The May Queen Murders Page 2

  “Is that t-true?” I asked. “That belladonna poisons the land?”

  “Well, it’d take a hell of a lot to actually get into the soil.” Rook knew every plant rooted in the Glen’s earth, right down to the Latin names. “But my mama makes me clear it out before planting. She ain’t completely crazed. The berries are toxic, and only a few can kill. What about y’all? Where are you headed?”

  “Your daddy called Uncle Timothy to Potter’s Field. They found a carcass,” Heather explained.

  “Mind if I come?” Rook asked, to which Heather said yes, but he hadn’t asked her. His hand found mine, his skin warm, callused, and thrilling to touch. We’d grabbed hands while climbing trees many times growing up, but touching him now was like a dandelion scattering inside me, seeds full of possibility.

  From the corner of my eye, I spotted Heather crossing her arms. She wheeled around, tugging my hand away from Rook’s hold. “Come on, Ivy.”

  Helpless but to go, I looked to Rook over my shoulder. He strolled over the swaying bridge. I’d linger with the same leisured pace as him, but Heather was rushing and breathless.

  For April in the Ozarks, it was no shock the wood was slick with humidity. Yesterday’s rain saturated the settlement, and soon mildew would creep over the horse fences. We’d get out there with vinegar water to clean off the black rot. It’d come back, and we’d clean again. Seasonal rituals and predictability of chores gave purpose and balance.

  We reached the other riverbank and trundled down a dirt path. With the sun drooping low to the horizon, an uneasy hush fell over the village. Vultures circled overhead. A rancid smell, like meat that hadn’t salt-cured quite right, drifted from Potter’s Field. All three of us covered our faces. The loudest sounds were Heather’s mouth-breathing and the swish of long skirts.

  Potter’s Field lay in a valley surrounded by blackberry thickets. We hunkered down in a cove and used rocks to shield us from the graveyard of the abandoned. A half dozen men stood around, foreheads gleaming with clamminess and skin greenish like they were fighting back the sicks. Of the men, the one I knew best was Sheriff Meriweather—Rook’s father. He and Papa were descendants of the Glen’s founding families. Sheriff wasn’t as tall as Papa; he was stockier with hair the color of nutmegs flecked by silver. Despite being head of police in these parts, he was more carpenter, and during growing months, Sheriff tended fields with Rook to supply a vegetable cart his mother took to town. Rook was the spit of his mother’s side, lean and pale and dark-haired Irish.

  Along with Sheriff, several other members of the Glen’s police—hillmen wearing a star pinned to their britches—crowded around something on the ground. The grass in Potter’s Field was brown.

  Except for one wide puddle of red.

  Sheriff’s boots slopped through the puddle and revealed it deep enough to soak his soles. “Timothy, as you can see, it’s a hell of a mess.”

  Papa pushed past the barrier of farmers, and I caught only the briefest glimpse of pink meat slick with fluid. He opened his medical bag and snapped on blue exam gloves. They seemed out of place against his modest shirt and vest. Most veterinarians I’d seen in books wore white jackets, but Papa was never like them, instead looking like doctors from over a century ago.

  “Gross,” Heather whispered and craned her neck over the rocks.

  “Don’t get too close,” I said, and pulled her back.

  She brushed my hand off her shoulder. “What? There ain’t anything dangerous.”

  “You’ll blow our cover.”

  Papa took a syringe from his bag, uncapped it, and jabbed the needle into the carcass. One of the men staggered before vomiting beside a gravestone. Sheriff raised an eyebrow. “One of you’s gonna need to grab a bucket from the river and clean up that mess. Show the dead some respect.”

  Papa withdrew the plunger, and the tube filled with blackish sludge. “This isn’t normal decay. This carcass is fresh, but you see how the belly’s torn open? Decay won’t cause flesh to burst for weeks unless it’s extremely hot. Ozarks are warm but not enough to do that, not yet. Something ripped it open.”

  Rook shifted beside me, took off his glasses, and averted his eyes. What could’ve done this? Maybe it was my suspicious nature, but I couldn’t help but feel something bad seemed to have roused and come to our land.

  “What kind of animal was it?” Sheriff asked.

  Papa coughed into the crook of his elbow. “It’s Bartholomew, the Logans’ wolfhound.”

  I covered my mouth to keep from crying out. Not Bart. Despite being the size of a small pony, he was just a juvenile. When he stood on his hind legs, he put his paws on my shoulders to dance. Heather reached over and stroked the back of my head.

  “Are you sure that’s a dog?” another man asked.

  Papa bent over, and something moist popped when he poked around the fresh kill. “Those teeth are canine, and I’m sure it’s Bart. I did a dental cleaning two months back. See where those incisors are missing? He’d broken them chewing on his crate.”

  Papa sounded clinical, but that emotionless tone carried him through his notes and kept him working on the clinic’s rough days. On those nights, he came home, and Mama opened a bottle of blueberry wine, set out a glass by the fireplace, and murmured to us to keep our distance—not because he had a bad temper. He simply needed time alone.

  “What’d you say did this?” Sheriff wondered, scribbling on a notepad. “A bear? Remember when Holly Fitzpatrick got mauled by the bobcat thirty years back? My old man said the clawmarks on her—”

  “This wasn’t some bobcat!” Papa rose to his feet. “And not a bear or coyote, either.”

  “Then what did it?”

  “What predator is the worst?”

  Sheriff didn’t have to answer. I already knew. The worst predators of all were humans.

  Chapter Two

  We all know Birch put his mama in the grave early, but most folks ain’t sure how, whether his hollering in Sunday church finally made her do the unthinkable to herself, or maybe it was the rusty knife he’d begun carrying around with him.

  The macabre news of Bartholomew’s demise was a whisper, passing from one farmhouse to the next.

  You hear how Bart was ripped apart, didn’t even look like a dog no more . . .

  Sounds like Birch Markle. Wonder if old Birch has come back . . .

  A panicked busyness settled across Rowan’s Glen. Since I was little, Birch Markle had been the reason children were told to avoid the tree line, why adults looked around with watchful eyes when outside after dark. Though the last sighting of him in the woods was years ago, his screams were still heard now and then, during the hush of night. Mamie once said it was so bad that for a while, after Birch killed a girl called Terra MacAvoy, no one was allowed out after sunset.

  What he did was horrible enough to change the way outsiders treated us. The Glen used to be open to anyone. Outsiders paid by the pound for our fresh crops, eggs, and milk. They came to us to have chickens butchered and deplucked.

  Then they stopped coming.

  Years dimmed Birch’s memory, but stories remained. Given the cries from the forest, the story felt truer now than before. We lost the occasional farm dog to the highway, but if Bart was any indication of the fates of the ones papering the clinic’s window, something far worse was going on.

  With fear came caution. Farmers locked their livestock in barns instead of allowing cattle to roam for hours of endless grazing; the gates and fences were now strewn with copper warning bells. The silence across the Glen was too silent, a breath drawn and waiting.

  During the day, we buried the lingering wrongness by going about our business. Goods were taken to the farmer’s market, where townies picked over our hand-stitched quilts, wooden toys, and crisp vegetables. They bought our items, but we didn’t mix much beyond that.

  We attended school as if nothing was amiss behind the Glen’s borders. Heather and I had a couple of classes together at Salem Plateau High School
. The Rowan’s Glen contingent comprised a small cluster of students amid townies and rollers. When I was younger, our church in the Glen had held classes in the basement, but some uproar about it not being official closed our village school and the county opened their doors to us—never their minds, though. We were outcasts.

  Shutting my locker, I nodded at August Donaghy, or rather his fuzzy mound of blond hair. He was the only sophomore bearing a full beard, which, paired with his burly frame, gave him all the tatters of a well-loved teddy bear. Violet Crenshaw stood with him, a bandanna covering the crown of her ice-white hair.

  “They’re talking about us,” she said, and slouched against the locker beside mine.

  That wasn’t a surprise. “They” often talked about us. “They” pulled our long hair or stepped on our skirt hems to trip us.

  “It’ll die down again,” I reminded her.

  Violet looked pointedly at August, who balled his hands into fists. His parents peddled tie-dye shirts at the market. The vegetable dyes left his fingertips discolored, so kids teased that he was diseased and his fingers would fall off.

  “Tell her what happened,” Violet said.

  August glanced around. “Some rollers heard about Bart. Said we was practicing animal sacrifice down in the Glen. Heather told them to shut up, but they turned on her.”

  Away from the security of the Glen, things were different. We’d heard every insult thrown at us: that we were inbred, hippies, or backwoods hillbillies. But if those names got too loud and persisted, then trouble might come. We couldn’t have that.

  “Is Heather okay?” I asked.

  “The name-calling got bad, Ivy,” Violet replied. “At least she had the sense to bail before it got worse.”

  Violet’s lips pressed tight. As if by habit, she rubbed her left cheek—the side of her sister Dahlia’s face had been ruined after she made the mistake of standing up to the rollers. I reached for Violet’s free hand, but she pulled back.

  “Heather’ll be okay,” I said, more to myself than my friends. “She always is.”

  “Rook went after her,” August added. “We thought maybe they grabbed you and headed back to the Glen.”

  My breath hitched. Rook went after Heather, and no one had seen them since? Anytime Heather got flak from outsiders, she came to me. I listened. We went everywhere together. If she’d left, why hadn’t she taken me along?

  A pain twinged in my chest when I thought of Heather and Rook without me. I didn’t have a claim on him. Neither did she, but she saw my sketchbook. She left comments in the margin about the thin scar on his upper lip and the cowlick he tried but failed to straighten above his widow’s peak. She knew what those sketches meant.

  “He’s p-probably making sure she’s okay,” I muttered. “I’d know if she wasn’t okay.”

  “Keep telling yourself that.” August walked backwards down the hallway. He side-eyed the rollers who chatted with a townie, chuckling at us. “And watch your back.”

  Violet hugged herself. “Don’t let yourself be alone, Ivy. I’d stay, but I gotta get to class.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Normally, I wasn’t alone.

  With Violet and August gone, I let myself into the stairwell, where the steel door thudded shut. I pressed my back to it, scanning from the base of the stairs to the second story. With no windows for sunshine, the lone halogen light flickered before dropping the stairs into half-dark. A red glow radiated from the EXIT signs.

  No one from the Glen went off alone to school. Most of us even walked to class in pairs. The trust that we’d make it up and down the stairs, back and forth through the hallways undamaged was a farce. Threats and taunts were just that until they weren’t. Dahlia Crenshaw needed a scarf to cover her scars. Those boys were arrested, but Dahlia never came back to school. She rarely left her home at all.

  I climbed several steps. Without any ventilation, the stairway was a hot box. Sweat beaded on my forehead, yet cold walked down my spine.

  As if someone came up behind me.

  I felt fingers stretching to touch me, coming closer. Praying I wouldn’t turn around.

  I pivoted to face the door at the bottom of the stairs. The echoes were loud here and the walls tight; a claustrophobic panic froze me.

  From below, the door banged. It was a boy wearing a flannel shirt and jeans with a hole in the knee, his jaw-length hair faded into once-bleached blond. He was a roller, but that was about as much as I knew. That and he spent English class texting on his phone.

  I kept my eyes on the banister while waiting for him to pass, but he stopped beside me, his shadow creeping over my body. He was tall, all legs and arms like the rope of a tire swing.

  “You’re from Rowan’s Glen?” he asked.

  He was talking to me?

  “You know, the cult outside of town?”

  My eyebrow quirked. A cult. That was one of the nicer things the Glen was called.

  He snorted. “You friends with that Heather chick? The redhead?”

  My muscles tensed. Who was this boy, and what did he want with Heather? How did he know her? If he’d made her run out of class, so help me God . . . I cringed because, really, I’d do nothing. I paused on the wolf-blue of his irises, then his full lips that’d be pretty on a girl but were strange on him. An overbearing cigarette odor choked me.

  His sneaker’s toe pushed mine. “You deaf? Or are you ignorin’ me ’cause I ain’t one of you?”

  “I-I just th-think you’re crass.”

  His mouth arced in a smirk.

  “What do you want with Heather?”

  “So you do know her.” He inched closer yet, barricading me against the railing with his arms. My shoulders clenched. Someone else should’ve come through the door at the bottom of the staircase by now.

  I tried to wriggle out from beneath him. “I gotta get to class.”

  He didn’t budge.

  “Tell Heather I need her.”

  “She won’t know who you are.” I jutted out my chin, but all the bad things that could happen while trapped in a staircase niggled at my mind.

  He snickered. “Oh, she’ll know.”

  I coiled my fingers around my sketchbook. The stairway door squealed, and boots tromped up the steps. Oh, God, another roller. My gut twisted. The herb salves hadn’t stopped Dahlia’s wounds from infecting. I knew what was said, how the rollers and townies claimed she’d brought on the attack.

  “My name is Milo Entwhistle,” the roller said in my ear. “And you are . . . ?”

  “The name’s Go to Hell.”

  My breath released as Rook shoved the roller’s hands off the rail. But I’d thought he’d left school. He was still here, which meant—where was Heather? Was she all right?

  Milo climbed a step and shook away from Rook’s hold. I placed the last name, sort of. A girl a couple of years older than Heather and me. She left in the middle of her senior year. He looked like her.

  “Jesus, we were talking,” Milo said.

  Rook’s voice was a sharp bite. “Why? So you can laugh later? Your kind says we sacrificed the dog since virgins aren’t the devil’s kink.”

  “You were there, man. I didn’t say that.”

  I peered back to see Rook’s jaw set hard and his eyes narrow behind his glasses. “You laughed. Go jack off somewhere else and leave her alone.”

  Milo stepped aside. “You’ve got some serious anger management issues.”

  “Go!”

  Rook pointed to the top of the stairs. Milo trudged up the remaining steps before he disappeared through the doorway. Like a plug pulled on a drain, the tension spilled from me.

  “Heather,” I blurted out. “Where is she?”

  She was all that was on my mind. Why she’d left. Where she’d gone. Why Milo wanted her.

  “Ivy?”

  The way Rook said my name, careful as if it were some half-broken creature cupped in his hands, brought me back to focus.

  “I’m okay,” I said.

/>   Rook eased my sketchbook from my arm and rested his hand on the small of my back. His hand was warm through my shirt, my body warmer still from my speeding heart. “I get worried about you.”

  “August said you left with Heather.”

  We ascended the staircase, Rook stopping me a few steps from the landing. “She wanted to leave, but I convinced her to take a breather in the library. I ain’t goin’ back to the Glen without you.”

  He wouldn’t go without me. I looked at his boots. “It’s ’cause of the animals, right?”

  “It’ll be safer if someone goes along with you, least till things get back to normal. My pops told my mama he owes it to Dr. Timothy to keep you safe and is ridin’ me about it.”

  Keep me safe? Why would Sheriff owe that to my father? I didn’t want Rook escorting me only because Sheriff didn’t give him a choice. Besides, everywhere I went, Heather went too.

  “Folks say it’s Birch Markle come back. What do you think?” I asked, taking a few more steps.

  Rook gave a heavy sigh. “I think people run their mouths.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Nothin’.” He pressed his back to the door for the art hallway so we faced one another.

  “Rook, come on.”

  “Just bothers me when rollers talk shit.” His mouth twitched into a frown. “They were saying stuff in history. They’re clueless about the Glen.”

  He rolled his eyes and leaned his head against the door. I stared at him harder, like I could will him into speaking. “What’d they say? Something about Heather?”

  He looked down.

  “About me ?” I asked.

  He hesitated. “All right, I’ll tell you. They were talking about how your daddy’s the vet, and if someone’s killing animals, then it’s someone who’s done it before. Like Dr. Timothy. Because as a vet, he puts animals to sleep.”

  The hair on the nape of my neck tightened, and a prickle crawled over my scalp until my hair and skin were a weave of dread. “My father wouldn’t.”