While Anders pulls the stretcher, we pass residents adding to the decorations. Heaven forbid a single wooden porch should lack evergreen boughs woven through each railing baluster. Or any door should lack an intricately crafted wreath. Or any lintel should lack ivy with bright red cranberries. Every tree has been decorated, and that’s saying something in a town filled with evergreens. That’s still not enough, and people have decorated all the perimeter trees, too. Making holiday ornaments is an all-year craft for some.
I can grumble, but that’s more eye-rolling than actual complaint, and even the eye-rolling covers the fact that I secretly love the way Rockton embraces the holidays. My parents celebrated Christmas—my mother wanted her daughters fully assimilated, and any of her own Chinese or Filipino family traditions were ignored. We were Canadians, and we would act Canadian, which apparently meant “Christian” at the holidays, even if we never attended church of any kind.
Neither of my parents was all that keen on Christmas, though. It seemed like more chore than delight for them. An unwanted distraction from their careers. We did all the basics: set up a tree, put out stockings for Santa, exchanged gifts and then had a holiday meal. But the tree went up Christmas Eve and was taken down Boxing Day. There were no concerts or parties. My parents didn’t have time for that. Well, no, they attended holiday parties—I remember them dressed up, April babysitting me—but only because the social events were necessary evils for career networking.
In Rockton we celebrate all the winter traditions, and that sounds very inclusive of us, but honestly, I think it’s just an excuse for more parties. If that leads to a greater understanding of different traditions and faiths, it’s a bonus. There are no churches in Rockton, but only because we don’t have space for buildings that’ll be used once a week. Services are held at the community center, with the various groups agreeing to a schedule.
If there’s an overriding theme to our winter celebrat
ions, it’s solstice. That makes sense up here, where we are enslaved by sun and season. Next week is winter solstice, the longest night of the year. The party will last for every minute of it, as we celebrate the return of the sun, knowing each day following will be longer, until summer solstice, when the town will party from 4 A.M. sunrise to midnight sundown. When you live without TV and social media, you exploit every excuse for a celebration.
My mood lifts on seeing the decorations. With Rockton’s wooden buildings and Wild West flair, there’s nostalgia there, too, even for someone who doesn’t consider herself particularly nostalgic. Squint past the modern clothing, and you can imagine a town from times past, bedecked in its holiday finest, everyone’s step lighter, their smiles wider.
Those smiles dim when they see the dead body on the stretcher, but even then, it’s simple curiosity. We are indeed, in so many ways, the Wild West town we resemble, where violence and death are as much a part of life as decorating for the holidays.
I head to April’s house, beside the clinic. Like Dalton, Anders, and myself, she gets a small one-and-a-half-story chalet to herself. That’s the perk of being essential services. Rockton could build one for each resident—we certainly have the land—but the larger the town is, the more likely it is to be spotted by planes. We use both structural and technological camouflage to prevent that, but we still need to keep our footprint as small as possible.
Anders takes both dogs to Raoul’s owner, Mathias, who’ll look after Storm while we’re busy with this problem. I rap on my sister’s door. I almost hope that she doesn’t answer. Or that, if she does, she has company. It’s her day off, and it’d be nice if she wasn’t spending it home alone, but with April, that’s like saying it’d be nice if the temperature hit thirty Celsius today. It just ain’t happening.
No, that isn’t entirely true. It would have been when she first arrived. Now, there is a chance she’ll be out, not exactly socializing but at least interacting. Inviting someone into her home is too much. She’s been known to haul the toilet tank onto her back porch for pickup to avoid having anyone come inside.
April opens the door as I’m reaching for a second knock.
“What are you doing back?” she says.
“Nice to see you, too, April.”
Her brows crease, as if she’s trying to figure out why it would be nice to see her. Isabel—a former psychologist—believes my sister is on the autism spectrum, undiagnosed because my parents refused to see anything “wrong” with their brilliant older daughter. They had enough trouble dealing with their rebellious younger one. To them, a diagnosis of even mild autism would have meant April was intellectually imperfect, and so they instead let her struggle through life, a gifted neurosurgeon and neuroscientist unable to form all but the most tenuous of personal relationships, lonely and alone and never knowing why. My parents screwed up my life in so many ways, but compared to what they did to my sister, I got off easy.
When we raised the possibility of autism with April, I’d been terrified she’d see it as sibling envy—me trying to knock down my brilliant older sister. I’d been convinced otherwise by a joint coalition of Isabel, Kenny, and Dalton … and they’d been right, which is humiliating to admit, proving how little I know my sister. Too much familiarity and too little actual understanding, a lifetime of trying to get to know her and, when I couldn’t, creating her wholesale.
April was fine with the diagnosis. She treated it the way I would have: like a physical ailment. Here’s the problem, and now that we know what it is, let’s tackle that. Relief, I think, at giving it a name.
“I brought you a body,” I say.
Her frown deepens, and she’s looking for some alternate meaning in this. A sign that I’m joking.
“I found a murdered woman in the forest,” I say.
Now she relaxes, and I get the April I know well, rolling her eyes at her feckless little sister. “Really? You don’t have to make the world’s problems your own, Casey.”
“You know me. Can’t relax. Always looking for work. If I don’t have it, I make some.” I pause. “Which does not mean I made this dead body. That would be wrong.”
A pause. Then, “That’s a joke, isn’t it?”
I clap her on the arm as I propel her back into the house. “Yes, April. It’s a joke.” I pull shut the door before she can protest. “Don’t worry—I’m not coming in for tea. I found something else, which I’d rather not broadcast.”
SIX
After I explain, we head out April’s back door and across her yard to the clinic’s rear entrance. As we do, she says, “I hope you’re not thinking of adopting this child, Casey.”
I tense so fast my spine crackles. “No, I’m not stealing someone’s baby, April.”
“The mother is dead. That is not stealing.”
“Presumably the father is alive, and potentially other family, which I’m going to find.”
“Good. This isn’t a stray puppy.”