Along the Indigo

by Elsie Chapman

  Marsden took in the sound, the time of day, and that she and Wynn happened to be leaving the covert. And she exhaled to hide her irritation.

  “Wynn, I . . . dropped my gardening gloves back at the fence, where we were sitting. Go on ahead and look for that juice, okay?”

  Her sister raced past. “Hurry up, then, or I’ll drink it all!”

  “I’ll just be a minute.”

  The second Wynn disappeared around the bend, Marsden turned and marched over to where she heard the giggle.

  “Red and Coop,” she said to the straggly bushes that were now starting to shake, “get out from there before I tell Nina you’re on her property.”

  Both boys tumbled out onto the crisp grass, faces dirty and resentful as they got to their feet, eyes narrowed in humiliation at being caught. Their BB guns hung at their sides, and for a second, real fear filled Marsden’s chest. The covert was the part of town that knew guns best, knew them most, but it didn’t mean the rest of Glory was free of them. And BB guns, while toys, were still dangerous.

  The brothers were fledgling skimmers, their mother a sufferer of early-onset arthritis, their father working the graveyard shift at one of the gas stations. Red was thirteen, Coop was fourteen, and both were on the low end of the brains scale. When they weren’t failing classes at school, they spent their days shooting at birds, stealing penny candy from Gwen’s corner store, or trying to trespass the covert to search for bodies to skim. Most of the time, they knew to wait until Marsden was actually in the boardinghouse before attempting, but only most.

  “Who cares about Nina,” Red muttered. His unwashed blond hair was thick with dirt. “This part is common land, owned by the town.”

  “Close enough that she won’t care, and you know it.” Marsden gestured toward the highway, unseen in the distance and through the dark. “Now leave.”

  Coop smiled—he needed braces, would never be able to get them—and it was somehow sly. She had to remind herself he was just a kid. “Maybe if you tattle on us to your mom, we’ll leave, since it’s her covert—and yours. Nina can’t do anything at all. ”

  She thought of the brothers’ sick mom, their work-beaten dad, tried to drum up some sympathy for them being as hardened as they were. She still couldn’t. “Hadley’s just a phone call away.”

  An empty threat, but she wasn’t sure if Red and Coop knew as much about the corrupt cop as she did. Both brothers were already terrible, were on their way to being even worse, but they didn’t live and breathe the covert like she did. Would maybe never even come close to what she was, BB guns and bird hunting or not.

  Hadley, though.

  She supposed it was only fitting that Glory’s head cop was more crooked than the elbow along the Indigo the town called home. Lazy and greedy, too, a caricature of a villain she would find easier to laugh about if she didn’t have so many dangerous secrets.

  He skimmed, too. She’d seen it herself, silently watching him from behind the trees. Not just cash, either, but jewelry, leather wallets—anything he thought worth enough to take. Who would question a cop? Not Fitz, the guy who now ran Seconds after buying out the previous owner, who didn’t bother asking Hadley where he got the pieces he was trying to unload. Not shoppers, who recognized them on the shelves and whose reports to Glory’s police department ended up nowhere. Not families of the dead, who were told nothing else was found with their bodies.

  After those times Marsden saw him in the covert, she’d hear of him hanging out at Decks’ card tables playing blackjack, or at Prince’s, where poker was played from sundown to sunup.

  Worse, much worse, was him showing up at Nina’s, his eyes greasy and eager.

  “Hadley?” Red’s mouth gaped open. He dared to seem betrayed. “You’d really call him on us? He’d talk to our folks, and we’d be grounded for weeks.”

  “Then he’d be doing his job.” For once.

  “Man, we were just hanging out, but fine.” He gestured toward his brother. “Seriously, let’s go.”

  Coop’s eyes narrowed as he watched her, looked her up and down slowly enough that she wanted to cross her arms over herself. Again, he seemed much older than fourteen. Seemed much smarter than she knew him to be. And much too aware.

  “Tell your mom we said hi,” he said. “Sure must be tiring, doing all that cleaning, having to bend over all those beds. Hope you’re picking up tricks of the trade. Because one day, you won’t be telling me to leave, right?”

  Long after they were gone, Marsden was still in the dark, her heart racing, winter in her blood.

  • • •

  She kicked off her covers, squinting at the clock.

  Two in the morning.

  Her skin still crawled with Coop’s words. With what he didn’t have to say.

  Peeking over at Wynn to make sure she was still sleeping, Marsden crept down the stairs.

  She flicked on the kitchen lights, the space still warm from the night’s cooking, the day’s collected summer heat. The air was fragrant with the scents of smoke, grilled meat, and the faint, perpetual hint of ginger.

  Her hands moved surely—greasing and dusting pans, pouring and measuring and mixing. She melted chocolate, brought butter to a foam, dredged berries in flour. Shine and Nina and the secrets and shames of the covert—they all went away for a while. She baked them into oblivion, gone until her hands were done.

  And when she sensed Star in the kitchen, Marsden knew her grandmother wouldn’t speak. She never did—just stayed silent, a kind of shifting warmth that did not scare Marsden at all.

  It was the closest she ever got to hearing the dead, anywhere.

  It was no longer enough.

  thirteen.

  She saw his careful approach through the grass and thought of wary feral animals.

  Marsden left the shade of the trees and headed toward the fence that enclosed the covert. The tattered wood held together by rusty nails had always marked the line between what was hers and not, what was secret and not. Meeting Jude here and agreeing to him crossing that line—well, that fence might as well have finally disintegrated into nothing for the sense of safety it gave her now.

  She’d wondered if he was even going to come that day. She’d mentally prepared herself for it and then she’d been anxious all morning, too restless to do much more than walk back and forth between the house and the covert. Being wired after being up half the night baking did nothing to help her nerves, either. Wynn had finally gotten bored enough to agree to getting groceries and then go raspberry picking with Dany. Dany herself seemed unaware of Marsden’s mood, as had Nina and Shine.

  So once noon hit, morning slowly becoming early afternoon, and still there was no sign of Jude, she’d assumed he’d either been busy or had simply come to his senses.

  But it had bothered her—to be honest. To be counting time so carefully over him, the thoughtless carelessness of his absence after intruding on her life with his sharp-yet-lazy grin and eyes that hid less than she would have thought. She couldn’t decide if she was relieved or resentful, and precisely because she couldn’t decide, she’d gotten the pair of giant hedge clippers from the shed and spent more than a few minutes ferociously hacking away at the worst of the blackberry bushes overrunning parts of the covert. The scent of wild ginger mixed with ripening fruit bloomed like dust from her tracks as she worked, a tornado of things being crushed.

  Last night, after she’d escaped Coop’s too-adult eyes, she’d found Wynn in the kitchen, messily attempting to make punch. Marsden had broken a plate, then a glass, while finishing up the dishes, her hands so shaky that Dany had to finish. Then, at bedtime, Wynn had drifted to sleep while talking about dresses and makeup. And Marsden had lain there, absolutely wide awake, willing her sister to dream of childlike things such as puppies and ice cream and feeding toast to hungry, needy squirrels. She’d watched the moon shift shadows on the wall, listening to the clock tick away minutes of an endless dark, before finally getting up, needing to pretend things
were different.

  She was examining the worst of the blackberry scratches on her arm when she heard the growing roar of an engine from just outside the covert. It cut out with a deep rumble, and she walked over to look.

  Through the trees, she saw Jude climb off a huge tank of a mower. The sight of his muscles working beneath his thin blue T-shirt had Marsden narrowing her eyes as something in her chest did a slow flip.

  They met at the covert’s fence.

  “There’s no real way to say this without it sounding wrong, but I’m here to mow your lawn,” he said, smiling.

  He looked tired and distracted, and that simmering anger he wore as an expression was a momentarily dampened fire. It made sense, though, his seeming on edge, perhaps even scared, considering where he was about to go. Maybe he hadn’t even slept well the night before—the covert liked being a part of bad dreams.

  She lifted a brow. “Not here to dig?”

  “Afterward, I promise.”

  “You were supposed to be here by noon.” She bit the inside of her cheek—she hadn’t meant to reveal she’d noticed.

  “I meant to be, but then a maintenance order came in from the town.” He gestured to the area just outside the covert’s fence, where the yellowing grass grew past the top of his work boots. “I had to put some gear together at work before I was able to leave.” He frowned at the ground. “This area is overdue for a cut.”

  “You really work for Glory?”

  “No, for Roadie, remember? Evergreen, the garden center, right downtown. We get contract work, though.” He glanced down at her. “You sound surprised.”

  “That you work at a gardening center?”

  His mouth lifted. “That I work.”

  “I just thought—never mind.”

  “That I didn’t have to because my family is supposed to have money?” Jude shrugged. “Not really. Maybe once, kind of. A long time ago. Before we moved here.”

  She lifted her chin at the mower behind him. “Is that your summer, then?”

  “And being here.”

  “I guess you haven’t changed your mind?” Now that he was here, right in front of her—too immediate, too tall, too not angry—Marsden wasn’t so sure she was ready. His being angry if he found out her secrets would be memorable, blistering.

  Jude pointed to what she was still clutching in her hand. “Is that for me if I say I haven’t?”

  She looked down, saw that she was still holding the pair of huge clippers, their blades and the skin of her arms a sticky, sweet carnage, and laughed. “This doesn’t look good, does it?”

  “Have you changed your mind?” His voice was low and braced and not threatening, but she still shuddered. His desperation had slipped through, and it spoke to her in ways that smooth words and convincing arguments wouldn’t have. She heard herself in it, an echo of her own need for answers.

  “No, I haven’t.” She let her gaze slide from his—those slightly speckled eyes of his were too curious, demanding more than she could give. “I’ll be back in a bit, if you don’t mind waiting. I need to clean up back at the house.”

  “I have to finish this job first, anyhow, then get this thing back to Roadie—the guy won’t relax until his baby is back home and resting easy. Then I’ll race back in the truck. Meet you back here?”

  Marsden nodded. “Here, right at the fence.” She touched it, the wood raw and scraping against her palm. Someone had scratched a new row of crosses into the wood, and their edges were still raised and splintery, fresh as a wound. “Wait for me before going in. That was the deal, remember?”

  “Until you trust me.” There was a glint in his eye that said he was joking. Still, she saw seriousness there, too. Had she ever seen him not serious at all? Completely free? She already knew she wanted to; her curiosity had awoken.

  “Maybe one day,” she said, daring a grin of her own. He made it easy to linger, to believe they were both typical kids without wounds still wide open, without ghosts to chase. “Unless I make you leave first.”

  “I’ll behave. I promise.”

  She stepped past him to get to the house. He smelled of herbs and clean earth and sun. He touched her arm just before she moved out of reach.

  “Marsden?”

  “Yes?”

  “Thanks.” Jude’s grin was like a finger on her heart, stirring her emotions. “For the ‘maybe one day.’ ”

  fourteen.

  He wasn’t playing fair.

  Jude Ambrose was supposed to be an ass, a guy who walked the school halls with either ice or fire in his eyes as he observed everyone, deciding if they were worth his time or not.

  That version of Jude would have been a lot simpler to deal with, Marsden thought, a lot easier to just dismiss or ignore. The one who couldn’t hide his devastation, the one arranging to meet her in the covert, was way too easy to understand.

  She tugged on a T-shirt free of blackberry stains and left her bedroom. She was about to go into the kitchen for the back door when she heard her mother.

  Shine’s laugh, coming from the lobby, was light and silvery and declared she didn’t have a care in the world.

  Both fascinated and dumbfounded—her mother never laughed like that, not off duty—Marsden retraced her steps and peeked around the corner.

  Shine and Brom, seated together on the love seat in the back of the lobby, half-shielded by a tall houseplant to offer a semblance of privacy. There was a pot of coffee and a plate of food on the table in front of them—two servings of the chocolate berry tart she’d baked just last night, she realized with a twinge of . . . what? Shock? Irony? Irritation? Brom kept talking, his hands moving animatedly from where he sat with his back to her, and Shine’s face as she watched him was girlish, almost embarrassingly rapt.

  If Marsden didn’t know any better, she would have assumed they were a couple. An average, possibly even married, couple. Anger washed over her, a tidal wave of choppy ice.

  Did her mother think what she did was merely a game? That she could set it aside and pretend she was anything but a whore whenever she felt like it? When her decision to be what she was still echoed in their lives every single day?

  With no idea of what she meant to do or say, she walked over and simply stood there. Her mother looked up. Whatever was on Marsden’s face made Shine stiffen. “Marsden.”

  Brom fell silent and turned toward her. His smile did nothing to make him less than repulsive to her. “Oh, hello.”

  Up close, his features were even blander than Marsden expected, an oval of oatmeal. Weak looking, his chin trembly and soft, and she wondered pettily how hard it was for her mother to work up such enthusiasm. Or if that blandness was actually his strong point—that he was, as far as anyone would say, easy to forget.

  She couldn’t work up anything close to politeness when she wanted him gone. “You’re a john,” she said to Brom. “This lobby is for guests. Unless you paid extra for day hours?”

  “Marsden.” Her mother’s whisper was properly shocked, unfailingly proper—Nina would be proud. “Please.”

  She remembered, then, what she’d meant to ask her mother since yesterday. If she hadn’t been waylaid with dinner, with Red and Coop, with Wynn and Jude, the boundaries of her everyday life, drawn by the boardinghouse, by the covert.

  She stared back at Shine. “I need to talk to you about Dad.”

  Her mother got up, circled the table, and grabbed Marsden by the arm. “Excuse me for a minute,” she said to Brom. “I forgot cream for the coffee.”

  She marched Marsden to the lobby bathroom, locking the door behind them. Shine leaned back against it and lit up a cigarette. “That was extremely rude.”

  “None of it was a lie.”

  Her mother sighed tiredly. “What is it? What do you need now?”

  “The night he died, Dad was at Decks, right? His favorite gambling house.”

  Shine’s expression hardened for a heartbeat before slackening. “You already know he was. Why?”


  “Who was he with?”

  “What? I don’t know. Whoever else was there that night, playing blackjack.”

  “No, you once said he was there with friends. The news said nothing, but I remember.”

  “The news? What are you—?” Shine’s confusion, if it was an act, was more than convincing. Her eyes roamed Marsden’s face. “There’s been some news?”

  “Not new news, no.” Suddenly, she felt bad about not being more careful. Her mother’s reaction surprised her, made her seem closer to the Shine she’d been, when she’d still been theirs and not yet Nina’s. Where was the denial, the tears, the childlike pleading? “I meant from eight years ago. Sorry. I just . . . You said he was there with friends. Who?”

  “Your father had a lot of friends—he was well liked in this town. It could have been anyone with him that night.”

  “But you must have known his best friends. Wouldn’t they have likely been the ones with him?”

  “Well, there was Eugene, but he’s gone now, moved away.” Her mother drew on her cigarette, recalling. “Casper, who’s in jail. Quaid, who died of an overdose last year. And Fitz, down at Seconds.”

  Fitz. The pawnbroker who bought Hadley’s skimmed pieces without question.

  How much of that was because the corrupt cop gave him no choice? What if Fitz had been the one to suggest it to Hadley?

  “Why didn’t any of the newspapers mention they were there?” Marsden asked.

  “They had no reason to, I suppose. He was never alone at places like Decks—that night was no different.”

  “Why didn’t you ask his friends about what might have happened?”

  “It was just one night out of hundreds, them gambling, all the same. I had nothing to ask. And if something had happened, they would have said something.”

  “Unless he didn’t leave alone. What if they followed him and—”

  “Stop, please.” Ashes trembled free from her mother’s hand. Her face was tired again, shaky looking. “Your father’s friends wouldn’t have hurt him. They adored him, thought he was cool and brilliant. Grant was like that, making people love him too easily. And it’s not like the police didn’t investigate.”