Sammy had wandered into the marina but hadn’t spoken to him, instead going to hang around Rig at the register. He felt her eyes from time to time. They should have gone to the police, Bolt had thought wildly, at the melting of afternoon into evening, as he clocked out of his shift. Why hadn’t they just gone to the police? He should have woken Diego up or Valerie, even Cassie.

  “What are you, hungover?” Bolt startled as Rig’s fingertip scanned his ribs. Now he was grinning at Bolt as he tipped one of his earbuds out. Rig’s eyebrows had a way of knitting when he smiled, making the expression ever skeptical; his was a deep, sly humor, constantly testing itself and everything else. “I heard you’ve got a big secret for me.” Sammy was watching from her spot restocking T-shirts from a large cardboard box.

  Disappointment rose in his throat. “What did she tell you?” Bolt asked. He didn’t have the energy to meet Rig at his usual sardonic level. He didn’t want to laugh at the world today, and his shift was almost over anyway. He hung his whistle on the wall with all the others.

  “Just that: you two have a secret.” Rig spun the earbud idly, searching Bolt’s face. “So what is it? Give me something good. My dad’s been a real lunatic lately. He let these steaks go rotten and then, like, carried them around with him.”

  Those last details were sickening enough that he relented. Rig wouldn’t give up. He pushed a hand into his hair. “We found something last night while you were off with Woody.”

  “Oh yeah?” Rig’s eyes seemed to darken, his interest piqued. “Something out in the graveyard?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it here,” Bolt hissed, as a couple of kids passed, running for the fake arrowhead key chains. Sammy shrugged at him across the room.

  “Fine.” Rig checked the time on his phone. “After work. My mom was coming down, but she canceled.”

  Bolt didn’t want to go, didn’t want to see those eyes or know if the sun and fish had taken their share. But there was no arguing with Rig when he set his mind to it, and if Bolt didn’t meet Rig after his shift, Rig would just come to the resort and bug him until he broke down.

  The four of them gathered in the rich purple dusk. Woody—stringy, unshowered, and excited—had his Swiss army knife out, tossing it and spinning it between his fingers. Bag slung over his shoulder, Rig had picked up a stick as they walked along the highway, and now its tip bucked and skidded across the uneven surface of the road.

  “He read my mind,” Sammy muttered, ambling along beside Bolt on her roller skates. “What were we supposed to do, anyway? They’re our—friends.” He caught that moment of hesitation, one that matched the strange cognitive leap he had to make to arrive at the word “friends.”

  Bolt’s skin remembered the chill of being pushed into the red lake, Rig laughing when he tried to clamber out. In his bones he remembered the secret Rig had spilled about Cassie’s land, the havoc he’d wreaked in her yard as punishment. “Are they?” he murmured.

  They looked at each other, and for a moment, they might as well have been alone. They were alone, somehow. But now the prows of abandoned boats peeked at them through the trees. It was too late to keep their secret.

  “Holy shit,” Rig breathed, kneeling beside the bloating mass in the shallows.

  The body lay like a heap of sodden rags in the reeds, the face distended into a topography of grayish mounds. Nose blurred into swollen cheekbones, which seemed to run in waxy rivulets around parted bulging lips. The leaves and debris they’d tossed hastily over it in the darkness clung to rough, homespun clothes, and tangled in the tongue of a moldering boot.

  “This is sick.” Rig drew his stick up and gave the mounded gut of the corpse a sharp jab. The body had the soft give of a fish belly. The slackened mouth fell as far open as the ruined jaw would allow, an icy stench of bile issuing from it. Woody leaped back.

  “It looks old,” he said, fingers twitching. Rig snapped a couple of photos with his phone. “I don’t recognize him. But, hell, bloated up like that, it could be anyone. Is there anyone who’s been missing around the docks?”

  Sammy rested her hands on her knees, leaning in. She didn’t seem to fear the corpse either, squinting at it with the same arrested disgust she’d had the night before. “It does look old. And yellow.” She glanced at Bolt, the only one she was speaking to. “I bet he’s from the churchyard down there. Under the water. Just like Nonnie told me, remember? There were a bunch of people who died from yellow fever, and they left some bodies and stuff when the town sank.”

  “Bullshit.” Rig straightened, giving one of the floating work boots a light kick. “You mean from a hundred years ago? This asshole is fresh.”

  “No,” Sammy insisted. “My nonnie was around then. She says there were still—”

  “It does look yellow,” Woody added. “Yellow fever sounds like a bad way to go.”

  Bolt’s throat went dry. Grandad had talked about it so rarely, but Bolt remembered. “Mosquitos did it,” Grandad had said. They’d been on the porch, and Bolt had felt one whine at his ear. He had sat still, terrified it might bite him. “There were so many around the water. No matter how early you went fishing or farming, there were mosquitos, clouds of them shimmering like heat waves in the air. About a week later, you’d know because you’d get chills, deep in your bones. Fever. You’d ache. Like your whole body had turned against you. And some—when the jaundice set in, you knew a person didn’t have long. Do you know what jaundice means, Bolt? It means the skin turned yellow. That’s when the body gets toxic. Not much a doctor could do, not then. When it got bad in Prosper, they got all the healthy people out and turned the old schoolhouse into a makeshift hospital.”

  He shook his head, tilting back his beer. “Only we didn’t have a doctor back then, and the Charlene doctor never went. Even he was too scared. The man who was supposed to have the answers was too scared. And if most everyone who had it was either poor or an immigrant or Black, he wasn’t risking his life.”

  Bolt shivered and shivered, and later, when he saw a mosquito bite on his arm, he burst into tears and ran to Mom, sure he had been infected. Mom had yelled at Grandad for scaring him, and Grandad’s face had pinched up with guilt.

  Yellow fever had a vaccine, and people around here didn’t get it anymore. He was safe. Everyone was safe.

  But as they stood there, Woody and Rig performing their own personal autopsy, Bolt began to believe Sammy. The clothes didn’t look modern and were almost worn to shreds. The boots, still crammed around swollen ankles, were so different from the soft sandals weekenders wore around the marina. These were boots built for hard work, patched in the heel and sole. The laces were gone, stolen by fish perhaps, leaving only torn leather eyelets behind. But it was no mummy, no dried-out husk or prehistoric man from deep in a peat bog. This was all mass, all tender layers, grocery store poultry left on a kitchen counter. And that skin, yellowed like old linen.

  “Why would it still be here?” Bolt asked, as the sun was making its definitive exit beyond the tree line. “If it’s that old?”

  “Same as the rest of the stuff that washes up.” Sammy touched a button on a stained and rotting shirt cuff, avoiding the mottled flesh beneath. Something clung in shimmering clusters to the roots of his fingers. “It’s probably cold down there, you know?”

  After his investigation of the corpse’s wrecked pockets, Rig pulled back, rummaging through the bag he’d brought along in the darkness. The air was warm and fetid. “I have the best fucking idea I’ve ever had.”

  “What’s on his skin?” Woody asked, pressing the end of his stick against the cheek. Bolt saw it too, shining like fish eggs at the corner of the dead mouth. More, larger, tucked into the coils of an ear. He imagined there were great swells of them under those stretched eyelids, precious blight growing in the warm caverns of the empty sockets. Maybe inside too, the skull a stinking treasure chest of them, clustering in that distended belly.

  “They’re pearls,” Bolt said. Poor son of a bitch. The lake rippled, and when it touched Bolt’s ankles, it was cold. “Woody, don’t. Come on. Let’s go.”

  “Hey, get back,” Rig commanded, moving past Woody with something in his hand. He stooped over the body, working, his back blocking Bolt’s view. “Toss me your light.”

  “What are you doing?” A wariness crept into Sammy’s voice.

  “Sick!” Woody crowed and scrambled back, eyes gleaming, and staggered up the bank, pulling his shirt over his mouth.

  The blue night briefly warmed with the lighter in Rig’s hand, and then there was a sharp crackle of ammunition. The whistle of a lit firecracker fuse. Rig ducked back, laughing. “Somebody record this!”

  The fuse hung from the corpse’s mouth like some kind of demented cigarette, lighting his face in ghoulish relief. For a moment he was animated, living, his face full of vivified horror. The invasive pearls were illuminated in sickly shades by the sinking, sparkling lit fuse. Bolt staggered forward—it wasn’t too late to rip it away, throw the cracker as far as he could into the lake—

  “C’mon.” Sammy wrenched Bolt back a few yards, sucking in a haggard breath.

  In the space of a second, the firecracker went dark. Then it flashed, a strike of lightning bursting from the water and clawing up at the sky.

  Bang. Bang. Bangpopopopop—

  “Sick!” Woody screamed in his ear. He and Rig leaped around them, hands up in praise at the arc of white fire in the sky, the streams of smoke and chaos. Sammy and Bolt had both fallen, and she had a gravel scrape on her cheek. They scrambled up. The firecrackers burst again as if they just couldn’t help it, lighting up the roadkill form—or what was left of it. Now it was pieces, legs and most of a torso, an arm here, and a mouth that was nothing now, a throat that was gone entirely. Charred, seared edges and teeth popped like popcorn, and then there were those boots, still perfectly intact.

  Sick, Bolt leaned over and heaved, but nothing came out. The lake had been disturbed, churning against the spoiled shoreline.

  When Rig turned away from his masterpiece, his eyes crackled, like the munitions had caught in them, embers burrowed deep. He swept his hair back, breathless, flushed. Ecstatic. “Well, gents,” he managed. “Looks like our work here is done.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  June woke up on the first of July in a haze of florals, her white pillow bleeding pink with petals. Begonias. For a moment, she expected to find Mom standing over her bed, worry creased in her face, scissors already in hand. When she raked a hand through her hair, she felt a few worn buds tangled at her temples. She tugged. They resisted. Her arms felt heavy when she flopped for the bedside table and the kitchen shears she kept within.

  After Lark and the bonfire, June hadn’t left the church grounds for days. She stayed in the church’s cool air-conditioning, ostensibly cleaning for Sunday and staying busy enough that Aunt Eliza wouldn’t worry. Much. She was too discerning not to worry at all, and she asked several probing questions about Jack, but June dodged them.

  Instead, she cleaned the church. She wandered the grounds. She taught herself to play the yellowed piano keys. Every so often, like missing a step on a staircase, a confident press of her finger yielded no music, just a long, breathy exhale where a note used to be.

  Despite herself, she thought of the box in Cassie’s care, even considered dropping by to check. But she wouldn’t do any good.

  The buzzing inside her didn’t stop. No one had ever known what it was like until Jack told her he knew how to make it stop. The cicadas droned in the evenings and followed her into her dreams, where they loomed, flexing their tymbals in chorus, blinking black marble eyes. They made her whole body thrum in concert.

  So she’d started to spend hours, long hot hours, outside in the cemetery. It was barely dawn, and there she was, tramping into the blueish light with her shirt wrapped around some old primrose bulbs she’d rescued from Aunt Eliza’s shed.

  June stopped at the edge of the clearing, upturned dirt and new flowers sprouting between gravestones. She had half of them cleared off now, the names becoming visible again. But there were beautiful flowering vines clinging to the trees and up the wings of a single weatherworn angel statue. Sunflowers peeked through on the edge, and spiky purple flowers, each an individual trumpet. None of it had been there the day before. Just like that, all the frustration, all her cramped anger—it dissipated like mist facing the sun.

  She knelt beside the angel, touching gentle silk petals. “You don’t look like the picture of milkweed on those seeds I bought,” she said. “What are you?” The smell was familiar, like warm summer evenings, like lingerie. “Jasmine,” she realized. “Jasmine. What are you doing here, gorgeous?”

  The angel offered no answers. June stood again. There was no true order to the new growth. It wasn’t clean or in sensible rows, but mixed, blending, swirling, all the roots tangled under the earth. It was as wild and random as a bar fight. It wasn’t a garden planted among the gravestones. This unexpected upshooting was something else.

  It was chaos.

  “What are any of us doing here?” she asked. At the edge of the cemetery, the tributary of the lake shrugged with the far-off passing of a Jet Ski, ruffling lily pads the size of dinner plates, and maybe it was her imagination, but the jasmine seemed to shiver.

  Surrounded by new growth, June picked a spot for the primroses. She imagined them, little patches in the shade around a lion statue she’d found at the antique shop and relocated.

  June bent until her lower back ached, cleaning moss off the next row of gravestones and shoving aside undergrowth. She had no real experience. The closest she had ever gotten to a garden was the apartment across the courtyard from the one she and Mom shared, where an elderly couple grew orchids, stately and ever so cool, like skinny women in tailored pantsuits. But sometimes she would sit, looking at a patch of tiny white flowers and think, Those could do with some more sunlight. Or when she saw the coil of vine around the feet of an angel statue: That could use a bit of fertilizer to really grow.

  There was a spindly tree growing in the sun near the water’s edge. Its leaves flourished fat and green, bigger than her hand, and June knew that if she waited long enough, soon the little late-season green bulbs would ripen, and she could bring Aunt Eliza the fresh figs.

  Growth could be violence, ignited by the heating earth. It could be the selfishness of the race to the sun and the agony of new birth. It was aggressive colonialism, the hungry way gooseneck gobbled up every bit of earth. People forgot because flowers were so pretty. But chaos was a blooming thing too. Chaos also wanted to grow. It wanted to spread. But it didn’t have to be violent, selfish, aggressive. Maybe this growth could be kind.

  “I’m going to make you so pretty,” June told the first of two primroses that would be planted in the shade, where only morning light would touch them once their blue-green leaves sprouted. Hours slipped by like dewdrops. June dug deeper under cracked, warm dirt to the moist earth underneath. She pictured black rosebuds, golden cornelias, and huge lily pads flowering at midnight, and something fragrant and vibrant blossomed inside her chest. She didn’t fight it.

  If it hadn’t been so quiet, she would have missed it; in the corner of her eye, she glimpsed something that was no leaf or petal but the figure of a person. There was someone in her garden. June paused, hands on one of the primroses, a wrinkled little shallot half buried in dirt.

  There had been no sound, no twigs cracking under someone’s feet, no sigh of moving branches, no polite greeting. Nothing at all. It wasn’t movement that had caught June’s attention because the person hadn’t walked up to her. They had not been there. Until in an instant, they were. The two bare, muddy feet shifted. And then walked closer. June kept her eyes trained on her primroses.

  Not again. After the fishermen, the sour, vicious way they had smiled while trying to scare her, June didn’t want to face whatever was with her now. It was too similar to that bloodred night. She’d been alone today; she’d been sure of it.

  And now she was not.

  “What are you doing here?” the voice snapped.

  June kept her head down, breathing through the anxious alarm, like an egg was stuck in her throat. “Planting primroses,” she said after a moment.

  Bare knees stopped close to her, and June steadied her fingers. Cold wrath rushed over her from the figure. “Why?”

  “I don’t mean any harm. I’m sorry.” June was at a loss for what to do, only certain she didn’t want to look up—not when she didn’t know what she would see. Perhaps June was intruding. She was Goldilocks, stepping into someone’s home without permission, pulling weeds and planting flowers with good intentions but not permission.

  The air at her neck was cold. Her skin had turned clammy. The feeling didn’t relent, but it didn’t intensify. “When will they grow?”

  What? June swallowed. “You’re supposed to bury primroses early in the fall. Let them sleep all winter. Then they come up in the spring.” Her eyes watered, and she blinked it back. “I’ll go. I can go. I shouldn’t be here. I’m sorry.”

  “If you go, you won’t get to see it grow,” the girl reminded her. And something in the air had shifted, the pressure of cold winds eased. The storm averted, June’s lungs filled with warm, sweet breath. Now the girl seemed pensive. Almost curious. “Don’t you want to see it grow?”

  “I don’t think I can stay.” June dared to dig a hole for the next primrose, trowel making soft, dry sounds. It seemed allowed now. “But I hope they grow.”

  With bloodless fingers, heart still thrumming, June interred the next primrose under that heavy attention. Until the girl spoke again. “I’ve buried something too. Near here.” There was only a misty silence, mournful and encompassing, like the scent of carnations. “Not everything that gets buried grows.”

  “Maybe it’s not in the right place. It could be getting too much sun. Or it could be wrong for this type of soil. What was it?” June pressed the next bulb into the ground, patted soil around it, left it there to sleep.