“Most. Some of them—like those Gibson ones on the side—I got from one end to the other all right, but that’s about all.”
She pictured Jude lying on a couch with a book, his expression completely lost and close to furious, and laughed. “They’re your books as much as they were Rigby’s, you know. Not just because he gave them to you, either.”
“What do you mean?”
You said are Rigby’s books, not were. When are you going to start feeling okay saying were? “They’re just . . . more Eddie Murphy movies that you guys saw together.”
Jude’s grin held a trace of sadness. “I like that. I bet Rig would have liked it, too.”
Marsden moved along the shelf, saw piles of old Archie and Richie Rich comics nestled alongside the books. Bundles of hockey cards, a bright blue yo-yo.
“You’ve got as many toys on this bookshelf as you do books,” she said.
“Hey, comics are books.”
Then her eye caught on something that made her smile.
She wrestled out the Magic 8 Ball. The black sphere was covered with scratches and scrapes and dust, a hand-size planet with a liquid core. “For example.”
“Wow. I’m ten years old, seeing that again.”
“Now you can give Theola a run for her money.” Marsden sat down on his bed, already flipping the toy.
“That was my plan all along.” Jude sat down beside her, rumpling the already rumpled sheets, and she tried not to think about that fact and where they were and that they were alone in the house.
“I used to have one of these,” she said, “but one day the die just stopped showing.” The sloshing sound was deeply familiar as she tilted it, as was watching faces of the small die appear through the viewer window, the tiny blue bubbles that accompanied it like froth from a surf. Star had given it to her, too amused with such a thing to not bring it home from the store, she’d told her. Shine had given the Magic 8 Ball a look of disgruntlement but had otherwise left Marsden alone, refusing to say a single word.
Jude reached over and wiped off the dust from the small viewer window with a swipe of his thumb. She passed it to him, and he tilted it. The die inside slowly floated up through blue liquid. IT IS DECIDEDLY SO.
“What was your question?” she asked, realizing she wasn’t even joking.
He flushed all the way to his hairline. “Uh, something about dinner.”
She laughed, was aware all over again of that word want, how it’d infiltrated her brain, her blood, made her reckless. “You’re an incredibly bad liar.”
“I know.” His gaze turned hot. She felt it on her skin.
Acting on absolutely nothing but instinct, Marsden moved to lie down on the bed. She turned on her side, inhaled his scent from his pillow, and tried not to think. “Come here.” She touched the bedspread next to her.
He opened his mouth to say something but abruptly stopped. He shut his mouth again, then simply peered down at her on his bed.
Her pulse was a jackhammer, and she felt the first stirrings of a terrible and long-lived embarrassment.
“I asked if you being here was a good idea,” Jude said quietly.
IT IS DECIDEDLY SO.
Marsden took the toy from his hand and placed it on the bed in front of her. “So come here. Magic 8 Ball orders.”
“I can’t.” His voice was low, rough as fresh timber.
“Why not?”
“Because. I might never get up again.”
She felt her own skin flush all the way from her toes to the top of her head. “There’s something to be said about you going all out with the honesty thing.”
Jude twisted over until he was lying down facing her, his face only inches away from hers on the pillow. Marsden knew, then, what it was like to have self-control slowly and definitively become untethered.
From the stereo, the Shindiggs song that had been playing suddenly surged into full chorus—She likes the city but hates the maaaaan—shattering the odd, delicious tension of the moment, and they both began laughing, hard.
“God, this song is awful,” Jude finally choked out when he could speak again. “I don’t know how Rig did it for all that time.”
She wiped an eye. “Didn’t you end up having to listen to them, too?”
“You’re right, let me fix that. I don’t know how I did it.”
“Hey, they were big for a reason, you know.”
“Well, it wasn’t taste.”
She grinned. “I like them. Don’t make me challenge you.”
He picked up the Magic 8 Ball. “Do the Shindiggs suck?” He flipped it. “MY REPLY IS NO.”
It took them longer to calm down this time, to just let the music play without breaking out into fresh laughter. Marsden knew it had nothing to do with the Shindiggs and everything to do with the strain of the last few days, the covert having slid into their hearts like an uneven beat, into their minds like a nightmare for the day, the pain-pleasure question mark of whatever she and Jude were becoming. That moment of loosening their grip, just a bit—it was like coming up for air before the final plunge.
She cleared her throat and gestured to the Magic 8 Ball. “I have a real question for this thing now.”
“Sure. Go.”
“Ask how many days until we find your brother’s time capsule.”
Jude smiled, uncertain. “What?”
“I’m serious.” And despite still being half-breathless from laughing, from lying so close to Jude she could feel his body heat, she now also felt a strange chill along her skin, the dance of skeletal fingers straight out of a graveyard. “Because even though it’s just a toy, we’re also in Glory. And Glory has its own rules.”
He nodded, though his eyes remained hesitant. “Only yes or no questions, remember?”
“Oh, right. Okay, so ask if we’ll find it.”
“Will we find Rig’s time capsule?” He flipped the Magic 8 Ball with one hand. “ASK AGAIN LATER.”
Marsden frowned. “Ask again.”
“I think later means later later.”
“Humor me.”
“Will we find Rig’s time capsule?” Two flips. “CANNOT PREDICT NOW. See?”
“Stupid toy.”
Jude snorted.
She shut her eyes. Her brain was on overdrive, fueled by the oddity of lying on his bed and needing to find some kind of truth from a toy. She saw the covert, the river, her father, each image seared into the back of her eyelids.
“Can you please ask if I’m ever going to hear the dead, so I can know for sure why my father left that day?” she whispered.
“It’s a toy, Marsden.” His voice was soft, infinitely understanding.
“I know,” she said, still whispering, staying in the dark. In her head, she was running, hands out, soil flying beneath her shoes, ginger as thick as mist in the air. Her lungs hurt with exertion, her heart burst with her wishes—I’m listening, I’ve always been listening!
She heard him ask and then read out the answer. “REPLY HAZY, TRY AGAIN.”
“Am I meant to hear the dead?”
“BETTER NOT TELL YOU NOW.”
“Now I know what really happened to my Magic 8 Ball,” she muttered. “It didn’t stop working—I just threw it away because the thing refused to give me the right answers.”
“At least you weren’t a demanding kid?”
Marsden opened her eyes. She was staring at Jude’s mouth, hovering so close to hers, and decided she wanted, more than anything else at that moment, to taste it. Him. Them, together.
She laid a hand on the side of his neck, let her fingers slide up and around to touch the back of his head, and stopped when she touched a curve of scar tissue.
“Stitches—the doctor never questioned Rig’s story about my falling off my bike.” His gaze was clear and unflinching. “My father never has bad aim.”
She saw in her mind’s eye the crescent of a dent in the kitchen wall, smashed in by a flying beer bottle, and knew she could hate Leo Ambrose for
ever. “Anyone ever tell you the scar’s in the shape of a horseshoe? Which means it’s a sign of luck.”
Jude smiled. “I knew the shape, just never thought of it as a good-luck thing.”
“Saving it. For one day.”
“Today.”
Marsden moved her hand to push his black hair out of his eyes, all thick waves between her fingers. “Ask if we’re ever going to kiss.”
The Magic 8 Ball slipped from his grip. It careened off the bed and smashed onto the floor behind him with a distinct crack.
He swore, loudly and without restraint.
She felt herself melt, felt her heart ache. “Well, now we’ll never know.”
Jude leaned up onto his elbow, wound one hand into her long, dark hair, and found her mouth.
thirty-five.
From where she sat on Peaches’s yellow patch of bed the next morning, Marsden watched Nina’s proudest worker and knew they’d both changed.
She wasn’t supposed to be anything but happy to hear that Peaches was leaving. Peaches was Peaches. She’d always been abrasive, overly blunt, half enjoying Marsden’s discomfort over the years. She had a hard heart, and only Lucy had been able to break it down.
But Lucy was gone, and Marsden never thought she’d see Peaches the way she was now—smaller, faded, beaten, made strangely vulnerable with brittleness. This Peaches, if Marsden squinted in just the wrong way, could easily remind her of her mother.
“Are you headed to Seattle, then, or just wherever?” She plucked at the blue pillow she held in her lap. On the bed next to her knee was Peaches’s camera, returned.
Brom’s photo was in her pocket. She’d tucked it there before coming to Peaches’s room, thinking she would simply drop off the camera and then leave for Seconds. But then she saw Peaches packing, preparing to leave the boardinghouse and Glory. And because she didn’t tell Marsden to go away, Marsden had come inside and sat down, wanting to say goodbye but unsure how.
Also in her pocket was a letter addressed to Adam Lytton with a dollar bill inside, no return address. It was the name of the last man from the covert. She’d found it by flipping through the newspaper that morning. She would mail it that afternoon. One more absolution she would never earn.
Peaches fished in the depths of a worn duffel bag she’d placed on top of the bed. It seemed out of place with the rest of the room, and Marsden guessed it was the same bag she’d arrived in Glory with, hitching a ride into town with Lucy five years ago.
“Just wherever.” Peaches tucked sneakers into the duffel. “But first, I’m going to Florida. There’s someone there I have to see.”
“Lucy was from Florida.”
“Yes, I know.”
She heard cool danger in those words. “Would she want you going to see this person in Florida?”
Peaches smiled, but it was hard and miserable, her eyes too shiny; Marsden couldn’t help but think of Jude as he was when he first came to her. Standing at the fence to the covert, nothing but bleak anger in his eyes. Not the Jude who’d kissed her last night like he couldn’t get enough, but the Jude who’d already seen too much and no longer cared.
“Ooh, no, probably not.” Peaches’s wink felt perfunctory, part of an old performance that was hard to shake. “But she always knew I had a hard time backing down from a fight.”
“Who is it? Someone in her family?”
“There’s a reason why Lucy never talked about her past.”
“You know about it, though, don’t you?”
Peaches nodded. “It only took about three years of being friends for her to finally tell me. But I’d kind of already guessed, putting together all the little things she’d let slip.”
“She said when she got here, working for Nina seemed like her only option. So she couldn’t go home, even if she wanted to?”
“There were no legal reasons why she couldn’t go back. But she didn’t leave home on a whim, the way I did. Lucy left because she no longer felt safe.” Peaches carried over a plain jewelry box—like the duffel, it didn’t match the room, and Marsden wondered if it’d been a gift from a john—and began to go through it. Her painted nails caught on earrings and flashed through paste gems. “Just because someone is blood doesn’t mean they won’t hurt you.” Her voice was tired, desolate—Marsden heard the anguish of Lucy’s absence in it. “Sometimes someone being blood means they think it’s their right to hurt you.”
The image of Jude as a little kid, damaged. Her own mother, begging Marsden to save her. “Lucy was beaten?”
Peaches said nothing, only looked harder at her. “You’re sixteen now, right? And Wynn is eight?”
Marsden nodded.
“Well, Lucy was twelve and defenseless, and I guess I’m feeling the need to let a particular someone know exactly what happened to that little girl.”
“So they can feel guilty?” Her stomach churned with growing awareness of what might have happened. And she thought of Wynn, who trusted way too much. How she was the one who’d kept her that way.
“No, because guilt means getting to feel sorry, and they don’t get to have that. Straight-up shame is what I have in mind.”
“Don’t get hurt.” Don’t be hurt, Marsden wanted to say, wished could be true.
Peaches’s laugh was flat, entirely humorless. “I’ll be fine. And I might even be back—I’ve never hidden that I don’t hate my work. I’ll decide later, when this is done, when things might start feeling bearable again.” Her gaze sharpened, turned knowing. “Has Nina asked you to work for her yet?”
The blue pillow shrank down within the sudden clench of Marsden’s fingers. She said nothing. Couldn’t.
Peaches moved over to her bedside table, pulled open the drawer, and took out a small handgun.
Marsden sat up straighter. In Glory, guns—real guns, not just the toy ones Red and Coop carried with them—were about as common as bad debts and hangovers, and she saw her share of them in the covert, left behind by their owners. But she’d never held one, was always careful to leave them untouched. “Have you always kept a gun in there?”
Intense grief crossed Peaches’s face. “Lucy told me once that she thought she should get one, too, dealing with johns, but I convinced her not to. I was worried she wouldn’t know how to use it, or she’d get in trouble if something went wrong. But I think another, smaller part of me also worried she’d use it for another reason, one that had nothing to do with protecting herself.”
“She didn’t use a gun, though,” Marsden said quietly.
“I know. It doesn’t change how I wish that that small part of me hadn’t been so small.” Peaches inspected the gun more closely. “If you decide to surprise the hell out of me by accepting Nina’s offer, just know what you’re getting into. And remember, aim to maim and go for pain.”
“Seriously?”
“It’ll be enough to stop them, and in the end, they’ll probably still lose it. How very unfortunate.”
“Who you’re going to see in Florida—you’re not going to take the gun, are you?” The possibility had hit Marsden like a slap. Imagining Peaches holding that gun with Lucy in her eyes.
“No.” Peaches’s lips curled into a scowl. “Though I considered it, because it felt good to. But if she wouldn’t want me going in the first place, there’s no way I can convince myself that she’d be okay with me killing him.” She slid the gun back into the drawer, her shoulders seeming slumped with defeat. “And I only ever got it for work—it seems right that it stays here. I’ll have to let Nina know about it before I leave.”
Marsden slowly pulled Lucy’s necklace from around her neck and off over her head. “I took this when I found her. I know she’d want you to have it.”
Peaches reached out and took the thin silver chain. Her eyes narrowed. “You make it a regular habit to lift jewelry from bodies you find in the covert, Marsden Eldridge?”
“I didn’t want it getting lost.”
“That’s not really an answer to my question, is
it?” But Peaches slipped the necklace over her head, smoothing down her auburn hair—it looked right on her, just as right as it’d looked on Lucy. Her eyes were wet. “She bought this when she thought she’d finally escaped the past and could stop blaming herself. But I guess you don’t really, not entirely. You can knit broken bones back together, but everyone knows they’re still not the same. And Lucy felt those breaks more than she didn’t. I should have been better about those times she didn’t. I should have helped her make them last longer.”
But Lucy had heard the call of the covert, Marsden knew, the one made powerful by the dark magic that ran in her family’s blood, that twisted Glory into what it was. And whatever guilt Lucy hadn’t been able to shake, it drew her to the land’s promise of being saved.
It made Marsden hate the covert all over again, for being not just a place of tragedy, but also one of trickery. She hated her name and blood for having written that story, the town for not fighting harder against reading it. She hated herself for still needing the covert anyway.
thirty-six.
She said goodbye to Peaches and left the bedroom. Walking down the hall toward the lobby, Marsden shivered despite the summer heat that simmered through the walls.
Since yesterday’s discovery of Lucy’s body in the covert, a kind of uneasy edginess had burrowed its way into the boardinghouse. It was as though whatever invisible boundary had kept the two places distinct was slowly falling away, letting both sides bleed into each other. Nina’s girls, normally a chatty, giggling group, went quiet and thoughtful. It’d been Lucy who had fallen prey to the covert, one of their own, a reminder that living in the boardinghouse didn’t mean they were any safer from the woods’ darker side than anyone else in Glory.
Reactions inside the house varied.
Peaches, of course, was leaving.
To keep Wynn from the covert, their mother signed her up for afternoon swimming camp. Wynn had barely reacted to the sudden loss of freedom, she’d been so shocked about Lucy.
Along the Indigo Page 21
