Bone White

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  She clenches her fist around her stemmed wineglass and holds her breath as he removes the other photo.

  “When something is over, Emerson, you move on.”

  “I’m not Emerson, Daddy. I’m Emily.”

  “Your mother wanted to name you Emily . . .”

  But her mother was gone.

  And after she was gone, Emily became Emerson.

  She watches Jake turning over the picture and squint, trying to read the old handwriting. “Looks like it says cousins Jenny Mundy and Deirdre Mundy.”

  Frowning, he flips it back to the front. “That can’t be right.” Checking the back again, he chuckles. “Not Jenny. Jerry. It’s cousins Jerry Mundy and Deirdre Mundy. Recognize them?”

  Yes.

  Her father.

  Her mother.

  She hears a thud, and feels something wet against her legs.

  The wineglass—it fell from her hand, spilling on the carpet.

  She stammers an apology.

  “No big deal,” Jake says. “It’s white. It won’t even stain. I’ll go grab some paper towels.”

  He puts down the photo and hurries from the room, reaching back to close the French doors behind him.

  He doesn’t want me to hear him tell Rowan that something’s wrong with me. Just like Roy. Just like . . .

  Emerson hesitates only a moment.

  Then she grabs the photo and goes straight to the French doors. As she pulls one open, she can hear voices in the kitchen. They sound concerned.

  She opens the front door and slips away, out into the night.

  So . . .

  Tired . . .

  So . . .

  Late . . .

  “Ora?”

  A voice reaches her, so close, much closer than Papa’s, and even Aunt Etta’s.

  But they were out there somewhere, calling to her.

  Yes. Morning had broken with dazzling light, and she was out at Schaapskill, and grass was green, and they were there, they were . . .

  They were telling her something.

  I must . . .

  I must . . .

  When night swooped in, she lost them again. Now she’s feeling her way back home in the darkness, all alone, alone . . .

  “Ora? Can you hear me? It’s Rowan.”

  Rowan . . .

  Ah, Rowan, the youngest of Mickey and Kate Carmichael’s brood, a pigtailed imp with a mischievous smile—missing her two front teeth, Ora recalls, and complaining that the tooth fairy had left her only a dollar.

  “All my friends get two dollars, Miss Abrams.”

  “Two dollars? For a tooth? Oh my. Why, a few pennies could buy a sack of candy when I was a girl . . .”

  When I was a girl . . .

  Aunt Etta, showing her a secret drawer filled with treasures.

  The skull . . .

  “One day, Ora, you’ll solve the mystery . . .”

  The gimmal ring . . .

  “I’ve written it all down for you here, see, Aurora? So that you’ll know . . .”

  You’ll know . . .

  You’re the only one who knows . . .

  About the ring, the skull, but there’s something else, something else . . .

  Go back. Tell them . . .

  She doesn’t want to go back. She’s weary.

  Rowan is here to listen.

  If she tells Rowan, she can return to Papa and Aunt Etta and the beautiful, beautiful morning.

  “I’m so sorry, Ora,” Rowan is saying. “I had no idea you hadn’t been feeling well, or taking care of things, until Emerson Mundy—”

  Emerson Mundy.

  Yes.

  The rest of Rowan’s words are lost in a loud, rattling sound from within—a gasp as Ora remembers.

  She struggles to breathe, to find her voice, to tell them . . .

  To warn them.

  Clenching the steering wheel, Emerson navigates the curves along Riverview Road.

  She’d been as stunned to glimpse that face in the old family album as she’d have been if her mother had walked into the room.

  Didi . . .

  Deirdre . . .

  She was just a kid in the photo, but the face was unmistakable. She later—though not much later—sat at her Hollywood mirror and gushed to her little daughter about movie stars, sounding like a star-struck teenager . . .

  Because she was a star-struck teenager.

  Emerson’s father really was her father; really was a Mundy. It just never occurred to her that her mother was, too.

  So her parents were cousins, her father decades older . . .

  He always did like little girls.

  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?

  It doesn’t only happen to Rowan, with her kitchen cabinets.

  And Emerson’s father wasn’t the only one who wanted to forget her mother.

  If she had ever allowed herself to search back in her mind for one missing item—her memory of her mother—other, darker things might come to light.

  When Didi was gone, she cried at night. Her father came to comfort her, and he stayed, and . . .

  Eventually, she stopped crying.

  Stopped feeling.

  Stopped remembering.

  Until last summer.

  Sully clutches her phone against the steering wheel as she turns into the driveway at 25 Riverview Road. Barnes should be calling back any second now with the information she asked him to find.

  Yes, any second, he’s going to confirm that the crazy idea that popped into her head back there on the Commons is just that. Crazy.

  Sully parks on the road in front of the house, thinking of Rowan’s nephew Sean, of Roy Nowak, of Emerson, her mother . . .

  She slams the car door, possibilities screaming through her brain like the crows startled from the overhead branch. Fat and black, they lift with a flapping commotion and then settle again in the boughs of a nearby maple. Beyond its branches, a curtain flutters in an upstairs bedroom window, and she sees the shadow of someone looking out.

  Come on, phone, ring.

  She hears only the peaceful hum of a boat on the river far below, and a tree frog croaking in time with her footsteps along the walkway toward the front door.

  The first time she entered the Mundy home, she discovered Rowan’s sister Noreen, throat slit, scarcely alive. Rowan, too, barely escaped with her life.

  The next time Sully walked through that front door, she found it hard to forget the bloodbath that had greeted her on that grim winter day. Three hours, a lot of laughs, and a couple of warm hugs later, she left by the back door.

  “The front’s for company,” Rowan told her that night. “You’re family now. Next time, come around back, and don’t worry about knocking. Just come on in.”

  She always does. Always . . . until tonight.

  For a brief, awful moment, standing on the steps, she imagines that something terrible has happened to them—all of them, the whole Mundy family.

  “Rowan?” she calls, knocking. “Jake?”

  Nothing from inside the house, but she hears a high-pitched cry somewhere behind and below her.

  Just a cat, poking a curious head out from under the steps, offering an unblinking green glare.

  The stray cat, the one who had kittens under the porch.

  “It’s okay,” Sully tells her, bending to give her a pat.

  The cat hisses.

  Fierce maternal instinct—she’s protecting her babies.

  This morning at Valley Roasters, Rowan had offered Emerson a kitten. She said she was allergic.

  Runs in the family . . .

  What else does?

  The door opens, and Jake is there. “Sully! Ro said she invited you, but she didn’t think you were coming.”

  “I’m not here for dinner. Where did she go?”

  “To the hospital to visit Ora Abrams. It’s kind of been a . . . strange night.”


  Momentarily forgotten, the old woman’s plight charges into Sully’s brain with new implications.

  “Can I come in, please, Jake?”

  “Sure. Come on back to the kitchen. I can’t leave Doofus alone with the food. I’ve got to go put it away.”

  Following him through the house, Sully is reassured to see the usual array of jackets and shoes, sports equipment and tote bags.

  But in the fragrant kitchen, bowls, pans, and platters of food sit out untouched. Why is he alone, putting it away?

  Sully’s heart beats a little faster. “Jake . . . are the kids home?”

  “Ours are here. I think Sean is at work.”

  “At the Windmill?”

  “Yes.”

  “Isn’t Emerson coming over for dinner?”

  He opens a drawer and pulls out a long yellow cardboard box of plastic wrap, a blue one of foil. “She was already here.”

  “She left without eating?”

  “Yes, she—”

  “Do you know where she went? I haven’t been able to reach her, and I’m supposed to take her to the morgue, and—”

  “The morgue!” Jake gapes at her.

  “She didn’t tell you?”

  “Tell us what?”

  She explains about Roy, framing it as a suicide, not betraying her suspicions.

  “Ro said Emerson was with Ora this afternoon when she collapsed. I couldn’t believe she came over here for dinner like nothing happened—and now you tell me her fiancé committed suicide on top of it? No wonder she seemed so strange.”

  “Strange how?” Sully asks sharply.

  “Jittery. Preoccupied.”

  “Anything else unusual?”

  “She was anxious to find out about the family. We were in the front room, and I was showing her the family tree and some old pictures, when she just got up and left.”

  “Why did she leave? What did she say?”

  “She didn’t say anything at all,” Jake says. “She spilled some wine, and I went to get something to clean it up, and when I came back, she was gone.”

  “She walked out of here without saying good-bye?”

  “Yeah, and she took the picture she was so interested in.”

  “What was it?”

  “One of the family reunion photos my grandfather took years ago, back in ’79.”

  Seventy-nine. The year Deirdre Mundy disappeared.

  “What did the photo show?”

  “Just some random cousins. My grandfather wrote their names on the back. Jerry and Deirdre.”

  Struck by a frightful new possibility, Sully asks Jake if he’s sure Emerson left the house.

  “At first we thought she might have just gone into the bathroom or something, but then we saw that her car was gone. Why? Do you think something happened to her? Was she in some kind of danger?”

  Sully shakes her head.

  Emerson said she was afraid of Roy, but if he’s dead . . .

  Her mind’s eye sees the bloated blue corpse hanging from the tree.

  Definitely dead.

  “What the hell is going on, Sully?”

  Before she can answer, her cell phone rings.

  Barnes.

  Finally.

  “I think I’m about to find out,” she tells Jake, striding into the next room to take the call.

  Driving through the night, bombarded by memories, Emerson needs a quiet place where she can process what she’s learned.

  Where do I go?

  Not the inn. Sully will look for her there.

  Not the hospital, either, though she’d intended to visit Ora later tonight.

  That can wait. She needs to be alone, to figure out her next move, though she’s pretty sure she knows what she has to do.

  She’s known ever since the truth came out last summer, as she sat beside her father’s hospital bed.

  He’d had a difficult night, and his breathing was labored. He needed heart surgery, but wasn’t likely to survive the procedure. The doctor asked if he’d signed a DNR and whether his affairs were in order.

  The answer to the first question was a solid yes. Jerry Mundy had made his wishes clear all along. He couldn’t bear the thought of being helpless, incapacitated, a prisoner in his own body.

  Ironic, Emerson thinks now, clenching the steering wheel harder as she slows the car at a fork in the road.

  As for the second question . . .

  Jerry Mundy asked for time alone with his daughter. The doctor and nurse left the room and she sat at the edge of his bed. As he spoke, she was forced to lean in close so that she could hear. Even when the words were coherent, she wasn’t sure she grasped what he was telling her.

  Her mother hadn’t abandoned them all those years ago?

  “Not you,” he said. “Just . . . me. She wanted to leave me . . . take you with her.”

  Emerson sat listening to him telling her that her mother wanted her to have the perfect Christmas. How she spent money they didn’t have on gifts for her little girl, running up debt for toys and a Cabbage Patch doll that had cost more than Jerry made in a month. They argued, he said, as he was outside in the yard assembling the rope swing Santa had left under the tree. Her mother said that she was leaving him, and taking Emerson—then called Emily—with her.

  “I went crazy,” he said. “I couldn’t let you go. You were my world. You are my world. My everything.”

  Numb, Emerson listened as her father told her he’d flown into a rage and strangled her mother with the rope from the swing. Tears trickled from his eyes as he spoke of his horror when he realized what he’d done.

  “I don’t know how it happened . . . I just lost my mind. It was like some kind of crazy spell, as if I wasn’t even there. When I snapped out of it, and saw her . . .” His voice broke. “I loved her. I did. From the moment I saw her. I’d have married her right then, at first sight, if I could have, but . . .”

  He didn’t tell Emerson what he meant by that, but now she knows. A forty-year-old man and a fifteen-year-old girl—his cousin’s daughter, no less.

  No wonder.

  He told her how he’d made up the story about her mother leaving, for Emerson and anyone else who happened to ask. There couldn’t have been many inquiries. They kept to themselves . . .

  Dear God, no wonder.

  She slows to a stop at the fork in the road. A sign indicates that Schaapskill is to the right, off Highview Road. The road to the left leads into town.

  She bears right, toward the sprawling oak tree with outstretched arms.

  Many things—but not everything—fell into place that night last summer.

  Her father swore he did it for her. That he hid the truth about her mother—hid her mother’s body—for Emerson’s sake. That he couldn’t go away to prison and leave her alone. He had to be there for her.

  “And I was,” he reminded her. “I was there for you.”

  Yes. He was there.

  Dammit, he was there. For her. With her. In the night. In her bed.

  “But now you’re grown up, and you don’t need me anymore.”

  No, Dad. You don’t need me anymore. Not that way. You haven’t in so many years that I’d forgotten. Buried it.

  But on that summer day at his bedside, the shameful brutality surfaced to roil and rot her brain, her gut.

  “Thank you for listening,” he whispered, closing his eyes. “Now, if I don’t make it, I can rest in peace . . .”

  “Or you can go to hell, you son of a bitch,” she hissed, and fled to be sick in the bathroom down the hall.

  Stepping into the Mundys’ dining room to take her call from Barnes, Sully finds linen and china, crystal and silver—table set for seven—the family, Emerson, and Rowan’s nephew.

  Sean Chapman wasn’t here the day his mother was attacked. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t think of it, playing it over in his head, imagining himself the hero who rescues her and changes her fate.

  Sully understands that. She’s been ther
e.

  Some people whose lives are altered by violence do find their way back to normalcy. Others are forever tainted—some numb, some wracked with sorrow, some so angry that violence begets violence.

  “Barnes?” she asks, pulling out her notepad and pen. “What do you have for me?”

  “First, Roy Nowak. Well-liked, judging by his social media accounts. No blemishes on his academic reputation. No police record, unless you count a speeding ticket yesterday. He was doing ninety, eastbound on the Pennsylvania turnpike.”

  “No evidence of obsession, stalking, delusion . . .”

  “None. But I’m sure he was concerned about Emerson.”

  A chill slips over her. “Why?”

  “Did you know she had problems at work?”

  “What kind of problems?”

  “Erratic behavior. Absences. They gave her a short bereavement leave last winter and provided counseling services—looks like she was having trouble processing her grief.”

  Sully writes it all down. A parent’s suicide is traumatic. This isn’t surprising.

  Then Barnes says, “She tried to finish the school year, but they let her go.”

  “Wait, they let her go? As in, fired?”

  “She didn’t tell you, either?”

  “She said she was a teacher. She said she’d just come from a history teachers’ convention in Washington.”

  “She’d scheduled that trip months ago. From there, she was flying to New York and then driving to Mundy’s Landing. After she lost her job, she should have canceled the conference, but she didn’t. She really was there, but she wasn’t supposed to be.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Group photos on a public social media page for the conference. She’s in a few of them. I saw some snarky comments about her being a party crasher, that kind of thing. Hang on, I’ll text you the link.”

  Sully’s brain sprints back over what she knows about Roy Nowak.

  Every negative detail, she realizes, was filtered through a single lens: Emerson Mundy’s.

  As Sean pulls up at the curb out front, Savannah is glad to see that the historical society is brightly lit.

  “It looks like Miss Abrams is here after all,” she says, having tried to reach her several more times. “I wonder why she didn’t answer the phone.”

  “Maybe she didn’t hear it ring from way downstairs. She lives on the top floor, and you said it was her personal line, right?”