The May Queen Murders (2 page)

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Boston New York

Copyright © 2016 by Sarah Jude

All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections

from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing

Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhco.com

Text set in Minion

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

tk

Manufactured in the United States of America

TK 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

45XXXXXXXX

To my sister Ericka, my tether,

who just
knows.

So you must wake and call me early, call me early, mother dear,

To-morrow ’ill be the happiest time of all the glad New-year:

To-morrow ’ill be of all the year the maddest merriest day,

For I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May.

— Alfred Lord Tennyson

“The May Queen”

Prologue

Now

Kerosene slopped from the rusty pail and splashed against the aban-

doned stable. Fumes burned my eyes but didn’t blur my father’s sil-

houette as he faced the building, bucket in hand. It would burn and,

with it, the body inside.

“Go to hell!”

Papa’s shoulders twisted as he wheeled back, shouting, sweeping

the pail around. More kerosene rained against the wood while bile

scorched my throat. I was too tired to get sick on the hay, my body

wasted from screaming. I wiped my hand over my mouth and some-

thing snagged my lip. My fingernail was missing, a ragged root jut-

ting from the bloody bed. Bitten off and swallowed by someone who

wanted me dead.

This ain’t real.

Yet I smelled the kerosene and felt the spring air and the dust in

my nose, my feet firm on the ground. No matter how my mind ached

to fly away, it tethered to a stark truth. This was real.

“Ivy, stay back,” Papa warned, and then looked to Mama, close by

1

with an antique lantern shedding dim light. The night sky swelled

with clouds like spiders’ egg sacs ready to burst, but the storm would

miss Rowan’s Glen. The hay, the ground, the stable were kindling-

dry, and every movement kicked up brown clouds. Mama pulled me

until we were safely away. The clink of her silver bracelets racked

together as she eased her arm around my shoulder.

“Don’t worry.” Mama’s still-thick Mexican accent lilted her voice,

but her expression was stoic except for a pinch around her eyes. That

blankness scared me.

“This must be done,” she whispered.

I wadded my fingers into my long skirt. The blue patchwork was

smeared with blood and dirt. Last summer, my cousin Heather and

I sewed peasant skirts together. They flared when I spun, round and

round, always with Heather.

The last time I saw Heather, she was wearing a skirt with red ruf-

fles.

Papa trailed kerosene on the ground and retreated from the stable

before tossing the pail inside. I couldn’t see into the shadows. The

body lying on the stone floor might yet have a pulse. A shiver tugged

at my neck, my chest rising and falling with shallow breaths. One

clear thought pierced my mind’s muddle, and it sickened me.

I
wanted
that body to burn.

“Timothy.” Mama fished a book of matches from a pocket in her

apron and gave them to Papa. He took the matches and stretched

one hand to hold mine. He was strong. My throat ached when I swal-

lowed, from being choked in an attempt to silence me. Now I said

nothing as Papa struck the match.

2

The fire didn’t whoosh to life. First, the match hit the ground and

breathed. Then a blue worm of flames emerged from the earth and

devoured one blot of fuel before moving to the next. Upon reaching

the stable, the worm bloated into a dragon that blazed yellow and

orange. The wood planks hammered by my great-great-grandfather

when he was young crackled, bone-dry from drought. Fire twisted

through the stable while coils of smoke erupted from the windows.

The pulse of the body inside
thump-thump
ed in my head. Frantic.

Dying.

“Mamá?”
I whimpered.

“It’s only fair,” she said.

Papa didn’t speak. Rage had made him do the unspeakable.
For

me,
even though I’d survived. But also for those who hadn’t. Fire was

cleansing. Fire was vengeance. The flames burned red, as red as the

ruffles of Heather’s skirt. As red as Heather’s hair.

3

Chapter One

Now, Ivy girl, you gotta know there’s bad out in them

woods, and the worst kind of bad Rowan’s Glen has ever

known is Birch Markle. Things weren’t ever right with the

Markle boy. There was no real reason for the things he

done, but sometimes, well, evil’s like that.

Then

Yet another lost dog sign marked the animal clinic’s window. This

one stung. Mrs. Knightley had brought her beagle Jones in for a

heartworm test only last week. I’d given him one of Aunt Rue’s dog

biscuits, and Jones’s tail had wagged with glee. Now he was one more

missing face. The curled papers blanketing the glass rustled against

the April wind. Some had been there since January, when the dogs

began disappearing. Papa wouldn’t take them down.

“There’s gotta be hope, Ivy.”

Glass shattered in an exam room, and I slid out from behind

the counter. My sketch of Whimsy, my Morgan mare, would wait.

4

Heather swept up remains from a broken jar and cotton bal s. More

glass crunched under her red Converse high-tops.

She pushed a tendril of hair from her forehead. “Uncle Timothy

needs to buy some Plexiglas jars. I’d break a lot less.”

“Plexiglas is p-poison,” I replied.

Heather snorted. Papa’s diatribes on warfare against pesticides and

plastics were common. Most Rowan’s Glen residents long ago decid-

ed that if we couldn’t raise, craft, or repurpose it, then we wouldn’t

use it. Over time, the buildings converted from no electricity to solar

energy. Our clothing was handmade, came secondhand from kin or

the town thrift store if splurging.

Glen kind looked different from the rollers in the trailer park and

the townies. We were hillfolk, with our boys in trousers and sus-

penders and girls clad in long skirts. Once a Missouri Ozarks out-

post for Scottish travelers searching for permanency, Rowan’s Glen

kept life simple and the outside world at bay.

It was my home.

The forever horizon of fields was dotted with horse pastures and

goats. Comfort came in knowing your neighbors and them knowing

not only you, but generations of your kin. It was a good place, even

with the screams that sometimes came from the forest, the screams

that had been there my whole life and longer.

“Rook’s almost as bad as Uncle Timothy,” Heather remarked. “Last

week in ecology, he claimed pol uted water gives men tits.”

The mention of Rook Meriweather fevered my cheeks. “You’re t-

terrible.”

5

She drew a circle with her shoe in the broken glass, her smile

taunting. “Don’t say you ain’t enjoying the subject. And what a sub-

ject Rook makes! I’ve seen your sketchbook.”

“Shouldn’t you clean up your mess?” I tried to smooth the bristle

in my voice, but Heather only laughed.

“I’m kidding with you, Ivy. You know that, right?”

She took my hand and squeezed. Of course I knew.

The day had wound down, which meant stocking the delivery

of Mama’s homeopathic flea powder would wait. There wouldn’t be

enough time to take Whimsy on a trail ride. Since the dogs began go-

ing missing, wandering the fields after dusk was frowned upon. Even

before then, we had stayed away from the woods. There were stories.

I returned to the waiting room and glanced to the clock.

“What’s wrong?” Heather asked.

“The clock stopped.”

The clock’s hands had halted at 4:44. It was a wood box with a pen-

dulum, older than anyone in the Glen. Normal y, the metal rapped

the wood in a perpetual, hollow note. Now it was mute.

“Fix it tomorrow.” Heather picked a section of my hair to braid

with her slender fingers.

“I have to fix the clock now,” I said. “Bad luck.”

Heather tsked. “You’re too superstitious. Mamie got you good.”

A draft plucked my neck. “You remember how when Gramps

died, Mamie stopped all the clocks in the house? She stopped death

from coming for more of us.”

“Huh. So that’s why. I should’ve guessed Mamie’d tell you.”

Heather’s fingers wove my hair. Bits of metal she’d found while

6

wandering the fields — part of a spoon, a coil, a lost buckle, a green

glass circle from the bottom of a bottle etched with her birthday

of March 27 — were strung on a silver necklace and jingled as she

moved. She unclipped her chain, chose a nut from some long-van-

ished screw, and fixed it to accent my braid.

She caught me staring at the stopped clock. “Ivy, don’t. It only

needs windin’.”

“It’s a death omen,” I said.

“Go ahead. Try to be a little more morbid, real y.”

“It ain’t morbid. It’s how things are,” I insisted. “Mamie knows this

stuff. She said —”

“When did she say?” Heather dropped my hair and crossed her

arms.

“It was a long time ago, when I was little.”

That was the last time Mamie spoke, before she went into the at-

tic. To live in silence.

Heather restrung her necklace. “I miss her stories too. Even the