Sawkill Girls

by Claire Legrand

  With Marion whispering her name against her hair, Val felt scrubbed bright and clean as the dawn.

  Marion

  The Plunge

  In retrospect, it probably hadn’t been wise to kiss Val.

  But sweet heavens, the kissing had felt good.

  It shouldn’t have felt good; it was supposed to have been a maneuver, a farce. She hadn’t planned on kissing Val, but when the moment had arrived, she had thought, all right, this whole getting-close-to-Val thing couldn’t have been developing more beautifully, could it?

  Then Val had melted under her touch, and let out a tiny ragged sigh of relief against Marion’s mouth, and Marion’s whole body had morphed at once into something beastly and divine—nerves pulled tight and legs wobbly as sticks, her brain slip-sliding into a slick, shifting heat she’d only ever before experienced in her most private fantasies.

  For a while, Marion had forgotten about her unsettling phone call with Zoey and the fact that Chief Harlow had a secret room of his own. She had forgotten that Charlotte had vanished, that her father was dead, that her mother existed in a half-lit haze of grief. She had forgotten that she was only supposed to be getting close to Val in order to extract information from her.

  While kissing Val, Marion had felt, simply and deliciously, like a girl.

  Night had fallen on day one of Jane’s disappearance. Marion was alone, freshly kissed, a smile haunting her lips and Val’s touch lingering against the curve of her back.

  She wandered across the Kingshead grounds, hoping the moonlight and sea air would cool her skin and shrink her back into a manageable shape. Otherwise she wasn’t sure she would fit back inside the cottage; the stale air in that house wasn’t fit to be breathed by a sprite such as herself. She sparkled with a vitality she hadn’t known she possessed.

  She had kicked off her shoes by the back steps and now wandered barefoot through the wet grass—black and clinging, rimmed silver by the moon. The cool earth seeped up through her soles; she swallowed and tasted the dark loamy tang of the forest.

  Then she heard a soft snuffling sound, like that of an animal foraging for worms in the damp. She’d reached one of the grazing pastures—vast and rolling, a glossy shivering imitation of the ocean.

  Marion froze.

  A beast was watching her.

  A horse, soot-dark and tremendous. Marion recognized him as one of the prized Mortimer stallions, a world-class stud. He stood on the other side of the pasture fence, his ears pricked, alert. With his front right hoof, he pawed the wet ground, scraping up strips of mud.

  “Hello,” she made herself whisper. Calm the beast. Let him know you’re a friend. This horse wasn’t Nightingale, but he reminded Marion of that horrible day nevertheless.

  As if in response to her memories, the bone cry roared to life. She sank to the ground in silent despair, hands rising automatically to cover her ears. The high whine rang on, so piercing it carved grooves into her teeth. In the distance came the sharp flutter of beetles’ wings, the cicadas’ droning call. The earth seemed to tremble beneath her bare feet.

  The cry was building up from inside the ground, Marion thought. It reached up from the mud and grabbed her bones and shook them until they shrieked.

  “What are you trying to tell me?” she muttered. “What do you want?”

  A sudden silence fell across the pasture—no birds, no bugs. Just the bone cry, droning on, and a brimming, soundless weight, like the world holding its breath.

  From behind Marion, in the trees, a branch snapped. A weight hit the ground. Something heavy dropping from the trees?

  Run.

  The horse kicked the pasture fence.

  Marion’s head snapped up.

  He kicked the fence again.

  A hot knife plunged into one of Marion’s ears and out the other. She staggered away from the fence, back toward the woods. Maybe if she ran, her feet would pound out the pain. And if she ran fast enough, maybe the bone cry wouldn’t be able to catch her.

  The horse reared up, his eyes wild. With his hind legs first, and then with his front, he kicked at the fence like a prisoner bent on escaping his cell, even if he had to smash all his bones to do it.

  “Stop,” Marion gasped, blinking hard to rid the fireworks of pain from her eyes. She reached toward the horse, her arm shaking. “Stop, it’s okay! It’s okay!”

  But the horse wouldn’t stop, and the fence was splintering. When he let out a shrill cry of fear, Marion saw a light switch on inside Kingshead.

  The fence shattered, black wood flying. The horse ran. A jagged piece of destroyed fence scraped up his side as he fled.

  And Marion followed.

  The bone cry told her to. A physical force accompanied it that night—a searing hand, unseen but unmistakable. It whipped up from the ground like an electrical charge and slapped down between her shoulder blades. It pushed her on, hooked into her bones and tugged, and said, with a slight shake, Go.

  She couldn’t possibly keep up with a horse; she was a mere human, and the farthest thing from a runner. But she pumped her legs hard, ignoring the shocks of pain that jolted her knees as her bare feet slammed against the rocky ground. Wet black branches struck her across the face, dragged red lines across her arms.

  The horse was tearing through the Kingshead Woods like it was the end-times. Marion kept running after him, though the horse was by now far away, vanished into the trees. Her side cramped, her lungs were twin hives of fire. Whenever her feet hit the ground, energy snapped up to smack her knees. Her legs couldn’t keep up with themselves. Her vision blacked out, tilting. She stumbled over a tree root, out of the woods, and into an out-of-body experience:

  She’d reached the northern edge of the island—past Kings-head, past the old Breckenridge farm. She emerged from the trees by Aurora Park, a tiny playground with red swing sets that offered the best view of the northern sea.

  It wasn’t possible. She had been running for . . . five minutes, maybe?

  And these cliffs, they were miles away from the Kingshead pastures.

  Ahead, the Mortimer stallion jumped over a hedge, landed wrong. Marion heard a sickening snap, and yet the horse pushed himself on, gait uneven, favoring one of his legs.

  “Wait!” Marion’s voice cracked. She ran across the playground, shoved past the swings and sent them flying. “Stop, please!”

  But the horse, if he heard her, had no intention of stopping. Without another sound, without pause, he jumped over the little fence that kept kids from plunging to their deaths and flung himself over the cliffs, into the ocean.

  Marion fell to her hands and knees, wrapped her arms around her head. She was a shaking ball on the ground. The bottoms of her feet were burning, and her body was marked by the fingernails of the woods.

  “Help me,” she whispered. The bone cry grew louder, rattling her from skull to toes. She tried to shove her thoughts against it, like shutting a door against a battering wind. She shuddered on the cold wet ground as daylight split open the east. The bone cry was thunderous in her ears, and as she braced herself against the ground, she felt a force rise up beneath her like the earth was going to crack in two.

  A sharp static force grabbed hold of her. The bone cry’s shrill whine exploded into a ringing, white-hot silence.

  Marion opened her eyes.

  She was no longer in the mud by the cliffs where the horse had jumped.

  She was on a beach, but not a Sawkill beach.

  This beach was soft and white. The water lapping at its shore was a rippling amber like pools of heated gold. Overhead, feather-thin clouds streaked a lavender sky. On the distant horizon, chunks of land white and craggy as glaciers hung in the air, capped with glittering structures.

  Marion shivered. It was cold in this place. She shifted in the sand, dislodging a fine coating of snow, and looked around.

  Detritus littered the beach—wreckage, maybe of boats? Planes? A propeller. Garbage, washed up from the water—a Frisbee, a toy truck
, a steering wheel, a helmet.

  Piles of clothes.

  Piles of bones, charred and heaped.

  A whisper came from her left. Marion whipped her head around.

  Fat white trees dotted a field of shimmering blue grass. The trees were rural neighbors with long, quiet space between them, their leafless, bony arms reaching crookedly for the sky.

  From her right: a low, soft clicking like the tap of tongue against teeth.

  Marion cried out, whirled right. Her limbs gave out. Her cheek slammed into the snow-covered sand. Home, screamed her brain, desperate for it. Safe.

  The world changed. It darkened and stilled. No more beach, no more whispering grass, no more sky-ice.

  She was in her bedroom, in the housekeeper’s cottage, at Kingshead.

  Her clothes were drenched with dew and sweat, and her feet throbbed red-hot. She’d scraped them raw, running after the doomed horse.

  A moth perched on the carpet in front of her face, watching her shiver. Its feelers inspected the tip of her nose. Sssss, sssss, whispered the quiet flap of its black-eyed wings.

  So said the moth: This is only the beginning.

  Zoey

  The Phone Call

  Zoey sat cross-legged on her bed, her father’s book open in her lap and her heart pounding a staccato beat against her breastbone.

  Grayson’s voice came through her phone: “There’s a lot of text to translate here, Zo.” She heard the clicks of his computer as he scrolled through and magnified the images she had texted him. She’d snapped photos of the first twenty or so pages in the book and sent them to both Grayson and Marion. “This will take me a while.”

  Zoey gently flipped through the book’s brittle pages—passage after passage of Latin text. “Well, good thing you’ve taken, what, three years of Latin now? Like a big ol’ dork.”

  “A dork whose services you desperately need,” Grayson pointed out.

  “Don’t push it, love. Just get to work.”

  “Aye, Captain,” replied Grayson, in a terrible Scottish brogue. “I’ll give it me best shot.”

  Zoey rolled her eyes, smiling despite herself. “Don’t make me laugh. I’m too freaked out right now to laugh.”

  “What does Marion say about all of this?”

  “I don’t know yet. She’s not answering my texts.” Zoey glanced at the clock on her nightstand with a twinge of worry. Ten thirty in the morning already. Marion had said she would come over at nine, for breakfast and book-analyzing.

  “Are there more pages than just these?” Grayson asked. “Did you photograph all of them?”

  “Not yet,” Zoey said, distracted, gazing out the window, “but, yeah, there are a lot more. . . .”

  A tiny white moth was fluttering silently down from the pale morning sky, and suddenly Zoey was interested in nothing else. She watched it descend with more trepidation than the sight of a moth would typically warrant.

  But she couldn’t put Marion’s words out of her mind:

  I see these moths.

  I think they’re trying to talk to me.

  Nor could she silence her own spinning thoughts:

  I can throw girls.

  I can move dressers without touching them.

  “Zo?” came Grayson’s voice. “Did you hear me?”

  Zoey ignored him, transfixed by the flickering black eyes on the moth’s white wings. It was a small world, now—a world for her and the moth alone.

  The moth came to a hovering stop, three inches above the windowsill. When it spoke, its voice was distant and small, like that of a child screaming from miles away:

  Run.

  Suddenly, Zoey felt eyes on her back.

  She spun around to meet the furious dark gaze of her father, who stood at the threshold to her bedroom.

  And there was the stolen book, lying on her mattress.

  And there was Grayson’s voice, on the phone: “Zo? Zoey, you’re freaking me out. Are you there?”

  The moth fluttered at the back of Zoey’s neck. Run!

  But Zoey hesitated. This was her father, after all. She shrugged a little, offered him a sheepish smile. “You left your book lying around again.”

  Her father did not return the smile. His hands hung in tight fists.

  “That book,” he replied evenly, “is not for you, Zoey. You need to stay out of this.”

  Zoey lifted her chin, chills popping like static up and down her arms. “Stay out of what, Dad? What’s going on? Who wrote this?”

  She almost asked him about the room downstairs, but it was possible there was more down there to be found.

  She held her tongue, asked instead, “What aren’t you telling me?”

  Her father shook his head, his shoulders tense and square. The quiet air of Zoey’s bedroom crackled, ready to ignite.

  Grayson’s voice broke the silence: “Zoey, I’m coming over—”

  Zoey’s father lunged for the book.

  Zoey scrambled across her bed for the window.

  Her mind exploded into a thousand frantic thoughts: She could crawl onto the roof and climb down the deck lattice to the backyard. Her bike was leaning against the fence. She would ride it to . . . where? To safety.

  To Grayson?

  No. To Marion.

  Zoey’s instinct screamed this at her, or maybe it was the moth shouting at her in its strange moth voice: To Marion. To Marion.

  She was halfway out the window when her father grabbed her right ankle and pulled her back toward him. She kicked out blindly with her left leg. Her socked heel slammed into his jaw, and he grunted in pain and released her.

  “Zo, what’s the matter with you?” he cried.

  But Zoey was already out on the roof, shoving her phone into her pocket and the soft leather cover of the book between her teeth. It hung like a heavy dead thing from her mouth while she crouched at the roof’s edge. She turned and clung to the gutter with slick hands, searched for footing in the deck lattice. Five seconds later, and she was dropping to the deck, tears of relief in her eyes—I didn’t die, keep running—and then she kicked open the gate, except she didn’t kick it, she simply thought about it. She flung out her leg, and the gate flew open before her toes made contact. It flew open so hard that it crashed back into the fence, swinging wildly. Zoey let out a tiny sob, jumped on her bike, and sped out onto the driveway.

  The front door slammed. She looked back over her shoulder, saw her father hurrying down the porch steps. She let out a frantic gasp and realized somewhere in her climb that she’d dropped the book.

  It didn’t matter.

  Grayson had the pictures. So did Marion.

  Besides, she hadn’t run to keep the book from her father.

  She’d run because, for the first time in her life, she’d been afraid of him.

  And because the moth had told her to.

  Great goddesses of the universe, Zoey thought, a little hysterically, I’m listening to moths. I can open gates with my mind, and also I’m listening to moths.

  She looked back one more time. In the driveway, her father bent to retrieve the fallen book.

  Zoey pedaled on, not stopping until she’d reached the edge of the Heart Woods at the center of Sawkill. She braked hard, left her bike lying on the ground, and walked around in circles through the trees until the world returned to her—blue sky, green grass, black trees that hummed and whispered like they were having a secret conversation with the sea.

  Zoey withdrew her phone from her pocket and sat on the ground in a patch of sunlight. She’d hung up on Grayson at some point, and now had seventeen frantic texts from him, but he would have to wait.

  A quick search online pulled up the number she was looking for. Her eyes burned while she dialed, but if she blinked, she might absolutely lose it.

  Since Thora’s death, she’d heard the mean whispers about her father. First Natalie, they’d said, then Thora, and now? Now Charlotte and Jane.

  Incompetence, was the word she’d heard most often.
Also negligence.

  Zoey had always been the first to jump in and defend her father to anyone who so much as rolled their eyes at him, which didn’t exactly help her own popularity.

  But now there was the matter of the secret room, the red map, the black book.

  Now, Zoey didn’t know what to think—except that not enough was being done. Three girls gone in a span of eight months? She didn’t think she could stand looking her father in the eye long enough to tell him that she, seventeen-year-old failed writer, didn’t think he was doing his job the way he should be.

  And that she, his daughter, didn’t think she could trust him.

  That she was even more than a little afraid of him.

  The phone stopped ringing. A crisp recorded voice announced, “You have reached the Boston field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

  Zoey exhaled, followed the menu options. When she finally reached a human, it was a woman. At the sound of her voice, Zoey blinked at last; her tears spilled over, and she clutched the phone to her cheek like a precious treasure.

  “Hi,” she said, shaky. “My name’s Zoey Harlow. Z-O-E-Y. Harlow with a W. I live on Sawkill Rock. I need to report two missing girls.”

  There was a long silence. Zoey checked her phone to make sure the call hadn’t dropped. “Hello?”

  “One moment, please,” said the woman, and as Zoey sat there listening to orchestral hold music, she searched the trees for moths.

  Then the music stopped.

  “Zoey?” came a new voice, male and pleasant. “Zoey, are you there?”

  Zoey drew her knees to her chest. “Um, who’s this?”

  “This is Roy Briggs, Zoey. I’m an agent with the FBI, and I’m an old friend of your father’s.” The man had a thick Boston accent, and wherever he was, the sea was near. Zoey heard the cry of gulls. “We met when you were little, but I don’t imagine you’d remember that.”

  “Nope. I don’t.” Zoey frowned at her filthy socks. The name Roy Briggs did sound vaguely familiar, but she couldn’t find a face. “What kind of old friend, exactly? Did you work together?”