Excerpt of Devil's Oven by Laura Benedict

CHAPTER ONE

Ivy laid out the body parts on the table as though they were pieces of a puzzle. Her half sister, Thora, was down the hill, in the tidy house they finally built for themselves after living in the rusting hillside trailer for most of their lives. Ivy was a seamstress by trade, but she knew Thora wouldn't understand what she was doing, why she would be stitching together a body she'd found in pieces up on the mountain. Thora wouldn't understand that the body—the man—was a gift from the mountain. It was so much more than the bits of decorated pottery or dull arrowheads Ivy had collected over years of walking the mountain's face.

Devil's Oven had taken her mother and father. Now it was giving something back to her.

She had been mushroom–hunting alone, as always. As she bent to inspect a clump of scarlet–headed false morels, she noticed a thick, rounded fingertip—a man's—poking up from the earth. But she wasn't afraid or disgusted. Even after she recovered the rest of the body parts from their small, absurdly shallow graves, she felt more wonder than fear. It had taken her days to find all the pieces. She brought them down to the trailer one piece at a time, secretly.

Never before had she touched a man's body so intimately, bathing each part in the trailer's tub with the same care she would lavish on an infant, drying it with thick towels she had sneaked out of the house. She had avoided toweling the most private parts, averting her eyes. Few of the clients who came to her to have their clothes altered or made were men, and Thora liked to tease her about the ones who were.

"You act like they're going to bite you," Thora said. "I'm right in the next room. What do you think they're going to do?"

Time and again, Ivy told herself that she wasn't really afraid of men. She had been friendly with a few boys in high school almost twenty years earlier, quiet boys like Tripp Morgan. The quiet ones never made fun of her badly repaired cleft lip, or the way she absently chewed her uncut blond hair when she was daydreaming, or her decades–out–of–date clothes that had belonged to Thora. They didn't mock her to her face, at least. But there had been no dates, no parties, no special boy. Worse, she had begun to wonder if Thora was right when she said it was her own choice to be so shy, that she wasn't bad–looking but was just too afraid to let a man near her. Was it possible that it was her own fault she blushed a fierce red each time she had to measure a man's inseam, even as he held the end of the tape against his own inner thigh?

Looking over the body, Ivy knew she had to start with something difficult, something bold, like attaching one of the severed legs to the torso. Her slender hands trembled as she threaded a curved needle with nylon that matched his olive–cast skin, and coated the nylon with a pinch of beeswax. If she was going to get all of the sewing done that night, she had to force herself to be brave about touching the body in those uncomfortable places.

She was glad no one could see her as she clumsily shifted the right leg so that the ragged edges of the thigh and groin would meet. The curtains were pulled shut, but it wasn't like anyone came near the trailer now, day or night. Not even Thora. The shabby building remained tucked against the side of the mountain only because Thora—stubborn Thora—had refused to have it demolished. Outside the curtains, a clear triangle of light illuminated the entrance to the old barn and nothing else. Their closest neighbor was a quarter of a mile away.

There were people who said they wouldn't live on Devil's Oven for love or money, but she could never be one of them. It didn't matter that there were books written about the disappearances and murders that had occurred there since it was settled over two hundred years earlier, and that in the last century, the mountain had seemed to reach out and pluck twenty different airplanes from the sky.

Devil's Oven was Ivy's strength and nourishment. Her home and heart. What was there for her to be afraid of?

It had given her the man lying before her. He could hardly be considered a threat; he couldn't even object if her handling of him was careless. He was dead.

Maybe.