one.
This early in the summer, Marsden hadn’t yet remembered how far sound could carry coming from an open window.
She half scowled as she looked back at the boardinghouse, the lights from the exposed bedrooms blazing into the near dusk like eyes from the shadows. Echoes of Nina’s brisk instructions—softer lipstick, bolder eyebrows, heels should be taller than four inches—swirled out into the air from behind mesh screens. Low murmurs as the girls fixed one another’s hair, as they chose between dresses, as they wondered who would be the unlucky one that night, the one to end up with the oldest john or the ugliest. The cheapskate. The fetishist.
Her mother, she knew, mostly dreaded the old ones. Shine feared age as though it were contagious, the weakness she said it was.
“Marsden, you’re tipping the bucket! We’re losing berries!”
“What? I’m not.”
“You are.”
She glanced down at the ice-cream bucket in her hand, saw that her little sister was right, and tilted it back to save the rest of the berries they’d just picked. Saskatoon ones, purple as night, hard as gems—they would still be more tart than sweet. Marsden knew they could have used more time on the bush, but when Wynn had suddenly wanted to get her hair done with the girls, offering to take her out into the half-dark to pick berries for homemade strudels had been the first thing to pop into Marsden’s head. Bribery: She would never be above it if it meant saving Wynn from the truth.
Still, she hadn’t missed her sister’s occasional glances back toward Nina’s girls and the boardinghouse as they moved toward the berry bushes at the edge of the covert—wistful, still longing. She’d understood it, even, despite not wanting to—that strange wish to get to know them well enough to call them friends, the ache to be surrounded by their sheer number, to let herself be cradled and wanted and accepted.
Wynn tugged at more branches. Berries fell into the bucket, plunks like rain on a roof. Marsden sucked at her thumb, still pricked from when it’d met a thorn, and blood ran into the tastes of dinner—salmon with dill and cream, grilled tomatoes—still lingering on her tongue. As one of two cooks for the boardinghouse, she’d made the dish dozens of times before. It was one of Nina’s favorites to serve guests.
Suddenly, her sister froze, her gaze locked on something past the line of berry bushes, and dread rolled into Marsden’s stomach. Because she knew, even before her eyes chased Wynn’s and saw what they saw deeper in the covert, lit up by the falling sun like a piece of shiny foil among all that dark green forest.
The body was a pale slash, and Marsden sighed—too late to try to hide it from Wynn. She’d checked the covert just that morning as always. But she’d been in a hurry—now that school was out, she had less time to comb the grounds before her sister was awake and up, wanting to play. She cursed herself for not being more careful, summer for existing, and Nina for wanting Wynn out of the boardinghouse in the mornings while johns were still slipping away.
“I bet she used a gun,” Wynn finally said, no longer frozen but contemplative—nearly clinically so—as she analyzed the presence of one more dead person found in the covert. Seeing her like that dismayed Marsden, though she wasn’t surprised. Wynn had grown up with the covert’s secrets and not-so-secrets. This was all normal to her. “It’s what I would use,” her sister continued.
“Don’t say that. It’s morbid.”
“What do you think she used?”
Marsden sighed again. “Probably a gun.”
“It wouldn’t have hurt, right?” Wynn grabbed Marsden’s hand. In the dim light, Marsden saw that berry juice had turned the tips of their fingers the shade of new bruises. The taste of blood on her tongue seemed to surge. “However that person died?”
Love flooded Marsden. In that moment, her sister was such the ultimate kid—choppy black hair askew all over her head like upturned paintbrushes dried wrong from inside a jar. How she hadn’t bothered changing her outfit from yesterday: a Jem and the Holograms T-shirt spotted with grass stains, a pair of baggy cutoffs, a striped rainbow belt with a drooping tail. She was even wrapped up in kid smells: sweat, cheap strawberry-marshmallow candy, the dusty outdoor burn of early July heat.
“Right, Mars?” Wynn pressed, needing to know, her fingers squeezing. Her bones felt as fine as a sparrow’s. At eight, her sister was tiny for her age, as Marsden herself had been—and still was, at sixteen—both of them sparse and stunted and wiry. Like plants grown beneath strange light, the town sometimes still said. “It would have been quick?”
Marsden nodded, though she had no real clue. Wynn knew she had no clue. She wasn’t really asking about how, anyway—more why. And that was a question they could never really answer for sure. Suicide notes, if they were found, had little meaning but for the person they’d been written for.
Marsden got a glimpse of pale skin through the trees, of blond hair splotched with the telltale darkness of blood. “It wouldn’t have hurt, no. Out like a light. Totally painless.”
“You’re guessing.”
“Why ask if you’re not going to believe me, runt?” She flicked a crumb from Wynn’s nest of hair—buttermilk waffle. Her sister had brought one along with her, a leftover from breakfast that she had crumbled into the grass to feed the squirrels.
“I do believe you.” Wynn chewed the plum-tinged thumb of her free hand; a sliver of nail coiled out from between her teeth like apple skin off a peeler. Bodies changed her covert, made it dangerous. She was never scared of the land, though sometimes Marsden wished she were, just a bit—it would make life that much easier, her sister not wanting to play there. Wynn’s expression was thoughtful as she looked up at Marsden. “But I bet Grandma wouldn’t have had to guess. I bet she would have known for sure.”
Wynn had never known their grandmother on their mother’s side, who’d died before she was born. But she’d heard all the stories and was familiar with the legend Star Liu had been in town. How she could hear the dead. How she could connect with them as a service.
“If Theola were here, maybe she could tell, too,” her sister continued.
Marsden snorted. She pictured their dead grandmother’s old friend: gaudy floral dresses, oversize feathered hats, a probing stare that tried to unearth all kinds of foul, shameful things from your mind. Old Theola Finney dressed bigger than the town, but her advertised psychic abilities said she fit Glory just fine.
“Theola tells fortunes down at her café, Wynn. Looks deep into your eyes and tells you your future.”
Wynn pulled her hand free. “I like her, even if you think she’s a liar.”
“I never said she was a liar. I just don’t think she tells the truth. It’s not the same thing.”
“How come we can’t hear the dead talk if Grandma could?” Her sister was staring at the body again. “Mom used to be able to, too, she says. So why can’t we? Don’t you wish we could?”
The summer heat—which was always bad in Glory, where it built into a thick shimmering wall that wouldn’t tumble down until nearly October—suddenly seemed cold. “Not really, no,” Marsden said.
“But—”
A laugh wafted out from the boardinghouse—a soft trill, perfectly crafted to appeal, their mother’s when she was working—and Marsden found herself scowling again. Still, it meant that all of Nina’s girls would soon be in their rooms for the night, and she could stop worrying about Wynn accidentally seeing what she didn’t need to see.
“Listen, you know the deal, if we ever see anything in the covert . . .” She dug a dollar bill from the pocket of her shorts. “It’s still light enough out, and the corner store won’t be closed yet.” Gwen carried Wynn’s greatest weaknesses, Kraft caramels and elasticized candy bracelets. “Go eat some sugar. I’ll come get you when I’m done checking.”
Wynn eyed the money and moved on from chewing her thumb to her pinky. Her expression was torn. Marsden knew that look. It said her sister wanted to be old enough to face the ugliest parts of the covert. It also said she wanted to pretend she didn’t come from a family whose name had long become synonymous with death.
Finally, Wynn shrugged, spitting out another sliver of nail. “Want me to bring the berries to the kitchen first?”
Marsden shook her head. “No, we’ll just grab them on the way back.” Another day bought. Still, her relief at saving Wynn from one more body in the covert was already fizzling away. Wynn saw Glory’s businesses during the day and assumed appearances were everything. Her sister had no clue that home—her beloved boardinghouse and the town’s best-rated overnight lodging among tourists—was also the town’s most popular brothel. She had no idea that Nina was more their captor than their savior. How much longer before she got old enough to decide Nina’s girls were more fun than her dull, worried sister?
Wynn began to head down the path toward the shed for her bike. “Want me to buy licorice for you, Mars?”
“Sure. Black.”
“Barf.”
“Not the rope kind, either”—she grinned for her sister’s sake—“but the kind that comes in big, fat chunks.”
“Double barf.”
“And don’t bother Rupert at the back of the store, even if Gwen says it’s fine.” Gwen’s brother-in-law ran his bookie side business out of the staff room. “See you in a few minutes, runt.”
She watched Wynn disappear from sight as she followed the wooden fence that separated the covert from the rest of the town, her family’s property from the rest of Glory. Hewn and nailed together by the bare hands of their long-dead great-grandfather, the snaking chain of timber seemed as old as the earth. The For Sale sign that was nailed to it was nearly so, the words on it faded away to nothingness. No one wanted land whose soil would always bleed red, that crawled with ghosts and strange stories and decades-old myths. The town itself had no reason to buy it from her mother when the covert—as morbid as it was—was nearly as much a tourist draw as the midnight casinos and gambling houses. Shine had long ago declared the place unnatural and unbearable; Marsden couldn’t remember the last time her mother had set foot in it.
If there had been potential buyers for the covert, then none offered the price Shine wanted for the only thing she truly owned. This, Marsden could understand—the setting of a price for freedom was something she still did every day, calculating, wondering which corners could be cut.
She turned into the covert, toward the body, and hoped there would be cash for her to steal.
Cash: the one thing that would get them out of the terrible, death-ridden town they called Glory.