A full second before he could speak. “Marsden? What’s—?”
She dropped the gun until it was aimed at his crotch. “I said shut the door.”
He pushed the door shut with his foot and dropped his lunch onto the bed. The bag, stained with grease, had come from the Finneys’ café; the smells of chicken and balsamic vinegar and bread rose in the air. “Does your mother know you’re here?”
“Considering where I have this gun pointed, you sure you want to bring up my mother right now? I really preferred her as a housekeeper.”
His hands slowly lifted. “What do you want?”
“I’m going to ask you some questions, and you’re going to answer them. That’s all I want from you. Just simple yeses or nos.” I’m going to shake you like a Magic 8 Ball, Brom.
“Questions?” Confusion pulled his features tight.
“You and Nina are working together to steal from the guests here. She gives you access to the bank information the boardinghouse collects from them and you then access their accounts through your own work.” Bluff, bluff, bluff. “And don’t bother denying it—I found your notebooks. The one here and the ones at your house.”
Brom’s eyes went narrow and knowing, his mouth clenched at the corners. Wynn’s face, Marsden couldn’t help thinking, how it would look once she saw too much, knew everything.
“It’s true,” he finally said.
“Unless you want Hadley coming around to talk to you, then I need to know one more thing.”
He said nothing, only waited.
“You were there the night my father died. At Decks. You knew he won four grand. You followed him home.” More bluffing. She prayed her poker face was as good as her father’s had been. “You robbed him, didn’t you?”
Being suddenly asked about Grant Eldridge, a long-faded memory from the long-ago past, disoriented Brom, left him fumbling.
“He was my friend,” he managed. “For a long time. Of course I didn’t. Rob him, I mean.”
“But you knew he had that money.”
“I did. But I didn’t take it from him.”
“Don’t lie. And don’t forget where I have my gun pointed.” She heard her voice break, took a deep breath. “A friend told me to shoot to maim because it’s more painful. That in the end, they still have to cut it off.”
Brom swallowed so loudly she heard the click of it in his throat. “I . . . followed him for a bit. After he left his friends outside of Decks. Because, yeah, I was thinking about stealing it from him—it was so much money, and he was going home to Shine, and—I just couldn’t do it in the end, all right? Believe me or not, but I didn’t touch him. Last I saw, he was walking down the highway toward home. And I let him go. He was my friend, so I let him go.”
That night came to life in her mind, what she could remember of it, how she’d imagined it as she struggled through the article in the local paper. She saw the Indigo, a wild, foaming curlicue. The sky, sooty with clouds, shot through with white lightning like veins on the back of a grizzled hand. The air would smell like something burning on the stove, hot and humid and brimming with electricity.
Marsden stared at Brom and noted the way he met her gaze, took in how she’d always be connected to him through Wynn. She felt her heart ache for her own father, the mystery of his mind. And knew she couldn’t force a truth that didn’t exist.
“And now you’re sleeping with his wife, after chasing her for years,” she said. “What kind of friend does that?”
Contempt scrawled itself across Brom’s features in a fast-moving wave. It wiped away his fear.
“I’ve always been Shine’s second choice—first with Grant and then with this damn boardinghouse,” he snapped. Her question had broken open some kind of floodgate, she saw. “She’d rather have had him and all his failures than me. Even our own kid—she knew Wynn was mine, but still she wouldn’t leave this place. Do you know how infuriating that is? She chose any paying guy over being with me. And here, in this town full of people who are never going to stop wondering if she really understands them when they talk to her. She’s lucky I’m better than all of them.”
His rage had her flinching, left her as cold as the Indigo in deep winter. Only the thinnest of lines separated the mess of what this man felt for her mother, the way both love and hate existed in his heart for her. What existed for her father, too.
“Still, she’s kept me strung along for years, and now she’s finally chosen me.” Brom’s eyes glittered, the pulse at his temple pounded, and Marsden tightened her grip on the gun. “Thinking I’m her way out, me and my money, now that she’s realizing she won’t stay young forever. Well, I’m just returning the favor while I can—my turn to string her along. I’ll break her heart later, just when she thinks I’ll never say no.”
“You’re pathetic.”
“And your mother’s a whore.”
“She still chose my father over you, however weak or stupid he was. He’s dead, and you’re still nothing more than a last resort.”
He made a forward motion, kind of a half leap, and Marsden’s arms twitched, letting the gun jerk wildly for one single second before she steadied it. “Don’t think I won’t use this. The covert’s my backyard, remember? Dead bodies mean nothing to me.”
Brom fell back on his heels, suddenly beaten, his confession the draining of some pent-up poison from an old wound. “Are you done yet?” he muttered.
She tried to picture her father this defeated, how he must have been the instant he’d decided he would greet the terrible pull of the river, and instead she saw only the man who’d once smiled his way through drinking pretend tea with her.
Marsden lowered the gun. “I have one of your notebooks—show up here again and I’ll pass it around for all the dinner guests to see. And stay away from my mother.”
“Wynn. She’s my kid. What about her?”
“Eight years, and you’ve never said a word. You really want to start being a dad now?”
His silence, woven through with resentment, was answer enough. Then he nodded, and Marsden got up. She dropped the gun back into Peaches’s purse, pulled the strap back onto her shoulder, and left the room.
She found Nina less than a minute later, perched on the same love seat in the lobby where Shine and Brom had pretended to be people they weren’t. She only had paperwork on the table in front of her, though, and for one giddy, delirious second, Marsden wondered if she should bring over a slice of raspberry crumble from the kitchen before breaking the news.
Nina glanced up as she sat down beside her. Her expression was cautiously triumphant, a gloat barely held in check.
It slid away like butter off a hot pan as Marsden spoke.
“I know you’re helping Brom steal from the guests here,” she said in a low whisper. From across the room, there was the ringing of the boardinghouse phone before one of the staff picked it up; from the kitchen she heard the muffled clatter of ceramic and water being run into the sink. “For a thirty-percent cut. I don’t think even you could keep the boardinghouse going once word spreads about you being a thief. Don’t you agree?”
Nina’s rose-tipped nails—dug deep into her palms, like blades into fruit—went even deeper with each passing second, each uttered word. Her eyes tried to burn holes into Marsden’s, invisible fingers gouging invisible holes. “Perhaps.”
“Here’s our new deal now: I’ll keep quiet about it, and you give me back all the money you stole. The debts my family still owes you from taking us in are now paid off. And you won’t ask me to work as one of your girls again—if it’s all the same to you, I’ll just keep working in the kitchen, and back to full wages.”
A slow hiss from between her teeth, like that of a spent grenade. “Fine.” Nina bit out the word as though she’d been close to choking on it. “Are you done yet?”
Exactly what Brom had asked her. She hadn’t been done then but she was now, and she nodded. Without another word, Nina went back to her paperwork, and Marsden st
ood up, headed for the front entrance of the boardinghouse, and walked out.
forty-four.
The covert.
Shine had said it was unhealthy, her being there as much as she was, and maybe that was true. But Marsden had been drawn to the woods as soon as she saw Caleb Silas hanging from the tree, by the knowledge that her father was buried in its soil. And right or wrong, Duncan Kirby’s mad blood ran in her veins, as thickly as the wild ginger that grew in the place.
Still shaken from Nina and Brom, she turned from the boardinghouse and headed for the dark heart of Glory.
She saw the truck from Evergreen before she got there. It was parked haphazardly along the shoulder of the highway, just beyond the entrance to the covert.
Then she saw Jude, and the earth pitched.
He was clutching the open door of the truck as though it were the only thing keeping him from falling. Raw and bruised and clenched white, his knuckles unfurled over the window frame, shattered, adrift. One eye was puffed completely shut, his lips split, his cheek slashed open along the bone. His dark hair looked wet from blood, freshly varnished with it. She tasted it—hot and coppery, battery in liquid form—in her own mouth as she ran up to him.
While she’d been holding a gun to the man she’d thought responsible for her father’s death, Jude had met the drunken fists of his own father all over again.
Her eyes blurred, turning his face into streaks of garish color, pinks and reds and purples. She wanted to touch him, was deathly afraid to. “God, Jude, what happened?”
He shook his head, but just once, as though he hurt inside there, too. His eyes were absolutely hollow, their depths littered with shock. “You should have seen him.” Then he attempted to smile, and his lips started to bleed again, and he swiped at them with his hand. “Damn it.”
She pulled his arm away. “No, you’re being too rough.” She tried to blot away the blood with her fingers and felt a fresh wave of disgust for his father. “How could he do this?”
Jude tugged at her hand, turned it over, and lifted it to his mouth. “What I said to you earlier, back at the river . . .” His voice was hoarse, as though it’d been beaten along with the rest of him. “I’m sorry. I was an ass. My anger—sometimes I can’t control it. Sometimes I don’t stop it from getting that way.” He took a deep breath. “Sometimes it feels good.”
In her mind, the images were ugly and raw: Adam Lytton’s note in his hand, Rigby’s last words spilling from her mouth as he faced all the lies she’d spun, Abbot in Jude’s arms . . .
Marsden fell back a step, breaking his grip. Her heart pounded its way up along her throat, and the earth was still pitching.
“I did something terrible when I kept Rigby’s note from you,” she said. “I had no right to do that. So I’m sorry for that, too.”
“That part about you not mattering. That wasn’t okay to say.”
“It was, if it was what you felt.”
He narrowed the gap between them. Up close, his swollen eye was livid, awful, his father’s nursed rage collected into a single explosion. His other eye was hot with guilt, what she recognized in too many forms. “It wasn’t what I felt. Not even close, okay? You matter.”
“And if I told you I can’t stop being a skimmer? Wynn’s getting older, and I can’t hide everything from her forever.” An image of her sister popped into her head—grin a mile wide, telling Marsden she was the best cook ever, pouring achingly sweet lemonade for the first guy who’d ever come to the boardinghouse who she hadn’t been warned away from. “I can’t hide her forever.”
“She calls you Mars for a reason. And I know why you skim now. I do.”
She felt his understanding reach out for her, try to tell her things could be all right again.
“I saw you with Abbot,” she said softly, hating herself for still wanting everything, simply unable to stop. “Outside the Burger Pit. You literally went from me to her in minutes.”
Jude shut his good eye, swore under his breath, and opened it again. “I was upset after leaving you at the river. I drove back into town, not thinking straight, and decided I’d go see Theola again, bug her some more about what Rig might have said that she’d forgotten. But then I ran into Abbot, and she was just—We’re only friends. We’ve only ever been friends, and that’s all we’ll ever be.”
“I’m never going to make friendship bracelets for you.”
His brow wrinkled. “What?”
“You guys have this history, years and years of it. I’m not saying I want it, but I’m saying it’s never going to be ours. Should I be worried about never being able to catch up? That I’ll never be her?”
He made a sound like he was still being punched and his jaw went tight. “I don’t want you to be Abbot. I don’t want Abbot, period. I just want you.”
She stared at him, heart like thunder in her chest. She’d never wanted to believe words so badly. But the smells of blood and ginger filled her head and left her confused. His fury when he’d left her along the river, his regret now—which was more real?
“You can’t just do that,” she said.
“Do what?”
“Say you hate me and then decide to take it away. Because whatever made you change your mind about hating me could easily change it back again.”
“I won’t change my mind.”
“So what happened? What’s going on?”
Jude opened his mouth, shut it, opened it again. His eyes were dazed, defeated looking, even as they flickered with heat. “I . . . I found out something. After I left you.”
The air in the covert stirred, running through the trees, along her skin. “Tell me.”
“Did you know that you being a skimmer has actually kept Rig safe in this town? You taking his note and hiding it—if anyone else had found it, everything would have come out. Hadley would have gotten involved, there might have been an investigation, and everyone in Glory would know.”
“Know what?” She was completely bewildered. Rigby’s note—the meaning of his words, what he’d really been saying—was still a mystery to her.
“What he’d done.”
“What could your brother have done that would let you stop hating me?”
Jude swayed on his feet, pain written all over him. The sun glinted off his blood-streaked hair, and her stomach clenched.
“Marsden, I can’t ever hate you, but the thing is—” His voice broke, then split wide open like he was just as injured inside as he was on the outside. Tears turned his eyes wet as he stared at her, his expression suddenly helpless. “The thing is, after I tell you, you might hate me.”
• • •
She made him wait by the fence while she ran inside the boardinghouse for bandages. Not because she still didn’t trust him alone in the covert, but because she didn’t trust the covert alone with him. It was her woods, and she knew its trees and soil and concealed paths, could close her eyes and sketch out the entirety of the land. But hundreds of hours she’d waited for the dead to talk to her as they were supposed to, and still they never did.
The covert, sly and secretive the instant that Duncan Kirby’s mind broke and he picked up a gun. Who knew what games it would play with Jude, alone?
And now he finally had a secret. One he was compelled to tell her. Whatever it was, it had to be bad enough to make her no longer so terrible. So many responses were immediately on the tip of her tongue when he said she would hate him: What are you talking about? What do you mean? I could never hate you. But something had kept her from saying any of them before she’d stumbled away, whispering that he needed something for all his cuts. How she would be back in just few moments.
His secret terrified her.
Marsden was grateful to find the kitchen deserted, though just. A crumpled napkin and a smattering of crumbs still littered the top of the table, there was a dirty plate and fork in the sink, and the last of her raspberry crumble was gone. She imagined Nina, raging over her lost business investment, trying to dro
wn out her bitterness by finally indulging in more forbidden dessert, and was coldly glad.
Jude was sitting against the fence when she got back. At the sound of her approach, he straightened up to face her. Beneath the bruises and cuts, she watched his skin pale with the motion, all its umber and amber tones washing away.
“You need to move more slowly.” She knew she sounded stiff, but she couldn’t help it. Her nerves rippled in preparation for what he might say. “Sorry, it’ll take me a bit to use all this stuff on you.” Unsure of what she needed, she’d grabbed towels, bandages, a bottle of water, and aspirin.
“This is all going to hurt, isn’t it?” His voice was just as stiff as hers, but she also heard guilt there, etched all the way through, and it left her cold. He rinsed out his mouth, spat into the grass.
“Probably,” she said, knowing he was stalling and not caring—she wanted to stall, too.
She poured water from the bottle onto one of the towels and began to carefully dab the blood off his face, from his lips. Her hands shook as she touched him.
He sucked in a breath, and she passed him the aspirin and the rest of the water. The smell of ginger wafted over them, spicy and barbed and dizzying. The sight of pretty heart-shaped leaves everywhere only turned Jude’s injuries starker, more painful looking.
“Wynn always runs and hides when she cuts herself,” Marsden said. “I end up having to chase her down.”
Jude stared at her as she worked, his uninjured eye blinking at her like an inquisitive owl’s, a blaze of brown flecked with amber. “You’re comparing me to an eight-year-old?”
“You did ask.” She poured antiseptic on the towel and touched it to his face gently. “I’m sorry.”
He hissed through his teeth. “Damn, that stings. Tell Wynn she’s smart to run.”
Marsden smiled, and it felt about as hollow as her stomach. She wanted to run. She also wanted to stay, to be able to kiss him and keep him from telling her whatever he needed to tell.
He picked up her hand and wove his bruised fingers between hers, and she braced herself. “Rig’s note and what it meant . . . Marsden, my brother killed someone.”
Along the Indigo Page 26
