The May Queen Murders Read online

  Marsh poured himself some ale and offered more to Sheriff and Papa, who both declined. Drinking was for a celebration, but Marsh perhaps wanted to drown the misery of the day. I didn’t want to be close to the grief. It was better to numb myself in the kitchen by cutting wedges of cheese or slicing bread, setting out cream churned to butter and pinch bowls filled with mixed salt and herbs. Busyness kept away reality.

  “You shouldn’t cut yourself off,” Rook remarked, leaning against the doorway separating the kitchen from the guests filtering in and out.

  “I—I can’t talk to anyone,” I said, voice broken.

  I wiped my eye with the heel of my hand and took up the knife to cut another loaf of bread.

  Rook wrapped his arms around me from behind while his chin rested on my shoulder. I longed to crumble, to break my knees and never run again. The sobs building in my throat caught in a web of stammers. A soft sniffle behind my ear, and I turned my head enough to see Rook’s eyes damp behind his glasses. He loved me, but he grieved Heather’s loss, too. She always was. Now she’d never be again.

  I laid the knife on the cutting board. We held each other in mutual sadness, in changes that came too fast. Love and sorrow were similar, in that both ripped you wide open and left you without skin.

  “I hate this,” I whispered into his shirt. My lip rubbed against a button. “I hate feeling so tangled inside.”

  He held the back of my head, lowering his mouth to kiss the top of me.

  The bell by the front door rang to announce the arrival of another guest. I composed myself and took out a fresh bread plate. Papa opened the door to Dale and Violet Crenshaw. Violet carried a pie and gave me a wan smile. Sheriff pivoted from talking with Pastor and marched over to Dale.

  “You ain’t welcome here, Crenshaw.”

  “What’re you talkin’ ’bout, Jay? I’ve been friends with Marsh for nearly forty years. We’re payin’ our respects,” Dale argued.

  “No, you ain’t.”

  Papa stepped between the men. “What’s going on here? This is a time for condolences.”

  “Fine,” Sheriff huffed. “I’m taking you to the station, Dale.”

  Mama hurried Violet to me. “Help Ivy in la cocina, sí? ”

  Violet’s feet skidded. The pie shifted in her hands, and I grabbed it to keep it from splatting on the floor. No one dared leave the room until we knew why Sheriff and his deputy were squaring off in a house of mourning.

  “I was gonna wait until I had a word with Marsh and Rue,” Sheriff said, shaking his head. “Heather’s autopsy report came this morning.”

  My breath hitched.

  “What’s this gotta do with Dale?” Marsh asked.

  “Heather was poisoned. By Crenshaw wine. The medical examiner confirmed what the granny-women already thought—there was belladonna mixed with her drink. That girl never had a chance.”

  Dale balked. “Jay, are you insane? I’d never go after another person.”

  “You can’t go ’round accusin’ people of things!” Violet yelped. “Besides, ain’t we said it was Birch Markle who killed her?”

  “How the hell is Birch gonna have a bottle of wine?” Marsh shouted back.

  Tension brewed thick and thunderous. Violet stood by her father. Marsh near Sheriff, Papa between both sides. There was no escaping the anger.

  “You got something on me, Jay? Come to my winery. Show everyone what you find,” Dale snapped.

  “I’ll do just that. Right now,” Sheriff replied.

  The front door swung open. Dale muttered a curse. Mama and Briar stayed behind to care for my aunt and Mamie, but I had to go. If this was how Heather had died, I had to bear witness. Find it, she’d told me. Maybe this was it. She’d chosen me to see that she had justice.

  As the last to leave, I pulled the door shut. My mind poked at the idea of Dale Crenshaw poisoning my cousin, how the father of a friend might be responsible for such cruelty. I only had a vague sense of Rook at my side, matching my stride despite his much longer legs, and keeping me from wandering lost. I knew the Glen. I loved the Glen. The Glen was home, yet without Heather, it was another hollow.

  When we reached the Crenshaws’ fermentation barn where they stored barrels of aging wine, a crowd gathered. A crate was filled with cobalt-blue glass bottles. Sheriff piled bottles in the crate before he grabbed another empty box to collect more.

  “Keep at it, Jay,” Dale growled. “You’re takin’ my livelihood for no good reason. I ain’t done anything!”

  Violet was a statue huddled against Dahlia and their mother, Iris. So much work in the field. So much time pressing the grapes. Those bottles represented the maintenance of fickle vines to produce Crenshaw wine generation after generation.

  Sheriff found an open bottle with the cork shoved in it. He swished around the wine, popped the cork, and sniffed. “This is goin’ for testing, and if it’s poisoned, Dale, you’re a murderer. Somebody gave it to that poor girl and left her half-dead on the riverside for Birch Markle to finish her off.”

  Or maybe Markle snuck into the festival and poisoned it himself. He could slip in undetected. He’d done it before. Yet I didn’t see Heather taking a bottle from a man covered in animal skins. Someone she trusted gave it to her.

  “Did you see what was left of her, Crenshaw?” Sheriff hollered, disgust twisting his features. “She was mutilated! ”

  A wave of nausea gripped me. I’d seen Heather’s corpse. Her living ghost had warned me.

  Death seemed close, so cold, so real that if I reached into the fog, I’d find its fingers and lock hands.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Wanting to forget that terrible things happened don’t change the past. The past makes you. It’ll break you if you let it, and Lord have mercy on broken souls.

  The lantern on my desk guttered as I sketched Heather’s arm, arced from her body as she choked a bouquet of dandelions gone to puff. I hadn’t left room to draw her face. Only her arm, her ribby side, bony hip, and skirt. Her curls. All of it red, red, red. I wanted to remember her in color, not the gray shell on the shore.

  That Dale Crenshaw could’ve killed her didn’t sit well with me. It seemed off, badly so. There had to be more.

  I tapped my pencil against my lips and glanced to Heather’s jewelry box that I’d taken from her home. What if Heather found out the secret Milo mentioned in the note? His sister didn’t want him talking to us. To what extent would the Entwhistles go to keep Heather silent? Birch Markle may have had his way with Heather’s remains, but someone she trusted put her in his sight.

  Down the hall, my parents’ movements weren’t the usual post-dinner sounds of washing dishes and murmurs meant for each other, sometimes punctuated by Mama’s trickling laughter. This night’s noises were feverish with too many thumps, and when I opened my door, I caught sight of Mama standing face-to-face with Papa.

  “Don’t go, Timoteo,” she begged.

  He lifted her hand and kissed her fingers. “Luz, I gotta. It’s about—”

  Mama jerked back. Some anger shook her, yet her voice was a whisper I strained to hear. “Say it. Say her name.”

  Papa lowered his head. I crouched on the floor, my lantern’s flame altering the shadows. Altering the way I saw my father’s face.

  “Say her name,” Mama ordered.

  I held my breath, waiting, and when Papa finally spoke, his voice was hoarse.

  “Terra.”

  The girl Birch Markle killed.

  Mama retreated from Papa and pointed toward the front door. “Go. Get out.”

  I didn’t know what I had witnessed between my parents. They bickered from time to time, but this was a vein burrowing deeper than a mismatching of minds. Something bitter nudged Mama’s words, and from the resignation in his tone, Papa sounded as if he knew he deserved whatever hell she unleashed.

  He reached for her, but she swatted at him, and he left her standing in the hall. A moment later, I heard the back door latch as he exited. Still
not moving from my spying place, I narrowed my eyes while Mama leaned against the wall to cross herself and slumped on the floor. Her brown hands with their strong joints gripped her forehead, then her shoulders quaked. My door creaked on its hinges, and my feet padded along the floor.

  “Mama?” I called.

  She didn’t move. I scooted in beside her and curled my arms around her. She was beautiful, even as she cried, even with gray glittering at the front of her forehead. I liked the shape of her wide lips, the same as mine.

  “Where’d Papa go?” I asked.

  “His friends,” she answered. Then she scoffed, a sour half laugh. “They’ve always been his friends.”

  “What do you mean? They like you.”

  Mama’s gaze slid to mine. “Other than your papa, the only person in this family who ever really liked me is Mamie. She and Timoteo taught me the language. She taught me how to do things the Glen way so I wouldn’t be such an outcast.”

  My chest ached hearing Mama’s bluntness. I knew a wall existed between her and others in the Glen. Heather had loved my mother. She’d never treated Mama as different, but maybe there were things I never saw.

  I followed Mama to the kitchen, where she drew out a kettle and filled it with water. I placed it on the wood stove. She chose some glass jars from a cabinet, a mortar and pestle, and ground herbs for a tea. The blend to calm my nightmares, I guessed by the smell. As she mixed, I noticed my father’s veterinary bag under the table. I slipped past Mama and sat in a chair, lifting the bag with my foot.

  “Do you miss La Pintada?” I asked, and eased open the bag.

  “Sometimes,” Mama admitted. “The village was small, far from any cities. I sold fruit, whatever was in season. Your father came with a church to build houses, and I noticed him because he spoke my language better than most of his group. I gave him extra fruit.”

  I smiled at the thought of my parents being close to the age I was now.

  My fingers dipped inside Papa’s bag, and I raked the bottom in search of Milo’s ring. The tubing of the stethoscope was sleek, the glass thermometer cool, and I tripped over packets of needles and catgut sutures. Then I found a buttoned pocket inside the bag and pulled open the snap, hoping Mama hadn’t heard the sound.

  “Papa said he helped your brother after he was hurt,” I said.

  Mama’s back remained to me, and she opened a metal tea ball to dump the herbs and roots inside, fastening it with a small, hinged lock. “He did. I miss my brother.”

  I remembered the letter Mama received a few years ago from the Mexican government, how her hands shook and she screamed in such horror that Papa came running. A landslide in La Pintada. Everyone was gone, her parents, her brothers and sister, their children. Friends she had while growing up. They had all died in the mud, and no one had told her until after their bodies were buried. Even if she wanted family outside the Glen, it didn’t exist anymore.

  “Do you wish you could visit their graves?” I asked.

  “What good would it do, Ivy? There’s nothing of them there, only ghosts.”

  “Mama . . .”

  She held up a hand, unwilling to talk more, and went back to readying tea for when my nightmares rose. I hurried my search around the pocket until my finger looped through a metal band, and I buttoned the pocket, returned Papa’s bag to the floor, and held Milo’s ring inside my palm. The light under the table was scant, but the hammered silver ring glimmered with an engraved crest: bare branches surrounding an M. It was old, an heirloom, probably. He’d want it back. I’d offer it to him in exchange for information about Heather and what secrets she kept. What secrets helped kill her.

  Mama dumped the tea ball into the kettle on the stove. “I love your father. I wouldn’t be alive without him, but I didn’t know everything about him when I married him, how complicated it’d be.”

  “If you’d known then what you know now, would you have come?” I asked.

  She set those char-black eyes on me. “Sí. You don’t stop loving a person because they have secrets. You make their secrets your own.”

  I couldn’t think about attending school, though Rook brought me assignments from the days I missed. How could I walk the hallways knowing she wasn’t in another class? All I wanted was to sleep. To go into the black hollow.

  Rook wouldn’t let me.

  One of Heather’s notes was tucked in my pocket. I reached inside to touch the paper, as if touching it would let me tap into what she had been thinking. Connect me to her once again.

  Meet me in the woods, she’d written. You know the place.

  Milo was in the woods on May Day. They’d planned it that way, and Heather had made him swear he’d not leave anything behind. Maybe they had.

  Strolling through Potter’s Field, I rested my head against Rook’s arm. He had come over and read books aloud when my head ached. When I’d awakened, I’d found an odd portrait of me in ink in my sketchpad. I worked in pencil. Rook had stayed, even when I slept. He stayed in the living room with a thin blanket Mama had brought from her village to block the draft.

  He stayed because he was Rook.

  “Are you sure you’re up to coming out to the woods like this?” he asked. “The funeral was yesterday, and I’m worried you ain’t thinkin’ right.”

  I shrugged. “I have to know, Rook. Milo told her he was gonna meet her out here. She was gonna run away from the Glen, but why?”

  “Does it matter?” Rook asked.

  “Yes,” I snapped. Rook jerked at the sharpness of my reply. I took a steadying breath and closed my eyes.

  Rook stepped under the shadow of the trees. “I don’t know, Ivy. All the shit Heather was hiding, about anything could’ve happened to her that night.”

  The hunting rifle strapped to his back smacked his hip. If we traveled too deep in the woods, if we heard twigs cracking and flocks of roosting birds upset the sky, I had a mind to yell into the woods, then wait for Birch to slink out of his secret spot, all so Rook could put a bullet between his eyes.

  “If we’re found out here, we’re gonna catch hell,” he said. “God, the things you drag me into.”

  I grinned. “Ain’t like you didn’t come willingly. You’ve only known me my entire life.”

  My entire life.

  Rook was born just over five months before me in September, on the proper side of the fall equinox. There wasn’t a day I breathed that he didn’t breathe with me. In spite of the chaos, knowing that brought some comfort.

  “After school tomorrow, I can’t stay with you,” he said.

  “You’re needed at home with your mama and Raven. I understand.”

  His jaw contracted while he checked his rifle. I fought back the urge to warn him. Gramps didn’t die of brain fever or cancer. He had been cleaning his rifle, and the rifle cleaned off his head. The bang from the bullet had reverberated to where I was playing outside with Papa’s shepherd dog, Elsinore. As had Mamie’s screams. It was months before they stopped picking bone and broken teeth from the walls.

  “I ain’t needed at home,” Rook said. “Pops has me on watch.”

  “What?” I crossed my arms. “You ain’t goin’ out there like bait.”

  The idea of Rook standing patrol, even with a rifle, made my gut tremble as if I’d eaten bad berries and swallowed mustard tea to make the bad come back up.

  “I’m doin’ this, Ivy.” He replaced his rifle on his shoulder. “I’ll be sheriff someday, but nobody thinks I can do it. Even my pops says I got no mettle. What kind of guy knows more about plants than how to disarm someone?”

  “One who’ll help his people through a bad winter,” I said.

  “One who can’t stop a murderer.”

  I gave a snort. “Your daddy ain’t stopped Birch either. Papa said Dale Crenshaw’s wine came up clean. So we still got a murderer runnin’ ’round.”

  Rook scowled. I’d pushed too far. He didn’t have to prove himself. Not to me.

  His nostrils flared with frustratio
n. “We got people comin’ to our house asking when the Glen will be safe. Birch Markle is a curse on my family. When Grandpa Jackdaw died, he begged Pops to find that bastard. I don’t want Pops beggin’ the same of me.”

  He took a few steps and gave a bitter laugh while I held still behind him. “I’m awful at hunting. The sight of blood makes me yellow-bellied. But if Birch comes for you, I’ll drop that monster dead.”

  I joined Rook’s side and maneuvered my arm around his. How I wished we were on a simple walk in spring. Nothing was so simple. I was tied up in unraveling the strings my cousin had loomed. She’d walked along those threads, hoping not to fall between the gaps. She fell, and the strings were left behind. It was my fault I’d gotten tangled in them.

  Ahead, I recognized the fabric remnants forming a tent among the trees. So many colors, like woven rainbows. Sunlight pierced the seams to catch on the dangling prisms of quartz and spoons.

  We weren’t the only ones there.

  Milo was perched on a rock with his head bowed and hand against his forehead while Emmie fingered a gauzy scarf draped over a branch. My eyes darted around the dreamlike place, and I realized now—in daylight instead of the drunken light of Star’s and Elm’s lanterns—these weren’t Birch Markle’s totems. Everything spoke of Heather, discarded velvet pillows hidden under ferns, bottles made into charms only she’d use as a decoration. On a tree trunk, the bark peeled to reveal cuttings of initials. H + M.

  I should’ve known before . . . but she’d denied it. She’d lied to my face. To protect Milo.

  “What are you doing here?” Rook asked.

  “Just saying goodbye. Since we weren’t welcome at the funeral, we came here.” Milo’s sister gave a bitter smile. “It’s a Glen rule, ain’t it? Bury the dead after three days, or at least three days after a body’s found?”

  I narrowed my eyes. Glen kind didn’t talk about our ways with outsiders, not the intimate traditions. We might sell our goods, help out with a secret charm bag or two for a price, but we didn’t share our lore.

  “How do you so much about Glen folk?” I asked.