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.”

Maryse thought of circus horses who did sums, tapping until their masters gestured subtly for them to stop. She wondered who was watching these girls, making sure they performed their tricks well.

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.

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

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.

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.