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  Books. Change. Lives.

  Copyright © 2023 by Quinn Connor

  Cover and internal design © 2023 by Sourcebooks

  Cover design by Erin Fitzsimmons

  Cover image © Magdalena Wasiczek/Trevillion Images

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.

  Published by Sourcebooks Landmark, an imprint of Sourcebooks

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  sourcebooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Connor, Quinn, author.

  Title: Cicadas sing of summer graves / Quinn Connor.

  Description: Naperville, Illinois : Sourcebooks Landmark, [2023]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2022061855 (print) | LCCN 2022061856 (ebook) | (trade paperback) | (epub)

  Subjects: LCGFT: Gothic fiction. | Novels.

  Classification: LCC PS3603.O5483 C53 2023 (print) | LCC PS3603.O5483 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6--dc23/eng/20230104

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022061855

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022061856

  CONTENTS

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Epilogue

  Reading Group Guide

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  Back Cover

  To my dad: the man, the mystery, the only one of your kind. Thank you for a lifetime of little talks.

  —A.

  For Rob Barrow, my daddy, who taught me to dream boldly.

  —R.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Dear friend,

  Alex and Robyn both spent happy family summers on man-made lakes in Texas and Arkansas. But there were always ghost stories. They are in the land whether or not we know them. Treading in warm, sunscreen-scented water, Robyn would suddenly drift into a cold spot and wonder if a spectral engine wandered on a rusting train track two hundred feet below. It was her childhood shiver that led to this novel.

  The town of Prosper was inspired by Buckville, Arkansas, which was flooded in the 1950s by the Blakely Mountain Dam and is now beneath Lake Ouachita. The upper Ouachita valley is a part of the homelands of the Indigenous Caddo Nation, which has been systematically displaced by settlers for hundreds of years. The dam resulted in the mass dislocation of Garland County residents, mainly struggling white farmers but also many who were Black and Native American, from their homes. We wanted to wrestle with submerged histories, memory lost and found, and the impact of “progress” on communities and land.

  Through this novel, we seek to honor and sensitively engage with these complicated histories so deeply entrenched in the places we come from. During our research for this novel, we contacted both local Black history bearers in Hot Springs and the leading historian of Garland County. But Buckville under Lake Ouachita is only one story. It is essential to remember that, all over the country, “development-induced displacements” disproportionately targeted and harmed Black and Indigenous communities.

  Indigenous and Black historians and activists continue to ensure their stories are remembered. Oscarville, Georgia, was the home of a thriving Black community until a white mob drove them out and eventually flooded their land to create Lake Lanier. Almost 80 percent of the Fort Berthold Reservation residents—more than three hundred Hidatsa, Mandan, and Arikara families—were forcibly displaced when a dam was built to form Lake Sakakawea in North Dakota. In 1948, when the dikes holding Smith Lake back from Vanport, Oregon—a 40 percent Black town—threatened to fail, officials evacuated six hundred horses from a nearby racetrack but assured forty thousand people that they were safe. When the dike broke the next day, Vanport was washed away, displacing more than 18,500 residents, 6,300 of whom were Black. The death toll is unknown.

  Too often, the dispossessed were not duly compensated for what they were forced to leave behind. With deepest respect, we acknowledge these wrongs. This book is set in a fraught land and addresses violence, complex intergenerational pain, and particularly class-based trauma. Please take care when reading.

  With our love,

  QC

  CHAPTER ONE

  Every May, Cassie locked up the old double-wide for the season and instead slept in her RV with the windows open, listening for the busy summer hum of honeybees. Their lullaby was not the only gift that came with the heat: there was also the smell of rain and blue moon hailstorms on the wind, black-eyed Susans spooling over her kitchen sink. Sometimes she dreamed about them carpeting her bed, the Agatha Christies on her built-in shelves, the ’80s green plastic breakfast booth, the flowered curtains, the shower.

  On especially hot nights like tonight, when the air was bathtub steam, she dreamed beautyberries, just like the ones on Grandad’s old china, bloomed purple over the bed and Solomon’s seal gathered in the shade under the unused driver’s seat. She dreamed azaleas settled on her pillow and grew down to the floor until everything was soft, living green.

  The RV—a big, beige crouched cat—hadn’t been moved in years; weeds poked out between the tires and tickled the exhaust pipe on the front lawn of Cassie’s childhood home.

  The double-wide, the family home, was all right. But if she stayed there too long, Cassie felt herself aging backward. She’d become a child again in her childhood bedroom and hear Grandad humming down the hall. She’d forget how to read and wait for Mom to appear in her nicotine clouds, hair crimped and bleached with lemon juice because Mom never quite left the ’80s. Cassie girl, what are you doing, staring like that? she’d say. Are you dumb? Go swim in the lake. Go, be a kid. Shoo.

  So most nights, Cassie chose to sleep in the RV and listen to summer. Summer meant the hives would wake up. After so long spent cultivating her ten small hives, she’d learned honey vintages could be as variable as wine. It was the second day of June after a wild, rainy spring, and the taste of the latest batch was as rich as blood oranges, the usual gold laced through with burgundy.

  Summer had kicked off with a helter-skelter storm that washed treasure onto the shore of Lake Prosper. Cassie hadn’t gone to the shore at all but had lain out, freckling on the hot RV roof, the commotion bouncing off the water to her. For an entire Saturday, the fishermen pulled up nothing but reed-tangled necklaces, soggy husks that had once been books, glass bottles. Before handing over their finder’s fees, she’d asked anyone who found anything—locals were used to her quirks—to lay the wet things out in the sun outside her antique shop, guarded by the statuary: a one-winged lion and a flock of metal lawn flamingos. The treasure had dried for two full days before she took it into her shop to be looked after.

  Cassie turned on the electric kettle, one of the few birthday gifts Mom had ever gotten right. This evening, hot tea was in order. When she turned back around, the cutlery drawer had opened itself. Odd. She plucked one of the spoons and nudged it closed with her hip. The kettle made its angry snake hiss. Behind her, the bed sighed. Cassie paused. Nothing but readjustment. Air, settling where her body had been.

  She took her tea out under the vine-laden eaves. Her little plot of land was peaceful, the trees cut back in a rough rectangle to let the sun shine down, and there were only two breaks in the mossy green walls: the gravel road up to the highway and the dirt path down to the lake. She let knee-high weeds have that one, let them bleed over the beaten path. If the Grand Destiny—the resort owned by Valerie and her son, Mitch—weren’t down that way, Cassie would have stitched it up with saplings until it was grown over and she couldn’t see the shallow prism of water anymore.

  It was now after Memorial Day. Minivans were rolling lakeside, k
ids tumbling out wearing their bathing suits under their clothes, unwilling to sit still for sunscreen. The cicadas had known it first. They sang their June hymns; the weather was changing, and people were coming back to the shores of Lake Prosper.

  Soon the air, which had been steadily heating, would burst, as if the whole of the South sat on a massive hot plate. At the turn of June, heat raged up from the ground, like it wasn’t the sun’s doing at all but the work of shifting tectonics and magma currents under a thin crust. Cassie wiggled her toes in the grass to feel that heat as she picked her way through the hives to the double-wide.

  Soon as well, Mom would arrive to drop Bolt off for a summer at the lake with Cassie. Bolt never quite felt like her younger brother; they were separated by ten whole years in age, which might as well have been an ocean. He wouldn’t even be staying if Mom’s rich best friend, Gladys, hadn’t invited her on a post-divorce girls’ cruise down South America, which promised to be a two-month affair. In preparation, Cassie had almost entirely cleaned out Bolt’s old room in the double-wide; only a few knickknacks remained, along with some of Grandad’s softest sweaters and a few pieces of furniture she thought she might refurbish and sell in the antique shop someday, though someday had not yet come. She’d found some of Bolt’s old toys too. He was seventeen now, probably too old for the stuffed tiger and plastic slingshot, but she’d charged his Nintendo DS just in case and left it on his bedside table. She still needed to get fresh sheets.

  A splash and a girl’s laugh peeled through the air. Cassie nearly sloshed her coffee over her fingers.

  The laughter rang out again, along with big playful splashes, the rhythmic slap of an enthusiastic swimmer. In a flash, Cassie was a child again racing toward the dock, water wings constricting her pale, freckled upper arms. And there without fail was her friend, waving at her from the shadow of the shallows. Her wet curls framing her tanned face, her smile, her come on, Cassie, jump, and I’ll catch you—

  This late in the evening, who would be swimming? Cassie started down the path, stomach swooping like a too-long fall off a tire swing over hungry water. She had been enamored with the light dancing on the surface back then, with the lullaby of waves against the ankles of the dock, lured by a voice as thin as air. “Cassie, jump and I’ll catch you.”

  “Catfish?” Cassie murmured, throat dry and weak.

  She crept to the edge of her land, where the clearing began to race down, down, down to the water. Below her, there was Valerie’s sea-green sign: GRAND DESTINY RESORT AND MARINA. There was the postcard-pretty pool and a few paddleboats tied to the dock under a passion fruit sunset.

  Cassie drank in the Destiny’s safety before dragging her gaze to the lake. Once, the lake had been smaller, shallower, but it had been engorged with the building of the Damnation—Grandad’s name for Prosper’s large industrial dam. Once, Lake Prosper had been manageable. But ever since the dam, it sprawled into every valley, every creek, every crevice like blood pooling from an opened vein. It washed away crops that had swayed in the wind, grew fingery canals and swamped the boundaries anticipated by the dam surveyors. When the rains fell every year, the lake rose, crawling higher and higher up Cassie’s hill, desperate to eat.

  It was quiet. The water was empty. Not even a ripple. The only sound was her own fast pained breathing.

  Cassie rushed back until the lake shrank, hidden by her land with every step she took. She retreated all the way into the double-wide and closed the door behind her, then slammed the windows into their sills, letting no sound—no watery calls—inside. Only sunshine.

  * * *

  The highway ran in a swift dark current away from her, and Lark searched for the only radio station that might reach her out in nowhere. It was an oldies channel with a Southern angle, one that played a lot of Tom Petty, a lot of the Band. When they had traveled this way together, Daddy used to twiddle the dial like this, twist and turn through static, when he forgot to charge his iPod. Lark snorted at that thought even as she listened to the AM stations, a thief picking the lock of a high-security safe. That old iPod was a fossil nowadays, with its supposed three days of shuffle that always seemed to exclusively play “Hurdy Gurdy Man” by Donovan.

  It was blackest night beyond the milky wash of her headlights. This old road wasn’t used to company so long past sunset, and it bucked nervously beneath her, took unexpected curves, plunged between the inky shadows of trees, and then curled back on itself like a wilting petal. Lark gave up on the radio and clutched the wheel with both hands, feeling increasingly like a passenger as the highway tossed her onward, cranked her up, spat her out, drove her ever closer to an inevitable sickening drop.

  When things at home were at their hardest after the incident, Mom had delayed, set this chore aside for weeks, until she’d admitted she just couldn’t do it. And then, still, Lark had put this journey off for more than a month and then all day.

  Hours before, as the beloved, slightly decrepit silhouette of Memphis had disappeared in her mirrors and she’d cruised through the endless horizontals of the Arkansas Delta, it had really, honestly felt as if Lark would never actually arrive. Thirty minutes from the scatterings of docks and houses that made up undefined, unincorporated Prosper, the cozy downtown and charming tourist stops of Charlene hadn’t wanted to let her go. The NOW LEAVING CHARLENE. BE SEEIN’ Y’ALL! sign took on a skeptical ring, as if to say, Come on back. Nothing to see down that way. But now the speed limit slowed, the woodsy curtains drawing back on familiar sights: the little gas station with its chubby pumps, the junk shop and its associated sculpture park of scrap metal, the stores selling Arkansas quartz. And then she was out of highway, and she turned, her right front wheel growling over gravel. The car, her rusted-out old Explorer, got its teeth into the loose paving and roared down the familiar path, rocking, like Lark was voyaging out into a vast shifting sea.

  She passed the riding stables, the crumbling mobile homes, the turnoff for the marina. The eyes of five ever-startled deer flashed iridescent in her lights. Her heart cracked quietly with each bump in this back road. There had been so many happier trips down to Lake Prosper. Her skin, the color of faded white linen from her indoor job and her city life, had once glowed all year round with a healthy summer tan from days in the sun out here. Boat rides, fireworks, lunches out at Aunt Valerie’s restaurant.

  Never once had Lark come this way alone.

  As much as Lark wanted to be self-sufficient at twenty-four, having Mom there would have steadied her. They could have found some way to laugh, to break up the cement heaviness that hardened around them when they were apart, that imprisoned them in solitary horror when Mom was caring for Daddy in Hot Springs and Lark was working at Goner Records in Memphis. Together, they might have paused for cheeseburgers at Stella’s drive-in, jalapeños raging on their tongues as they cackled over the latest hijinks of the family’s dopey brown poodle, Doris Ann. Doris Ann’s nickname was Methuselah; she was about a thousand years old in dog years. Deaf and nearly blind, she was content to stagger merrily through the woods around their house, roaming like some woolly donkey, Mom chasing after her, shouting her name at top volume for absolutely zero response.

  Yeah, Lark would’ve felt braver with Mom there. But Mom had everything on her plate right now, not just the grind of her forty-hour weeks but also making sure Dad somehow made it out of the long shadows of his own mind. She was doing her best; she was doing everything. Lark could take this one burden on. She could settle the boat and the collection. She could make sure no one had this dark hole to fall back into.

  The road opened into the familiar grassy lot. Lark parked the Explorer. The air was warm and heady. It tasted like midnight, and closely set trees, and damp pavement. With one strap of her backpack over her shoulder, Lark took the long, steep walk down to Echo.

  The path tripped down toward the water through dense woods. Lark’s steps, short and careful, sounded loud, unwelcome in her own ears. An owl cried curiously at her from somewhere above. And then the ramp came into view. The lake was low, so the ramp connecting Echo to solid ground was at a violent diagonal. In the distance, looming like a cloud, the bridge above the massive dam hung, the dam that had expanded the lake all those years ago. Lark paused, looking over the sunken nighttime vista. Toward Echo, or E Dock, where Lark’s family had kept their houseboat, the Big Dipper, for more than twenty years.