha endured just six days without her husband before she, too, closed her eyes forever on this dark afternoon. I could not rest her remains alongside my brother, as the white blanket had long since enfolded him, but I dug a small spot in the same vicinity. The harsh wind pummeled me as I lay down Tabitha’s withered frame, and I shall confess that I contemplated settling myself there with her. My body so ached with bitter cold and hunger and grief that only the thought of you and Mother forced me back indoors. I cannot leave you to wonder ever after what became of your family, or to hope that perhaps we might return to you, as we have waited in vain for your ship’s arrival for many months now.

  I shall add this to my previous letters, in the hope that you will discover them one day. I can only pray that my own death will come as gently and swiftly for me as it did for Tabitha and John and the others. Now, Father, my last deed has been accomplished. May we meet again in heaven.

  Your son,

  William Ransom

  Chapter 15

  With one unexpected word, Barnes has effectively blown Sully’s burgeoning theory about Jerry and Roy and the hangman notes.

  “Emerson’s mother is dead?”

  “Yes,” Barnes says.

  “For how long?” Sully holds the phone clamped by her shoulder against her ear, hands prepared with paper and pen to write the information she’s certain he’s about to deliver—that the woman was found dangling from a noose somewhere, a hangman note at the scene, and . . .

  “Thirty years.”

  “Thirty!” She curses softly.

  “She died around December 27, 1983.”

  “But . . .”

  This changes everything.

  It happened right after she walked out on Emerson and her father.

  Or did she walk out?

  Did she die, and Emerson’s father couldn’t bear to tell her the truth?

  Sully’s seen the reverse—one parent leaves, and the other fabricates a death for the children, thin
king it’s better to grow up thinking your father or mother would be there, given the choice.

  That lie, as Sully has learned over her career, can come back to haunt a grown child.

  What about this one? People make irrational choices under duress. If Jerry Mundy told his young daughter that her mother had abandoned her, he must have had his reasons.

  Or maybe it was simply what he believed to be the truth.

  “Barnes, let’s back up. Tell me how you know all this.”

  “Records. Birth, death, newspaper . . . it’s all there. It fits.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Deirdre Davies Mundy.”

  Deirdre Davies.

  Didi, a nickname for Deirdre.

  Or D. D., her initials.

  “That makes sense.” She writes it down. “Keep talking.”

  “Born in Philadelphia in October 1964. Parents met at Princeton, mother a Main Line debutante, father from a New York banking family that—”

  “Wait, this can’t be right. Nineteen sixty-four means she was just a kid herself when Emerson was born in 1980.”

  “A woman calling herself Gerry Mundy gave birth to a daughter named Emily in Los Angeles on New Year’s Day, 1980.”

  “Gerry? Emily? See, that’s not right. Her father’s name is Jerry, and her name is Emerson.”

  “Maybe she decided to change it to something more exotic. Happens all the time.”

  “I’m sure she would have told me if that was the case. She knew I was going to look for her mother.”

  Sully pencils a big X over the page of notes she’d just scribbled. “You’ve got the wrong person, but thanks for giving it a shot.”

  “Hear me out. There’s more. The dates line up, and—”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Close enough. Maybe the hospital got the baby’s name wrong, maybe the mother changed it later. The dates fit, and the address on the birth record matches the one Emerson gave you.”