Bone White Read online

  Dedication

  FOR MY COUSINS BILL AND KAREN CORSI—

  Always there for me,

  Always upbeat,

  Always loving and dearly loved.

  For my husband Mark,

  And for our March birthday boys, Morgan and Brody.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Map

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Email

  Chapter 2

  Letter

  Chapter 3

  Letter

  Chapter 4

  Notice to Heirs

  Chapter 5

  Letter

  Chapter 6

  Letter

  Chapter 7

  Letter

  Chapter 8

  Letter

  Chapter 9

  Letter

  Chapter 10

  Letter

  Chapter 11

  Letter

  Chapter 12

  Letter

  Chapter 13

  Letter

  Chapter 14

  Letter

  Chapter 15

  Letter

  Chapter 16

  Letter

  Chapter 17

  Letter

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise for the Mundy’s Landing series

  By Wendy Corsi Staub

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Map

  Prologue

  July 1666

  Hudson Valley, New York

  The crowd jeers, and Jeremiah Mundy grips his younger sisters’ hands, steeling himself for the unthinkable tragedy about to unfold.

  Thou art a man now, he reminds himself, echoing the last words his father, James, said to him weeks ago, before he and Mother were taken away.

  At fourteen, Jeremiah felt in that moment, and feels in this one, like a mere child. Yet he promised his parents that he would accept his manly obligation, taking charge of his sisters and the household in their absence. He just never dreamed the absence would endure for weeks, let alone . . . forever.

  But forever it shall be.

  James and Elizabeth Mundy are sentenced to die today at the hands of the black-clad, hooded hangman who, like the others present, recently arrived in this year-old colony perched on the Hudson River’s western bank. They were due last fall, having traveled from England with sorely needed supplies. But a harsh winter froze the river before the reinforcements could make their way north from the port of Manhattan. The Mundy family and their fellow settlers were left to fend for themselves for nearly five months.

  Day in and out, Jeremiah trudged with his father through a swirling white maelstrom to chop wood and feed a fire that did little to stave off the bitter cold. They could not hunt, nor could they forage. For a long time, there was no way to feed the relentless hunger. The family nearly starved to death.

  But they did not. They were the lucky ones. They found the means to salvation—horrific means, and yet, as Jeremiah overheard his parents saying, what choice did they have?

  Starvation does peculiar things to a person. The hunger is unbearable, a living, breathing monster growing within your gut, its ferocious growls drowning out the voice of reason. You will do anything, anything within reason—and eventually, anything well beyond the realm of reason—to feed the beast. And when you have—when you’ve done the unthinkable, and the agony has abated—you’ll fear not just for your life, but for your sanity.

  There will be no turning back.

  When at last the supplies and reinforcements arrived in May, only the Mundys remained of the three dozen original English settlers.

  “Look there! Satan himself blazes in the Goody Mundy’s eyes!” a man proclaims from the crowd behind Jeremiah.

  “Ay, and peculiar eyes they be,” comes the reply, and he recognizes the rasping voice of the Goodwife Barker, whose brother was among the first of the winter’s casualties.

  Peculiar . . .

  Jeremiah closes his own eyes: one a piercing shade of blue, the other a chalky gray.

  Years ago, back in England, he caught a glimpse of himself in his grandmother’s looking glass and was startled to see that he, like his mother, had one pale iris and one fully pigmented.

  “’Tis a rare gift,” his beloved grandmother told him, and he believed it . . .

  Until now.

  Rare, yes. Not a gift, but a curse.

  The subject of his mother’s “peculiar” eyes came up at the trial—offered as additional evidence of Elizabeth Mundy’s guilt, lest there be any claim that her initial confession had been coerced through bodily torture.

  A stalwart Jeremiah had witnessed that torture, a public spectacle that unfolded on the riverbank on a gray spring day. The entire colony turned out to watch, bristling with anticipation like an amusement-deprived London audience flocking to post-Restoration theater.

  His father was first to be strapped to the ducking stool as Jeremiah, helpless, stood apart from the gawkers and gossipers. Their voices and the chirping chatter of woodland creatures were drowned out by violent splashing as James Mundy was repeatedly submerged in the murky current. Each time he sputtered to the surface, he defiantly proclaimed his innocence, determined to let them drown him—until the moment they assured him that his wife would be spared the same punishment if he confessed.

  And so he did.

  Jeremiah’s fists clenched as he listened to the confession. Either way, his father would die: drowned in the river, or sentenced to death for murder. At least James Mundy had preserved his wife’s dignity and her life . . . or so he believed.

  They had lied.

  Jeremiah’s mother had her own turn on the ducking stool. A pair of burly men—the same men who escort her to her doom this morning—held Jeremiah back when he tried to rush to her side. She endured nearly three hours before confessing to the heinous crimes of which she and her husband had been accused.

  The trial, now a mere formality, was swift; the verdict unanimous; the sentence so inevitable that the platform was being built beneath the sturdy branches of an oak tree even before the trial had concluded.

  The crowd assembled at sunrise, as eager to know that the devil had been banished from the settlement as they are thirsty for diversion from daily drudgery.

  Eyes squeezed shut to block out the horrific sight of the crude wooden structure, Jeremiah scours his memory for the image of his mother’s face as it once was—serene, affectionate, exhilarated by the promise of life in this New World. But he can envision it only pale with worry, and then—oh, and then contorted in feverish wrath as starvation took hold.

  At the telltale pressing of the crowd around him, he opens his eyes to see that it has parted, allowing the procession into the clearing.

  Flanked by pairs of the settlement’s strongest men, Mother and Father appear even more frail than they were a few days ago, when they were sentenced to death after they confessed to murder—and worse. Far, far worse.

  Twelve-year-old Charity, the elder but smaller of Jeremiah’s sisters, begins to whimper. Priscilla, eight, remains as silent and stoic as her brother, grasping his hand firmly.

  The magistrate reads the charges in a booming voice and orders that the death sentence be carried out immediately.

  Jeremiah shifts his gaze toward the forest on the far end of the clearing as an escape fantasy takes shape. His parents shall break away and run toward the trees. They’ll disappear into the dense woods and find their way to the water, eluding their captors and the executioner’s twin nooses, and—

  A gleeful roar disrupts the comforting daydream. Elizabeth Mundy has fainted. The brutes yan
k her upright again and drag her toward the gallows beneath the oak.

  Priscilla remains steadfast at Jeremiah’s side, but Charity tugs his hand. “I cannot bear to watch.”

  “We must.”

  With a plaintive wail, his sister wrenches herself from his grasp and flees, capturing the crowd’s interest.

  Jeremiah will comfort her when the ordeal is over.

  Someone touches his shoulder, and he turns to see Goody Dowling, whose husband and sons are building a home on land adjacent to the Mundys’.

  Her expression is not unkind. “I shall see to the girl.”

  She hurries away, leaving him dumbfounded.

  He’s scarcely wondered what might become of him and his sisters after today, but when he does allow himself to speculate, he assumes the other settlers will shun them, forcing them to leave this place.

  Where will they even go?

  When they fled England a year ago, they were destitute, evicted by their landholder with nowhere to turn in an overpopulated country. Their only hope of salvation lay across the sea. The British had recently wrangled control of the New Netherland colony from the Dutch and renamed it New York, luring settlers like the Mundys with the promise of opportunity, freedom, and abundant land.

  Even if Jeremiah and his sisters could afford to pay for passage back to England, they’d be as alone there as they are here. Grandmother was struck by the plague before they left. When she passes on, Aunt Felicity will join them in the New World, perhaps already having begun the journey. They have no other family to speak of.

  Here, they may not have relatives or friends, but they do have a home—if home can be defined as land, shelter, and food. The last has finally come in abundance with crops in the fields, fish in the river, game in the forests.

  What little Jeremiah knows of the world beyond this settlement is formidable and fraught with danger. Mountains and forests teem with feral creatures and unfriendly natives. Neighboring settlements are few and far between, populated by the Dutch, no ally to the English.

  Having glimpsed the teeming port of Manhattan last year and found it rife with strangers and filth, he has no desire to make his way back accompanied by two vulnerable little girls.

  Thanks to a stranger’s unexpected benevolence toward the imminent orphan and the crowd’s murmuring of sympathy as Charity fled, Jeremiah wonders whether he and his sisters may be permitted to stay on in their parents’ home. It isn’t the ideal scenario, yet it’s the only one he can fathom.

  Now, however, isn’t the time to plan for the future. Somehow, he must find the strength and courage to focus on the present.

  Thou art a man now.

  His parents stand on the scaffold, side by side, hands bound, facing the crowd.

  Father’s jaw is set, his gaze fixed straight ahead. Mother searches the crowd as the hangman wraps a length of rope around her skirt, binding her legs.

  Her gaze lands on Jeremiah. There is no evidence now of the madness that gripped her last winter in the throes of famine. In his final glimpse of her peculiar eyes, he sees a frantic question.

  Then the hangman blindfolds her with a length of cloth and commands the prisoners to bow their heads for the nooses.

  Sunlight glints against the gold ring on his mother’s hand, and Jeremiah swallows a rush of bile.

  Priscilla’s grasp tightens on his hand.

  The hangman nods, satisfied that the nooses are fixed. An expectant hush falls over the crowd as he descends a rickety ladder creaking under his weight.

  The command is given, and in that moment, Jeremiah finds his voice at last. “Fear not!” he calls out, and to his own ears, his voice is shockingly strong and sure. “I shall protect my sisters and we shall make you proud and—”

  His final message is lost in a roar of approval from the crowd as the platform drops.

  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 strangle at the end of the rope, his body contorting with futile 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 will forever after haunt their nightmares. They scuttle away until just the hangman and the Mundy siblings remain beside the scaffold, accompanied by a flock of fat gray geese that has alighted nearby like scavengers.

  Watching his mother’s corpse sway gently beside her husband’s agonizing spasms, Jeremiah remembers another death. Brutal as the arctic air on that February day, it left a numbness that has yet to subside. Perhaps it never will.

  Priscilla’s sturdy little body wracked with silent sobs, she 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 as the hangman cuts his parents’ bodies down from the branch to be hauled away for unceremonious burial.

  Priscilla pulls back to look up at him, her blue eyes raw and swollen. “What will happen to us now?”

  “We shall return to our home and never speak of this again to anyone but each other and Charity. No matter what happens, for the rest of our lives. Do you understand?”

  “I do.”

  Satisfied, he looks over at the hangman, loading their dead father onto a cart like a sack of grain.

  “Wait here for me, Priscilla. I shall return momentarily.”

  She slumps against the oak’s broad, sturdy trunk as he walks over to the man.

  “Sir,” he says, “may I have a moment with my mother?”

  The man regards him for a long moment, then nods.

  Jeremiah crouches on the grass and reaches among the folds of his mother’s skirt. Her hands are bound with a strip of cloth, fingers clasped as if in prayer. To the man standing above, it may appear that he wishes to touch her hand one last time in farewell.

  But Jeremiah’s fingers close over the gold gimmal ring she’s wearing. He tugs. Her finger is bent, and it fits her snugly, difficult to remove.

  I must have it.

  He tugs harder, and feels the sickening crack of bone as he removes the ring.

  Closing it in his fist, he bends to press his lips against her forehead.

  There, he whispers 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 20, 2016

  Los Angeles, California

  We shall never tell.

  Strange, the thoughts that go through your head when you’re standing at an open grave.

  Not that Emerson Mundy knew anything about open graves before today. Her father’s funeral is the first she’s ever attended, and she’s the sole mourner.

  Ah, at last, a perk to living a life without many—any—loved ones: you don’t spend much time grieving, unless you count the pervasive ache for the things you never had.

  The minister, who came with the cemetery package and never even met Jerry Mundy, is rambling on about souls and salvation. Emerson hears only We shall never tell—the closing line in an old letter she found yesterday in the crawl space of her childhood home. It had been written in 1676 by a young woman named Priscilla Mundy, addressed to her brother, Jeremiah.

  The Mundys were among the seventeenth-century English colonists who settled on the eastern bank of the Hudson River, about a hundred miles north of New York City. Their first winter was so harsh that the river froze, stranding their supply ship and additional colonists in the New York harbor. When the ship arrived after the thaw, all but five settlers had starved to death.

  Jeremiah; Priscilla; their sister, Charity; and their parents had eaten human flesh to stay alive. James and Elizabeth Mundy swore they’d only cannibalized those w
ho’d already died, but the God-fearing, well-fed newcomers couldn’t fathom such wretched butchery. A Puritan justice committee tortured the couple until they confessed to murder, then swiftly tried, convicted, and hanged them.

  “Do you think we’re related?” Emerson asked her father after learning about the Mundys back in elementary school.

  “Nope.” Curt answers were typical when she brought up anything Jerry Mundy didn’t want to discuss. The past was high on the list.

  “That’s it? Just nope?”

  “What else do you want me to say?”

  “How about yes?”

  “That wouldn’t be the truth,” he said with a shrug.

  “Sometimes the truth isn’t very interesting.”

  “Life is easier when things aren’t interesting.”

  She had no one else to ask about her family history. Dad was an only child, and his parents, Donald and Inez Mundy, had passed away long before she was born. Their headstone is adjacent to the gaping rectangle about to swallow her father’s casket. Staring at the inscription, she notices her grandfather’s unusual middle initial.

  Donald X. Mundy, born 1900, died 1972.

  X marks the spot.

  Thanks to her passion for history and Robert Louis Stevenson, Emerson’s bookworm childhood included a phase when she searched obsessively for buried treasure. Money was short in their household after two heart attacks left Jerry Mundy on permanent disability.

  X marks the spot . . .

  No gold doubloon treasure chest buried here. Just dusty old bones of people she never knew.

  And now, her father.

  The service concludes with a prayer as the coffin is lowered into the ground. The minister clasps her hand and tells her how sorry he is for her loss, then leaves her to sit on a bench and stare at the hillside as the undertakers finish the job.

  The sun is beginning to burn through the thick marine layer that swaddles most June and July mornings. Having grown up in Southern California, she knows the sky will be bright blue by mid-afternoon. Tomorrow will be more of the same. By then, she’ll be on her way back up the coast, back to her life in Oakland, where the fog rolls in and stays for days, weeks at a time. Funny, but there she welcomes the gray, a soothing shield from real world glare and sharp edges.