The May Queen Murders (4 page)

Papa bent over, and something moist popped when he poked

around the fresh kil . “Those teeth are canine, and I’m sure it’s Bart. I

did a dental cleaning two months back. See where those incisors are

missing? He’d broken them chewing on his crate.”

Papa sounded clinical, but that emotionless tone carried him

through his notes and kept him working on the clinic’s rough days.

On those nights, he came home, and Mama opened a bottle of blue-

berry wine, set out a glass by the fireplace, and murmured to us to

keep our distance — not because he had a bad temper. He simply

needed time alone.

“What’d you say did this?” Sheriff wondered, scribbling on a note-

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pad. “A bear? Remember when Hol y Fitzpatrick got mauled by the

bobcat thirty years back? My old man said the clawmarks on her —”

“This wasn’t some bobcat!” Papa rose to his feet. “And not a bear

or coyote, either.”

“Then what did it?”

“What predator is the worst?”

Sheriff didn’t have to answer. I already knew. The worst predators

of all were humans.

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Chapter Two

We all know Birch put his mama in the grave early, but

most folks ain’t sure how, whether his hollering in Sunday

church finally made her do the unthinkable to herself, or

maybe it was the rusty knife he’d begun carrying around

with him.

The macabre news of Bartholomew’s demise was a whisper, passing

from one farmhouse to the next.

You hear how Bart was ripped apart, didn’t even look like a dog no

more . . .

Sounds like Birch Markle. Wonder if old Birch has come back . . .

A panicked busyness settled across Rowan’s Glen. Since I was lit-

tle, Birch Markle had been the reason children were told to avoid the

tree line, why adults looked around with watchful eyes when outside

at night. Though the last sighting of him in the woods was years ago,

his screams were still heard now and then, during the hush of night.

Mamie once said it was so bad that for a while, after he killed a girl

called Terra MacAvoy, no one was allowed out after sunset.

What he did was horrible enough to change the way outsiders

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treated us. The Glen used to be open to anyone. Outsiders paid by

the pound for our fresh crops, eggs, and milk. They came to us to

have chickens butchered and deplucked.

Then they stopped coming.

Years dimmed Birch’s memory, but stories remained. Given the

cries from the forest, the story felt truer now than before. We lost the

occasional farm dog to the highway, but if Bart was any indication

of the fates of the ones papering the clinic’s window, something far

worse was going on.

With fear came caution. Farmers locked their livestock in barns

instead of allowing cattle to roam for hours of endless grazing; the

gates and fences were now strewn with copper warning bel s. The

silence across the Glen was too silent, a breath drawn and waiting.

During the day, we buried the lingering wrongness by going about

our business. Goods were taken to the farmer’s market, where town-

ies picked over our hand-stitched quilts, wooden toys, and crisp veg-

etables. They bought our items, but we didn’t mix much beyond that.

We attended school as if nothing was amiss behind the Glen’s bor-

ders. Heather and I had a couple of classes together at Salem Pla-

teau High School. The Rowan’s Glen contingent comprised a small

cluster of students amid townies and rollers. When I was younger,

our church in the Glen had held classes in the basement, but some

uproar about it not being official closed our vil age school and the

county opened their doors to us — never their minds, though. We

were outcasts.

Shutting my locker, I nodded at August Donaghy, or rather his

fuzzy mound of blond hair. He was the only sophomore bearing a

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full beard, which paired with his burly frame, gave him all the tatters

of a well-loved teddy bear. Violet Crenshaw stood with him, a ban-

danna covering the crown of her ice-white hair.

“They’re talking about us,” she said and slouched against the lock-

er beside mine.

That wasn’t a surprise. “They” often talked about us. “They”

pulled our long hair or stepped on our skirt hems to trip us.

“It’ll die down again,” I reminded her.

Violet looked pointedly at August, who balled his hands into fists.

His parents peddled tie-dye shirts at the market. The vegetable dyes

left his fingertips discolored, so kids teased that he was diseased and

his fingers would fall off.

“Tell her what happened,” Violet said.

August glanced around. “Some rollers heard about Bart. Said we

was practicing animal sacrifice down in the Glen. Heather told them

to shut up, but they turned on her.”

Away from the security of the Glen, things were different. We’d

heard every insult thrown at us: that we were inbred, hippies, or

backwoods hil billies. But if those names got too loud and persisted,

then trouble might come. We couldn’t have that.

“Is Heather okay?” I asked.

“The name-calling got bad, Ivy,” Violet replied. “At least she had

the sense to bail before it got worse.”

Violet’s lips pressed tight. As if by habit, she rubbed her left cheek

— the side of her sister Dahlia’s face had been ruined after she made

the mistake of standing up to the rollers. I reached for Violet’s free

hand, but she pulled back.

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“Heather’ll be okay,” I said, more to myself than my friends. “She

always is.”

“Rook went after her,” August added. “We thought maybe they

grabbed you and headed back to the Glen.”

My breath hitched. Rook went after Heather, and no one had seen

them since? Anytime Heather got flak from outsiders, she came to

me. I listened. We went everywhere together. If she’d left, why hadn’t

she taken me along?

A pain twinged in my chest when I thought of Heather and Rook

without me. I didn’t have a claim on him. Neither did she, but she

saw my sketchbook. She left comments in the margin about the thin

scar on his upper lip and the cowlick he tried but failed to straighten

above his widow’s peak. She knew what those sketches meant.

“He’s p-probably making sure she’s okay,” I muttered. “I’d know if

she wasn’t okay.”

“Keep telling yourself that.” August walked backwards down the

hal way. He side-eyed the rollers who chatted with a townie, chuck-

ling at us. “And watch your back.”

Violet hugged herself. “Don’t let yourself be alone, Ivy. I’d stay, but

I gotta get to class.”

I didn’t know what to say. Normal y, I wasn’t alone.

With Violet and August gone, I let myself into the stairwel , where

the steel door thudded shut. I pressed my back to it, scanning from

the base of the stairs to the second story. No windows for sunshine, a

red glow radiated from the exit signs. The lone halogen light flick-

ered before dropping the stairs into half-dark.

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No one from the Glen went off alone to school. Most of us even

walked to class in pairs. The trust that we’d make it up and down the

stairs, back and forth through the hal ways undamaged was a farce.

Threats and taunts were just that until they weren’t. Dahlia Cren-

shaw needed a scarf to cover her scars. Those boys were arrested,

but Dahlia never came back to school. She rarely left her home at

al .

I climbed several steps. Without any ventilation, the stairway was

a hot box. Sweat beaded on my forehead, yet cold walked down my

spine.

As if someone came up behind me.

I felt fingers stretching to touch me, coming closer. Praying I

wouldn’t turn around.

I pivoted to face the door at the bottom of the stairs. The echoes

were louder here and the wal s tighter; a claustrophobic panic froze

me.

From below, the door banged. It was a boy wearing a flannel shirt

and jeans with a hole in the knee, his jaw-length hair faded into

once-bleached blond. He was a roller, but that was about as much as

I knew. That and he spent English class texting on his phone.

I kept my eyes on the banister while waiting for him to pass, but

he stopped beside me, his shadow creeping over my body. He was

tal , all legs and arms like the rope of a tire swing.

“You’re from Rowan’s Glen?” he asked.

He was talking to
me?

“You know, the cult outside of town?”

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My eyebrow quirked. A cult. That was one of the nicer things the

Glen was called.

He snorted. “You friends with that Heather chick? The redhead?”

My muscles tensed. Who was this boy, and what did he want with

Heather? How did he know her? If he’d made her run out of class, so

help me God . . . I cringed because, real y, I’d do nothing. I paused on

the wolf-blue of his irises, then his full lips that’d be pretty on a girl

but were strange on him. An overbearing cigarette odor choked me.

His sneaker’s toe pushed mine. “You deaf? Or are you ignorin’ me

’cause I ain’t one of you?”

“I-I just th-think you’re crass.”

His mouth arced in a smirk.

“What do you want with Heather?”

“So you
do
know her.” He inched closer yet, barricading me

against the railing with his arms. My shoulders clenched. Someone

else should’ve come through the door at the bottom of the staircase

by now.

I tried to push out from beneath him. “I gotta get to class.”

He didn’t budge.

“Tell Heather I need her.”

“She won’t know who you are.” I jutted out my chin, but all the bad

things that could happen while trapped in a staircase niggled at my

mind.

He snickered. “Oh, she’ll know.”

I coiled my fingers around my sketchbook. The stairway door

squealed, and boots tromped up the steps.
Oh, God, another roll-

er.
My gut twisted. The herb salves hadn’t stopped Dahlia’s wounds

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from infecting. I knew what was said, how the rollers and townies

claimed she’d brought on the attack.

“My name is Milo Entwhistle,” the roller said in my ear. “And you

are . . . ?”

“The name’s Go to Hel .”

My breath released as Rook shoved the roller’s hands off the rail.

But I’d thought he’d left school. He was still here, which meant —

where was Heather? Was she all right?

Milo climbed a step and shook away from Rook’s hold. I placed

the last name, sort of. A girl a couple of years older than Heather and

me. She left in the middle of her senior year. He looked like her.

“Jesus, we were talking,” Milo said.

Rook’s voice was a sharp bite. “Why? So you can laugh later? Your

kind says we sacrificed the dog since virgins aren’t the devil’s kink.”

“You were there, man. I didn’t say that.”

I peered back to see Rook’s jaw set hard and his eyes narrow be-

hind his glasses. “You laughed. Go jack off somewhere else and leave

her alone.”

Milo stepped aside. “You’ve got some serious anger management

issues.”

“Go!”

Rook pointed to the top of the stairs. Milo trudged up the remain-

ing steps before he disappeared through the doorway. Like a plug

pulled on a drain, the tension spilled from me.

“Heather,” I blurted out. “Where is she?”

She was all that was on my mind. Why she’d left. Where she’d

gone. Why Milo wanted her.

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“Ivy?”

The way Rook said my name, careful as if it were some half-bro-

ken creature cupped in his hands, brought me back to focus.

“I’m okay,” I said.

Rook eased my sketchbook from my arm and rested his hand on

the small of my back. His hand was warm through my shirt, my body

warmer still from my speeding heart. “I get worried about you.”

“August said you left with Heather.”

We ascended the staircase, Rook stopping me a few steps from the

landing. “She wanted to leave, but I convinced her to take a breather

in the library. I ain’t goin’ back to the Glen without you.”

He
wouldn’t go without
me.
I looked at his boots. “It’s ’cause of the

animals, right?”

“It’ll be safer if someone goes along with you, least till things get