What the Dead Know (Into Shadow, #4)

by Nghi Vo

They didn’t think she was Black, but she might have been Native, and God forbid they treat her as a white woman.

“Water women,” Vasyl said. “They have them here too.” “They have them everywhere,” Maryse said absently, looking for others. “There’s never a shortage of unlucky girls who end up in the water.” “What a grim thing.” “We are in a grim business, darling.” “We could go into vaudeville, you know. I can dance. Perhaps you can sing?” “I absolutely cannot. I’d rather puke up rocks.” Vasyl laughed, throwing an arm around her shoulders. “How lucky we are, then, to know what the dead say.” They didn’t, of course they didn’t, but it was a living, and thus better than a dying, as Vasyl would say when he was drunk.

people would pay to hear Vasyl condescend to them, so long as he did it in a specific way.

The sky was bruised, a tinge of green to the gray, with the last of the sunlight giving it a bloodied edge.

Strong storms and angry rivers. This part of the country wouldn’t love them, and while she was usually fine with that, now it made her shiver.

Out of the corner of her eye, Maryse saw an older matron quizzing one of the girls about how she might handle a dinner party to which a clergyman had been invited but one of the guests had apparently sold their soul.

whose meanings were assumed by the grieving or the desperate themselves.

The screaming started, and Maryse wondered if they were allowed to scream in the exotic land she came from.

“One with a lock to it. She goes to the dead, and sometimes, they come to her.”

On second thought, she didn’t really want to talk about it in the dark. She pressed her forehead against his shoulder and closed her eyes.

Maryse’s skin crawled at being so close to this dead woman, because she was dead, had been dead, would always be dead, and oh, how she smiled.

“I don’t know why he killed her,” Nina said softly. “What reason could he have had?” Maryse didn’t have an answer for her, but she found herself speaking, thinking of the flash of a pink palm in the water, the river women from all along the length of the great Mississippi. “As many reasons as there are women in the water,” she said.

She wondered whether she saw a hand, white this time and calloused by the telegraph’s bar, waving from the waves; whether the woman was thankful, as her sister Nina didn’t want to be. But of course she wasn’t. She was dead, and Maryse had finally learned, after five years as a medium, what the dead spoke of. Hate. Pain. Cold. Dead. Always dead. Dead forever.