The May Queen Murders

by Sarah Jude

  “So, tell me more about Milo,” I said. “Was it him you were with in the stable?”

  She shook her head and laughed. “I swear, you’re still so hung up on that. Come on, Ivy. I’m making a quick stop. That’s all.”

  The soles of my shoes ground on the gravel road. I pretended to study a dandelion. “Can’t you just walk with me?”

  “I gotta go. Promise me you won’t tell. If you do . . .” Heather’s threat stayed in the air, unfinished with the imagination of what could be painful enough to hold me silent. I hated being alone, left to watch as she crossed the road and checked a metal pail hanging near Milo’s trailer before removing something to shove in her bag. She’d never show me. Maybe before, but not now.

  By that afternoon, she leaned on me as we sat outside her house. I drew a picture of Rook’s greenhouse. Heather embroidered blue flowers on a handkerchief and tucked it inside her shirt when she finished, setting about to braid my hair.

  “Your time will come, Ivy,” she said.

  I closed my sketchbook. My time, I had always believed, would be with the boy who built that greenhouse.

  “You know all you gotta do is open your mouth and talk. You’ve got a lot of good stories, Mamie’s stories, if you’d get over being so shy.”

  “I ain’t changing who I am,” I said. I was Ivy. I was the quiet one.

  Heather pulled another lock of my hair into the braid. “You need to have more than only me.”

  It’s a warning, I heard Mamie say in my head. She’s movin’ on, and you’re stayin’ behind.

  The next morning, I knocked on Heather’s door, only to surprise Aunt Rue. Heather had left hours before, claimed she was up early to bake muffins with me as we often had. I wasn’t quick enough to come up with a lie for my cousin and ran away. As I passed the Meriweathers’ farm, neat bundles of belladonna were stacked, a sign Rook had been there, but he was gone too. My left eye twitched, wondering. Why didn’t he wait to walk with me?

  By the third morning, I stopped looking, knowing I would see Heather at school. Knowing she was hiding things from me.

  My shoes, some new-to-me gray Chucks Mama traded for at the thrift store, sank into the earth. The only sound was the faint chime of bells sewn into my skirt. My schoolbooks nestled against my chest, my gaze fixed on the path. The wind’s cool wisps traced my bones. I was alone, exactly what I was warned never to be. I wished I cut a more imposing shadow, but I was short and not at all a savage thing.

  I heard heavy footfalls nearby and stopped.

  Someone lingered close behind. My fingers tensed around my books. A rusted weathervane of a blackbird spun, metal whining as it spiraled. My heart slithered up my throat.

  I spun in a hesitant circle. A chicken pecked at grubs in the dirt. My eyes lifted to the glower of a scarecrow’s black-button eyes. Only a scarecrow . . .

  Yet someone was out there.

  “Ivy!”

  The whup-whup of August running accompanied the flop of his curly hair. His barrel chest heaved. “Wait up!”

  My muscles unwound. Hay and manure from mucking stables flecked his boots while the sweetish odor of horses emanated from his shirt.

  “Rook asked me to walk with you,” he said.

  I raised an eyebrow. Why should Rook be thinking of me at all? “I’ve been walking by m-myself. No one’s talking to me.”

  “No one knows what to say, Ivy.”

  Hearing that reply, however honest, angered me, though my stammer tried to block my tongue.

  Speak steady, Ivy. Think about your words, and they’ll not trouble you.

  Yes, Mamie.

  “Why?” I asked. “’Cause I’m a third wheel?”

  “What? No.” August pulled a dusty St. Louis Cardinals cap from his overalls and tucked his perpetual cowlicks beneath the brim. “Don’t be such a head case. Seeing that dead goat, Rook’s freaked. He’s got nightmares. And if he’s bad off, I can’t imagine what it’s like for you.”

  “At least he has someone to talk to. Heather keeps going off,” I muttered.

  “Heather’ll find herself trouble.”

  “No, she won’t. I’ll cover for her ’cause that’s what I always do.”

  My voice thinned. The last thing I wanted was to cry in front of August. Did he know how it hurt to think of her and Rook together?

  We landed on the country highway leading into town, where the lush barricade of oak trees was gone, replaced by wild oat grass tolerant of the Ozark heat. The gravel road through this hollow didn’t find much traffic, yet a big rig barreled through and kicked up a dust cloud.

  The trailer park was across the road. Each unit was a pastel color: robin’s egg, canary, salmon; all with white roofs and mold crawling up the sides. A pink trailer with a sunflower pinwheel was closest to the road. The ground was dead earth, no green or yellow sprouting from it. A child’s slide and tricycle faded under the sun. My nose burned as I crossed a plume of cigarette smoke—it was like someone had plunked against one of the emaciated trees and inhaled half a pack of cancer sticks in a single go.

  A screen door banged, then a girl laughed. “Oh, Milo, you’re terrible.”

  My neck went stiff. The lullaby lilt of Heather’s voice was unmistakable.

  “What’s she doin’ here?” August whispered.

  Not now, August. I needed to hear what she and Milo said.

  “I’m just sayin’, you know you can’t get enough of Mary Jane,” Milo teased.

  I crept closer. He was talking about weed. I’d heard rollers at school calling marijuana that. It seemed Milo was a dealer, while Heather his latest buyer.

  I slunk past August’s arm and inched along a chicken wire fence. Milo was sitting on the steps of a pink trailer, puffing on a cigarette. Heather stood by him, one foot wrapped behind her other ankle like a flamingo. The way she leaned toward him, she knew him. Her hand was out as he took a case of folding papers from his shirt pocket, removed one, then doled out some weed from a bag he’d tucked in his jeans. He rolled a joint, his eyes on her as his tongue slicked out to wet the seam and seal it.

  “A little Mary Jane to start your morning?”

  “Oh, hell, yes.” Heather put the joint between her lips, bouncing when he brought up his lighter to give her a spark. During afternoon picnics by the riverside, it wasn’t that uncommon for Rook, Heather, and me to pass one around until we laughed and sprawled, skirts and limbs flopped over each other like a snuggly litter of puppies.

  Dragging on his cigarette, Milo folded his arms. “You know, the rest of the trash livin’ in this dump would string you up by your long skirt if they knew what you really came here for.”

  “I. Don’t. Care,” Heather said, and blew out smoke with each word.

  “People ’round here have heard about what creepy shit you heathen weirdos are into.”

  Heather laughed again. “You watch your mouth, roller scum. You know well as I do that we ain’t heathens, just simple folk.”

  “In some places, simple means dumb.”

  He gave her a crooked grin. She raised her middle finger, laughing and smoking. “You think you know me so well.”

  Milo leaned against the trailer door, his hand coming down to smack the red lid of an orange drum beside the front stoop. It was marked with a big label reading BIOHAZARD . “You’re smart, but you do dumb things. Like hang out here.”

  She shrugged. “I gotta get my fix.”

  The quirk was gone from his mouth as he sucked the last of his cigarette, blowing out the smoke from his nose in twin streams. “You always get what you want, don’t you? ’Cause you’re you, and no one’s gonna say no to you.” His eyes went dead as he fixed on my cousin.

  “Milo.”

  “I just don’t want nobody to get hurt, that’s all,” he said, a touch of tenderness creeping into his voice. Then he dropped his cigarette butt to the ground.

  Heather squashed the filter under her foot and picked it up, discarding the wasted filter in his palm. �
��Keep that poison outta the soil.”

  “I’m mighty sure there’s worse comin’ for me than a few cancer cells.”

  With a jut of her hip, Heather waved off, ducking under the trees and slipping through a gap in the fence. August and I stayed frozen, my eyes trained on the red fire of my cousin’s hair as she sauntered down the road.

  Standing in a cloud of smoke, my legs grew heavy. “I don’t like this.”

  August’s nose wrinkled. “Stay away from him.”

  “I doubt Milo gives a damn about me.” My knees buckled, and I slumped beside a tree. “Milo’s got his sights set on Heather. Like everyone else.”

  “Don’t be like that.”

  “L-like what? Like I’m sick of being forgotten? So what if I don’t laugh as loud or talk as much? It’s always her and what she can get, and since I’m her cousin and her best friend, I gotta be h-h-happy. If I say I’m not, I come off like a jealous bitch.”

  August knelt beside me. Why I’d poured out all that to him, I didn’t know. Because he was there? Because he wasn’t threaded in the knot that Rook, Heather, and I had become?

  His dye-stained fingers withdrew a necklace of a leather cord strung through an acorn from his pocket. “Heather doesn’t get everything.”

  He lowered the necklace into my palm.

  The acorn cap was still warm from his pocket. “August, this is sweet.”

  His mouth cracked in a smile. “Let me put it on you.”

  He swept aside my hair to expose my neck. His thumbs treaded down the bumpy ridge of my neck bones and then he looped the cord and tied it. The acorn fell just above my breasts. Acorns came from oaks, trees that were sturdy and hard to break. They didn’t have to grow in a grove and did fine all alone.

  A red curl hopped along the oat grass field, bobbing low, then high, an undulating wave.

  “August?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Did you . . .” I trailed off, brushing dirt and roots from my skirt as I clambered to the road. I felt the red curl’s pull, and I followed.

  Heather should’ve been far, far ahead, yet I saw her. Red hair. No one had hair like hers, so wild with braids and metaled with beads. She walked down the hollow’s road, sunshine so harsh I shielded my eyes, but I knew the sway of her hips. Her feet were bare. They shouldn’t haven’t been bare.

  “Heather!”

  She walked on.

  I dug my shoe into the gravel, sprinting forward, chasing her. What was she doing? Why wasn’t she going to school? Something wasn’t right.

  As I closed the gap to twenty, fifteen, ten feet, I spotted two old silver coins in her palm, the kind of coins dating to well over a century ago that we sometimes dug up on Glen land. It was corpse money, pieces of silver to lay over the eyes of the dead. Mamie kept a set on her dresser for when the time came. I slowed my gait and studied the hand holding the coins. Her skin was gray, her fingernails purplish-blue and slipping loose from their beds. The fingers were bloated, while the fat part of her palm’s heel was split, the skin peeling back in a translucent flap. My shoes ground to a halt. Gravel spit out from beneath my soles.

  That ain’t Heather.

  Yet it was.

  She moved in a herky-jerky dance as she pirouetted to face me. I shrieked, covering my mouth. My legs turned coltish, and I couldn’t move to run. My skirt wrapped around my legs, cocooning me.

  Heather’s mouth was too wide across her face and curled to twist upward beneath her eyes. All her teeth showed at once, gums visible. Her lips were gone.

  Gone.

  Removed, not hacked off in some juvenile fit like the massacred animals, but sliced off with precision to preserve the Cupid’s bow at their peak. Her face was a death pallor, blue and white to make her freckles stand out like specks of dried blood. She grinned, not because she wanted to, but rather from the corrupted smile slashed into her face.

  My throat was raw, scraped out by screams. I should’ve broken away, tailed back to August under the tree, yet I waited by this dead walking Heather.

  Blue-black veins bulged near her temples and hid beneath the surface only to burst forth again in thick cords at her neck. Her clothes whispered of some unspeakable thing. The fabric slashed open, with dark, curdled sludge spilled down the front. It plunked on her bare feet and rolled over her skin to the gravel.

  Ting, ting, ting. Her fingers twitched, the coins clinking together.

  I whimpered, “H-Heather . . . wh-what happened?”

  She cocked her head. Her hair slung over one shoulder in a wet heap. She was soaked. From her too-wide mouth and her nose, dirty fluids streaked down her skin.

  My pulse battered the space between my ears until my sight went hazy. I fell backwards on the road. Jagged pebbles dug into my back, and the sun’s rays were so sharp and bright they blinded me. Then Heather’s dead face loomed over me. She was closer, dripping cold and wet on my forehead.

  Then, the sound of tires skidding on gravel.

  “Ivy, look out!”

  Chapter Six

  Pastor tried praying for Birch Markle’s soul. He brought us women healers and our herbs and stones to draw out that darkness from the boy, but he laughed. It was a terrible sound that I still can hear. Birch didn’t want no saving.

  August grabbed me out of the way of a truck. The driver’s horn blasted at us while it passed, and tires kicked stone pellets against my skirt and arms. I didn’t see it coming, my head lost in a mist of terrors and tradition.

  Like others in the Glen, I grew up throwing chicken bones to divine the future and predicting rain by when dandelions closed their yellow heads. I knew a frost’s arrival by the cicadas’ buzz. What happened, that horrible monster I saw on the road, was a nightmare thing. Stories of old claimed that shadow selves wandered the hills and emerged once death circled near. It wasn’t something you brought up over the dinner table while passing the butter dish. You waited until night fell and the hearth fire wearied. The hiss of pinesap in charred wood coaxed secrets you’d never share with sunlight on your face.

  Long before my birth, a shadow self visited my family. Gramps was still a youngish man. He’d claimed October that year was blisteringly cold, winds from the north bringing such an early chill the Glen feared for its autumn harvest. The story went that he minded the fire while Aunt Rue, then a toddler, skipped around the long table. Upstairs in the little house, the midwives had shooed away Gramps. He was to have clean towels and hot water ready. Mamie—or Ginger, as she was called then, before she had grandchildren—was in the labor pains, and that was granny-women’s business, no room for a sheepherder like him.

  The clock struck ten o’clock, and a draft whisked through the home to stir the family Bible’s pages. Gramps clutched the cracked leather cover and, by the fireplace across the room, saw Mamie’s silhouette. She wore her birthing gown, her red hair unpinned in sweaty curls. In one hand, she held the iron poker and prodded the fire’s embers until orange tongues unfurled as hot as possible. Mamie’s other arm coddled a newborn wrapped in blankets. She focused on the baby, a baby that made no sound.

  For as long as Gramps lived, he swore what happened next was God’s truth. Mamie’s skin was as thin as tissue paper, veined black. Gramps set aside his Bible and called to her, but she didn’t flinch. The only movement was a twitch of her lips, which were blue but for the fat part of her lower lip where her teeth had gouged as she pushed out the baby. She didn’t notice Gramps and stoked the fire until it was so hot he yelled to stop or sparks might escape and burn down the house. Then she dropped the iron poker, metal clanging on rock, and drew one fingertip along the curve of the baby’s cheek. She threw the baby in the fire where it landed on the logs like a squirmy grub. The flames scorched the swaddling and turned dead-white skin to ash.

  That was the night Mamie gave birth to a stillborn daughter and nearly bled out herself on the bed.

  To see a shadow self was to see the walking soul of someone whose back was in the grave while they faced th
e living. What I saw on the road could’ve been exhaustion, stress, a nightmare, or—as August suspected—some hallucinogenic accident because I wandered too close to smoke from Milo’s Mary Jane.

  Excuses didn’t make what I saw less of a warning.

  August swore he wouldn’t speak of it. I believed him, but I wouldn’t find peace of mind until I saw the real Heather.

  I finally found her outside by the football field at school with a joint between her forefinger and thumb.

  I held my sketchbook to my chest. “W-we need to talk.”

  “About?” She puffed on the joint and offered me a hit, but I shook my head.

  “I’m worried. I saw something when you left the trailer park—”

  She held up a hand. “Hold up. You followed me to the trailer park? Ivy?”

  “I didn’t follow you.”

  She tipped back her head and took a few noisy breaths. They were supposed to be calming breaths, yet her shoulders went high at her neck. “So what is it?”

  “You’re in trouble,” I said.

  “Did Marsh see me? Uncle Timothy?”

  “No, danger trouble. Mamie’s stories ’bout shadow selves and how they’re death omens? I saw yours, Heather! You know what that means!” I felt silly saying it, knowing how easy she would dismiss it as foolery. Still, I had to warn her in the hope that maybe—not now but later, once she was alone—she’d hear me and be careful.

  She gave a smoky laugh, then a doubtful scan from my face to my toes and back to my face. She knew I wasn’t joking, but still she scoffed.

  “You gotta be kidding me.” Heather finished her joint, grinding out the cherry on the metal overhang of the bleachers. “You’re all worked up over nothing.”

  “Will you please listen?” I begged.

  “You know what your problem is, Ivy?” she snapped. “If it were up to you, everybody’d only listen. Well, I can’t listen anymore. Some things I gotta do. ”