Along the Indigo

by Elsie Chapman

  “Because you don’t trust me.”

  “No, because it’s not easy being alone with the dead. You’ll see.”

  His gaze narrowed. “The trust thing sounds easier.”

  “Am I supposed to trust you?”

  “Maybe.” His smile was nearly playful. “One day.”

  “Fair enough.” Wind whistled through the trees in the covert, there was the slightest hum in the air, and the scent of wild ginger wafted out and stained them all over. “Okay, so those are my conditions.”

  Jude nodded. “You’ve got yourself a deal, Marsden Eldridge.”

  nine.

  However Marsden felt about what took place in the boardinghouse—within its walls, below its roof—she’d always loved how it looked. She knew she was growing up in the prettiest place in all of Glory.

  By comparison, the town’s lone public library—plain brown concrete shell, pitted concrete front walk, nonexistent windows—was a hopeless cause.

  She would have preferred to live there if she could.

  Wynn yanked open the heavy front doors and was already running toward the kids’ section before Marsden had fully stepped inside. “Come find me when you’re done!” she called out.

  “Runt, remember where we are again, right? You can’t yell in here.”

  “Sorry!” A hiss of a whisper, and her little sister disappeared, swallowed up by old steel racks, by tens of thousands of pages. Her hair was everywhere, the butterfly clip she’d stuck in it that morning already lost.

  Marsden went upstairs. It was where the library stored its research materials. Where she could read up on Glory’s history. The nicest parts of it and the ugliest.

  It was summer, so the study cubicles were mostly empty, the few scattered tables unoccupied. But the air-conditioning in the place was strong, which likely explained why it wasn’t entirely deserted.

  Yesterday’s conversation with Jude was what brought Marsden to the library in the first place, and she found herself walking over to where she once saw Rigby try to right the world for his brother. The aisle was empty now, but standing there, the memory sharpened, got clearer. She remembered how there’d been books scattered all over the floor, in piles at Rigby’s elbows. How all those cream-colored pages came together to form a pair of giant paper wings, ready to fly him away.

  Jude would have seen them the second he came running, those wings at Rigby’s side.

  Would he have thought the same thing? That if he waited long enough, those giant paper wings would fly his brother far away from him, leaving him alone with their drunken father?

  Marsden turned away and headed for the library’s newspaper collection.

  Rigby’s death was just one more in a long, long line of suicides in Glory, but his father had been someone, once, out East. Maybe enough of a someone that his son dying meant an article, talking again about Leo Ambrose. She could have asked almost anyone in town, and they probably could have filled her in on Jude’s father, but then her asking would become news itself. The last thing she needed was more talk about her.

  Thumbing through back issues from three weeks ago, she picked out ones for the local and East Coast–based papers—the second of which always arrived in Glory a few days late—and carried them over to a free cubicle. She was more than curious about the history of the boy she was bringing into her history. Jude, meet the covert. But first, what are your family secrets, before you learn mine?

  The local write-up and obituary—she still remembered both from the first time she’d read. When both had been fresh, when the town had still been rumbling with news of Rigby.

  But that was before Jude, a boy who could barely say his dead brother’s name without sounding like it hurt, had come to her. Before she’d said yes to his being a daily distraction, to the possible unmaking of all her plans, to not being able to skim as freely or as quickly with him around. When she had yet to consider how his being in the covert—and connected to his own dead—could prove another way for her to reach her father, since she’d already failed on her own.

  Reading it again, she felt a sense of purpose she hadn’t the first time. Before, she’d felt nothing but the dull sadness she always felt reading about deaths in the covert. It was also how she felt whenever she skimmed, whenever she stilled over a body and listened to the covert and heard nothing. Her helping Jude—she could be something other than what the town already decided she was.

  In the East Coast papers, only one mentioned Rigby, and it was a finance one—the tiniest, briefest note that the son of a former CEO of a stock company had suddenly and tragically passed.

  Marsden returned the newspapers and went to the microfiche cards. She located the cabinet that stored the data for out-of-state papers, flipped through cards until she found East Coast ones, and then narrowed those down to the time right before Leo Ambrose headed west.

  She carried the cards to the microfiche reader.

  Leo Ambrose hadn’t merely lost his cushy job when the market turned, it turned out, but also the entire family fortune, which had been deeply invested in stock. His firm set up a satellite position for him on the West Coast, and so the Ambrose family moved.

  That was all. But Marsden had heard enough from Dany and the town to fill in the rest. How Glory was close enough to Seattle and the firm’s West Coast office that Leo would still feel important but far away enough that his drinking wouldn’t be an embarrassment. How the death of his young wife on top of all that had turned his sons into targets.

  Marsden returned the cards back to the cabinet, thinking about Jude, knowing he would have wondered the same thing: How much did Leo’s anger affect Rigby’s choice that day?

  She was about to go find Wynn to leave when she glimpsed the cabinet that held the cards for the local paper. Sorted by year, from the gold rush to town establishment to present day, Glory’s entire history, if she were interested.

  Most of it she already knew, had learned all the facts and folklore and legends.

  After Duncan Kirby bled his family and himself all over the covert nearly a hundred years ago, his brother eventually came to Glory to claim the land. That had been Asa Kirby, her great-grandfather. He didn’t build a cabin for himself in the covert like Duncan had, but instead built a fence around the entirety of the land before buying a small duplex right in town, where he lived out the rest of his life. He sold off bits and pieces of the family property over the years, like chunks of bitter chocolate broken off the bar, until the duplex and the fenced expanse of trees and soil and ghosts was all that remained in her mother’s name—at least until Shine had to sell the home where Marsden had lived with her parents.

  Just as the covert’s reputation as a place of redemption grew—Duncan’s waiting ghost, taking your hand and leading you deep—the rest of the town grew, too. First as a humble tourist town, its folk—stubbornly sure gold would return to their river’s shores—serving travelers drinks and snacks from stands along the highway while selling handmade protective charms meant to ward off spirits lost and wandering free of the covert. (The first time Marsden saw these charms—a stand of little Duncan dolls on key chains, their tiny fabric boots dyed red, thin rolls of black felt for their guns—she’d been with her mother, and Shine’s face had blanched, her mouth had gone a bloodless, lipless line, and she’d led Marsden to the corner store and bought her dollars’ worth of penny candy.)

  But honest money came slow to the town, and still no gold showed. So casinos and game parlors opened, though the highest risk machines only came out at night. Card and gambling houses operated as car repair bays during the day. Pharmacies cooked up more than prescribed medicines between dusk and dawn.

  Marsden’s skin chilled from the suddenly too-strong air-conditioning. Her hand riffled through the stack of cards until she came to 1980: the year of the mysterious death of Grant Eldridge. Officially classified as an accident, but the town quietly believed it to be a suicide despite there being no covert soil on him.

 
Her heart thumping, Marsden fed the cards into the microfiche reader, and she was eight years old again, struggling to read about her father never coming back.

  She scrolled over magnified black text, feeling sick as the words painted images of that night in her head:

  Her parents’ argument inside their duplex home.

  The building spring storm outside as she and Shine waited for him to come back. And waited.

  The Indigo finally giving him back up the next morning.

  But she’d misread the news, it seemed, that first time eight years ago. Or not read enough. Or Shine had revealed more than a little girl needed to know, and Marsden had never even realized it.

  She sat up abruptly from the reader, the walls of the library spinning just as her brain whirled with microfiche words. Her stomach clenched the way it always did when she’d failed with Wynn, when her sister saw real glimpses of a body or when she asked one of Nina’s girls to do her hair instead of Marsden.

  The articles she’d just read—they were bare bones, only the facts, dry as dust. What was one more death in a death-ridden town, after all?

  Her father, more drunk than not after a night of blackjack at his favorite card house, making his way down the highway in the direction of the covert, the direction of home. Reports from other players at Decks that night had said he’d had a winning night. His pockets being empty when they pulled his body from the Indigo meant little, considering it was Grant Eldridge. Likely he’d stumbled somewhere else after Decks, made an impromptu bet, and then lost it all. Or, just as likely, that the tide had taken it, the river’s muddy, silt-filled fingers greedy.

  But years ago, before she refused to speak about her dead husband anymore, her smoke trembling between her whitened fingers as she whispered it was time to let go, Shine had told Marsden how he’d been with friends that night, all of them playing out the hours over games of blackjack. She hadn’t been more specific than that—only friends—or if she had, then Marsden had forgotten. The articles made it sound like he’d gambled on his own.

  How could she have forgotten Shine telling her about her father’s winning night? So that the knowledge had then slipped away from her as easily as he himself had? It didn’t seem possible that her mother wouldn’t have said anything, given that most of Shine’s everyday life back then had revolved around money, or the lack of it.

  Unnamed friends, whom the police hadn’t felt necessary to report.

  Missing winnings, which her mother might never have spoken about.

  Marsden’s skin rippled—and not just from the air-conditioning.

  “Excuse me? Are you done with the reader?”

  Marsden blinked, saw a boy standing in front of her, a stack of microfiche cards in his hand. Waiting for a turn.

  “Oh, sorry. Yes, I’m done.” She gathered her own cards and walked them back over to the cabinet, filing them away with fingers gone cold.

  Her pulse was too fast and dread had lodged in her chest as she headed downstairs, looking for Wynn.

  Because she knew what she needed to do.

  She had to ask her mother—who’d become nothing more than an act—to tell her, all over again, exactly what happened the night her father died.

  ten.

  It was late afternoon by the time Marsden and Wynn left the library. The sun remained blistering, pounding the dusty pavement with waves of heat. Marsden didn’t welcome it, even after a solid hour of overpowering air-conditioning—and even though she was still chilled from the inside out after uncovering the unknown about her father’s death.

  She’d always had questions for him, but not for anyone else. Why would she when the truth was obvious, regardless of what the papers had to say?

  Death by suicide, nothing else.

  Her hand shook as she unlocked Wynn’s bike, then her own, from the rack on the sidewalk.

  “You ready to go?” She hoped she sounded normal, though her mind was racing. All these years of living with the covert nestled into her heart like another hollow chamber, the idea of death, whatever its form, should be something she was used to. “I have to stop at the post office on the way back.”

  “Who are you writing to?” Wynn leaned over and squished the books that wouldn’t fit into her own bike basket into Marsden’s. Her eyes lit up with curiosity. “Like a pen pal? Where are they from?”

  I’m writing to the dead. They come from places all over, just to see the covert.

  She kept her smile casual as she hopped onto her bike and headed down the road. “Not a pen pal, no. Just a payment I have to mail for Dany.” A white lie, boring enough that Wynn wouldn’t think twice about it. Through the gaps of the houses along the highway, the Indigo was visible. Marsden caught flashes of the setting sun, winking off the river like bits of lightning. The faint metallic smell of the water floated through the air and tingled her nose. And though it was getting close to dark, there were still rental boats and canoes out, their shapes black wedges of shadow cutting close to the shore. She heard distant hollers and laughter and the splashing of water.

  “It’d be neat if you did have a pen pal, don’t you think?” Wynn asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Because you don’t like the kids from your school very much.”

  Marsden was surprised enough that it took her a few seconds to respond. She showed a sudden prolonged interest in the buildings they biked past, the same tourist-friendly ones she’d seen all her life: Poseidon, where you could order takeout fish and chips and rent fishing equipment by the day; Spokes, for bikes if you wanted to explore the town and the long Indigo coast; the Glory Heritage Museum, where they did slideshows of the town’s historic gold rush four times a day, carefully edited to end before Duncan Kirby lost his mind. “Who says I don’t like them, runt?”

  “No one.” Riding along on their bikes, there was the slightest of breezes, and Wynn’s nest of hair was only getting messier, clip still missing. “But I can tell. You’re never on the phone with anyone like I am with Caitlyn and Ella. And you’re always home, working.”

  Her sister was shades of Shine, lecturing her, and it would have struck Marsden as amusing if she weren’t already on edge. Wynn never seemed bothered by stares and slights, was still mostly oblivious—but that would slowly change with time, with age. When she knew the truth and began to view Glory through it. When the friends she had now learned to see her through that same truth, too.

  “I’m always home because that’s where I work,” Marsden said carefully. “And just because you don’t see me on the phone making plans to hang out with anyone doesn’t mean I’m not, right?”

  “I guess there was that boy looking for you outside the covert yesterday.” Wynn’s earlier curiosity was back tenfold. “Does he go to your school? What did he want?”

  “Just—oh, there’s the post office. Let’s go.”

  Marsden was greatly relieved to bike a bit ahead, to avoid having to answer her sister’s questions. Jude was more dangerous than not, his sudden presence in her life like the key to a change she wasn’t ready for.

  “Uh-oh, it’s closed,” Wynn said, coming up alongside her. “The windows are all dark.”

  “Dany had stamps at the house, so I just need the box anyway,” Marsden said. “Wait here for me, okay?”

  But her sister was no longer listening, was already reading one of her library books pulled from her basket as Marsden swung off her bike, leaving it standing alongside the curb.

  She’d been prepared for the post office to be closed when they’d left for it. In fact, she’d planned it that way. For as long as she’d been mailing away bits of her guilt—and it’d been years now—she’d always used the after-hours box outside the entrance. She already stuck out in the town—she didn’t need her letters to be remembered, too.

  She slipped an envelope from her purse.

  After skimming the woman’s body in the covert yesterday, she’d taken the five-dollar bill to the boardinghouse’s front desk and changed it
for singles at the till. After the newspaper had been delivered that morning, she’d scanned the small column hidden deep in the local news section that was dedicated to covert updates, searching for the woman’s name, then looked for her address in one of the phone books in the lobby (Dany kept both local and state ones for boardinghouse guests to use; beyond that, Marsden was sometimes forced to call the operator to ask for an address). She’d addressed a plain white envelope, slipped in a dollar bill—it was always a dollar whether she skimmed five or fifty—stamped it, and sealed it shut.

  Where there should have been a return address, she’d left the envelope blank. As she always did.

  Now Marsden dropped it into the mail slot, heard the shimmy of it as it slid down.

  It’d started with Caleb Silas, of course, the first body that she’d skimmed. Her guilt, the letters.

  She’d known skimming was wrong, just as she’d known she was going to keep doing it. At first, because it was rebellion—against her new home, her father being gone, her new life. Then it became a weapon, a means to an eventual escape. And soon, a compulsion, the only way she could ever understand why her father left. The only way how, given her blood and its dark magic, she could hear from him, be told that his death had nothing to do with her. How, as long as she kept going, she could also hear from those she skimmed, be assured they understood why she did what she did.

  But he didn’t speak to her. No one in the covert ever did.

  So she talked to them with these letters, this money. An apology of sorts, sending back a portion of what was rightfully theirs. Or, even more than an apology, the absolution she would never earn. She would always owe a debt.

  The problem was Wynn might end up being the one to pay it. Marsden’s guilt was slowing down her saving, keeping them in Glory even longer.