Bone White

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  Not finish.

  Not quite yet.

  She wouldn’t be here, in this situation, if not for the greatest irony of all.

  Her father had made a stunning deathbed confession . . . and then lived.

  After the surgery, the doctor told Emerson how lucky she was that he’d pulled through.

  Yes . . . so lucky.

  The patient was heavily sedated, intubated, recovering.

  She sat dutifully at his bedside day after day, making friends with the nurses and orderlies who wheeled carts past his room, and sometimes into it. Carts filled with food, equipment, medication . . .

  She knew what they had, and where they kept it, and how to use it.

  When they were there, she spoke lovingly and sometimes teasingly about her father, and to him. She spoke about the strange concoctions he whipped up in the kitchen, and their nightly tradition of watching Wheel of Fortune together, and the arm-wrestling matches he never let her win. They said he could hear her, even when he appeared to be dozing.

  She spoke to him, too, when no one else was around. In a low voice, she told him about the past—about what she remembered of their lives together.

  Unable to answer, fat tubes clogging his throat, he could only stare at her, eyes wide, as she reminded herself—and him—what he’d done to her.

  And to her mother.

  With his sick, perverted fantasies.

  With his lies.

  With a rope . . .

  A rope like the one that’s coiled now in the trunk of her rental car. She stopped to buy it on the drive up from New York, just in case, just in case . . .

  But it wasn’t meant for Roy.

  Damn him, following her here.

  If only he’d stayed away when she’d told him she wanted to be alone. If only he wasn’t always sniffing around, worrying, asking questions . . .

  Maybe he sensed the truth about her father long before Emerson allowed herself to remember. Maybe Roy really was trying to help her. Maybe that was why he came to Mundy’s Landing. To rescue her, save her life.

  Instead . . .

  But he didn’t belong here.

  She could have belonged. She’d finally found a place where she could make a fresh start. No one would have known about her strange, solitary childhood, or the emotional breakdowns that had plagued her this past year, after her father died . . .

  No. No more lies.

  After you killed him.

  The idea came into her head that day at his hospital bedside, when he told her he’d murdered her mother.

  The funny thing is, she’d already thought of it long ago, when they were talking about the historic execution of James and Elizabeth Mundy. He’d mentioned that there are worse ways to die.

  “Worse than being strangled to death by a noose?”

  “It’s faster than you’d think. You fall, and your neck breaks, and it’s over. Better than wasting away.”

  That, she knew, was what he feared more than anything else. The wasting. The helplessness.

  She had promised she wouldn’t let it happen to him. That if there ever came a day when he was suffering, she wouldn’t blame him if he decided to end his own life. She agreed that she would do whatever she could to ease his way.

  The day, when it came, didn’t play out the way she’d first conceived it—with herself as the merciful angel releasing him from an agonizing plight.

  By then, she knew what he’d done to her mother. By then, she’d remembered what he’d done to her.

  She didn’t want to end his suffering. She wanted to end her own.

  She wanted him gone.

  He was released from the hospital to “recuperate”—a synonym for waste away until you die, and they both knew it. He’d survived the surgery and the aftermath, never reaching a point when a DNR would come into play and someone—the doctors? God? Emerson?—could make a decision about whether he lived or died.

  He lived, but the quality of living was negligible. He was wheelchair-bound. Couldn’t stomach solid foods. His legs were covered in sores.

  Insurance would pay for a home health aide for one hour a day.

  “What the hell am I going to do the other twenty-three hours?” he’d blustered.

  “Thank goodness you have your daughter,” the hospital staffer said, handing him a clipboard full of papers to sign.

  Yes, he would have his daughter.

  She and her father returned to the house filled with secrets hidden behind closed doors and in dark, spidery nooks.

  For several days, she did what was medically necessary to keep him comfortable, medicated, nourished, alive.

  On the final day, she did what was necessary to kill him.

  Perhaps he knew it was coming. Perhaps he welcomed it.

  He was asleep when she injected him with the strongest sedative she’d managed to steal in her time at the hospital. She fixed the noose around his neck.

  It was ordinary rope, purchased at a hardware store, though she’d have preferred the shiny plastic rope from a child’s swing.

  “You have to get stronger, Emerson . . .”

  “How am I supposed to do that?”

  “Lift some weights. Do some pull-ups.”

  She’d listened.

  She’s strong.

  Strong enough to hang him and make it look like a suicide . . .

  Just as she’d done with Roy.

  When she called him back late last night, he said he was in Mundy’s Landing, about to check into a hotel. He kept asking where she was.

  She didn’t tell him, but thanks to Sully, he guessed. She saw him drive by the Dapplebrook. He kept texting, late into the night, waking her from the nightmare about the gallows.

  He wanted to see for himself that she was okay.

  Finally, she told him to meet her outside. When he arrived, she was waiting, in a hood she’d hastily fashioned from a charcoal gray pillowcase, using the stolen steak knife to jab eyeholes. Waiting with a syringe filled with medication and the noose she’d planned to use on herself if she didn’t find what she was looking for here in Mundy’s Landing.

  It happened so quickly.

  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 . . .

  Perhaps she should understand, now, how her father could have done what he had to her mother.

  How her great-great-uncle could have done what he had to his brother.

  How Elizabeth Mundy could have killed—and eaten—the young servant girl who was carrying her grandchild.

  That was the first of the many twisted ironies that had led her here, and the one that had sealed her own fate centuries before she was born. There must be something—in her brain, her chemistry, her blood—some violent compulsion, a trait passed from generation to generation along with the heterochromia.

  We shall never tell . . .

  Their terrible deeds may have gone undetected for the duration of their own lives, but Emerson had pieced it all together. She alone knew who they really were.

  She’d come to Mundy’s Landing bearing evidence of what had happened in 1666—that James and Elizabeth had not been executed for a crime they didn’t commit. Their claims that they’d eaten only the flesh of fellow settlers who’d died naturally were supported by historical accounts. But no one had seen the letters Emerson had inherited.

  They had murdered Anne Blake in cold blood.

  Emerson had done the same to her own father.

  And to Roy.

  When she came to her senses in the shadows of the Dapplebrook Inn last night, she found herself staring through tattered pillowcase holes at his lifeless body.

  She panicked. Upstairs, in her suite, she deleted the telltale final text exchange from her cell phone and from his. Then she grabbed her suitcase to begin packing, knowing she had to flee.

  But where could she go?

  If she left, they’d suspect her. They’d find her. Punish her.
/>   If only there was some way she could make Roy’s death look like a suicide, as her father’s had. If only she could link the two somehow to something else, someone else . . .

  Staring into the bottom of her empty suitcase, she thought of the letter that lay beneath—the one Priscilla Mundy had written to Jeremiah. The one that mentioned the name of the pregnant girl he’d loved, the girl their parents had killed, only to face the hangman . . .

  Anne . . .

  Hangman.

  In that moment, the idea came to her.

  The local authorities are no stranger to serial killers leaving cryptic notes, or to copycat killers.

  She wrote four notes, each containing a letter of the dead girl’s name.

  She crept downstairs and tacked one to the tree beside Roy’s corpse.

  She slipped the rest into the lining of her bag. If she offered one voluntarily, claiming to have found it with her father, she might be able to deflect suspicion.

  She wasn’t sure, at that time, what to do with the other two notes.

  Then Ora Abrams collapsed at her feet after triggering the notion that her father was an imposter. Emerson instinctively did the right thing and called for help. But as the old woman drifted in and out of consciousness and she sat breathing the foul, familiar scent of age and squalor, she was back in her father’s house, back to the lies, and the rage.

  Only when she heard the paramedics at the door did Emerson realize that she’d taken the sofa pillow from beneath Ora’s head and was pressing it against her face.

  She threw it aside in horror as the rescuers burst into the room. Ora was still breathing when they took her away, but will she live? Does she know? Were her eyes open when the pillow came down? If she saw, and if she lives to tell someone that Emerson tried to kill her, will they believe her?

  She’s senile. And she’s lived out her years.

  No one would be surprised to see Emerson at the hospital, visiting Ora. She planned to go over there with the third hangman note in her pocket. This time, she really would be an angel of mercy, saving an old lady from the inevitable sad, slow decline.

  As for the fourth hangman note . . .

  In Mundy’s Landing, she’d found everything she’d always wanted—roots, and the warmth of friends and family, and the sense of belonging somewhere at last. But the unexpected photo of her parents in the old family album had shattered everything. She can no longer live here—but she can die here.

  The Schaapskill park officer unwittingly intercepted her fatal leap out at the hangman’s tree.

  Now, she parks the car in front of the historical society and presses the button to release the trunk with a satisfying pop. From it, she retrieves the hood and then a coil of rope, quickly, expertly, fashioning a noose at one end. She grabs the remaining length of rope and both hangman notes.

  It hasn’t worked out the way it was supposed to. For her, nothing ever does.

  She finds the front door unlocked just as she’d left it. Stepping into the foyer, she sees the staircase and balcony above.

  It isn’t the tree, but it will do.

  She climbs the flight surefootedly and drops the noose over the rail, gauging the length. She looks around for a place where she can anchor the other end and sees a closed door behind her.

  Stepping closer, she sees that the plaque on the door reads: Mundy’s Landing 1665–66: Early Settlers Exhibit.

  Ah, the final irony.

  She finds herself smiling as she secures a length of rope to the doorknob and checks the noose again. It dangles about eight feet off the floor. If the fall doesn’t break her neck, she’ll strangle there.

  Either way, it will be over.

  The name of the first innocent will have been revealed.

  The guilty will have been punished.

  And—

  She hears a creaking sound somewhere overhead. For a moment, she wonders if it might be the cat.

  Then she realizes that it’s footsteps and knows that Ora Abrams, like her father—like Emerson herself—has come home to die.

  “Sean?” Savannah calls from the top of the steep flight leading to Ora’s apartment.

  As she waits for his answering voice, she looks nervously, guiltily, over her shoulder.

  She should have left as soon as she found the door to Ora’s private quarters ajar, and realized Ora wasn’t here. But then she glanced out the window at the top of the stairs and saw the old woman’s car parked in the driveway below.

  What if something had happened to her? She could have fallen. She could be lying injured right now.

  Savannah hurried into the apartment. She hasn’t found Ora, but she’s discovered something else.

  Beneath a built-in bookshelf, a wide, shallow drawer is concealed behind a panel that matches the room’s carved baseboard moldings. It’s open, revealing an assortment of boxes in an array of shapes and sizes. Labels describe the contents of each, written in vintage penmanship—not as old-fashioned as the seventeenth-century script on the letters in her bag, but certainly not of this century, and maybe not the last, either.

  Savannah was tempted to delve in, but that would be wrong. Instead, she was about to head back downstairs when she heard a noise below.

  “Sean?” she calls again. “Miss Abrams? Hello?”

  Poised at the top of the stairs, she listens for a reply, or movement.

  All is still.

  She must have been mistaken. She descends anyway, intending to check the rest of the house for an injured Ora Abrams. If she doesn’t find her, she’ll walk over to the Windmill and alert Detective Leary that the house is unlocked and Ora unaccounted for.

  Or is that overstepping? she wonders as she reaches the second-floor hallway.

  Maybe she should just—

  She freezes, feeling a hand on her arm.

  Turning, she sees . . .

  Someone.

  Someone whose face is covered by some kind of dark gray hood with ragged eyeholes.

  Someone who, in one swift movement, puts a noose over her head and gives her a hard shove toward the balcony.

  When the girl appeared before her eyes, Emerson was stunned.

  Anne Blake.

  Back from the dead, haunting the attic, come to avenge her cruel death at the hands of Emerson’s ancestors.

  The girl struggles, arched backward, the balcony banister against the small of her back. Her feet are crooked into the railing and her hands flail, trying to grab Emerson, grab the rope that tightens around her neck with every movement. Her abdomen is bared above the waistband of her jeans, muscles straining, no sign of Jeremiah’s child growing in her womb.

  Emerson shoves a piece of paper into her front pocket—the hangman puzzle and word diagram showing only the first of four letters, an A.

  “No! Please!”

  Straddling her body, Emerson sees that the knot is no longer on the left side of her neck, where she’d positioned it for optimum efficiency. It’s shifted in the struggle, now at the back, not as likely to snap her neck and sever her spinal cord, making her death instantaneous.

  It isn’t Emerson’s concern.

  She pushes the girl’s shoulders, feeling her wobble . . . wobble . . .

  Then her pillowcase hood shifts sideways and she’s blinded, eyeholes no longer aligned. She releases Anne to yank the hood from her head.

  Gaining leverage, Anne struggles upright, again moving the knot, trying to loosen it with one hand as she reaches for the railing with the other. Emerson tosses the hood aside and lunges again.

  Back, back, back Anne goes. As before, only her feet, wedged between the spindles, hold her on this side of the rail.

  Emerson reaches down, grabs hold of one ankle, and yanks it free.

  “No!”

  Anne’s leg swings forward, her body slips backward.

  Emerson reaches for her other foot. The rubber sole rubs along the curved wood, coming loose inch by painstaking inch . . .

  It’s stuck, her sh
oe turned sideways, toe stuck behind one spindle, heel behind the other.

  Time stands still, Anne poised in midair, dangling between life and death.

  She screams shrilly.

  “Help me! Please! Help m—”

  Infuriated, Emerson gives her ankle another jarring tug—not toward her this time, but upward.

  The shoe remains wedged between the rails, but Anne’s foot is no longer in it. With a final thrust, Emerson sends her up, up, and over the edge.

  She manages to grab on to a spindle, and it breaks her fall.

  Then she goes down with a swoosh and a thrashing of limbs, the length of rope slithering after her. For a brief, terrible moment, Emerson wonders whether it will hold.

  It does, lashed to the doorknob on the far wall. It grows taut as Anne’s feet halt in midair two, maybe three feet above the polished hardwoods.

  Emerson peers over the edge. She’s still moving, clawing at the rope constricting her neck.

  She shouldn’t have moved the knot; shouldn’t have grabbed at the railing. A hard, fast fall with the knot positioned to the left beneath her chin would have killed her instantly.

  Now she’ll strangle to death—a barbaric, painful way to die.

  That’s what her father said about her mother. He made it happen that way, watched it happen.

  Emerson will not.

  She grabs the other length of rope she’d taken from the car—much shorter than the first, but long enough to do the trick. Her fingers tremble as she loops one end into a noose; as she pulls the other end once, twice, three times around the balcony railing before tying it in a firm double knot.

  She stands facing the crystal chandelier suspended from a plaster medallion. Below, Anne Blake dangles, struggling, gasping.

  Emerson fumbles for the pillowcase she’d tossed aside and pulls it over her head again, this time, with the eyeholes at the back of her head. She pulls the noose down over her shrouded head, and fixes the knot just below her jawline, on the left.

  She swings one leg over the railing, sits, swivels to throw the other leg over.

  From her pocket, she takes the yellowed pages that started it all, and the final hangman note that will end it.

  Another gallows, and the remaining letter, an N.