The May Queen Murders (10 page)

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 some-

one 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 ter-

rible.”

My neck went stiff. The lul aby lilt of Heather’s voice was unmis-

takable.

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

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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, re-

moved 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, hel , 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 real y 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 hea-

then weirdos are into.”

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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 wel .”

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 al ,” 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, dis-

carding 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

cel s.”

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.

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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 ev-

erything.”

He lowered the necklace into my palm.

I curled my fingers around the acorn. It 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 hard to break. They didn’t have to

grow in a grove and did fine all alone.

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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 pul , 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 we sometimes dug up on

Glen land that dated to well over a century ago. 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.

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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 sur-

face 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

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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!”

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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 blast-

ed 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 the 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 night-

mare thing. Stories of old claimed that shadow selves wandered the

hil s 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 pine-

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sap 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 blis-

teringly 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 in

her arm, 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

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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 stil born 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 the living. What I saw on the

road could’ve been exhaustion, stress, a nightmare, or — as August