“The court of the Sisters Whitney has summoned you before us on charges of giving dirty looks to your neighbors, coveting your neighbor’s wife”—your mother—“and leading a generally unpleasant existence. How do you plead?”
The scarecrow says nothing. It twitches in the breeze.
“Then on behalf of the tribunal convened, we find you guilty and condemn you to burn at the stake.” Violet’s eyes flash white. “Executioner ready?”
You slide your hands into the dry brush and take a deep breath. A wisp of smoke rises almost instantly from the base of the post. The heat comes with greater ease each time you tap into that vein of power you discovered running through you last year.
The fire catches and you take a step back. As you concentrate, the flames march up the post toward the crucified scarecrow. You watch with guilty delight as the fire sinks its claws into the knotted corduroy knees and starts a slow crawl up the flannel.
The process is too slow for Violet; she steps in and rips open the flannel shirt, sending the buttons showering over the nearby grass. The fire ignites the straw within, and the slow burn transforms quickly into a blaze, no longer your careful creation but a savage and uncontrollable beast.
“We deliver you unto the all-consuming fires of hell,” Violet shouts over the blaze. The scarecrow’s once-proud face wilts and turns its attention to the ground as it passes into the great beyond. “May God Almighty have mercy on your soul.”
Then something happens that has never occurred during any of your previous executions: The fire has grown so hot that it has somehow devoured the middle of the scarecrow’s post. The post cracks in half loud enough to send birds soaring off from a nearby tree in an explosion of black wings. Your victim crashes headfirst to the ground, and the grass around him ignites, tinder for the burning.
“Violet!” you shriek. “Put it out!”
Violet reaches for the sky and bunches up her face.
“Hurry up, Violet!”
“I—I can’t,” she stutters. “It’s too dry! The rains won’t come! Can’t you control what you’ve made?”
You stagger back. The fire continues to creep out through the grass, an ever-widening bull’s-eye with the blazing effigy at its center. “Maybe if it were a candle flame on a wick,” you snap. “I can’t contain this!”
“Then it’s time to go,” Violet says quietly. She tugs at your dress.
You point to the old stone well on the other side of the blaze, and the metal bucket propped against it. “We can still douse it with well water before it hits the fields!” You start to skirt your way around the blaze.
Violet catches you by the elbow, her grip so fierce that you’re sure it will leave a handprint on your skin. “We both know that it’s too late.” She stares deep into your eyes the way only Violet can. “Think about it. This never happened in any of the other executions. Maybe we should take this as a sign that God wants to punish McGrath for what he’s done.”
For what he’s done.
Violet must be referring to your family tragedy last summer, but of course you have no proof that McGrath wronged your family. What you do have is suspicion. Memories. Dark possibilities. You picture the festival last year in the town center. You picture the hazy, distant but ill-intentioned sheen over McGrath’s eyes after all that whiskey.
Mama’s strange silence and insistence that you all leave.
Finding her crying in the barn later that night.
Finding her hanging in the barn a month later.
Violet’s grip on your arm retracts. Her hold on you does not.
You don’t look down, but you can feel the heat of the flames that are almost upon you. You nod at her. “Then let God’s will be done.”
The two of you scurry up the hill and past the imposing McGrath estate. It’s only when you’re beyond the back of the house that one of the curtains parts and you see Melinda’s sallow, sickly face watching you through the glass.
The dinner table is oddly silent tonight at the Whitney farm. Not that it’s been all that chatty since Mama exited this world with the creak of a rope. Grace sits silently in the high stool Papa built for her. Papa moves the corn around on his plate. Even Violet seems to have retracted into grim silence—Violet, who normally laughs in the face of the law.
You always knew that Papa was the one who loved you more. The adoption had been his idea, when after five years of marriage he and Mama had remained childless. As the only surviving children from each of their families, they’d all but accepted that the Whitney and Carlson family trees had reached a mutual end.
Then a lobsterman, a family friend, was out setting traps just off Bar Harbor when he heard the crying. As his small boat approached a buoy, he found a wooden washtub snagged in the seaweed . . . and, inside it, two children who were clearly not Maine natives. One was nearly a year old and remained strangely silent even as the men pulled her up onto the boat. But you couldn’t have been more than a few weeks old at the time, swaddled in an old stretch of canvas and wailing your little lungs out. The story goes that you had a mighty fever, that until they brought you below deck and out of the sun, your little body was burning up with a raging heat.
You wouldn’t be able to appreciate the irony until thirteen years later.
When the lobsterman brought the girls to the Whitney farm (he never went to the authorities), Papa didn’t consider how the color of your skin might change the way the neighbors treated the Whitneys. He didn’t care that you and Violet were both girls; the farm was small, easy enough for Papa to manage without any strapping young sons. He just wanted a legacy in this world beyond his toils in the field before he ended up in the family plot across the road.
Mama did eventually grow to love you, though not in the unconditional way that your father did. She grew to love the sixth sense you seemed to have when it came to baking, how you knew exactly when the chicken or the bread or, on those lucky nights, the casserole had cooked properly. She grew to love the way that Violet’s outlandish stories made everyone laugh, without realizing how that same skill would eventually allow Violet to blossom into a masterful liar.
Little Gracie was a different story, one that made even your buoy rescue sound like a typical adoption.
You were ten at the time. Papa always told you not to play hide-and-seek in the cornfields, but you played anyway. You had just found a gap in one of the cornfield lines and wiggled your way through, not bothering to think of what Mama would say about the dirt clumps on your dress.
You heard rustling through the stalks in front of you. Knowing that Violet would soon catch you, you decided to get the better of your older sister by scaring her first. So you plunged through the leaves and hurled through the last row of stalks with a battle cry, prepared to strike.
You nearly stepped on the baby. She crawled—no, slithered—soundlessly, naked, through the dirt, weaving between the stalks. Even as your foot came down next to her, she didn’t even look up at first to see what monster the foot belonged to.
But then her eyes tracked up and saw you, and she rolled onto her back and gurgled. She had the same clay skin as you and Violet, the same sharp eyes, and even the beginnings of the same ebony curls you would never be able to control on humid summer days.
Without knowing where she came from, or how she ended up in this field, you knew one thing for certain.
The girl your adoptive parents would eventually name Grace was, just like Violet, your blood sister. And she’d found her way from faraway shores to the bowels of Maine to reunite with you.
Now the three of you sit with Papa at the squeaky little table with just the light of the setting sun filtering through the open window. These days you’re the remainder of a strange and eclectic family that once felt whole but was left disjointed and sterile when you found Mama in the barn. It’s like the one woman who’d always felt like the odd one out had somehow been a linchpin to your family’s happiness.
“You’re awful quiet,” Papa says
in the thick Maine accent the three of you somehow failed to adopt when you learned English. “All three of ya.”
In the silence that follows, you and Violet exchange a look over the corn and potatoes. Grace gurgles. For a four-year-old, she’s always acting more like she’s two, and even though she does talk on occasion, you wonder whether she’s really all there.
“Just at the end of my wick from playing out in the fields,” Violet lies. She reaches for the butter. “I think I got a bit sunburned on my neck too.”
This at least gets Papa to chuckle. “My island girls—a darker shade than the Maine natives, but still not impervious to the sun.” His grin fades when he turns to you. He hasn’t smiled at you in a long time. Does it have something to do with the fact that you were the one who found Mama? Sometimes you even have to wonder if he secretly blames you. But you know that’s absurd. Papa has never looked on you with an ounce of resentment, even when you snapped his fishing rod in half.
“And what about you, darlin’?” He leans over the table. His hand finds yours, which is closed in a fist on the table, and he shakes it gingerly. “Did you sell that charming voice and quick wit of yours to the devil?”
You can’t help but smile. “No, sir.” You pat the top of his hand, and then pull yours away so you can reach for the carafe of milk in front of Gracie. “The only way I’d let the devil at my voice,” you say as you bring the carafe over your empty glass, “is if he pried it from my unwilling hands.”
The bullet hits the carafe. The glass shatters over the table before you can even register that the deafening bang from across the room was a gunshot. The milk splashes over your face, and Papa cries out when a sliver of glass pierces his cheek.
Horatio McGrath stands in the open doorway with a rifle snug against his breast. The bloodshot eye that gazes down the sights of his barrel twitches uncontrollably. When he smiles, his teeth burn red from the wine. If the man weren’t such an impeccable shot even when he’s drunk, the glass carafe could have very well been your head. You drop the broken bottle neck onto the table.
“Horatio!” Papa shouts. He stands up and kicks the chair out from behind him. “What the hell do you think you’re—”
McGrath flips the rifle from trigger to barrel, wheels back, and strikes Papa hard across the face with the stock. Papa hits the table on the way down. He grabs his head and moans on the floor, but he’s still conscious.
“None of y’all move,” McGrath says, returning the rifle to its perch against his shoulder.
Even Gracie stops fidgeting in her high chair. You’re too terrified to even wipe the milk from your face.
“Now, Phillip,” Horatio says out of the corner of his mouth. He always speaks that way, even when he isn’t chewing tobacco. “This community stood by you when you decided to adopt Satan’s offspring, not once, but twice. We sympathized with your fruitless efforts to yield some real salt-of-the-earth children. I even allowed my girls to play with yours in the hopes of teaching your girls the fineries of American so-ci-e-ty.”
Papa seizes the back of the chair and winces as he raises himself to a knee. “Save your sermons for mass,” he wheezes, “and tell me why you’ve barged into my house, endangered my daughters, and cuffed a man who never raised a hand to you.”
“Never raised a hand to me?” Horatio growls. “Maybe you haven’t; but the fire-lighting hounds of hell that you call daughters managed to burn through half my harvest.”
Papa immediately stops trying to get up and turns his gaze on you. He says nothing, but his eyes whisper, Is this true?
“Now justice has come to collect.” Horatio stumbles a little bit on a loose floorboard, but his aim stays true. “You know, Phillip boy, if you’d just given Clarisse the child she wanted, like a real man, none of this would have happened. . . . Shame I had to fill in for you.”
Your breath catches. Papa’s grip on the chair tightens so much that you can hear the wood splinter beneath his hand.
Horatio sneers. “You mean you didn’t even suspect?”
Papa draws himself up to his full height.
“When Clarisse sent herself back to her Maker in that barn,” McGrath says slowly, “she took one of mine with her.”
Papa screams and lunges for McGrath.
McGrath opens fire.
The impact folds Papa’s body in two and carries him across the room into the stove, where he shudders once and lies still. His unseeing eyes glare up at McGrath.
At once Gracie is wailing and Violet is screaming, and you want to join them, but the heat within is devouring your voice. Instead you dive for McGrath yourself.
He doesn’t have time to properly aim his rifle, but he shrugs you off hard with his shoulder, knocking you back into the kitchen table. It flips over along with you, sending corn and the extinguished lantern down onto the wooden floor.
The cold barrel presses into the side of your neck. “Any last words before I show you the same courtesy you showed to my scarecrow?”
“The same thing we told your scarecrow,” Violet says from behind him. “Burn in hell.”
McGrath hollers, and the rifle clatters out of his hands. You turn in time to see McGrath clutching his bloody thigh where Violet has plunged in the broken milk bottle. Before he can reach for the fallen rifle, you snatch the lantern. In your mind you picture a bonfire in a field. Instantly the wick inside the lantern ignites.
Then you smash the lantern against McGrath’s face.
He howls again as the glass and fire torch his cheek, and he tumbles to the ground.
Unfortunately, he lands right on top of the rifle, and to try to pry it out from underneath him is just asking to get shot. So you cast one last tear-filled look at Papa’s still form, slumped against the stove. Then you push Violet out the back door—it’s safer if you split up for now—and pull the squealing Gracie out of her stool. With one arm curled around her little body, you hurdle over McGrath’s moaning body and run out the front door onto the porch.
You start for the road, but you hear the kitchen door slam open behind you, so you change course for the shelter of the barn. A bullet hits the WHITNEY FARMS, EST. 1796 sign next to your head, doing to the Whitney name what it had just done to Papa.
Inside the high-roofed barn you drop Gracie and heave the massive door closed as two more rounds slug the wood next to the handle. Twilight streams through the holes.
McGrath’s leg may be wounded, but with Gracie slowing you down, there’s no way you can outrun him. You’ll have to hide and hold on until Violet comes back with help.
You hoist Gracie onto your back so that her arms wrap around your neck, and you climb up to the loft using the rickety ladder. Up top the two of you scamper over the hay until you’ve found a nook in the straw. The last dregs of daylight stream through the gaps in the wooden walls. You press Gracie, who has fallen silent now, flat against the floorboards, and you make a small hole in the hay in front of you so you can peer down at the barn floor.
It doesn’t take long. McGrath hauls open the century-old door, which squeals disagreeably on its track. His eyes take in the barn—the broken carriage in the far corner that hasn’t been hitched to a horse since before the Civil War, the collection of old hoes and shovels lining the walls, the ungainly tractor that Papa purchased secondhand and never found use for in the fields.
Then McGrath’s gaze slowly shifts to the loft. When he smiles, fresh blood dribbles from the gaping wound the lantern left on his face.
As you listen to his footsteps plod patiently across the barn floor, you tremble under the weight of the decision you have to make. If you try to take Gracie and flee, McGrath will catch and kill both of you.
But if you lead the monster away from her . . .
“Gracie,” you whisper as the first step of the ladder creaks. You press your face into her hair, letting your tears wet her beautiful dark curls. “I will come back for you.” A second creak. “And I love you very much.”
You spring from al
l fours out of the hay and off the edge of the loft. McGrath stops climbing when he sees you. He lets loose a round with his rifle hand, but the bullet goes wild and pierces the roof.
You hit the floor behind the tractor, and now this steel beast is the only thing that separates you, the prey, from the predator. You press your back up against the chassis and risk a peek around the tractor’s back wheel.
A shot hammers into the tire, which lets out its air with a defeated poof. A second round grazes the fuel tank. Gas begins to pour out onto the floor.
You hear jingling. McGrath must be reloading from his pocket, and you know this is your moment. You give one look back at the loft. Gracie is peering out at you, with her lip quivering and her face framed by the straw. You try your best to smile at her.
Then you swallow the vomit and fear and the memory of your dead father and kick off across the barn. The back door is so close, swinging loosely on its hinges, and you just have to make it outside before McGrath pushes another round into the chamber. . . .
Then the explosion.
The flames hit you from behind in a wall and propel you off your feet. You crash through the flapping door. Even with your back to the explosion, your vision glows white.
Next thing you know, you’re outside on the grass, rolling in the dirt to try to put out the fire on your dress, which you can’t extinguish with your mind because there’s a dreadful ringing in your ears. Wooden debris rains down around you.
When you finally flip onto your back, you see the ruins where the barn used to be. Fire streams up the one remaining wall like it’s coated in kerosene. The top half of the barn, roof and loft included, has blown completely off. McGrath’s bullet must have hit the tractor’s gas tank or the leaking fuel—nothing else could have caused this sort of devastation.
There is a hand on your arm, pulling you back. “No,” you shout at Violet, though your words sound strangely muffled in your own ears, as if you’re screaming them through a pillow. “Gracie’s in there! Let me go!”