by Sarah Jude
I clambered for the pail of grooming tools, dumping out the brushes and picks before I flung the bucket at Sheriff. It bounced off his shoulder and into the aisle outside the stall. His hand shot out to grab me. “No more fightin’, Ivy.”
The hoof pick coiled in my fist, I brought down the curved edge in the web between his finger and thumb and felt the pop of flesh as I ripped it straight through. Sheriff yowled and cradled his wrist with his other hand. New blood speckled the floor and hay. I forced myself to stand, and with an airless scream from my damaged throat, I ran at him, arm back to plunge the pick’s curved hook in the side of his neck. Sheriff fell onto my shoulder, but I pushed him off. His body smacked the ground. His breath gurgled. I lurched into the aisle and stumbled outside.
“Where is he?” Papa yelled, running toward me. He caught me around my arms and pulled me against him.
“He’s inside,” I forced myself to speak even if every word scraped my vocal cords raw. “He killed Marsh. He killed Terra. He’s been lyin’ to you for years!”
Papa’s nostrils flared, and he ushered me over to Mama, who had come with him. She and I tumbled to the ground, murmurs of Spanish soft in my ears. Papa placed his hand on Mama’s shoulder.
“I’m goin’ in.”
Mama stroked the back of my head. I rested against her as she slowly rocked in place. My fingernail ached where the root protruded and bled. All the fight was out of me, my body so sore I couldn’t move again.
Rook’s acorn necklace hung over my heart.
I lived. I lived when Heather hadn’t. I lived, and I’d keep living.
After a while, my father exited the barn. Wordlessly, he walked across the field in the direction of our home. Papa brought two pails of kerosene when he returned and poured them inside the stable. He soaked the doors. He watered the land with fuel. The fumes stung my nose and eyes, but I didn’t know if the tears streaming down my cheeks were a reaction to the vapor or crying. Clouds in the sky roiled thick and impenetrable. A storm that’d bring soaking rain was on its way. Thank God.
“Ivy, stay back,” Papa said.
Mama helped me to stand, and we staggered, hand in hand, her warm skin against mine.
“Don’t worry. This must be done.”
I wasn’t worried.
She reached into her purse and offered a pack of matches to my father. “Timothy.”
Papa’s hand squeezed mine. Then he lit the match.
The fire devoured the stable, the stalls, the hay inside sparking up. Flames spread into the dried grass. Mama held me against her while the ghost of Heather dancing in front of her lover turned to ash. The bloodstains left from Journey’s death became char and flecks rose against the dark sky as orange embers.
“Mama?” I asked.
“It’s only fair,” she said.
My parents led me away from the barn with the body burning inside. Behind us, fire scoured Rowan’s Glen. Plumes of black smoke roiled over the fields, and the wind carried pieces of hot ash, dropped them farther away until more fields caught flame.
Ragged and torn, I was only vaguely aware of the sirens wailing closer.
The land burned. Burned out the lies. Burned out the rot. Burned out the secrets so buried they blackened and poisoned the roots.
Chapter Twenty-three
And sometimes, Ivy girl, you know wrong’s been done to you, wrong done on your behalf, and you best pray it’s enough to be forgiven.
What do you do when the person who taught you how to fall in love dies?
That question lingered from my dreams each morning. The only answer I settled on was that you go on. Everything Heather had taught me—to be joyful, to have dreams, to share yourself with someone else—I took it and lived.
I reached out with my little finger. Rook’s looped around mine.
Mamie and Dahlia waited inside the old house, but the weather was too nice, especially for mid-June with the sun gilding Rowan’s Glen. Black earth and lush green crops on every field. Rook’s movements were wearied, and I wrapped my arm around his back as much for balance as endearment. The bandage over his missing ear did little to hold his glasses straight. Briar had sewed a band to fit his head, but he couldn’t wear it until he healed. Time yet for that.
Inside Mamie’s home, Dahlia set out the mortar and pestle, dried comfrey root, and a kettle of boiled water with steam coming out the spout. Here she didn’t wear the scarf. Her scars were a testament to the potency of the herbs. There was another bowl of wet, fat leeches, drenched with river water.
“Which do you choose?” she asked Rook.
He wavered from the herbs to the leeches. “Does bloodsuckin’ actually work?”
Dahlia caressed her film-thin cheek so we could see it.
“Dahlia,” I said, “we know you’d have nothing but a hole big enough for a peach pit if it weren’t for leeching, but Rook’s lost too much blood. Can’t you tell by his color?”
Her mouth managed some kind of ripple of a grin. “Your granny’s recipe is on the table. You write it down yet in that sketchbook of yours?”
“Indeed.” I withdrew the book from the bag over my arm.
My sketchbook wasn’t only a study of faces and scenery anymore. There were words mixed in, everything from the hushed talks by candlelight Dahlia and I had as we tried to reconcile the damage done—my pencil capturing the story and our hands knotted together in half-dark—all in the book. Dahlia and I spent time together, more than her teaching what she’d learned from Mamie and Rose Connelly, the way of charms and tinctures. She craved an understanding of her sister’s secrets.
I understood that craving.
Mamie’s recipe dictated to bloom comfrey root in hot water, then to grind it up with the mortar and pestle. No specific amounts other than a feel for it. Drops of plant essence. Drops of venom. Sometimes mixed at midnight or dawn, depending what hurt needed healing.
“You got too much water,” Mamie said behind me. “You need to paste the boy, not bathe him.”
On the first of June, Mamie had come out of her attic and asked for coffee. Mama, who’d been at my aunt’s house tidying up, dropped the coffee mug so it shattered into pieces. After so many years of silence, I hadn’t thought Mamie would talk again. Losing Gramps had thrust her into a quiet solitude, and maybe it took losing Heather to bring her voice back, to remind her that silence meant no more stories. I needed her stories, her secrets, her superstitions. I needed them because they were my way.
“Yes, ma’am,” I replied, and sprinkled more root into the mortar.
Mamie knotted an oiled red thread around Rook’s wrist. “Keep this on, and when it frays, don’t you cut it with a blade, you hear? No metal must meet this string. Bad luck on you, and you’ve had more than your due share.”
A baby cried from the other room. Mama’s voice singing a Spanish lullaby to Sage traveled through the house. She and Papa kept him in a crib in their room most of the time. Aunt Rue took ill and wouldn’t see him, spending the past week since his birth in her room. She needed help but wouldn’t take the teas Mamie brought her, wouldn’t listen to the urges for help. Baby blues, they first said. She refused to name the child, and for three nights, he had no name until I rocked him and mentioned to Mama how his eyes were wise.
It’d be nice to know what it was like having a brother.
“Your mama needs a rest,” Mamie said. “Baby’s looking yellow, and the sun’ll take that outta him.” As she left the kitchen, her hand stroked my cheek. “Dahlia, be a dear and come along.”
She smiled as she left Rook and me in the kitchen. I set to peeling off the remains of the poultice from his back, withdrawing a pained hiss from him. The gouges were deep, the new skin thin. Angry pink trails carved across his skin. He’d complained about how tight they were, and Dahlia warned he’d be sensitive once the weather went cool.
Once the new bandages were in place, I pulled my chair around to his other side and moved for the one covering his ear, but he jerke
d away.
“Don’t.” He stared at the floor. “I don’t want you to see it.”
I tilted my head. “I n-need to look.”
“I’ll have Mamie change it later.”
“You’ll let me change it. Now.”
My finger curled under his chin to lift his face. I leaned in close and touched my lips to his. He kissed me back, soft. He kissed me with all his breath, all that was warm inside, and I kissed him with all the shadows of grief burned out by daylight.
Papa had driven me to the hospital and made me wait while he broke the news to Rook that Sheriff was gone, that he had perished in the fire. The terrible howl that followed, the way Papa held him as he bawled, some scars weren’t on the skin.
His ear didn’t look as bad as he thought.
“I don’t hear real well on that side,” he admitted as I changed the bandage. “The doctors said there’s nothin’ to catch sound.”
“You’ll be okay,” I promised.
“Everybody looks when I walk by.” He tried adjusting his glasses, but they fell crooked until he gave up with a huff. “I won’t ever be sheriff.”
“I know.” I tied off the bandage and repeated the same thing I told him every time he got into a slump. “You have your greenhouse and fields. You have your horse. You have me. That’s all you need, Rook.”
His lips formed a smile. “Maybe so.”
I helped him stand. He put his arm around my shoulder; mine went to his waist. The cuts from the sickle had left nerve damage numbing his leg; other times it burned like brimstone. The night before had been a bad one, with Briar banging on the door after midnight, begging me to come with my medicine bag and Mamie’s recipes.
Rook and I took the steps out of Mamie’s house slow. For a while, we wandered the razed fields. The burned areas were bad. Fire had ravaged acres before the town’s firemen contained the blaze. The stable was a loss. The ground still stank of char and ash, but rain fell after the fire that destroyed too many fields, and new green found ways to sprout.
“Hey,” Milo called when he spotted us and wiped sweat from his brow.
He had a water pail. Fire could still be hot well below the soil, but he and Emmie had taken it upon themselves to tear away the stable’s remains. Work moved faster now that Milo’s cast had been switched to a soft one. Pieces of wood too damaged to reuse went into the forest to return to earth, while smaller things like doorknobs and hinges that had survived lived in a box in the bed of his truck for salvage.
Rook kicked at a green vine in the ground. “Get rid of it. Pull it out and kill the root.”
Emmie knelt and tugged at the plant. “It’s a persistent little shit, ain’t it?”
“Burn it if you gotta. I don’t wanna see it poisonin’ this ground again,” he said. “It’s belladonna.”
Something in the way Emmie dug at the plant changed. She grabbed at it harder, more determined. Funny how so much memory attached itself to the mere mention of one little plant.
Milo took Rook’s other arm and helped me guide him to the open door of the truck on the road so he could rest. Their brother hadn’t made it out of the last half of May, and without knowing what to do with themselves and nothing else to care for, Milo offered to help muck stalls and plant crops to repay Papa for healing his broken wrist. Hillfolk cared for hillfolk, Papa said. Still, I knew why the Entwhistles had demanded this field for working. The plan was to call it Heather’s Garden.
I walked alongside Emmie, watching as she raked new soil into old. If drowning led to that silver place of dreams, then golden days right before the summer solstice were the grounding of life. Clouds like raw cotton spun overhead, and the blue sky was sharp. This was here. This was now. This was how life had changed.
Milo came away from the truck where Rook rested. He motioned me aside, speaking so hushed not even his sister heard. “You tell him yet?”
“Soon.”
“He’s got a right to know what his daddy did. The longer you let it go, Ivy, the harder it’s gonna be to forgive.”
I eyed Milo, didn’t flinch, not even when I knew he disapproved. “Rook knows I love him. He’ll forgive me.”
“I wasn’t talkin’ about him needin’ to do the forgiving.”
Milo patted my shoulder before returning to work on the field. It wasn’t that I needed to forgive Rook. He’d done nothing but love me. For all Sheriff’s talk of wanting to keep me safe, all he’d wanted was to find out how much I knew. Keep himself safe. Self-preservation made us do the most damnable things. Our secrets, our lies, there were choices made to protect Rook’s family and mine. Milo knew a thing or two about holding on to other folks’ secrets, and he knew when it was time to give them up.
I approached the truck’s open door. “You ready to go?”
“Already?” Rook asked.
I helped him stand. “We gotta talk.”
Throughout the paths of Rowan’s Glen, I spoke and Rook listened. He held my hand tighter, and when I was finished, he embraced me.
He knew.
He knew what his father did, the years of secrets, the damage wrought. My father had told him. He still didn’t want to talk about it. Which meant that lost look about him would stay a while, the one he’d worn since the night he almost died, and I knew it well. It haunted my own eyes. Whenever I looked in the mirror, my ghost looked back.
Sometimes when I thought I was alone, I sensed someone watching. Of course, no one was there when I turned around. Maybe someday, though, I’d catch a glimpse of a skirt with red ruffles, a curl of red hair. Some things you can’t ever let go.
Acknowledgments
I wish I could say writing The May Queen Murders was easy. It wasn’t. Delving into subjects you’ve cut off from memory and having them come rushing back is a trial. To have the faith of Julie Tibbott at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt—I couldn’t be more heartened. Thank you so much for “getting” this book, homing in on how to make it better, and challenging me all the way.
Miriam Kriss, my literary agent and confidant. The believer in my word gremlins and the one who read the first pages and said, “Keep going. This is it.” You were right, as always.
The SS Family: Zac Brewer, Cole Gibsen, Emily Hall, Jamie Krakover, Shawntelle Madison, Marie Meyer, L. S. Murphy, and Heather Reid. I can’t do this without you.
The YA Scream Queens: Catherine Scully, Courtney Alameda, Dawn Kurtagich, Hillary Monahan, Jenn “J.R.” Johansson, Lauren Roy, Lindsay Currie, and Trisha Leaver. The spooky girls and a bond I treasure.
Amanda Bonilla, warrior, cheerleader, mama bear, and warm blanket on cold nights.
Windy Aphayrath, Gypsi and Wolf Ballard, Lisa Basso, the Bromley and Freeburg clans, Sandra Fenton, Maria Fernandez, Meghan Harker, Jenny McCormick-Friehs, Krista Winters-Irrea, Antony John, Beth Jones, Courtney Koschel, Andrew Lovitt, Gretchen McNeil, Angela Mitchell-Phillips, Bebe Nickolai, Marcie Olsen, Kelly Rose Oswald, Mary Beth Pilcher, Rachel Rieckenberg, Timon Skees, Paula Stokes, April Terviel, Dawn Thompson, April Genevieve Tucholke (for the owl), Karen Utsmann, Alexandra Villasante, Dana Waganer, Judy Rhodes Williams (whom I miss so much), Melissa Williams, Cat Winters, the Handsome Family, JabberJaws, Wally, David, Annika. Thank you all.
Thank you to Dorothy Rush. Little girls who are forever friends. In memory of Jocelyn Stanley.
To Erich and Ericka Zwettler. Thank you for your faith, your love, your prayers. It took the unthinkable to become so close you, sister, and now I will never let you go.
To Jack and Lucille Powell. I watched your friendship with my mother from the time I was born until she died, and I learned how to be friends from you. Then you taught me how to be a mother.
Gwendolyn, Adrian, and Brendan, I pray I’ve given you the steel to be resilient, because you’ve given it to me.
Timothy, the boy next door. The one with his nose always buried in a book. The one who turns my head with a smile. I have you, and you have me.
My parents, Richard and Sharon, and my bro
ther, Michael. I love you. I miss you. I’ll see you on the other side.
About the Author
© Tim Johnson
SARAH JUDE lives by the woods and has an owl that lands on her chimney every night. She grew up believing you had to hold your breath when passing a graveyard. Now she writes about cemeteries, murder, and folklore. She resides in Missouri with her husband, three children, and two dogs. When she’s not writing, she can be found volunteering at a stable for disabled riders.
Visit her website at www.sarahjude.com