twelve.
The sky was nearly fully dark, the air close to cool on her bare arms. An owl hooted from within the covert.
They could have gone back inside long ago.
Any johns checking in for the night would have long done so. Just as Nina’s girls would already be tucked away with them in their bedrooms, ready to get to work.
The common areas would be mostly empty, guests off to enjoy the shady offerings of downtown Glory that came with sundown.
Dany would be in her room, probably watching Dallas or The Golden Girls or Miami Vice on television, and who wouldn’t mind at all if Wynn or Marsden wanted to watch with her.
Still, Marsden didn’t move. She leaned back against the fence of the covert—the sunburned dying grass was nearly up to her elbows, she would have to cut it soon—and tasted the wild ginger that filled the air. It billowed from the woods, its fragrant fingers reaching out and stroking her hair, her skin.
She shivered. The covert was no sanctuary from the boardinghouse, either. Not from her mother, not from Glory as a whole. It grew a darkness of its own, its yield the regular harvest of bodies and the subsequent ghosts and legends that would forever chase her name, forever linger in her blood.
Beside her, Wynn, humming a pop song from the radio, was dribbling the last of her pudding onto the ground. Freed ants teemed over the pink rivulets, gorged on the pool of sugar, grew drunk on her sister’s generosity.
“That’s gross, you know,” Marsden said. A part of her envied her sister’s carefreeness around the covert, even as she saw exactly how it had worked out to be that way. Wynn had never seen more than a glimpse of a body there, had no dead to try to listen for, had never spoken of ever experiencing anything weird about their woods—for all the stories and tales she knew about the place, she was much more easily frightened by a scary movie or book. Duncan Kirby had been her great-great-uncle, too, but he was no more real to her than any dead historical person she might learn about in school. Given all that, why would Wynn be scared of the covert?
“Ants need love, too,” Wynn said as she watched her feasting insects wobble all over one another.
“How are you going to get them back into the pickle jar?”
Wynn shrugged. “I’m not. They look so much happier out of it, don’t you think?”
“They do. See-through glass or not, that jar was still a prison.”
“Mars, I need a dress.”
Startled, Marsden looked more closely at her sister. It wasn’t Wynn’s topic hopping that made her suddenly uncomfortable—that she was used to—but where their conversation had turned.
She scrambled for an argument, even a bad one. “Dresses are kind of impractical—how would you climb trees? Hop fences?”
“And I wish I had curly hair.” Wynn grabbed at a chunk of her thick black locks. “Mine’s so boring.”
“I like your hair just fine the way it is.”
“That’s because it looks like yours, except messier.”
“Exactly.” Marsden stood up. “Let’s go in. It’s getting late, and I’m thirsty. We can check if there’s any juice in the fridge.”
“Do you think if I asked Peaches and Lucy, they’d take me shopping? I have allowance saved up.” Wynn laid her jar on its side, a makeshift shelter for any ants that felt like it. Marsden thought of telling her it’d be an oven come morning, baking any unaware occupants, but she was frazzled, a touch panicked. “I’d ask Mom, but she usually just says to wait for Dany.”
“I’ll take you shopping, all right? We’ll go to the bookstore and then get ice cream from Big Chill.”
“Okay, but a dress first, one with—”
“I hear you, and we’ll talk about it tomorrow,” Marsden lied as she led the way back toward the house. Wynn chattered incessantly as she followed—about silks, curls, eyelashes. Marsden’s mouth pulled into a grimace, concealed under dusk’s thick light.
A low muffled giggle—barely trickling through from between the near-constant flow of her sister’s ramblings—came from the side bushes.
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.