Along the Indigo

by Elsie Chapman

  She heard Jude mutter under his breath. She caught the words creepy and goddamn it and stupid Rig. It was almost enough to make her grin.

  Almost. Because she pushed aside a final handful of branches—filigreed, delicate, a gentle protest to their presence in this least-navigated and most-untouched part of the covert—and knew they’d reached where they’d been meant to go.

  It was the only part of the covert not burst through with trees and bushes. Negative space, a gap between the trees, a mini meadow of wild ginger. Out in the open, it would have called for picnics and dozing beneath the hot sun. Here, walking beneath the shade and nearly cool dampness, Marsden could almost believe someone would sink in and never come back out.

  Rigby had shot himself through the temple. The results had been devastating and destructive—she’d shut her eyes at seeing his body and had to steel herself to approach. She hadn’t fully looked at what was left of his face, and now she wondered if she would have seen some of Jude there. How much had they looked alike? How much of Jude had Rigby taken with him? How much of Rigby did Jude keep?

  Then the covert spoke, and she felt it through her feet, in her hands. It was like a rumbling of the ground, even as the earth didn’t shift an inch, and her entire body seemed to tingle.

  Was this—?

  “Do you hear that?” she asked. Her mouth was dry. “The covert. It’s . . .” Her words trailed away. She couldn’t explain it. It was like trying to describe a color only she could see, a flavor only she could taste. How could she define something she didn’t hear with her ears but felt along her skin, in her teeth, that was a quiver in her veins? She thought wildly of stories of animals that sensed earthquakes long before they came.

  Jude was confused, staring at her with dark, startled eyes. “No, there’s nothing.”

  “I think—”

  The echo came again—a trembling of the air, an unseen ripple that ran throughout the wood—and she hugged herself, chilled.

  She was listening to all the covert’s bones. All its blood. All its sins and guilt. From Duncan Kirby to his wife and kids and all the others who’d ever taken the passage of the covert—she was finally hearing the dead.

  Telling her what, though?

  “You’re hearing them.” Jude’s whisper was half-frightened, half-awed. He took her hand. “The dead. Their voices.”

  “I think so.”

  “What are they saying?”

  Marsden shook her head. “I can’t tell. I’m not—” She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and focused, trying to grab on to the invisible fingers she now sensed reaching out from the covert. A meeting of the minds.

  There were no words, but she heard them still. They washed over like water, like the wind, and she read them the way she might read the weather, a fever, a face.

  We speak now only in echoes, in traces of what once was—ash and dust and salt, from blood and bone and tears. And you hear us now because you’ve let us go. Because you know no answer will change us back from being that ash and dust and salt.

  Why can I hear you, if you have nothing to say?

  You hear what you are ready to hear.

  She opened her eyes when the covert’s fingers danced away from her brain. “No less cryptic than a Magic 8 Ball, really,” she muttered.

  Jude’s fingers squeezed. “Tell me.”

  “They’re saying whatever answers we might find in here, it doesn’t change what’s already happened. How finally figuring out how to be okay with that is a kind of answer.”

  He glanced around as though expecting ghosts to show themselves from within the trees, out of the air. “So they’re really here in the covert with us?”

  “No. More like”—Marsden laid a hand on his cheek—“I’m touching you, there’s no mark on your skin, but you feeling it is absolutely real, right?”

  “Why can you suddenly hear them now?”

  “Because I finally let the dead be free.”

  He tugged her close, kissed her. “I prefer the living, too.”

  They saw it a moment later, just a few feet away.

  The edge of a round blue tin poked out from the thick mat of ginger on the forest floor.

  They approached it as though it were alive, a skittish creature that would up and leave at one wrong move. Wynn’s squirrel came to mind, that first day at the fence outside the covert. When she’d shoved buttered toast into Jude’s hand and asked him to feed a wild animal, and he’d done it without hesitation. He’d been so lost, his face battered in invisible ways as he asked her for permission with a plea in his eyes. And then he’d grinned with that overly generous mouth of his, and she’d forgotten how he was supposed to be a stranger.

  They fell to their knees.

  “Holy shit.” He picked up the tin and slowly rubbed dirt from the rounded edge of it with his hand, a blue of velvety, glossy night skies gleaming through. “Can you believe it? I owe your sister big-time.”

  “Don’t tell her that, or you’ll never hear the end of it.” Then Marsden opened her mind to that tremble and felt for Rigby’s voice. Filled her head with her own message: Jude is okay. He loved you. You didn’t fail him.

  A single frisson that raced along her spine before it was gone. The sensation it left behind was like cobwebs on her hands, more unreal than real, almost impossible to gather back together and form into words.

  But she did, and that they left her almost cheered meant something, too.

  Jude was waiting, his hope reluctant and careful but still there, written all over his face. “Well?”

  “Rigby just . . . wants you to be fine. He knows you thought he was the best brother.”

  His eyes filled. “I miss him.”

  “He knows that, too. I could tell he knew even before I heard him.”

  Jude swiped at the flat surface of the lid. There were drawings of butter cookies on it—some with sugar on top, some iced, some twisted into knots. A strip of masking tape slowly appeared from beneath the veneer of old soil. Scrawled on it in faded childish handwriting was Property of Rigby Ambrose. Top Secret! For a single second, Marsden saw four scrawled lines echoing with desperation, of being haunted.

  “Should we take bets on what’s inside?” Jude asked. “I really have no clue what he might have put in here. I remember this tin now—our mom used it to hold her sewing supplies. After she died, he kept it for storing toys and stuff. But I don’t think we’re going to find baseball cards or marbles.” He shook it gently. There was little to no sound. “Definitely not marbles.”

  “It depends on when he buried it, what was important to him at the time. So it could just be baseball cards.”

  “But you don’t think so.”

  “I don’t think so.” Rigby’s life had been a landscape of deep hurts and sharp terrors, with only his love for his little brother keeping him from being buried beneath the two—he wouldn’t choose to leave behind anything that wasn’t equal in terms of feeling. She didn’t think he could, even if he wanted to. Feeling would have been all he knew, even the slow dying of that feeling as he got older, as his guilt begun to overshadow everything else.

  She touched the tin. The circumference of it was no bigger than a side plate, the kind Dany would set out in the dining room for dessert. But looking at it there in the deepest shade of the covert, the way Jude held it as though it were made of glass, it seemed much larger, oversize with significance.

  He pulled at the lid, but it didn’t budge at all. She watched as he kept trying to loosen it with no success and remembered how Wynn had also been unable to open it.

  After Jude swore loudly again, she held out her hand. “Here, let me take a turn before you start shouting at it.”

  She’d expected to struggle just as he and Wynn had, but the lid twisted loose from the tin nearly as soon as she touched it. The thought came and went, fleeting and disturbing: that the tin had wanted her to be the one to open it first. Not Wynn, and not even Jude. Oh, Rigby, what is this?

 
“You got it,” Jude murmured. His eyes were wide as he stared down at the still-covered tin.

  Marsden nodded. Then because she was scared and because it was Jude, she placed it between them. “Open it with me?”

  “Together?”

  “Together.”

  The lid hit the ginger-covered ground with a soft rustle. The hollow seep of stale air being released emerged from the tin, the final gasp of something dying.

  And time reeled back. Years disappeared. Rigby was alive with a knife and a bluff; Jude was nine and sleeping in the back of a truck; Marsden was eight and crying while her parents hated each other in the front room, while her father told her he’d had enough.

  Jude’s face was completely unreadable as she reached inside.

  A letter.

  And four thousand dollars cash.

  • • •

  I don’t know if this will ever be found. A part of me hopes it won’t be, because then I can keep telling myself none of it happened. Maybe I’ll even believe it one day. I’d wanted it for me and my brother, but not this way. The money feels full of bad luck, like there’s magic in it but none of the good kind. It tells me if we try using it anyway, we’re doomed. So that’s why another part of me does want someone to find it, especially if they can really use the money. Because I know it’s only cursed for us.

  I can’t keep it in my room anymore. Sometimes it feels alive. I see his face all the time, everywhere. I hear the knife splashing into the river. His skull when it hits the ground. I feel the water pulling at my shoes. It’s not just when I’m sleeping that I have nightmares.

  It happened so fast that I can’t remember much of it. I know I was supposed to walk away after he gave the money to me, that’s what I promised him. But then I couldn’t do it. It was like someone else was inside of me, telling me to not let him go. The same way I found myself lying about just accidentally hitting him with our truck. No one knows anything about this money either. Just like how no one knows that when I pushed that guy down, I had been thinking about Dad. That if he were somehow gone, life would be so much easier for me and my brother.

  I wish I could take it back, more than anything. That if I said I was sorry enough, it would change the past. Most days, I want to be dead, so it’ll stop replaying it in my head, except that I can’t leave my brother alone. Dad says he’s never going to drink again, and I want so badly to believe him. And he hasn’t broken his promise yet. So maybe this time he really means it.

  I saw a movie once about blood money. The idea is that a victim’s family gets repaid for their loss by the person who hurt them, or by the person’s family. So while this money isn’t really blood money, because it was his in the first place, maybe somehow it will still make it back to his family. It’s why I’m burying it here on their property, in the deepest, darkest part of the covert.

  forty-seven.

  There was a sound at the bedroom window.

  “Mars!” Wynn’s voice, sounding panicked from across the room.

  Again. A series of small, dull thumps.

  Something was being thrown at the window screen.

  “What is that, Mars?”

  Marsden opened her eyes to see Wynn sitting up in her bed. Moonlight shot in through the window and everything was tinted grays and blacks, smears of smoke. The outline of her sister’s bed hair was again the wild bristles of an oversize paintbrush.

  The sound came once more, still soft and now more than insistent.

  Marsden climbed out of bed, kicking aside the blankets she’d been using despite the heat of the day lingering in the night air, turning it soggy and full. Her pulse raced, her heart crept into her throat. She supposed it should have been caused by fear, but she knew it wasn’t.

  Jude. It could be no one else.

  She peered out through the mesh of the screen.

  He was standing out there just below the window, a mere blur against pale moonlight. His face was nearly hidden in the dark.

  Still, she would have known him anywhere.

  He must have seen her move behind the mesh, because he lifted his arm in a wave.

  Marsden pushed open the screen and leaned outward, letting the slightly cooler night air wash over her skin. The moon had left a thin silvery sheen on everything, wiping away the hot, dry dust of day. Farther beyond him, she could see the swaying treetops and scraggly brush of the covert, the shadowed line of the fence that encircled it. It was just hours ago that they’d walked through it, holding a tin full of cash and with the knowledge they could finally stop listening for the dead.

  “What are you doing?” she called down in a loud whisper.

  “I was trying to be goddamn romantic.” There was embarrassed, disgruntled laughter in his voice. “I wanted to wake you up by tossing pebbles at your window.”

  The corners of her mouth twitched. “You were aiming wide—you kept hitting the screen.”

  “Crap, sorry. I have a good arm, I swear—I blame only having one eye. Anyway, I couldn’t sleep—I forgot that Karey and Langston snore like hell when I said I’d stay over. And . . . I wanted to see you.”

  Heat rose along her cheeks. “It’s the middle of the night.” She tried to sound like boys coming to her window after midnight was an ordinary occurrence.

  “I like nights. Plus, chocolate-chip waffles, if you’re up for it?”

  She laughed. “Come to the kitchen door.”

  “Okay.”

  She pulled the screen shut and turned around. “Go back to sleep,” she said to Wynn. “I won’t be long.”

  “I wasn’t sleeping—and neither were you. I could tell by the way you were breathing.”

  No, she hadn’t been remotely close to sleeping. Thoughts of Jude and the day had crept into her brain and wouldn’t leave.

  Her father’s winnings were in an envelope, folded into an old winter scarf tucked into the highest shelf in her closet. She could have stuck the bills into her boots as she’d done with cash from the covert since she was nine, but it felt wrong. Like going backward. Even the money that Nina had already returned—silently, coldly, her mouth set in her familiar moue of displeasure as she handed it over—was now stored elsewhere, a coffee container Marsden had taken from the pantry that she’d emptied of its fragrant contents.

  After finding Rigby’s tin, Marsden had led Jude to where her father was buried in the covert and listened for him. Eight years, and she’d never guessed the truth of his dying—she wanted him to know she would no longer wonder about him, all her questions had been answered. I don’t hate you. I’ve never hated you. I’m sorry you’re no longer here. His voice had rolled in like soft thunder, so that for a handful of seconds, the woods blurred and the air felt full of echoes. She’d cried at his understanding, at finally accepting what was.

  A part of her still hurt to think that he’d died for that money—that in a way, his life hadn’t even been worth the four grand, since Rigby had panicked anyway and still ended up killing him. But she understood panic, too, understood desperation and how it could make someone do things that could lead to the unthinkable. When she thought about her father from now on, she wouldn’t always automatically think of the river or of rainstorms at night. Instead, she’d think about how he liked the radio loud and his pretend tea spiked with pretend sugar.

  She grabbed a T-shirt from the closet to wear over her tank top. “I know you were sleeping, Wynn, because of the state of your hair.”

  “It’s Jude outside, isn’t it?” In the half-light, her sister resembled their mother more than Brom, more Marsden than a stranger of a father. “Do you like him?”

  “Yes, I do. Is it okay if I do?”

  “He’s nice—and he likes your waffles. But he sure gets into lots of fights. I guess because he looks like he wants to fight a lot of the time.”

  Marsden grinned and pulled on the shirt. “He doesn’t really want to fight all the time.”

  “Was the cookie tin his brother’s?”

  “Yes. No
w go back to sleep.”

  Wynn slid back beneath her covers. Marsden noticed she hadn’t bothered to change out of her clothes from the day, as was typical.

  “He killed himself, just like Lucy did,” her sister said.

  Images of Rigby and Lucy, each covered in blood, a boy named for a song, a girl with Alice in Wonderland hair.

  Marsden sat on the edge of Wynn’s bed, unsure of what to say. Until Lucy, her sister had never known any of those who died in the covert. And until Rigby, she supposed, simply because he’d been Jude’s brother. “He did, yes.”

  “He listened to that voice in his head, then—just like Lucy listened to hers. If he’d been like Grandma, he might have had someone else to listen to, since he was in the covert.” Wynn drew the covers to her chin, sounded sleepy again already. “Sometimes, lately, I hear them. I wonder how close it is to what she used to hear.”

  A chill ran through Marsden’s blood. “You can hear the dead?”

  “Not words or anything. But a really strong feeling that tells me something.”

  “Finding Rigby’s tin out there today”—Marsden shivered, remembering how she’d heard the dead with her bones, with her teeth—“was it not because of the detector?”

  “It was. But it also wasn’t. I just . . . knew where to go. And then it was there.”

  “Wynn, I can hear them now, too.”

  Her sister sat up like a shot. “Really?”

  Marsden nodded. She wasn’t sure if she wanted Wynn being able to hear the dead—not that it was up to her—but she felt better that neither of them was alone in it. “Let’s keep this our secret—you know Mom doesn’t like you in the covert anyway.”

  “Have you talked to her?”

  Marsden had not seen Shine since Brom and his confession about his stealing, the admittance of his strange and twisted love for her and her dead husband. The topic of why she’d told Nina about the money remained untouched and was an eruption in the making. Now, Marsden was no longer sure she wanted it to erupt. What could she say that wouldn’t just be making things worse between her and Shine? She didn’t know if she could trust her mother to ever pick her or Wynn over Nina—worse, she didn’t know if she cared that it didn’t really matter anymore. “Talk to her about what?”