CHAPTER FOUR
What the Ink Wants
They buried Lark out in Metairie, on a white blank morning, from a church Maren had never once been allowed inside while Lark was alive.
The family had moved fast, the way the very respectable move fast around a shame.
A closed casket. A priest who got her name slightly wrong, twice.
Hymns Maren didn't know, sung by people who had not seen Lark in six years and had spent those years praying she would come home to them ashamed.
Maren sat at the very back in the same clothes she'd worn to identify her, and no one asked who she was, and that was its own answer.
She had been the most important person in Lark's life, and at Lark's funeral she was a stranger in a back pew.
It was the wrong funeral, and she could not stop knowing it.
This gray careful hour, the priest, the hymns, the hard clean God of all of it, were the exact things Lark had run from at sixteen and never once gone back to, and they had reclaimed her the moment she could no longer fight them off.
Lark would have wanted color. She would have wanted noise, and her own music, and people who had actually known her standing up to tell the embarrassing true ones.
She got organ hymns and a stranger's careful Latin and a family who had always loved the idea of a daughter more than they had ever managed to love the one they got.
Maren grieved twice in that pew. Once for Lark, and once for the send-off she should have had.
She sat through all of it with the mark over her heart pulling steadily, insistently, the way it had pulled since the coroner's step, toward the doors, toward water, toward away.
She saw the sister at the graveside.
She knew her before anyone said a name, because she was wearing Lark's face.
Not exactly. It was Lark's face with the light taken out of it: the same wide-set eyes gone wary, the same coloring gone tired and mousy, the same mouth held in a flat braced line that Lark's mouth had never once learned to make.
Where Lark had been a window thrown open, this woman was a door someone had shut a long time ago and locked behind them.
Bryony. Maren had heard the name once or twice across the years, always with a small flinch attached to it. The good daughter. The one who stayed.
Bryony did not cry. She stood a little apart from her parents with her hands knotted white in front of her, her bitten nails, her modest gray dress, and she watched the casket go down with a face Maren could not read and would spend a long time afterward trying to.
It was not grief, exactly. It was too tight for grief.
It looked, if it looked like anything, like the face of a person looking at a thing she had done and could not undo.
Their eyes met once, across the open grave.
For one second Bryony looked at Maren, and something terrible moved behind her face, there and then gone, and her mouth opened as though she might say a thing.
Then her mother's hand closed over her arm, and she looked away, and she did not look back, and Maren never got whatever it had been.
There was no afterward for her. No house to go back to with the others, no casserole, no place laid.
The family filed off to their cars and their grief that came with rules, and Maren stood alone by the raw earth in the white heat, her girl six feet down in a box bought by people who had never deserved her.
Over her heart, the mark pulled, and pulled, and pulled.
?
For three days she did nothing.
She went back to the apartment above the shut-up studio and she did nothing.
She did not open the shop. She did not answer the phone.
The few who counted as theirs left food on the step, and she let it sit and spoil.
She lay in the bed that still smelled of Lark and waited to feel anything other than the flat white nothing, and the only thing that ever came was the pull.
It did not stop now. Waking or trying to sleep, the mark over her heart leaned, always the same way, a low steady insistence like a hand laid in the small of her back.
Toward the door. Toward the water. Toward go.
On the first day she had thought it was grief making her mad.
By the third she had stopped being able to tell grief from madness, and stopped much caring which of them it was.
It came to her on the third night, lying in the dark with her palm flat over the pull.
The mark was the only piece of Lark left in the world.
Everyone else had been given a Lark to bury, a daughter or a sister or a six-year-old grudge, and they had buried her and driven home.
Maren had this. A heat under her own skin that moved, and wanted, and pulled toward something with all the flat stubbornness Lark had brought to every want of her whole life. And it was asking her to follow it.
People would tell her it was nothing. A pinched nerve, a grief-dream, a tattoo.
People had a word for women who followed their dead down into the dark, and it was an ugly one.
Maren lay there and weighed the whole sensible weight of it, the doctors she ought to see and the grief she ought to do properly and the life she was meant to start wanting again, and she set all of it down, because none of it had Lark in it, and the pull did.
She would follow the ink. Wherever it wanted her, however mad it was, she would go.
It was the last thing left in the world that still reached toward Lark, and if it reached, too, toward whatever had done this, toward the still water and the red bloom and the thing that had emptied Lark's own mark and filled Maren's overnight, then she would follow it the whole way down.
There was nothing left to lose that she had not already lost.
She got up in the dark and got dressed.
?
She let it lead her.
That was the strange part. She walked out into the small hours and gave herself over to a pull in her own chest and followed it.
Down toward the river it led her. When she turned the right way the warmth spread and steadied; when she went wrong on purpose, at a corner, to test the thing, the heat thinned and cooled until she turned back and it rewarded her.
It was patient. It never yanked. It only leaned, and waited for her to come with it, and warmed when she did, the way you would guide someone you loved through a dark house with the lightest hand on their arm.
By the time she came out along the wharves, with the river going black and wide and muscled beside her, she had stopped testing it. She walked where it warmed.
It brought her to a bar.
A low building down by the water that she'd walked past a hundred times and never once gone into, a dock-and-fishing-crew place with a hand-painted sign and a screen door and a single window crowded with old beer signs.
The pull went warm and sure under her hand when she set it on the door.
Whatever the ink wanted, it was in here.
?
Inside it was dim and cool and smelled of spilled beer and the river.
Half a dozen people at that hour, mostly men, mostly old, the kind who fished or worked the docks and drank in the seam between.
Nobody gave her a second look. She took a stool at the far end and ordered the cheapest thing on the board and sat with it and did the thing she had apparently come all this way to do, which was listen.
The bartender, a heavy woman with a tired, kind face, set the drink down and asked her nothing, which Maren was grateful for.
She wrapped both hands around the cold glass and did not drink it.
She was twenty-two years old. Her girl was three days in the ground.
She had walked across the city in the dark on the say-so of a tattoo, and she could not have told one soul in that room why she had come, because she did not fully know herself.
She only knew the warmth in her chest had wanted this door.
So she sat, and she waited, and she listened to other people's ordinary night.
It took a while to come. They talked weather first, and the Saints, and a boat motor nobody could fix, and Maren had nearly decided she had lost her mind for good and all, that she had followed a cramp clear across the city to a room full of strangers, when two of the old men down the rail got onto the subject of the water, and from the water they got onto the red.
It was killing the fishing, the first one said.
Out east, out toward the Rigolets, the trout were gone and the redfish were gone and the water just sat there, flat and rust-colored and dead, worse this summer than anyone living could call to mind.
Bad water, the second one agreed. Always been bad water out that way.
His grandfather wouldn't fish past a certain line of it and would never say why.
There were rules to that water, he said, the kind nobody bothered to write down.
You did not fish it after dark. You did not take the last of anything living out of it.
And if you ever saw the red come up thick and still on a slack tide, you got off the water and you went home, because the red was her color, and the slack of the tide was her hour.
"Slackwater's hungry," the first one said, and laughed. It was the laugh you do to put a thing back in its box.
The second man didn't laugh. "Took the Doucet boy in the spring," he said. "Took that girl just the other week. The one they found out past the Rigolets."
Maren's whole body went still.
"Accident," the first one said. It was not quite a question.
The second one made a low sound that was not agreement.
"Our Lady of Slackwater don't have accidents," he said.
"She has debts." And he crossed himself, the old way, right to left, and reached for his beer, and that was the end of it.
Two old men and a piece of superstition.
Except that one of them had just folded Lark into a legend, and Maren was sitting six feet down the bar with her dead girl moving under her skin.
She should have left then. She had more than she'd come for: a name for the thing, a shape for the dread.
But she sat frozen on the stool, and the two of them drifted off it the way the living always drift off the dead, back toward boats and weather, and she had almost let go of the whole night when one of them said it, idle, a thing tossed off on the way to something else.
"Wonder old Vaudry don't do something about that water. It's all her land out there. Far as the Rigolets, every foot of it. Been Vaudry land a hundred years."
The mark over Maren's heart recoiled.
Not the cold lean toward water it had given her for days.
Not the warm pull that had walked her here.
This was a flinch, a hard fast shrinking, the whole mark snapping back from the sound of that name like a hand off a stove, hard enough that Maren gasped and crushed her arm against her side to cover it.
And she knew the name.
She had seen it three weeks before, in Lark's cramped hand, in the cheap notebook, in a column of names that had meant nothing to her then.
Vaudry. One of the dead old names Lark had been chasing through libraries and would not explain, in the month when she went quiet and started locking the doors.
Maren sat in the dim bar with her arm pressed hard over the flinching mark and understood, at last, all the way down, what the ink was.
It was more than grief, and it was no compass turning her toward water to weep beside.
It was Lark, or whatever wore Lark now, and for days it had been straining to tell her the one thing it had left to give.
It knew where to look. It recoiled from that name the way Lark herself would have recoiled from the sight of her own killer.
It was pointing.
Maren put money on the bar with a hand that didn't feel like her own and walked out into the river dark.
Over her heart, slowly, the mark eased back from its flinch into the old patient pull, leaning again, waiting again.
Toward the water. Toward the name. Toward whatever was left out there to find.
She had a place to start.