Sawkill Girls

by Claire Legrand

  Two paramedics hustled past and gave the weeping, stricken-faced Marion some kind of shot. She relaxed immediately, popped-out veins smoothing themselves back into her neck.

  Val saw a shell-shocked woman struggling to get through the onlookers. Recognizing that pale skin and dark hair, Val thought, Ah, and strode forward.

  “Move aside,” she commanded. Gently, she took the woman’s arm. “Are you Marion’s mother?”

  “Yes,” whispered the woman. No color in her cheeks or lips. Wide eyes trained on her sedated daughter. “I’m . . . I’m Pam.”

  “She’ll be all right,” said Val. “We’ve got wonderful doctors on Sawkill, the very best. They’ll help her.” Val squeezed the woman’s hand. Softly now, Val. Kindly. “Please don’t be afraid.”

  And as Val passed Mrs. Althouse over to Charlotte, Charlotte’s eyes met Val’s.

  Thank you, said Charlotte’s grateful smile.

  Val returned the smile—gentle, endlessly compassionate—and even with her sister unconscious on the ground and her mother stunned and frightened, Charlotte seemed to relax a little.

  Val’s black heart rolled over on its back and wriggled, because everything was happening as it should.

  Goddamn. She was good at this.

  She was good at being queen.

  Zoey

  The Pink Paper

  Zoey only dreamed in black-and-white.

  This dream was no different, except instead of aliens and tornadoes, dinosaurs and flying up, up, just pushing off with her feet and flying to a desert land with no water anywhere in sight, she dreamed about running horses, each of them carrying a girl on its back.

  Which one to choose?

  Which one to save?

  She thought about it, her dreaming mind choked with indecision, and then followed the one on the left, because that dark hair and white skin reminded her of Thora.

  Wait, was Zoey on a horse herself?

  Or was she running? Flying?

  What did it matter? She reached the horse, finally, and yanked Thora free. When the world stopped spinning, she looked down at the girl in her arms.

  Val Mortimer’s face stared up at her from a mess of tangled dark hair. Wrong: Val Mortimer’s hair was molten gold. But it was indeed Val’s face, laughing so hard her face looked ready to crack open.

  There—a fissure in her cheek. Zoey plunged her thumb into it.

  The fissure widened, and blackness poured out. A thick tar sea.

  The other horses ran on, girls clinging to their backs, until the horizon swallowed them.

  Zoey woke up with her heart pounding in her ears, safely tucked beneath the quilt her dad had made her two years ago, as a Welcome to Sawkill present.

  The quilt had this marvelous quality of absorbing all the best smells of their house—her father’s cigars, the cilantro and rosemary and basil of their indoor herb garden, the chemical lavender scent of their laundry detergent, last night’s arrabiata pasta.

  It was a crooked quilt, and more than a little ugly. When her father had presented it to her, wrapped up in brown paper and tied with twine, she’d opened it and laughed. A honking guffaw. The laugh she’d inherited from him.

  Because Zoey was more than a little screwed up, and part of the whole teaching-herself-not-to-cry thing was resorting to the default of inappropriate laughter in moments when she didn’t know what to do with her emotions. Laughter was safe, and it scared people a little, that she laughed when lovers died in movies. When she crashed her mountain bike the first day she’d ridden it, she’d lain there in the center of Sawkill’s main drag with torn bloody knees, cackling at the sky.

  But Zoey knew her father had made this quilt for her because it was the sort of thing her mother would never do—take the time to learn a new thing, simply so she could do something nice for her daughter. So she could make her feel more loved, and maybe a little steadier.

  It was why Zoey had moved in with him when he’d asked, instead of moving from Baltimore to San Francisco with her mother.

  Zoey hadn’t yet decided if she regretted that decision. Moving to Sawkill had brought her Thora, sure. But the loss of Thora had carved out a piece of Zoey’s heart, and she didn’t think she’d ever be able to replace it, and she was fairly certain she didn’t want to.

  Zoey grabbed her phone and sent a text:

  You awake?

  A few seconds. Then:

  Barely. What’s going on?

  Zoey snuggled deeper under her quilt. Grayson Tighe was the only trustworthy male on the island, besides her father.

  Can I say, once again, how thankful I am that you actually spell shit out in your texts?

  And use proper punctuation?

  It’s pretty hot, ngl.

  Looks like you forgot some vowels there.

  That’s how the youths talk, yo.

  So I’ve heard.

  Zoey felt the tension drain from her body. God bless Grayson. She headed downstairs for a glass of water. Her throat felt like she’d been the one screaming.

  So did you hear about the new girl?

  Marion Althouse.

  Yeah.

  I heard she had some kind of fit.

  It was fucked up.

  Use your words, Word Girl.

  Fucked. Up. Sorry, love. Sometimes you’ve just gotta say it.

  She could practically hear Grayson’s sigh through his text.

  So you were there, right?

  Right.

  Zoey?

  She turned on the tap, filled up her favorite cup—a chipped plastic relic that was as bright an orange as her newly dyed curls.

  Yeah.

  It’s 3:00 a.m. You know that, right?

  Is it really? Wait, what are these numbers on my phone?

  Zoey.

  What do they mean??

  Zoey.

  Is it a code?? WHAT IS THIS? WHERE AM I? WHAT YEAR IS IT?????

  ZOEY.

  At your service.

  So what really happened with Marion?

  Zoey gulped down her glass of water. She stood by the sink, watching the lighthouse beacon circle slow and steady.

  I couldn’t sleep, she replied at last. Maybe Grayson had fallen asleep by now.

  Marion freaked me out.

  How?

  She was screaming like . . . I don’t know. It was wrong.

  Wrong like what?

  Wrong like normal people don’t scream like that. She was practically convulsing.

  Not how people usually act after being thrown from a horse.

  Not so much.

  Maybe she has health problems. The fall could have triggered something.

  Maybe.

  Zoey dug the heels of her palms into her eyes, so hard it hurt.

  On the counter, her phone exploded:

  We can dance if we want to

  We can leave your friends behind

  She answered before it could wake up her father. “Grayson, what the hell?”

  “You weren’t answering my texts,” came his voice, as untroubled and matter-of-fact as always. A hint of an old New England accent clung to his words. She’d given him shit about it when she first met him; now that she knew he wasn’t an unbearable ass, she found it charming. “I didn’t want to go to sleep without making sure you’re okay.”

  “You beautiful sap.”

  Grayson let out a little sigh. A happy one, Zoey thought, and then came the familiar, traitorous litany: Maybe I could have sex again, for Grayson’s sake.

  Maybe it was a mistake to break up with him.

  Maybe I would stop dreaming about Thora, if Grayson was mine, just like before.

  “Please tell me you don’t still have ‘Safety Dance’ as your ringtone,” he said.

  “‘I’m sorry, Dave,’” Zoey intoned. “‘I’m afraid I can’t do that.’”

  “Are you doing the creepy HAL head tilt?”

  “Of course.”

  “Even though he was a computer console and not an and
roid, and therefore couldn’t actually do the robot-head-tilt thing?”

  “Missed opportunity. Kubrick should have hired me.”

  “You weren’t alive back then.”

  “Says you.” Zoey raised herself up onto her toes, lowered herself into a plié. “I’m a resurrected feline. I’m an old soul. I contain multitudes.” She returned to a relevé position, brought up her left arm over her head, stretched her fingers like a dancer. “In my next life I’m going to be a ballerina. Like a hard-core ballerina. Sparkly tutus but also knife-throwing. Daggerina. And I’m gonna have so much money I’ll buy Sawkill and kick off all the rich assholes and run wild with the horses and open a drive-in movie theater.”

  “For who? You and the horses?”

  “The concession stand will serve popcorn hay bales.”

  Grayson chuckled, a warm, rich sound that kept Zoey happily twirling.

  Then, he said quietly, “Val has a party next Friday.”

  Zoey’s heels plunked back onto the ground. “Way to kill a girl’s buzz.”

  “Hey, now. You requested I keep you updated with the social calendar.”

  “I already knew about this one.”

  “How?” Grayson sounded confused.

  Understandable. No one even remotely associated with Val talked to Zoey except for him, so. There was that.

  “Got an invite in the mail, a whole eleven days in advance. What do you think? I think she really wants me to come. I think she wanted to give me enough advance notice so I could keep that day open for the party of the season.”

  Up in her room, the crumpled pink invitation and crisp white envelope smelling of Val’s gardenia perfume sat in the trash can.

  “Shit.” Grayson hardly ever cursed. There was a clean, empty silence. “Zoey, please don’t.”

  “You can’t control me, Grayson.”

  “I’m not trying to control you, and I don’t want to control you. I also don’t want you to get hurt.”

  Once, Zoey had decided caution was for pansies and shown up to a Val Mortimer party uninvited. She’d barely made it out of there with her nose unbroken. Only Grayson’s interference had saved her from an ass-kicking. Not from Val; Val would risk neither her sparkling reputation nor the integrity of her manicure.

  That was what other people were for. Minions. Val had dozens of them.

  And wouldn’t it be easy, whispered a Thora-shaped voice in Zoey’s mind, to do away with someone, if you had an army of minions at your disposal?

  It was a thought Zoey couldn’t shake, even though, really, it made no sense. At first Zoey had assumed Val had stolen Thora away from her just to prove to Zoey that she could. Because Val was Sawkill royalty and Zoey didn’t fit the Sawkill mold, didn’t care to, and thought Sawkill social politics were bullshit. The nerve of that seemed to stick in Val’s craw like a trapped popcorn shell between her teeth.

  And what better way for Val to give Zoey the finger than by stealing away her best friend?

  But as the months crept by, it became clear to Zoey that Val adored Thora, without pretense or pretend.

  So it didn’t make sense that Val would have murdered her.

  And yet, Zoey’s mind buzzed around the idea like an angry bee. Mostly because it was a nice fantasy, to imagine your nemesis doing something so heinous. All the more reason to hate your guts, my dear.

  But also . . . there were the other girls.

  “Val was all up in Charlotte Althouse’s personal space yesterday,” said Zoey, pacing.

  “Wait, who?”

  “Marion Althouse’s sister. Pretty girl.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “You wouldn’t kick her out of bed, is what I’m saying. If you were into having people in your bed.”

  “I don’t see what this has to do with—”

  “She seemed nice, and I don’t want Val getting her claws in her, okay? Like . . .”

  Zoey, the noncrier, was not immune to throat lumps. She swallowed hard, fighting to reclaim her words as she made her way back upstairs.

  Grayson’s voice was gentle. “Like Thora?”

  Once in her room, Zoey lifted up her mattress, withdrew the bulletin board hidden on top of the box spring. She propped it up against the wall, sat cross-legged in front of it, stared at the canvas of newspaper clippings, computer printouts, and the smiling gazes of twenty-three girls.

  Evelyn Sinclair. Fiona Rochester. Avani Mishra. Grace Kang. Natalie Breckenridge.

  Thora Keller.

  Decades of dead girls. Poor girls and rich girls. Black and brown and white girls.

  All of them Sawkill girls.

  Not all of them had been close friends of the Mortimer family—but enough had, making Zoey wonder, and theorize, and drive Grayson nearly out of his mind with her rants.

  “Yeah,” Zoey replied. “Like Thora. Plus, she sent me a freaking Barbie-pink invitation. So. Challenge accepted.”

  A beat of silence. “Tell me again,” said Grayson, “what is it you think Val’s family did?”

  Zoey bristled at the reasonableness of his voice. “Don’t patronize me.”

  “Zo, really, I’m just trying to understand—”

  “I don’t know what they did!” Zoey threw up her hands. “And I don’t know why they did it, but they did . . . something.”

  Grayson sighed softly. “I see.”

  “How many girls have disappeared from Sawkill over the years, Grayson?”

  “A lot.”

  “And all of them were . . . ?”

  “Zoey, everyone on Sawkill is friends with the Mortimers. That doesn’t mean—”

  “I’m not. You’re not.”

  “Well, my mother actually did have tea with Val’s mother last week—”

  “Shut up, Grayson,” Zoey said, but there was no heat behind it. She slumped onto her bed, flung her arm across her forehead.

  “All right,” he said agreeably. A beat of silence, followed by another, and a third.

  “Thora was my friend.” Zoey’s eyes burned with exhausted tears she refused to let fall. “She was our friend, Grayson. Then, out of the blue, Val decided to take her from us, and three months later, she was dead.”

  Grayson said nothing. He’d heard it all before.

  Zoey pushed herself off the bed and stabbed a thumbtack into place on her bulletin board—not the hidden one, but the one that hung in plain view over her desk. Val’s invitation now fluttered beside magazine clippings of actors and actresses so beautiful it pained Zoey to look at them. Poetry scribbled on notebook paper. Polaroid photos—of her father, of herself and Grayson and Thora exploring the beach below the Black Cliffs, of a smiling white woman with a five-year-old Zoey in her arms.

  “Don’t worry, Grayson,” Zoey said. “I’ll forget about Thora, and all the other girls, too. Just like everyone else on this shithole rock.”

  Then she hung up.

  Marion

  The Doctor

  “Marion? I need you to open your eyes for me.”

  But Marion couldn’t open her eyes. Part of her skull felt caved in, and if she opened her eyes, she’d have to face the horror of it.

  Instead, she forced her fingers to creep up the pillow until they found first her hair, which someone had combed neat and straight, and then her scalp.

  She whimpered.

  She was going to find a whole gaping section of her skull missing, she just knew it. She was going to smooth the pads of her fingers along the side-part in her hair and feel a whole jagged hot wet section gone, carved out.

  “Marion?” A patient voice kept repeating her name. “Marion, please open your eyes.”

  It took her a good two minutes to make the full inspection. Rubbing her head again and again. Preparing for the absolute worst, for brain bits and blood-soaked hair.

  But somehow everything was intact. How was that possible? She distinctly remembered something hard slamming into her head. A sensation of flying, then falling, then the slamming, and then a soft nothingne
ss. Except it hadn’t entirely been nothingness, because there had also been this fear so visceral it sounded like an angry wasp nest breaking open in her head, and there had been a cry—

  A cry. Yes, there had been that, too. A cry, a shriek. A shrill grinding noise, like her bones rubbing against one another. The scream of bones, both quiet and unbearably loud.

  “Mom?” She forced out the word between cracked lips, struggling to order her brain. “Hello?”

  Then, urging her eyelids open, Marion blinked at a dim, soft world.

  “Can you follow this light for me?” asked the patient voice.

  The world brightened. Marion followed the light source—back and forth, back and forth.

  “Excellent.” A soft rustling movement. “Can you tell me your name?”

  “Marion Althouse.”

  “Wonderful. What day is it? Will you tell me the date, please?”

  “June nineteenth. Thursday. I think?”

  “Outstanding. You’re going to be all right, Marion. The worst of it has passed.”

  “Worst of what?”

  “You had an accident. A concussion. Do you remember?”

  An image of a slender gray bird flitted through Marion’s mind. What did it mean?

  “Nightingale.” She said the word, and suddenly things became clearer, like she was sliding up out of water into clean, sweet air.

  She sat up. She was in a bed, pillows piled at her back. Across the room, fluttering white curtains flanked a wide window. And beside her bed sat a white man in a button-down shirt and tie underneath a sweater pale as sand.

  He stared at Marion, unblinking, a small smile frozen on his lips.

  “Nightingale threw me.” Marion coughed. Her limbs were stiff, her mouth sour with sleep. “He took off from the market and we went down this road. There were cliffs on one side. There were trees, and he threw me. I don’t know what happened then.”

  The memories ran at her face like a movie on fast-forward, and she couldn’t look away from them.

  “Is he okay?” she croaked. “The horse, I mean.”

  “Nightingale’s fine,” the man reassured her. “Something spooked him, but he’s back home now. Sometimes animals are unpredictable.” He tilted his head to the side. “Can you tell me what happened before Nightingale started running? Did anything strange happen?”