Some of those creatures left the world by the power of her hands and some as the result of a higher law, but Jo grieved them all. Some days she got to thinking the marsh was nothing more than an open wound sunk in the flesh of the earth, a festering raw place where the here and now met the great beyond. She had lived in it so long that she was immune to its harsh ways, but she couldn’t say the same for Claire, who never did love the land the way Jo did. Icicle’s death reminded Jo all over again that her sister had come home to a place where she couldn’t turn her back on the intricacies of the world. Jo had found Claire wandering in the salt ponds in the prime of the evening, when the marsh’s packs of flies disappeared and gave way to the first of the night’s bats. Normally Claire was skittish of them, but that night she didn’t notice. Her face was the color of sand, and her eyes were two blank buttons, the way they’d been right before she’d set the barn on fire all those years ago.
