She didn’t let go. Instead, she smiled, revealing a mouth devoid of any teeth.
“Take your money and leave this place,” she hissed, her voice like rustling leaves. “Take your money and flee the swamp. These people—”
Anne tried to wrench her arm away from the horrible woman that she had never seen before, but her grip held fast.
“—the people of the swamp never forget.”
They were lost in the center of the throng of marketgoers now, but as Anne glanced around, she realized that no one was looking at the strange woman. Terry didn’t even seem to notice her, content with muttering gibberish to her doll.
“Let go,” Anne repeated, her eyes wide.
“It’s not just Wallace that is buried in the swamp, Anne. There are more bodies there, and there is something evil beneath... that’s why you have never been able to grow anything.”
Anne looked around desperately, searching for someone to save her. She pulled again, and the woman finally let go of her arm.
“Mommy? You okay?”
Anne turned to Terry and put on a fake smile.
“Fine, just—”
She turned back to the woman, but she was gone.
“What?”
Anne looked around, trying to find her crooked outline amidst the others. She was nowhere to be found. The only evidence that she hadn’t made her up was her sore arm and the lingering smell.
What the hell was that?
“Mommy?”
Anne pulled Terry quickly to the final stall.
“Nothing, Terry. I’m fine.”
Mr. Jenkins greeted her with his predictable frown.
“Yes?” he asked, his voice deadpan.
Anne cleared her throat, trying to put the image of the woman’s crooked nose and black eyes out of her mind.
“A ration of bacon,” she said quietly.
“What?”
“Bacon,” she repeated. All of a sudden, the idea of meat felt less than appealing to her. It felt grotesque.
“You have money?” the man asked, eyeing her suspiciously.
Anne took a single pence out of her pocket and laid it on the wooden counter.
Mr. Jenkins nodded and snatched the money before reaching beneath the stand, pulling out a thick wad of brown paper. Anne didn’t even bother looking inside. She grabbed the parchment and turned to Terry.
“Let’s go,” she said, the smile gone from her face.
Anne refused to let the strange encounter in the swamp get to her. Not now, not when things were going so well.
It’s not just Wallace buried in the swamp...
What did she know? She was a demented old lady, probably a relative of one of the women rumored to live deep within the swamp, the ones with the scabies. Or maybe she had scabies, for all Anne knew.
Regardless, the crooked woman knew nothing about Anne.
Nothing.
Still...
Anne didn’t stop at canceling her schedule for the day—she canceled it for the rest of the month, electing instead to spend time with her daughter. Before the accidental encounter with Veronica, she had spent very little time with Terry—really with her. Instead, she used to spend nearly all of her time worrying about how they would eat that day. And the next. But now she not only had enough produce to last for weeks, but enough money to probably buy food for the rest of the year should the gifts dry up.
How much difference a single visit could make in their lives. Anne was hoping that the other visit would bring with it even more riches.
Nearly a month to the day exactly, there was another knock at the door late in the evening. A quick peek out the window revealed a horse and carriage; plain, but clearly not from the swamp.
It was Jane, she knew, which was why her smile was big and broad when she pulled the door open. Upon seeing the woman, however, any expression of glee fell off her face.
“My God, are you okay?” she asked in a whisper.
Jane’s head was bowed, her blonde hair covering her face. And yet despite the woman’s obvious efforts to conceal her face, Anne couldn’t help but notice the purple welts that peeked through.
“No,” Jane said hoarsely.
Anne whipped her head around to look at Terry, who was sitting on the wool rug, playing with Mother.
“Terry, can you go play in your room, please?”
The girl looked up at her, concern on her face.
“Why?”
“Terry, please, just do it.”
The girl opened her mouth as if to say something else, but seeing the look on Anne’s face, she quickly hopped to her feet and made her way to her room.
“And close the door, please.”
Terry obliged.
Only then did Anne turn back to Jane.
“Come in,” she said, stepping out of the woman’s way. “Please, come in.”
Chapter 11
“It doesn’t always happen right away,” Anne said. She tried to keep the uncertainty from her voice, but doubted she did a good job of it. The truth was, she really had no idea how any of this worked. After all, she was just a simple girl from the swamp without a name.
As she sat across from the woman nursing the tea in front of her, she realized that she had grossly underestimated the extent of Jane’s bruises when she had first arrived.
Her right eye, the one that had been bruised when she had visited a month ago, had turned a sour yellow, but now the other eye was bruised nearly as badly. And there was a cut on her lip, a deep cut. When Jane spoke, she did so with a slight lisp, which Anne figured was either to cover up the fact that one of the front teeth in her lower jaw was missing or that it was caused by the missing tooth itself.
“How many times will it take?” Jane asked meekly.
Anne thought about it for a moment. With all the other girls—nine, she counted—drinking the tea had been a one-shot success. It hadn’t occurred to her that it might take more than one attempt. Rather than answer with an ambiguous response, she changed the subject.
“Are you sure you aren’t pregnant?”
Jane nodded.
“Got my blood yesterday.”
Anne chewed her lip, trying to decide how to proceed. Jane saved her the trouble by standing and hiking up her dress. At first, Anne looked away, thinking that the woman was going to prove to her that she was in fact bleeding, but when Jane spoke next, Anne quickly looked back.
“And when Benjamin found out, he did this.”
Anne cringed.
There was a red welt that ran all the way across her stomach. The wound—from a horse whip, maybe?—became progressively deeper as it went from left to right across her pale belly, and the last three inches on the right side were still bleeding.
“Jesus,” Anne whispered as she started to stand. “Let me get you something to clean that up.”
Jane stayed her by raising a hand.
“No, please, sit. It’s not that bad.”
Anne obliged.
“Tell me how many times it will take.”
“I—I—I am not sure,” Anne stammered. “Three, maybe?”
Jane took a large gulp of the tea that Anne had mixed with four ounces of breast milk.
“Three,” Jane repeated, more to herself than to Anne.
“Maybe two. This could be the time.”
Jane swallowed another gulp, her lips turning down at the ends.
“He—he is having sex with other women,” she admitted quietly. “I know he is. He says he isn’t, but I smell their perfume on him. I can literally taste them when he kisses me.”
Jane made a disgusted face and Anne cringed involuntarily. She felt bad for this woman then, bad that she had only pictured her as a means to her own end. But then she thought of Terry and how they had eaten oats and only oats for so long that she couldn’t even look at them now without gagging.
There was no way that she would ever go back to that.
And then there was the woman at the market, the old
crone that had insisted that she take Terry and leave.
Anne shuddered and tried to stay focused.
“He’s getting more and more angry—and more violent. He can’t even look at me without cursing. I’m afraid... I’m afraid that...”
She let her words trail off, and it was just as well. Anne knew where this line of dialogue was headed, and it would do neither of them any good to say the words out loud.
“Drink your tea, Jane. Drink your tea, and I’m sure that this time everything will be okay. That this time you will get pregnant.”
Chapter 12
Anne was made a liar.
A month to the day, she heard that same quiet knock at her door. But this time when she spotted the horse outside, the shadow of a driver, slumped ever so slightly, her spirits didn’t lift.
Instead, her heart sank.
“Terry, go to your room.”
They were in the middle of dinner, stewed tomatoes and potatoes with celery, and the girl was still chewing.
“Can’t I finish, Mom?” she asked with a mouthful of food.
Anne shook her head.
“No. Go to your room now,” she said more forcefully than she had intended. The girl swallowed, grabbed her doll from the table, and quickly went to her room.
With a deep breath, Anne made her way to the door and pulled it open.
Jane’s arm was broken. Anne could tell by the way the woman was holding it close to her body, bent, pressed protectively to her chest.
Her broken nose was more obvious: both eyes were black, but unlike her previous black eyes, the discoloring spread from the cut on the bridge of her nose and concentrated beneath her eyes. The nose itself, previously Parisian and true, had a slight depression in the area of the cut, and continued a little to the left.
For some reason, the bent nose reminded her of the strange woman from the market, and Anne felt an icy chill travel up and down her spine.
Wallace isn’t the only one buried here—you should leave.
“Can I—?” Jane broke into a phlegmy cough. The motion caused her broken arm to bounce, and she cried out in agony.
It pained Anne just to look at her.
“Come in, come in,” she whispered.
There was no small talk or idle chitchat this time; there was nothing that needed saying. Jane’s eyes did enough talking.
She was frightened for her life.
Why isn’t it working? Why isn’t she getting pregnant? What the hell is going on?
“This is the third month,” Jane said at last, her words coming out with too much air. The woman didn’t even bother to disguise the fact that the incisors on her lower jaw were gone. All told, Jane Heath was a shadow of the woman that had first arrived, even with her eye swollen shut at the time. Three months ago, she had exuded an aura of prestige, of wealth, but now the only thing coming off Jane was the reek of fear and pain.
Anne swallowed hard.
“I know.”
She offered the woman more tea, but Jane refused.
“You have to drink,” Anne said. “You have to drink the tea.”
Jane shook her head.
“No, no more tea.”
Anne hesitated, confused by the woman’s words.
Was she giving up? Was that it? What would Benjamin do to her? And if she has given up, what is she doing here?
This last thought came with an overwhelming sense of fear. If Benjamin had inflicted such pain on his own wife, what might he do if he found her here, with Anne? What might he do to Terry?
No, she can’t give up. It’ll take just one more time, that’s it. One. More. Time.
Thoughts of Veronica Thomas drifted into her mind. The frightful experience with the old crone had kept her away from the market for nearly a week, but the bacon had been so good, so ridiculously delicious, that no feeling of unease was capable of keeping her away. And when she had gone back to the market, she’d seen Veronica. The woman had given birth to a beautiful blonde girl—Harmony—and the entire Thomas clan had been at their booth. Even Ken Thomas, who had been actually smiling, had seemed elated. They’d appeared so happy that it warmed Anne’s heart; after all, her milk had done this.
She had done this.
But it hadn’t always been that way for the Thomases. There had been a time that Veronica had been scared like Jane. In the swamp, having children meant everything.
And evidently the same was true for Jane... or at least for her husband.
Anne waited for her next instruction, but Jane seemed content with staring at the table before her. It was as if she were analyzing every nook, every crevice, for some unseen treasure—or a way to escape, to burrow deep inside one of those infinitesimal separations of wood grain and hide.
Anne knew this, because after Wallace had died, she had felt much the same way. But she had had Terry to pull her out of her funk, a luxury that Jane didn’t have.
At least not yet.
Slowly, Jane raised her eyes.
“No, no tea,” she repeated. “Just the milk.”
Anne nodded, pleased that Jane hadn’t given up after all. She quickly went to the cupboard and retrieved a four-ounce bottle of milk. She placed it on the table before Jane, but the woman with the bruised and battered face didn’t immediately grab it and drink it down as Anne expected, as she had done with the tea on her previous visits. Instead, she stared at it much like she had stared at the tabletop.
“Jane? You okay?”
Jane looked up at her and again shook her head.
“No, not the bottle, either.”
Anne tried not to let exasperation leak into her voice.
“What, then?”
“From the source, Anne. I want milk from the source.”
Anne’s brow furrowed in confusion.
The source?
Then she followed the woman’s gaze down to her own chest. Realization fell over Anne.
“Uhhh,” she hesitated.
She wants to suckle from my breast like a babe?
As if reading her thoughts, Jane nodded.
“Please, if I don’t get pregnant this time, Benjamin is going to kill me.”
It was going on two months now that Anne had refused to see any other desperate women, and she was slowly starting to regret her decision to turn them away. Not only did this impact her income, but she had detected a change in the overall feeling she was getting from others in the swamp. And Veronica parading little Harmony Thomas around wasn’t helping. All eyes seemed to be on Anne when she walked through the market, but unlike before any of this had happened, they weren’t staring at her with gazes full of pity or scorn. Now, they seemed filled with jealousy and... something else. Distrust, maybe? Or suspicion.
In the swamp, suspicion was bad. Very bad.
Women weren’t happy that Anne had given Christine and Veronica and the other seven women the gift of a child while they were left without. Once, when she and Terry had returned from the market, there had been one of her scarecrow figurines on the porch swing, one that hadn’t been there when they had left.
And it had been missing its head.
Anne swallowed hard and looked down at her blouse.
What harm could it do?
Her fingers, trembling ever so slightly, moved to the buttons and she cast a quick glance over her shoulder to see if Terry’s door was still closed.
It was.
As she fumbled with the buttons, Anne felt herself nodding.
This is the time—the last time.
Chapter 13
This time the knock at the door wasn’t a meek pattering.
This time it was like a massive fist hammering against the wood.
Anne jumped.
“Terry, go to—”
But she didn’t even get the words out before the door was thrown wide. Terry screamed, and Anne protectively moved in front of her daughter.
As before, Jane’s hair hung in front of her face, and the bruises that marked her features pe
eked through. Her arm, however, had either healed or she was so enraged that she didn’t notice the pain. A horsewhip was clutched so tightly in her hand that her knuckles were alabaster white.
“Anne,” Jane said, her eyes blazing into her. “You promised; three months at most.”
She took an aggressive step forward, and Anne responded by backing up a pace. Her heel brushed against Terry’s shin, who was now cowering behind her, and Anne nearly fell. She caught herself by reaching back and grabbing Terry’s arm.
The girl dropped her doll.
“Hurry,” Anne shouted over her shoulder. “Go to your room, close the door, and get under the bed.”
Terry ran.
“You promised me,” Jane hissed. She was missing more teeth now, rendering her mouth a gaping hole and her words wet and slurred. “You promised me I would have a child.”
Jane took another step forward, bringing the whip in front of her at the same time.
“I didn’t—” Anne began, but the whip shot out with amazing speed, sending an audible crack into the air. The tip snapped against Anne’s bare forearm, immediately causing a hot red welt to rise. Anne screamed and grabbed her arm.
“Three months I have come to this shithole swamp, drinking your—”
Jane cracked the whip again, this time snapping it within inches of Anne’s face. Anne, still clutching her burning arm, stumbled backward and tripped over her own feet. She fell to the floor, a gasp escaping her tight lips.
“—foul milk. But nothing... I sneak away from Benjamin every month, each time wondering if this is the month that I return only to be greeted by a shotgun.”
“Please,” Anne begged, tears streaming down her face. She was in agony, her arm burning, her ass throbbing from where it had struck the hardwood floor. “I didn’t promise anything.”
Jane took another several steps forward until she was hovering directly over Anne’s fallen body.
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