Quiver by Holly Luhning

beige film. My thin T-shirt was damp and stuck to me like papier mâché. I gave up on the compact and decided to look for a place to get a soda.
    I found a pub in the square, just a few yards down from the museum. Over the entrance gate was a wooden cut-out of a woman’s head, with what was supposed to be, I guessed, Báthory’s picture painted on it. Below the head, a sign read Alžbeta B á thory. Her name in Slovak. Dense vines, green with small white flowers, twined around the tall gate. The place was tacky, but lush. Cooler than standing under the half shade of a tree. I pushed the gate door open a little; several plastic tables and chairs were set up on a cobblestone courtyard.
    “Danica!” Maria stood up from a table. “You did come by yourself!” She hurried over to the gate and led me inside. “I called this morning, Dani, but there was no answer in your hotel room. You are not upset, are you?” She motioned towards the chair across from hers.
    “What happened?” I said. I didn’t sit down.
    “Oh, it was one of those things. You know. I got up this morning and Dedrick was in the lobby. He is an old friend of my ex-husband, he offered me his car for the day. I thought it would be so much nicer for us to drive here than take the train. Air conditioning, you know. But by the time I called, you were gone.”
    The waiter came over, and Maria said a few words to him in Slovak. “I just ordered you a Topvar. You cannot drink anything else in this heat.” The table she had chosen was dead centre in the yard, no umbrella, no shade from the vine-covered gate. She took off her broad-brimmed sunhat and fanned me with it. “Sit, sit, Dani. Your face, it is so red. Rest.” The midday light made Maria’s hair look almost maroon.
    “You made it sound so easy to get here by train,” I said. I sat down. She had tried to call, after all. “I was a bit worried when I saw that the station here was boarded up. And there was no town in sight.”
    “Oh, that. I suppose it slipped my mind.” The waiter came back and set a very large bottle of beer in front of me. I attempted to thank him in Slovak. He smiled and gave me a nod.
    “See,” Maria continued, “there are villagers only out here, no one who would hurt you. I knew you would find the town. I thought it might even be a bit of fun for you, an adventure, no?” She took off her dark sunglasses and arched her eyebrows. “And the weather, it is lovely. No rain to spoil a walk, yes?”
    I drank a few sips from the cold Topvar. I could feel the flush fading from my cheeks. “I see the museum opens in half an hour,” I said.
    “Yes, we will start there.”
    “And the castle?”
    “Dani, of course.” She smiled.
    I smiled back. It was impossible not to forgive her.
    After the beer, we headed to the museum. An Austrian tour group was ahead of us, and they had just started to filter out of the foyer into a large hall through a pair of arched wooden doors. As the crowd left, I noticed a display of several large photos, bride-and-groom couples standing in front of an old castle tower or a crumbling arch, wild bluebells and poppies springing up from the dusty grounds of the ruins. One of the larger photos was displayed on an easel, and there was a stack of business cards on the right-hand side of the easel’s ledge. “Maria,” I said, “are those wedding photos taken at this castle—Báthory’s castle?”
    She swivelled around me, hand on my shoulder. “Ah, those photos. Yes. This display is larger than the last time I came. Everyone wants the fairy-tale background.”
    “But why would they want their wedding pictures taken in a place where so many awful things happened?”
    “That part, they do not have to mention,” said Maria. “Look at them. If you did not know, all you would see are wedding photos, brides and grooms in front of an old castle. They want a pretty picture, and they do not worry about the past.”
    The first room of the museum smelled