The May Queen Murders (9 page)

late to stop a fresh well of pain from springing. Warmth kissed my

cheek, his palm cupping my face, the pad of his thumb blotting away

a tear.

Yet no matter the heat exuding from him, the coldness returned to

my body, starting with my feet. The longer I stood with Rook under

the predawn sky, the cooler the earth beneath me grew. The fire of

my temper, which sought to burn and blister, Rook abruptly snuffed.

I was burned out and numb. A stench reminiscent of deer-hunting

season when the carcasses were bled at nearly every farm gagged me.

“What is that?” I asked.

Rook lifted his col ar to cover his nose. “Something smel s dead.”

I squinted and looked out past the horse fences. Something pale

with curves and hollow caught a few fickle rays of light from the

57

torches. Ribs. Legs bones. Something
was
dead and stripped of its

flesh, leaving a skeleton jutting up from the field.

“Oh, God,” Rook blurted out. “What do you think it is?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Go get your daddy.”

“Hang on a second.”

Rook pulled himself over the horse fence. I tucked up my skirt

and climbed over after him. The closer we drew, the easier it was

to see the carcass. Bits of meat still clung to the pearly bones. Tufts

of coarse brown fur lay on the ground, half submerged in a thick

puddle of darkness spreading out from around the skeleton. It had

cloven hooves. It was a goat.

Its head was missing.

58

Chapter Five

You’d smell Birch before you saw him. He never bathed, or

if he did, the water was tainted by blood. He took animal

skins and wore ’em. Once, he cut open a deer and wore its

belly chains ’round his neck like some kinda unholy shawl.

My feet were cold, my shoes seized by Sheriff and zipped in a bag

marked evidence. They had to know which footprints in the field

came from me.

Women came outside wearing aprons, interrupted from preparing

the day’s first meal. Some carried baskets of speckled eggs plucked

from hen houses moments before the commotion began. The men

forgot to fasten their suspenders or slick back their hair once Sheriff

and his men knocked on their doors to account for folks’ where-

abouts.

Absent from the souls milling in fear was Heather.

Across the road, Rook was sequestered at a harvest table. Beside

him was the bag containing my shoes. Rook’s boots were in another

bag. His head lifted, lips parted as if about to call to me. He didn’t.

59

Instead his mama, Briar, crowded him to fuss with his col ar and

smooth his hair, all while his little sister, Raven, jostled her free hand.

Mama hurried close and shoved an extra pair of shoes into my

hands, but I didn’t budge, too stupefied to move as she knelt and

eased my feet into the sneakers.

“So what d’ya think, Timothy?” Sheriff asked, his head angled so

close to Papa’s that I strained to hear.

Papa stooped beside the viscous puddle, a vial with a sample in his

hand. “No animal did this, if that’s what you’re askin’.”

“You think it’s the same fellow who did in the dog?”

“Maybe.”

No tracks on the ground except for Rook’s and mine, nothing to

yield answers to multitudes of questions. The rising sun cast a rosy

glow, dawn’s promise, yet in that glimmer, the darkness of death was

fathomless.

Near the puddle, Sheriff’s men guarded a sheet, once white, now

painted with rusty splotches, covering the remains. Dale Crenshaw,

a deputy and winemaker, wiped his forehead with a handkerchief.

“I reckon it’s time to call in the county officers, ain’t it, Jay?”

Sheriff looked toward Papa. Some expression I didn’t know on my

father’s face worried me, how his eyes widened and cheeks paled at

the mention of outside police. They weren’t to be brought in, Papa

always said. Nothing happened in the Glen that our own people

couldn’t handle.

“You’re jumping to conclusions, Dale,” Sheriff said. “We don’t

know what we got going on, and you real y think the county’s gonna

give a damn about dead livestock?”

60

Sheriff and Papa both peered under the sheet covering the skel-

eton and skin. A fly buzzed near the corner, dipping inside, zooming

out a second later. A whimper escaped my lips, and I tucked myself

against Mama. She pushed my hair down in front of my eyes, and her

hand spread warm on my cheek as she turned my face.

When livestock died, folks removed the carcass before the flies and

death smel came, ideal y within twenty-four hours. That meant haul-

ing the dead south to the bone land. Coyotes took care of the flesh.

But if Papa found the creature diseased, the carcass was burned, and

there was no escaping the odor, no matter which way the wind blew.

I breathed to calm myself, but a metal taste crept up my throat and

lay flat on my tongue.

My mother murmured, “
Ay, Dios mío, bonita,
” and she rubbed

her hand along my back. I had to get away, walk around, or do some-

thing, so I stepped outside of my mother’s reach and closed the gap

separating me from Papa and Sheriff. I stayed on the fringe, not

wanting to hear and yet a morbid curiosity forcing me to listen.

“Sheriff,” Dale said, “you gotta catch this killer before he goes after

some person.”

The crowd split and wandered away, but Sheriff caught my father’s

shoulder and hissed in his ear.

“I don’t like havin’ that son of a bitch Birch Markle on a killin’

spree. I’m worried Crenshaw’s right and we’ll have more than dead

animals soon. But I ain’t turning it over to county police. Not after

how they mucked things around last time.”

Papa shrugged off Sheriff’s hand and buckled his veterinary bag.

“Jay, you truly suspect Birch?”

61

“You yourself said some animal didn’t do it,” Sheriff said. “Woods

are wide, Timothy. People get lost and don’t come out, but who’s to

say a few don’t come out on purpose? And after killing Terra —”

“Jay,” Papa interrupted. He stared at me. “How much have you

heard?”

“Enough,” I said. “I know the stories.”

My father sucked in a sharp breath while Sheriff walked to a fence

and snatched an oddly discarded spade lying nearby. The blood

soaking dark into the earth thickened on the dirt’s surface.

“What about the screams from the woods at night?” I pressed.

“There’s truth in the old stories, Ivy,” Sheriff declared, his words

punctuated by the metallic singing of the spade striking rock. “Get

on home. Get there fast and safe.”

A child’s nightmare came to life. The monster in the woods, the

howler at night, was real. With the spade, Sheriff scattered fresh dirt

over the blood. He’d dry it out best he could and bury it deep. No

one’d know it’d ever been.

"

Heather walked with me to school the following morning, but upon

reaching the trailer park, she broke away.

“I gotta make a quick stop.” She bounced on the toes of her sneak-

ers and looked over both her shoulders as if to see who might be

watching.

No one from the Glen went to the trailer park, but Milo was look-

62

ing for her the other day. What if it was for something more than just

weed? How easily could he slip across the Glen’s borders and go un-

noticed except by a girl meeting him in the stable? My heart skipped.

I half smiled. Maybe Rook wasn’t Heather’s lover after al .

“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 al .”

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 tel . If you do . . .” Her 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. She 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.

63

“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 Meriweath-

ers’ farm, neat bundles of bel adonna 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 bel s sewn into my skirt. My schoolbooks nestled against my chest,

my gaze fixed on the path. The wind’s cool fingers 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.

64

I heard heavy footfal s 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 from my chest.

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 and 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 stam-

mer 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 overal s and tucked his perpetual cowlicks beneath the brim.

65

“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 tol-

erant 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