The Beautiful Maddening

Prologue

PROLOGUE

Locals say the dirt in Cutwater isn’t good for farming. Too swampy, too clotted with clay, too much rain in the fall and not enough in the spring. But behind our house the tulips break through the mud, fearless, staking their claim in the terrible soil.

They are night bloomers.

Tiny green sprouts twirling upward in wild, broken rows beneath a star-crusted sky. Full of promise.

But after a time, when the smooth, silky heads begin to unfurl under the dusky light of a spring moon, the blooms reveal their truest, darkest nature.

The white petals are marred.

Imperfect.

Cut through as if by a villain’s bone-sharpened blade.

Crimson streaks run down each delicate, buttery petal, as dark and gruesome as blood freshly broken from young veins.

Mrs. Thierry, who lives half a mile down the dusty, rutted lane, calls it a curse. Some peculiar poison in the land. Others say it’s a result of the graveyard whose headstones once dotted the meadow behind our house, bodies rotting beneath the earth, ancient blood leaching up into the tulips. A reminder of what lies below.

Whatever the cause, these rare tulips have darkened my family for generations. For it’s not only the tulips that others find strange…. It’s us .

The Goodes are a family to be avoided. The odd and unordinary. The ones who speak in riddles before we can even walk, who prefer night over day, who drink sunrises and sleep in a drafty, cobwebbed attic. Or so the locals like to say. Most of it isn’t true.

Far from it.

But still, they steer clear of us, of the teetering house where we live, built—foolishly—over Forsaken Creek. Glacier water rushes beneath the floorboards at all hours, even while we sleep—our dreams are saturated with the sound of it—the current threatening to carry the old, rotted house away into the elm woods, into the soft, grassy valleys at the lower end of the state. Good riddance, most would say. Because the Goode family is anything but good .

When I was young, I used to believe it was the creek that split us apart, made our family wild and feral and heedless. But it’s the tulips that make us go mad.

The tulips… that will destroy us all in the end.