Alma Jorie's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Alma Jorie had written down every secret in Mangrove Maw except the one that mattered. It lived in her head, where she dared not put it on paper. A respected man had knelt in her clinic and confessed something that could hang him, and she had let her pen stay still. Now a dying woman's words from last week pointed at the same man, and the only proof was a body in the ground by morning. Alma pressed the red book flat against her uniform and ran. The clinic stood at the water's edge, its flower boxes bright under a gray sky. She had left the door open. She did not care. The gravediggers worked in a far corner of the churchyard. Two men leaned on their shovels. A plain box sat beside a fresh hole. Alma reached them with her breath gone ragged. "Wait," she said. "I need to see her. The nurse must check the body." The older man frowned. "She's been seen. Doctor signed it. Drowning." "Then one more look costs you nothing." Alma opened the lid before he could answer. The dead woman lay still and swollen. Alma made herself look past that. She turned the cold hand over. Along the wrist ran a line of small, dark pricks, the same marks the confessor had hinted at when he spoke of a poison that mimicked the sea. No drowned woman carried those. Alma took out her book and wrote fast. Puncture marks, left wrist, four of them. Skin blue at the lips. She wrote what the confessor had said, the part she had refused to write for weeks. Her hand shook, but the words went down. "That's enough," the older man said. He pushed the lid shut. "Burial's paid for. Orders." "Whose orders?" He would not say. He named no one. But his eyes moved toward the road, toward the fine house where the respected man lived, and Alma understood. The men lowered the box and began to fill the hole. She did not stop them. She had what she came for. Alma walked back to the clinic with the book held against her chest. The evidence was gone into the earth now, but the record was hers. She had broken her own rule. The secret she dared not write was written. She climbed the porch steps and stopped. The door she had left open now stood only half so. Someone had been inside. Her drawers hung open. Papers lay scattered across the floor. The man knew she had heard his confession. And now he knew she was writing it down. Alma shut the door and slid the bolt. The book in her pocket was no longer a shield. It was the one thing that could get her killed, and the one thing that could end him. She had until he came back to decide what to do with it.