The May Queen Murders Page 9

  The cups on the table were empty. We needed to go out to the well for water. I motioned for him to come with me. Our mothers looked up from preparing a salad of early spring greens—red romaine lettuce and herbs with cheese—and shared a look as we entered the kitchen.

  “I hope Jay and the others get back soon,” Briar said to my mother. After the accusations at church, Sheriff had tried to show his worth by taking some dogs to the woods along with a few men and lanterns.

  “I pray they find el diablo, ” Mama replied. She patted her apron pocket without withdrawing the rosary. “I’ve never seen the Glen worry so much.”

  Briar took a deep breath. “It’s been worse. Before you came, Luz. I’d always hoped our children wouldn’t face something like it themselves.”

  Her gaze went across the room to where Raven stood on a chair to mix together oil and vinegar for a salad dressing. The little girl had a patchwork fox doll next to the bowl and whispered to him. I hoped she was oblivious to the death that too frequently rattled the warning bells in the fields, silent now, though tense and poised to ring again.

  “We gotta get some water,” I said, and retrieved a pitcher from the counter.

  “Don’t be outside long,” Mama ordered.

  “Take Rook with you,” Briar said, a tiny smile playing on her mouth as she winked at Mama.

  Rook and I ducked out to the yard. Though sunset had yet to drop the Glen into darkness, torches burned along the fences, and crackles of yellow and orange soared skyward. My eyes watered from the peculiar odor of pinewood and burning fuel. Rook eased the pitcher out of my grip and pressed his palm to my back as I dabbed at my face with my apron.

  “M-must be some grit or ash,” I murmured.

  “Here.” His thumb rubbed near the corner of my eye. “That any better?”

  Actually, it was.

  He walked with me to the field where a water well was constructed from a cylinder of stones piled on top of one another. Several wells lay on Glen land. From the time children were small, they were taught not to play near the inviting red roofs. They weren’t pretend houses but dangerous pits. It was easy to fall, easy to drown. Even with the pail and pulley, if someone fell in, getting them out before the water took them was impossible.

  “I told Pastor I’m taking up with you,” Rook blurted.

  My feet froze to the ground. “You what?”

  “I needed to get my mind off Journey. If you don’t want it—”

  “No,” I said. “I-I’m surprised, is all.”

  It wasn’t uncommon to go to Pastor Galloway to get his thoughts when young couples came together. For years, granny-women used to be matchmakers. They traced the bloodlines to make sure generations didn’t mix too near. They knew the family histories. Sometimes they threw all that out if they saw two people truly in love.

  “So now folks’ll be watching us,” I said.

  “They already are, according to Pastor.” Rook laughed. He put his arm around me and nudged me closer to his side. “He said it was ’bout time.”

  I stepped in front of Rook and tipped back my head to study his face. I liked the shape of his lips, the heavy frames of his glasses and how the lenses snatched all the bleeding colors of the sunset. My fingers traced his cheek, his jaw, and he gave a swift twist of his head to catch the tips with his lips. Then he took my hand and turned it over. His mouth was hot as he laid a kiss on my wrist, then another on my forearm, yet another in the crook of my elbow before he placed my arm up on his shoulder to wind it around his neck.

  “S-someone might see,” I said.

  “So?” he asked, half his mouth spreading in a cocky grin.

  He kept grinning when our mouths met. I didn’t want to close my eyes. The woods weren’t far off. Yet the more the kiss grew, the harder it was to keep them open. I gave in to the feeling of flying. Rook’s pulse thudded with enough power that I felt it in his chest. Surely, he felt mine. My heart rose just like I did.

  A sudden swirl of black wings and caws erupted from the tree line. A murder of crows rushed into the sky and perched upon the houses, the fences, wherever they could find a place to land.

  Rook and I pulled apart. “Something spooked them,” he said.

  Somewhere within the woods, far past the youngest trees at the outer rim and deep where the oldest ones knew secrets, someone lived. I shifted from one foot to the other and wished I had Mamie’s shawl to dull the gooseflesh prickling my skin.

  “The water,” I said.

  We hurried to the well. The bucket was tied up. Age and weather had hardened the rope, and the wheel to work the pulley system was rusted. Rook gave several hard tugs to render it loose enough to turn. I stood near him, pivoting to look behind us, to the left, then the right. A crow settled on the peak of the well’s roof. In the red haze of sunset, his eye was a dark gem. The edges of his sharp beak opened to reveal a pointed tongue before he gave a loud “Caw, caw, caw! ”

  Three cries from a crow. Not a good omen.

  “H-hurry,” I urged Rook.

  “I’m trying. The rope is stiff. If I go too fast, it’s gonna snap and the pail will be gone.”

  We were being watched.

  It didn’t come from one side or the other but from all around. Inescapable. It could’ve been the crows with their wicked eyes. Or maybe it was that dark soul lurking in the woods.

  A hound bayed in the distance. Rook stopped lowering the bucket into the well. “Maybe the search party found something.”

  A second dog joined in the howling, then a chorus of rabid barking lifted from the trees.

  Crack!

  I jumped, gunfire echoing overhead. The bucket reached the water and banged against the rock walls with a clang before splashing. Rook worked the pulley faster to draw some water, but I kept my eyes on the woods, across the narrow river dividing us from whatever might come running out.

  As Rook hoisted the pail from the well, he gasped.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  Before he answered, the smell hit my nose. Amid the sulfur and iron odor of well water, something tangy mixed in, something rank, decayed.

  Inside the pail was a goat’s skull with fur and flesh still clinging to its white bones.

  Night fell over the Glen. That didn’t stop folks from coming out of their homes to ask what Sheriff and his hillmen had uncovered, what they’d shot at in the woods. Rook showed Sheriff the goat’s head from the well. Papa took some measurements, a rag tied over his mouth and nose to stop the smell from making him ill.

  “What’s this, Timothy?” Sheriff asked.

  “That goat that’d been decapitated? We got its head,” Papa answered. “Birch must’ve hung on to it till now.”

  Papa wrapped the skull in a cloth. He’d go down to the bone land to bury it soon. My stomach churned. Why was it dumped in our well? There were plenty others in the Glen. Even leave it in the woods where it’d not be found. Unless Birch wanted it found. A warning, perhaps, not to go looking for him.

  “In the woods, there’s some kind of camp . . .” I overheard Sheriff tell some folks gathered in the road.

  “It looks like Birch has been stealing things from around the Glen and using them to make a home,” Flint Denial added. “There were blankets, pillows. He’d taken all kinds of things and strung them through the trees.”

  “Skirts,” another hushed voice caught my ear. “He’s watching our girls. Wonder how long he watched Terra before . . .”

  If Birch Markle came into the Glen and no one saw him, then he was closer than anyone realized. He took our things. He used them, maybe even stroked them and smelled them, treating them as souvenirs. Perhaps it was what had kept him from killing again. Or it had sated his hunger for only so long and now he was starving.

  I hung back, close to my parents and where Rook perched on the slats of a horse fence. A figure with red curls in a long skirt made her way up the road. Heather walked alone, fearless, with her chin up. I navigated through the bodies crowdin
g the path. The torches by the road shed enough light that my cousin saw me coming. She stopped and turned around.

  “Wait,” I called.

  She halted. “What do you want?”

  “You weren’t in church this morning, and Mama wasn’t sure you’d make it to Sunday dinner.” I didn’t want the conversation to go ugly. I didn’t want to be accusatory. Not right away.

  “I was sick.”

  Her cheeks were colored. She looked better than she had in a while. As if the hollowness of worry was somehow filled.

  “You ain’t sick.” The toe of my sneaker kicked the dirt. “Did you skip church to see Milo?”

  Her eyebrows drew together, and she balled her hand. Paper crinkled between her fingers. Both of us looked at the small corners of white sticking out from her fist that gave her away.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “It’s mine, Ivy.”

  “I want to make sure you’re safe.”

  She pursed her lips. “What does it matter?”

  “You’re still sneaking out. Sheriff found a hiding place in the woods. It’s got all kinds of stuff Birch took from the Glen.”

  Heather stood on her toes to look around me at the group breaking apart on the road. “Some hiding place in the woods?”

  I nodded. “I know you went in there the other day. Did you see anything?”

  She shook her head. “Of course not.”

  Heather sidestepped me and walked closer to the crowd. I ran up alongside her and grabbed her elbow. “You have to stop runnin’ like this. You’re gonna get hurt.”

  “I told you before, I don’t care. Some things are worth the risk.”

  “You’re gonna tell me some roller boy is worth chancing your life?” I demanded. “Do you know what folks here would say if they knew you’d taken up with someone like him?”

  “They ain’t gonna find out.” She scowled. “Unless you say something. Which is why I can’t trust you. Not with this. Not with anything. You can be worried all you want, but it changes nothing. I have my life. You have yours.”

  Heather walked toward the house, where we would paste on false smiles and pretend everything was fine during Sunday dinner. Rook noticed her and then me, his eyebrows above the rims of his glasses. I lowered my face. I didn’t want him to see the tears stinging the corners of my eyes, and if I spoke, my voice would crack.

  Papa paced near the gate separating our yard from the road. Mama came up behind him and rested her hands on his shoulders. Sheriff dismissed the last of his men and wandered toward my father. “We’re gonna find this son of a bitch.”

  “Why wasn’t this place found before?” Papa took off his glasses and squeezed the bridge of his nose. “This is the first time in twenty-five years anyone’s found a place where Birch might live. I’m surprised. Nothing more.”

  “The screams, and every once in a while, some hunter stumbles on a deer carcass that don’t look like anything a coyote would do. There’s been signs he’s there, Timothy,” Sheriff countered. “Today we went farther than anyone’s been in those woods for years. Even when folks go hunting, it ain’t like we gotta go all that far to find deer or ducks. No one wants to go in very far. Everybody knows if you go in those woods, there’s a chance you ain’t coming out.”

  Chapter Nine

  Terra MacAvoy was a pretty thing, sweet as strawberries, and gentle, too. Crowning her May Queen was the right thing to do.

  On the first of May, mere days after the discovery of Birch’s forest lair, each evening haunted by howls from the search dogs, paper cones filled with flowers were hung on all the doors in Rowan’s Glen. Ribbons in pale blues, pinks, and yellows twined along the fences, unfurled in gusting wind. A spring storm was coming.

  I didn’t feel any celebration of life, no virtue and fertility in those bouquets or sprouting from the ground. Fear of death tainted everything. Tales of Birch Markle walked up the chimneys and crept through mouse holes in the walls.

  I wore a blue dress of eyelet fabric that had once belonged to Mamie. A woven ivy crown sat upon my head.

  Not a queen, a maiden.

  I lined up with my parents. Papa’s face was pensive, perhaps because his frustration was futile—the festivities were proceeding despite his protests. Whatever his thoughts, they remained unspoken.

  Mama fussed with my hair and spread the dark locks across my shoulders while singing in Spanish. Her touch lingered on the acorn necklace. I undid the cord and placed the necklace in my pocket. I’d give it to August later.

  “You and Heather still won’t speak,” she said.

  “She’s Heather. I’m Ivy,” I answered flatly.

  In nature, ivy and heather never grew together. They couldn’t because ivy liked shade, whereas heather required sun. They did better apart because, side by side, one withered.

  The beat of a bass drum, steady and hollow, began down the road and signaled the procession’s start. Mama scrambled to gather some long Timothy grass and hand it to my father. She checked over the white and yellow scarves wrapped around her arms to flow behind her, light perpetual. More families in costume, everyone from Coyote Jones in an animal pelt to Iris Crenshaw with purple petals painting her face. The drum’s rhythm was louder, and I bounced in place. I wanted it over.

  The girls my age led the parade, the drummer behind them. They laughed and scattered flowers. The order of the procession was the maidens followed by the drummer and the youngest children. Others filtered in after, I supposed to keep any rogue children from darting off. We’d walk forward, some dancing, some skipping, all to the field where the May Queen waited.

  I picked up a willow basket and sifted through lilies of the valley and ivy leaves. The flowers were fragrant, the leaves fertile green with edges so sharp they might cut. Then I fell into the parade, walking in time with the drum’s beat. Close to me was Violet. Her dress was purple with a tiered skirt, and her crown mixed purple and white violets against velvety leaves. When we were little, Violet had begged to play with me. But Heather never let me give my attention to anyone but her. Violet was shy, and Heather was too much to ignore.

  Violet smiled. “Of course Heather was voted May Queen.”

  “Was there any doubt?” I asked with a sigh. “Did you know they couldn’t vote for me ’cause of my mama?”

  “Stupid rules. You think it’ll ever change?” She waved at a pair of young girls in bunny masks and tossed sachets to them. The girls scuttled forward to grab the flowers, giggling, excited. Maybe dreaming they’d one day be crowned May Queen. I wondered if they understood that only one of them would be chosen each year.

  “It must be hard to be so close to someone like Heather,” Violet mused.

  “After a while, it’s impossible.”

  I laid eyes on a little girl wearing a mask of black feathers with silver ribbons streaming through the black. Raven, Rook’s younger sister. I waved to her, and my gaze roamed the assembling crowd. I saw a woman with a black eye mask and striped sleeves down her arms and another wearing the mask of a fox with a long coat. The animal faces blurred, the eyes all dark and empty, while human hands clapped. The catcalls and cheers became a barrage of yelps and howls. A ring of sweat beaded under my crown.

  Then Rook appeared.

  He mounted a fence post high above the road, the stormy sky behind his back. A black cape shaped like wings fluttered, and his face hid behind a dark-feathered mask that came to a pointed, gray beak. Beside him, a figure wore a gilded mask of a summer sun—August, always at his friend’s side.

  My neck grew hot, and I halted, nearly tripping Violet, and she linked our arms to pull me forward. “Keep going, Ivy.”

  I couldn’t stop. The crowd fell in place behind the maidens and the drummer. We reached a clearing, a field unused in years, but dried pumpkins littered the grounds, musty gray and riddled with bumps where they rotted. On the side nearest the woods, a man in a blue cloak and jaybird mask was posted, rifle in hand—Sheriff, guarding the tree
line.

  Heather waited in the field near a massive brush pile. Her red ruffled skirt billowed out around her. Pink blossoms on a fernlike crown topped her curls. Pregnant Aunt Rue beamed under the heat lightning skirting the clouds. Farther back, almost invisible, Mamie stood. So strange to see her away from her room in the attic, away from her octagon window where she watched the Glen’s days pass. I hadn’t expected her to come. Could it be that she’d finally speak? What would it take to break her quiet? She held a walking staff. The end was covered with knotted cloth, most likely soaked with moonshine, and burned amber flames.

  The drumming ceased. Silence. I surveyed the crowd, the animal masks, and elaborate costumes.

  Heather drew near and joined my aunt. Mamie handed the torch to Aunt Rue, who passed it to Heather. Applause went up, a roar that rattled my skull. Numbness deadened me from my fingers to my chest, from my toes to my hips, as I watched Heather approach the brush pile. She was so much like one with the fire while she heaved the torch onto the leaves with a whoosh. Plumes of smoke streamed toward the sky. The perfume of fire and smoke was so heady, I dizzied, tipping backwards until a hand caught between my shoulders.

  “Breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth,” my father instructed. “It’ll keep you from hyperventilatin’.”

  I did as he said, and the brain fog lifted. My belly stayed queasy, though I wasn’t convinced that was only smoke.

  A sack was near Heather’s feet. The harvest inside was valued more than all precious metals. It took hours of sifting through remains of last year’s harvest to select the best seeds. Heather plunged her hand deep into the sack and withdrew a palm filled with these. She flung out her arm, seeds raining, some picked up by the breeze. The dirt would find the seeds and drag them into darkness. In time, they’d sprout. In time, another harvest would come. But some plants wouldn’t grow, strangled by another’s roots.

  Heather was the May Queen. Beautiful, nurturing, simple.

  That was the surface. Beneath were secrets and the desperation to keep them hidden.