The King of Crows

by Libba Bray

  Ling opened her eyes again. “Why…?” Ling stopped, afraid to say this aloud. “Why can’t we be something new?”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “What if our love is like a new species, something with no classification yet? What if what we have together doesn’t fit neatly into any labeled drawer? That doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”

  Alma turned her head toward the open window, through which shone a buttery spring moon.

  “There might need to be compromises,” she said at last.

  With effort, Ling curled herself toward Alma, the window, the moon. “I understand.”

  Alma shifted onto her side, facing Ling once more. She stroked the backs of her fingers against Ling’s soft, full cheeks. She kissed Ling, once on the lips, then on the forehead. It was very nice, Ling thought. It was enough, though she knew it wasn’t enough for Alma. “Whatever you do, will you come back to me?”

  “Yes,” Alma said. “Always.”

  That same buttery moon bleeding through the motel’s thin curtains kept Jericho awake. Doc was gone. No sooner had they settled into the room than he’d slapped on some aftershave and headed out again, saying, “Don’t wait up for me, Freddy. I got friends in this town.” Jericho got out of bed and performed a set of one hundred push-ups, then he stepped outside for some fresh air. He was pleasantly surprised to see Lupe standing by the railing, looking up at the moon.

  “Couldn’t sleep either?” he said.

  “Not with the way Babe and Dorothy snore. Sounds like the roof’s about to come off,” Lupe said, making Jericho laugh. He tended to do that a lot around her. “How come you can’t sleep?”

  Jericho pointed at the night sky. “Who could sleep with that moon?”

  Lupe grinned. “That there is a dancing moon.”

  “I was going to suggest taking a walk.”

  “Dancing is like walking, only faster.”

  “I don’t dance.”

  Lupe made a face. “Pffft, Freddy.”

  Jericho wished he’d used an alias that didn’t remind him of Sam’s teasing now that it was coming out of the mouth of a girl he was falling for.

  “I truly do not,” Jericho said.

  Lupe’s bright smile drooped. “What’s the matter? Don’t you like me, Freddy?”

  Jericho’s breath caught. “I like you very, very much,” he admitted.

  Lupe broke into a satisfied smile.

  “But, um, I have another name, a middle name, that only my family and closest friends call me.”

  “Yeah? What’s that?” Lupe teased.

  “Jericho.”

  Lupe’s eyebrows shot up. “Like the Bible?”

  “My parents were religious.”

  “Like my abuela.”

  “Your what?”

  “My grandmother,” Lupe explained. She pursed her lips. “Jericho… Jer-i-cho…” she said, and he loved the way she made it sound. Like he was someone else. Someone who deserved happiness.

  “Follow me.” She took Jericho’s hand and guided him through the parking lot into the flat field behind the motel. Jericho tensed, thinking of the last time he’d gone wandering off from an inn. But he would not allow Sergeant Leonard and his dire warnings to intrude on this moment.

  “Hold me right here,” Lupe instructed, moving Jericho’s hand to the middle of her back. She placed her hand on his shoulder. Their other hands were joined in the air. “Now: one, two, three, four,” Lupe intoned, pushing and pulling Jericho into each movement.

  The only other time Jericho had danced with a girl, it had been on a disastrous date with Mabel. They’d ended up salvaging the night in the end, but Jericho never felt a spark with Mabel. Not like he had with Evie. And nothing like what he felt standing so close to Guadalupe de la Rosa. He wished he were more graceful and experienced. Mostly, Lupe moved around him, leading him through a series of steps that seemed complicated and confusing. When he got them wrong, which was most of the time, Lupe would break into snorts of laughter. Jericho was not offended. He found it all pretty funny, too.

  “Okay, okay. Be serious now,” Lupe said, still fighting the giggles. They resumed their positions. Jericho moved in closer. Lupe raised her chin and looked into his eyes, and all at once and completely, Jericho fell hard for her as they moved seamlessly together, one, two, back and forth and sideways. He even finished by dipping her low, his mouth near her neck. When he lifted her body back to standing, her face was flushed.

  “You have that whole room to yourself?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Jericho said.

  “Seems a lonely shame,” she said and bit her lip.

  This time, Jericho led the way.

  Jericho had read many books in his eighteen years. Thousands of pages full of words, but none of them were adequate to describe what transpired between Lupe and him in that room with only a golden moon as witness. There was nothing he had ever experienced that could match the profound sympathy of their bodies learning this new dance, nothing that had prepared him for how incredible it was to be that close to another person. If he were doomed to repeat his life endlessly, at least there would always be this moment.

  They lay together, his arm around Lupe, her head resting on his chest, which had never felt more human. The sky was brightening toward morning. His right hand tingled, half-asleep. For a moment, the old panic resurfaced. Jericho made a fist, just to be sure, and sighed in relief when it was easy to do.

  As easy as falling in love with Guadalupe de la Rosa.

  Everywhere they traveled, the ghosts followed. After the music and the dancing, when folks let down their guard, it was the ghosts they wanted to talk about. Sometimes, when they went out back to pee in a field behind the dance halls, lodges, and nightclubs, the spaces they’d had to carve out for themselves on the edges of white towns, they got a shiver up the neck and a need to race back toward the lights of those clubs, to the sweat of the dance, to the human press of communion. Sometimes they spoke of things glimpsed from a bus window late at night when most everyone else was sleeping and it felt as if the country’s loneliness had crawled out of its graves to stand along the split-rail fences and beside the red barns and Burma-Shave signs, on the high ridges of desert canyons and Civil War battlefields, out where the buffalo had once been plentiful. Ghosts? They saw these winking reminders and quickly told themselves they had not. They did not want to believe in ghosts.

  “I’ve got a ghost story for you—it really happened to my sister,” Babe said as the Ford rolled into another night on its way to the next town. “My people are from South Carolina. That’s where my sister, Doreen, lives, and all my cousins, too. Doreen’s a nurse. She went to deliver a baby out near Pickens. A fine boy,” Babe said.

  Alma wrinkled her nose. “Pickens! What kind of a name is that?”

  “Shh, Alma, let her tell it,” Emmaline chided.

  “It is a funny name,” Alma whispered to Ling, and held her fingers where no one could see, like a secret they shared.

  “He took his sweet time coming, though. Doreen had to drive back home in the dark. She said her little headlamps were the only light, and she couldn’t see farther than the little bit of road in front of her. All of a sudden, those headlamps fell on a white lady waiting by the shoulder with her suitcase. She was dressed real nice, and Doreen stopped and asked her what she was doing out there in the dark—she was likely to get run over! Well, the lady said her name was Reecie Cowan and she was going to Spartanburg and would be much obliged for the ride. They rode together for a few miles. Doreen asked the lady all about herself. She said Reecie told her she was going to Spartanburg to meet her fiancé, who’d run off after getting her in the family way. His name was Milton Swinton, and after she’d threatened to report him for desertion, he told her to meet him at the Calvary Baptist Church outside town and they’d get married there. Doreen figured that was why she was dressed so nice. Sure enough, about a mile from town, they were coming up on Calvary. The lady started acting st
range. ‘This is where it happened,’ she told Doreen. ‘Where what happened?’ Doreen said. ‘This is where Milton Swinton bashed my brains in,’ the lady told Doreen. And then, right in front of Doreen’s eyes, Reecie started to bleed from her head. Blood pouring down all over her pretty dress. ‘I’m dead. I keep forgetting as long as there’s no justice.’”

  Two seats up, Lupe jumped at this and Jericho put an arm around her shoulder, holding her close. She gazed up at him, happy, and Ling looked away, embarrassed.

  “My sister stopped that car on a dime and got out, screaming. She said she looked over and Reecie was on the side of the road again with her suitcase. The blood was drying up, pulling up into the air like rain in reverse. ‘Tell the police to look for my locket. He kept it. And don’t pick up anybody else on this road,’ Reecie told her. ‘It won’t be safe after I’m gone. There’s bad ghosts these days. Ghosts that belong to the man in the hat.’”

  “What did she mean by that?” Sally Mae asked. She’d been resting her eyes, not really interested till now.

  “Beats me. Doreen didn’t know, either.”

  Alma squeezed Ling’s hand, and Ling nodded without looking. Up front, Jericho leaned forward, suddenly tense. Say something, Ling thought. Say something, Ling. But then Eloise was asking what happened next and Babe was talking again.

  “Then? Then Reecie Cowan disappeared.” Babe snapped her fingers. “Well, Doreen liked to nearly die from fright. She hopped back in that car quick and drove with her hands so tight on that wheel and didn’t stop till she got to Spartanburg! The next day, she asked around and heard that there’d been a girl named Reecie Cowan found out on the road near Calvary Baptist Church. She’d been murdered, her skull bashed in with a rock. They never found her murderer. She’d been dead eight years. Doreen told them she thought it was Milton Swinton who’d done it, but Milton Swinton was friends with the mayor. He was married to a Lassiter girl, who came from money. He said he didn’t do it, and they believed him, and Doreen said she felt so bad for Reecie, wandering that road, just waiting for justice.”

  “When did this happen?” Ling asked.

  “She told me this story about two years ago October, and it had happened the spring before.”

  “That’s a long time. It’s been going on a lot longer than we thought,” Ling said.

  Lupe turned around to look at Ling. “Dios mío, Mary!” she laughed. “You sound as creepy as that ghost lady.”

  “What’s been going on a lot longer?” Eloise asked.

  “Nothing,” Ling said. Jericho glanced over his shoulder and caught Ling’s eye. She shook her head.

  “I’ve got one for you,” Eloise said, in between bursts of blowing on her nail varnish. Ling was amazed that she could paint her nails on a moving bus. “I heard from my friend Joe, who heard it from his friend Jorge, who got it from his girl, Fatima, and she got it from her cousin Johnny, who plays with a territory band on the circuit.”

  “Lord, Eloise, we don’t need the whole begat’n Bible. Just tell the story,” Alma said.

  “Just letting you know where I heard it. Anyhow, two weeks ago, they went to play a little town in the Piney Woods of Louisiana.” Eloise pronounced it Loose-ee-ana. “But when they got there, they said that town was just plain gone.”

  “What do you mean, gone?” Jericho asked.

  Eloise shrugged. “Gone. Nobody there anymore. They said it looked picked over, like a big old vulture had got to it. A ghost town. It was like Judgment Day had come to call. And when they were leaving, Johnny said he swore he could see strange storms passing through, tearing up the sky.” She winked. “But Johnny likes to exaggerate. Probably they just didn’t want to play that town ’cause the booze was no good, and they needed to make up a story for the promoter.”

  “Seems like there’s a lot of ghost stories these days,” Lupe said, burrowing into Jericho’s side again.

  “There’ve always been ghosts,” Dorothy said.

  “You think it’s true, that the Diviners are making it happen?” Sadie asked.

  “No, I don’t,” Alma said decisively. “That’s bunk!”

  “Don’t get hot, Alma. Nobody accused you of being a Diviner,” Sally Mae said.

  “What if I were?” Alma challenged.

  “Then we’d all be five thousand dollars richer!” Doc called from behind the wheel.

  And everybody laughed, grateful for the break in the tension. Everybody except for Ling, Jericho, and Alma.

  “I think one of those Diviners even has the same last name as you, Mary,” Sally Mae called. “Better watch out they don’t confuse you two!”

  Ling stiffened.

  “That Diviner’s name is Chan, not Chang,” Lupe said with annoyance.

  “Mary’s no Diviner,” Babe tutted. “That girl can’t even sing. If she had some kinda powers, wouldn’t she at least be able to sing?”

  “It’s all right,” Alma whispered to Ling. “Nobody would turn you in.”

  Ling nodded, but something about Babe’s and Eloise’s stories unnerved her more than usual. A sense of something bearing down that was far too big and coming much too fast for them to handle on their own.

  ZENITH, OHIO

  “Zenith, Ohio! Coming in to Zenith, Ohio!” the conductor called as he walked through the train car. Evie’s heart began to beat faster. She snugged down the window and stuck her head out as they approached. There it was—her hometown, just as she’d left it.

  “They should’ve named it Nadir, Ohio,” Evie grumbled.

  Sam put an arm around her and rested his chin in the space between her neck and shoulder. She liked the weight of him there. “Where should we go first, Baby Vamp? Can I see your room? I’ll bet it’s very frilly.”

  “We are not going anywhere. Did you forget that I can’t show my face in that town?”

  “Shame. It’s such a nice face.”

  “Aw, you’re all wet.”

  Evie was going home. When she’d left in infamy as “that troublemaking O’Neill girl,” she’d vowed to come back as a star. For months, she’d harbored fantasies of returning, decked out in her New York finery—the latest fashion from Bendel’s or Bonwit Teller, maybe something that had come all the way from Paris. It brought her great satisfaction to imagine sashaying into the town’s swankiest hotel, stockings rolled down, hem shortened to a scandalous length, and being escorted to the very best table, where she would hold court. She’d look those Blue Noses and Mrs. Grundys who constantly judged her square in the eyes and give them her brightest smile, but they would know that she hated them.

  Now those phonies thought she was a disgraced radio star guilty of treason. Instead of coming home a glamorous It Girl, she was returning as an anonymous circus clown.

  Swell.

  Safe in her greasepaint and wig, Evie galumphed through the heart of the town, waving to the crowd. It was still all there, unchanged: the churches, the shops, the country club where Evie had gone to luncheons with her mother’s fancy friends and had to keep her back and her smile straight, knowing she was being scrutinized on her manners and found wanting. She felt a surge of anger when she passed the Zenith Hotel, where she’d read Harold Brodie’s ring and gotten exiled to New York City for it. She’d told the truth about that louse Harold, and everyone, including her parents, had believed the boy over her.

  All of it seemed banal to Evie now. These little people with their little lives. Their petty concerns—whether Mrs. Berg’s toast points had been soggy at the bridge club or if Mr. Tufts had made a fool of himself putting on airs around Evelyn Miller, who was half his age. Their mothers would suck the misery marrow from those bones of contention for a month. No matter what those people did going forward, they would forever be known and judged by their all-too-human mistakes. And for what? So those petty folks doing the judging would have something to feel superior about? So they wouldn’t have to think about their own emptiness?

  It won’t keep you from dying, Evie thought as she waved to t
he faces both familiar and strange lining the roadway. But they were dying already in so many ways. Trapped in their little cages of loneliness and desperation and bitterness.

  Once upon a time, Evie had cared about such things, too. She’d wanted that easy life of never-ending parties and handsome beaus driving her around town in their new autos where she could be seen by all. She’d wanted desperately to be liked. That girl and her wants seemed to belong to a different lifetime. It was astonishing to Evie that she’d ever wanted any of that life at all. She didn’t know what she wanted next, but she hoped it would feel truer. She wasn’t even sure there would be a something next. Not if they couldn’t stop Jake Marlowe and the King of Crows. Not if they couldn’t stop evil from destroying it all, even the stupid country club luncheons Evie loathed.

  Right now, though, she wished more than anything that she had one of those flower buttons that squirted water so she could spray Norma Wallingford square in the face.

  She’d work on being a better person tomorrow.

  As the caravan continued down Main Street, Evie was chilled to the bone to see new signs posted: DIVINERS ARE A THREAT TO OUR NATION. REPORT YOUR SUSPICIONS TO THE AUTHORITIES. KEEP AMERICA SAFE! KEEP AMERICA FIRST! She tried to catch Theta’s and Sam’s eyes, but they were too far ahead. The Blue Noses of Zenith had gone from being phonies to being dangerous phonies. Evie’s breath caught as she spied her mother and father in the crowd. They looked small and spent, like they were watching the circus but seeing none of it.

  Mama. Daddy. I love you, Evie thought rather suddenly, and then they were moving away from her.

  While Zarilda’s crew set up the tents and wagons and stalls all over again on the Zenith fairgrounds, Evie sneaked back into town, still in her clown getup. She wanted to see her parents again, and remember James. But every front yard she passed, every corner she turned, made her uneasy. Inside Mr. Beaton’s five-and-dime, where Evie had spent many an afternoon lusting after the penny candy on display, a couple of kids she didn’t know giggled at her in her getup, and she responded by dancing the Charleston. The bell over the door tinkled and Evie went still as her mother entered the shop with her head lowered. She seemed so much smaller and more drawn than before. The presence of her mother, so close, brought a small lump to Evie’s throat.