The May Queen Murders Page 5

  I waved off her comment and sat beside her. “Must be something I ate.”

  She grinned and hugged me close against her. My arms were heavy, but I managed to rest one around her waist. How could I not want her to be happy? How could I stop from wanting what she had? I would listen, smile, and be happy for her no matter the ache inside. But I could have secrets too.

  “Please don’t be mad,” she murmured into my ear.

  I shook my head, unable to find my voice.

  I’m furious because you were with him.

  “N-n-not angry,” I replied, and stepped out of the hug. Don’t sound jealous. Be her friend. “Why are you sneakin’ around?”

  “It’s special, Ivy, and I’m still figuring out what it all means.”

  Heather turned her face to the dawning sky, and everything about her softened—her smile, the pinch around her eyes. “It’s all I want, but nobody would understand.”

  “I might.”

  “No, Ivy, I don’t think so.”

  “You know I’m here for you.”

  “Don’t, please. Don’t guilt-trip me.”

  I bristled. “I’m not laying on a guilt trip, but you’ve never held anything back. So why now?”

  Because she’s in love with the same boy you are, and she doesn’t know how to tell you that he loves her, not you.

  Her cheeks were no longer pink with the bud of first love, but her nose went red, eyes shining wet. She reached out her hand, and though I had unanswered questions, we laced fingers.

  “You’d tell me if someone kissed you, right?” she asked.

  I forced a laugh. “I’d tell you immediately. Hell, you’d probably know before I did.” After she’d let the pause draw out too long because we both knew no one kissed me, I said, “Tell me about it.”

  Heather had to tell me everything. She had to, or I’d never stop thinking about it.

  “It’s like trying a new fruit.” She didn’t look up. “At first, you’re sorta shy about putting your mouth on another person’s, but all you feel is softness and warm and wet. You open your lips wider, and once their tongue first flicks yours, it seems like your heart could flutter right up your throat and come outta your mouth into theirs, and they’d have your heart forever.”

  I didn’t want to picture her kissing Rook, each of them guessing what to do, feeling good together.

  “And there’s more than that,” she said. “Fingers pull at your shirt, tickle your waist, then move higher. It’s handful after handful of sweaty skin, and your mouth hurts from kissing.”

  No, no, no, I didn’t want to hear this.

  But I would.

  I wouldn’t hold it against her. She deserved falling in love. Everyone did. Including me, someday. So why did my chest expand with panic as if a million butterflies were shivering against a screened window, waiting to burst through?

  “Ivy, last night, it started innocent, and the kisses went to my neck, down my chest, from one side to the other.” She motioned between her breasts. I closed my eyes and willed myself not to see what she described, Rook’s dimples as his lips touched her skin. Had he taken off his glasses so they wouldn’t be in the way? I wanted to stop my mind, yet the more she talked, the more detail she felt compelled to give, and I listened because that was what good friends did. “I didn’t know I could come from touching and kissing, but Ivy, I did.”

  The silence between us was so solid, I didn’t know if it’d break.

  Not knowing what to say, I asked the obvious, to know and get it over. “You had sex?”

  Heather nodded. “Yeah.”

  Her bluntness surprised me. She didn’t hold back even after my jaw dropped.

  “You know how they say it hurts the first time?” she remarked. “It ain’t like that at all.”

  I didn’t want more details. It’d be too much. There were other things I wanted to know. “So who is it?”

  She didn’t answer.

  I pressed again. “Is it Rook?”

  She let out an exasperated breath. “That’s what you ask?”

  But she isn’t answering.

  Everything hinged on this one admission, and she kept it from me. Was she that afraid of how I’d act? I wouldn’t slap her. I wouldn’t stop talking to her. But maybe she knew that. Maybe she knew me so well that she expected me not to react until I was alone.

  That same bewildered, sick feeling hit me hard again. I didn’t dare move away or let a muscle in my face twitch. I should be heartened she’d chosen me to share this with first, and yet I ached to run past the scarecrows to the fields and flop in a vegetable plot to cry into my skirt. I hadn’t known we were both racing to the same finish line until she arrived first.

  “Nothing’s changed, Ivy. Not between us,” Heather swore.

  Everything had changed.

  She’d left me behind, and she felt it as well, or she wouldn’t have said anything. She reached over, our pinkie fingers twined around each other, and she watched me, an expectant look on her face. I needed to come up with something.

  “Is it worth all the secrets and sneaking around?” I wondered.

  Heather sat on the step with her knees drawn to her chest. “You know, Ivy, I think it is.”

  When Heather and I stopped outside her house, she tugged me into a hug. The abruptness of it, the tightness, startled me.

  “Thank you,” she whispered, “thank you so much.”

  I took her weight of secrecy. It became mine. My silence. My sadness. So she’d be happy.

  My hand twitched, the red threads on our wrists side by side, an infinity loop. Heather broke away with a wave and disappeared inside. School was a good two hours off, and the night only began to dissolve into daybreak. The first violet ray of dawn crept over the horizon, and smoky blue drenched the Glen. My feet tromped the ground, and though I was aware of houses and farms, I was blind.

  The rustle of leaves and stomp of boots caught my ear. Ahead of me lay the Meriweathers’ vegetable plots. The soil was tilled black. For now, the seedlings took refuge inside Rook’s greenhouse built from windows and glass doors reclaimed from the hollow’s demolished buildings. He and Sheriff retrieved the discards from the roadside and fastened parts together until they had a curious building of pieces unwanted by others. Through dusty glass, I spied two shapes moving about the greenhouse, one burly and the other leaner and athletic. The second silhouette appeared in my sketchbook dozens of times. The sight of him caused me to break into a cold sweat.

  How could I speak to him now? How could I not feel something rip in me?

  I lifted my skirt’s hem to run, but I hadn’t made it more than five feet before he called.

  “Ivy!”

  Don’t face him. Despite my brain’s begging, my heart demanded I stay.

  Rook waited outside the greenhouse. His brown shirt and trousers were dingy, and his hands, protected by gloves, held a snarl of branches dotted with dried black berries. Belladonna. He weeded it from the fields each year, and some must’ve taken root in the greenhouse last fall.

  “Why are you over this way so early?” he asked.

  “I went for a w-walk.” I fumbled the words.

  “Alone?” He threw down the belladonna, stripped off his gloves, and moved toward me. His gait was an easy jog, and the redness in his pale cheeks a combination of working and the brisk morning.

  Behind him, the second shadow exited the greenhouse. August remained in the background, knee-deep in belladonna and called, “Rook, what’s goin’ on?”

  He ignored August, his focus intent on me. A day ago, I would’ve craved his determined gaze. “Ivy, I told you what my pops said ’bout not going out alone.”

  “I was with Heather.”

  So were you.

  I bit back the venom of my wounded feelings. He’d made his pick, and I wasn’t it. If Heather had found anyone else, I’d have danced with her in dizzy circles. Because it was Rook, a tremendous guilt filled my belly for wishing it wasn’t.

 
; He crossed his arms and looked every bit a self-appointed big brother. Maybe he never had seen me as more than a sister. “You should be more careful. I don’t think you get how serious Pops was when he said not to go off on your own. I mean it—if you’re gonna be wandering ’round, take me with you.”

  Something in my head snapped. It cleaved open the last bit of will holding back my hurt. He was a hypocrite, telling me to watch my back and be safe while he and Heather snuck around. All the soreness clamping my heart, the anger and sourness, rose from me.

  “Screw you, Rook! I ain’t the one runnin’ around half the night!”

  He staggered back into a horse fence. “Ivy, what the hell?”

  My mouth fell open, and I tried to come up with more to yell. My thoughts were colors, shades of red, alarming and enraged.

  He peeled himself off the fence and reapproached me. “I have no idea—”

  “Don’t give me that bullshit,” I growled. “You treat me like I’m a kid! I’m older than Heather! You pull this on her?”

  “You think she’d listen if I tried? No! She’d laugh in my face.” He jammed his fingers through his dark hair. “Heather’ll take care of herself, but you depend on her for every—”

  My hands slapped against his abdomen and knocked him backwards, but he regained his balance. It made me want to throw my weight into him again. I lunged for him. He caught my wrists, and we twisted together, me trying to strike him and him deflecting me no matter how rabid I was.

  “Stop!” he ordered. “You’re gonna get hurt!”

  “I’m already hurt!”

  His grip tightened around my wrists, and he stared so intently I wondered if he was trying to crush me. I wanted to be dust.

  “Rook, let her go!” August grabbed his friend to separate us. “Jesus, she’s crying! You see that?”

  I lifted the corner of Mamie’s shawl to wipe my eyes as I bolted toward home. Behind me, Rook and August yelled back and forth, but I didn’t hear what they said. My breath rushed out too hard. Yet within a few paces, fingers snagged at my sleeve.

  “Wait!” Rook called.

  I wanted to leave. I wanted to make-believe that everything, beginning the minute I’d found Heather in the stable to discovering her secret, was nothing more than a fever dream.

  “For God’s sake, girl, stop runnin’ from me!”

  The driving force to flee emptied from my legs. But I wouldn’t face him. I didn’t want him to see me looking like a mess from sniveling and my hair ragged. He stood so near that his body heat reached out to me. With a deft gentleness hard to imagine from someone who worked in fields—let alone someone who had every right to be angry with me—his touch slipped down the length of my arm.

  “Ivy, what’d I do?”

  I sniffed back a sob, but the noise was half strangled. Rook circled in front of me. He was over six feet tall, and the top of my head didn’t even reach his shoulder. Though I tried not to look at him, it was too late to stop a fresh well of pain from springing. Warmth kissed my cheek, his palm cupping my face, the pad of his thumb blotting away a tear.

  Yet no matter the heat exuding from him, the coldness returned to my body, starting with my feet. The longer I stood with Rook under the predawn sky, the cooler the earth beneath me grew. The fire of my temper, which sought to burn and blister, Rook abruptly snuffed. I was burned out and numb. A stench reminiscent of deer-hunting season when the carcasses were bled at nearly every farm gagged me.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  Rook lifted his collar to cover his nose. “Something smells dead.”

  I squinted and looked out past the horse fences. Something pale with curves and hollow caught a few fickle rays of light from the torches. Ribs. Leg bones. Something was dead and stripped of its flesh, leaving a skeleton jutting up from the field.

  “Oh, God,” Rook blurted out. “What do you think it is?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Go get your daddy.”

  “Hang on a second.”

  Rook pulled himself over the horse fence. I tucked up my skirt and climbed over after him. The closer we drew, the easier it was to see the carcass. Bits of meat still clung to the pearly bones. Tufts of coarse brown fur lay on the ground, half submerged in a thick puddle of darkness spreading out from around the skeleton. It had cloven hooves. It was a goat.

  Its head was missing.

  Chapter Five

  You’d smell Birch before you saw him. He never bathed, or if he did, the water was tainted by blood. He took animal skins and wore ’em. Once, he cut open a deer and wore its belly chains ’round his neck like some kinda unholy shawl.

  My feet were cold, my shoes seized by Sheriff and zipped in a bag marked EVIDENCE . They had to know which footprints in the field came from me.

  Women came outside wearing aprons, interrupted from preparing the day’s first meal. Some carried baskets of speckled eggs plucked from hen houses moments before the commotion began. The men forgot to fasten their suspenders or slick back their hair once Sheriff and his men knocked on their doors to account for folks’ whereabouts.

  Absent from the souls milling in fear was Heather.

  Across the road, Rook was sequestered at a harvest table. Beside him was the bag containing my shoes. Rook’s boots were in another bag. His head lifted, lips parted as if about to call to me. He didn’t. Instead his mama, Briar, crowded him, smoothing his hair with a hand meant to steady, to wipe away all the horror he’d seen. All while his little sister, Raven, jostled her free hand.

  Mama hurried close and offered me an extra pair of shoes, but I didn’t budge, too stupefied to move as she knelt and eased my feet into the sneakers.

  “So what d’ya think, Timothy?” Sheriff asked, his head angled so close to Papa’s that I strained to hear.

  Papa stooped beside the viscous puddle, holding a vial with a sample. “No animal did this, if that’s what you’re askin’.”

  “You think it’s the same fellow who did in the dog?”

  “Maybe.”

  No tracks on the ground except for Rook’s and mine, nothing to yield answers to multitudes of questions. The rising sun cast a rosy glow, dawn’s promise, yet in that glimmer, the darkness of death was fathomless.

  Near the puddle, Sheriff’s men guarded a sheet, once white, now painted with rusty splotches, covering the remains. Dale Crenshaw, a deputy and winemaker, wiped his forehead with a handkerchief.

  “I reckon it’s time to call in the county officers, ain’t it, Jay?”

  Sheriff looked toward Papa. Some expression I didn’t know on my father’s face worried me, how his eyes widened and cheeks paled at the mention of outside police. They weren’t to be brought in, Papa always said. Nothing happened in the Glen that our own people couldn’t handle.

  “You’re jumping to conclusions, Dale,” Sheriff said. “We don’t know what we got going on, and you really think the county’s gonna give a damn about dead livestock?”

  When livestock died, folks removed the carcass before the flies and death smell came, ideally within twenty-four hours. That meant hauling the dead south to the bone land. Coyotes took care of the flesh. But if Papa found the creature diseased, the carcass was burned, and there was no escaping the odor, no matter which way the wind blew.

  Sheriff and Papa both peered under the sheet covering the skeleton and skin. A fly buzzed near the corner, dipping inside, zooming out a second later. A whimper escaped my lips, and I tucked myself against Mama. She pushed my hair down in front of my eyes, and her hand spread warm on my cheek as she turned my face.

  I breathed to calm myself, but a metal taste crept up my throat and lay flat on my tongue.

  My mother murmured, “Ay, Dios mío, bonita, ” as she rubbed my back. I had to get away, walk around, or do something, so I stepped outside of my mother’s reach and closed the gap separating me from Papa and Sheriff. I stayed on the fringe, not wanting to hear and yet a morbid curiosity forcing me to listen.

  “Sheri
ff,” Dale said, “you gotta catch this killer before he goes after some person.”

  The crowd split and wandered away, but Sheriff caught my father’s shoulder and hissed in his ear.

  “I don’t like havin’ that son of a bitch Birch Markle on a killin’ spree. I’m worried Crenshaw’s right and we’ll have more than dead animals soon. But I ain’t turning it over to county police. Not after how they mucked things around last time.”

  Papa shrugged off Sheriff’s hand and buckled his veterinary bag. “Jay, you truly suspect Birch?”

  “You yourself said some animal didn’t do it,” Sheriff said. “Woods are wide, Timothy. People get lost and don’t come out, but who’s to say a few don’t come out on purpose? And after what he did to Terra—”

  “Jay,” Papa interrupted. He stared at me. “How much have you heard?”

  “Enough,” I said. “I know the stories.”

  My father sucked in a sharp breath while Sheriff walked to a fence and snatched an oddly discarded spade lying nearby. The blood soaking dark into the earth thickened on the dirt’s surface.

  “There’s truth in the old stories, Ivy,” Sheriff declared, his words punctuated by the metallic singing of the spade striking rock. “Get on home. Get there fast and safe.”

  A child’s nightmare came to life. The monster in the woods, the howler at night, was real. With the spade, Sheriff scattered fresh dirt over the blood. He’d dry it out best he could and bury it deep. No one’d know it’d ever been.

  Heather walked with me to school the following morning, but upon reaching the trailer park, she broke away.

  “I gotta make a quick stop.” She bounced on the toes of her sneakers and looked over both her shoulders as if to see who might be watching.

  No one from the Glen went to the trailer park, but Milo was looking for her the other day. What if it was for something more than just weed? How easily could he slip across the Glen’s borders and go unnoticed except by a girl meeting him in the stable? My heart skipped. I half smiled. Maybe Rook wasn’t Heather’s lover after all.