two.
Marsden’s sneakers broke through the ginger plants that carpeted the covert, turning the dusk air pungent with their scent. Their heart-shaped leaves ran rampant in the space, thriving beneath the cool shade thrown by the trees. Only in the covert, away from the simmering heat of town, would they not wither and die.
Once the groundcover had been nothing but crabgrass and clover and thistle. It would have been like that when her great-great-uncle had walked over it nearly a hundred years ago, when Duncan Kirby first came to this part of the world looking for gold. The stuff was first discovered in the banks of the Indigo River back in 1890, with the most generous amounts in the deepest, most crooked bend that eventually became the town of Glory.
When the gold began to disappear, so did most of the townsfolk who had come west for it. But Duncan stayed, waiting for the gold to come back. He built a cabin for his young family in the town’s west end on land he won in an epic game of poker. And when the gold refused to show again, his sanity ended up lost with it, and he went on to shoot his wife and kids before turning the rifle on himself.
Glory decided to burn the cabin—and the bodies still within it—to the ground afterward. A cleansing fire, the townsfolk nervously called it as they stoked the flames until nothing remained but the gray and salty ash of bone. It would change the covert from a cursed place to one that was blessed, the place where sins could be left behind before going to heaven. Dying after touching its purified soil meant salvation—just a handful of the covert’s dirt needed to be stuffed into a pocket or smeared onto skin.
Marsden decided long ago Glory’s first settlers had no idea what they were doing, because her family’s land still felt cursed. And all the fire did was turn the town into a spectacle. Nearly a century later, and still people came. Like the thirstiest of bees, the most vulnerable of them, the ones looking for understanding of some kind, were drawn in by the covert. The Private Property and Keep Out signs nailed along the outer fence might as well have been blank. Each body Marsden found was just another person fooled, lured by a promise that redemption could be found in its bloodstained and now ginger-scented dirt.
At least the sanctity of the covert’s myth was strong enough that no murder had been committed there since those at the hands of Duncan. Or had yet to be caught, anyway.
She saw the gun a second before she would have stepped on it. It had fallen to the side of the body. In the covert’s shadowed light, the black of it was harsh against the soft green needles, the pale gray stones.
The woman had aimed for her mouth.
Marsden had to fall into a crouch at the sight, dizzy as the covert spun. Not since her first body—a man hanging from a tree by his midnight-blue tie, his name had been Caleb Silas, he’d had ten dollars in his wallet—had she thrown up.
But she had to hurry to finish.
Private property or not, she wasn’t the only skimmer in town.
She took a deep breath and moved over to the body. She pulled out the thin gardening gloves she always carried for just this purpose. There were ghosts everywhere in the covert—her own ancestors were but a few of them—and she felt their eyes on her as she ran her hands over the woman, searching for her own kind of gold.
There was a necklace, as delicate as spider webbing, its hue that of wheat in falling sunlight. A ring studded with gems.
Both were useless to her. She’d learned that the hard way when she brought a pair of cuff links she’d taken from Caleb Silas’s body to Seconds, the town’s biggest pawnshop. His widow had reported them missing, but the pawnshop owner at the time had already sold them for a nice profit to a tourist passing through—the only reason Marsden escaped. Forever scared into thinking the owner would remember her face, she never went near Seconds again.
She took the five-dollar bill she found in the woman’s wallet, then placed the slip of cheap red vinyl back in the pocket. It wasn’t much, but it brought her that much closer to the two thousand dollars she wanted to have before she could even think about taking Wynn and leaving Glory. It would be enough for two bus tickets to Seattle, a few months rent for a cheap apartment, and food while she looked for a job.
She had just over a grand and a half saved up, hidden in a pair of old boots in her closet. All of it from skimming—tens and twenties most of the time, the very occasional fifty—and from working in the kitchen in the boardinghouse, which never amounted to more than a few hours a week during school months. Summers were when she tried to make up for the rest of the year, to save the fastest. But summers were short; she could not add hours to the clock just as she couldn’t add bodies to the covert. Some months saw a dozen if not more; some saw only one or two—the only thing she could count on for sure was never knowing.
She readjusted the fall of the woman’s blond hair and fixed the patches of dirt still carefully scrubbed into the backs of her hands. Marsden made sure it looked like the body had never been touched. Glory police would be there not long after she called in the discovery. The department was small given that the town was also small—outside of tourists—so it wasn’t hard for Nina to pay all the cops well to only patrol the area when they had to, and discreetly. It didn’t make for good business, having cop cars driving around the boardinghouse all the time. And while dead bodies in the covert were worse, they didn’t make any noise; their names printed in the paper the next day were easily missed, the print fine, the column small. The police would barely give the body a glance—head cop Hadley might even skim it himself—before taking it away, but Marsden had learned to always cover her tracks anyway. The covert was her best chance at escaping from Glory; she could never risk it.
Marsden tucked away the cash and her gloves and got to her feet. She was brushing off her hands and knees when the sound of a branch snapping nearby made her freeze. Her eyes went everywhere and nowhere, and her breath caught in her ribs like a fork clanging off teeth.
She saw Hadley coming over the dusk-dimmed rise, shouting at her to empty her pockets.
She saw Nina telling her that she belonged to her now, that she would always work for her, in whatever way Nina decided best.
She saw her mother, crying to never leave her alone, that their debt was Marsden’s, too.
And then she saw Wynn, her black hair as messy as ever, her face full of fear as she slowly approached, and she knew her sister was the one who was real.
Wynn’s gaze darted to the body, and through the gloom she paled, came to a stop. “I . . . the store was closed, there was a sign—”
Marsden darted forward and spun Wynn around by her frail shoulders. “You should have waited for me by the fence.” She heard the fury in her voice, the fear, and tried to soften. And failed, because most of that fury was for herself. “Let’s go.”
They marched in silence, her mind racing, her eyes threatening to fill. Here she was, determined to keep her sister safe from who they were, what the town had determined them to be. But how to run from your own shadow? Your own name?
“Mars?” Wynn was working ginger leaves between her palms—crushed, their scent was strong enough to make Marsden’s nose tingle.
“Yeah?”
“Can we go see Dad’s grave?”
• • •
Their mother had had him buried on the west side of the covert, where the trees were thinner and sparser, their canopy less protective. As such, the one that marked his grave was about as expected, its branches wispy, almost fragile in the gray light.
Marsden wished Shine had chosen a more mature tree to watch over the man she’d met and fallen in love with when they’d both still been kids—one sturdier, more remarkable. She wondered again if it had been a final dig at him, his being buried in the covert. How it wasn’t because it was family land, or because he’d died by suicide—and suicide and the covert went hand in hand—but because it was Shine’s way to finally corral her useless, restless husband.
Wynn let her crushed ginger leaves fall to the ground and plucked clover blossoms from a nearby patch. She tucked them beneath a small rock at the base of the wimpy tree. After a long moment of silence: “I don’t hear him like Grandma would have. Do you think it’s because I never met him?”
Like their grandmother, Grant Eldridge was a stranger to Marsden’s sister, too, having walked into the Indigo six months before Wynn was born. Shine had always told Wynn this was a blessing—memories could also be curses.
“Well, I have definitely met him, and I don’t hear him, either.” Marsden shifted on her feet. “Why are we here again?”
“It’s Daddy—we should visit when we can.”
“We do. But now it’s getting dark.”
Wynn decorated the rock with more blossoms. Her hand and arm glowed a ghostly gray against the murk of the forest. “Do you think Mom could hear them again, if she only tried?”
“You know she won’t. And it’s been too long since she’s heard anything, not since she was a kid.” Or so Shine claimed. Her mother had gotten good at talking without actually saying much at all. It came with her job, Marsden knew. Like a final polish that, over time, became hard to remove. “Grandma told me once that the ability’s just like any living creature—it needs air, or it dies.”
Her sister was watching her. “Do you ever still try to hear the dead?”
Marsden’s face stiffened with embarrassment, heat along her ears, and she was glad for the thin dark so she could hide.
She did try, but she didn’t think she could ever admit to Wynn her reasons. That she sometimes sat in the covert in front of a body, eyes shut tight against the quiet and the trees and the ginger, trying to extract from all of it the voices of the dead. Telling her how they came to be there, who they’d once been. Because she thought if those she stole from could be bothered to talk to her, then it couldn’t be long before the voice she heard next was that of her father. Explaining to her why he did what he did. Assuring her he didn’t leave because of her. That he hadn’t hated life because of her.
Always, though, she heard nothing. From anyone.
“The dead are dead, Wynn,” she said quietly now. “They came here to find some kind of peace. And I think, sometimes, we might be wrong in demanding they still be here, just for us.”
Her sister poked in a final blossom and stepped back. “I still wish I’d known him, even for just a bit.”
“Me, too.”
“But you did know him, Mars.”
Had she, though?
She’d been eight when they found him drowned in the shallows of the Indigo. No explanation, no note left anywhere. It’d been classified an accident.
Marsden couldn’t remember him well enough to still hate him for it. Memories of him were like cards in a deck, slowly shuffled away as time passed, moments of her childhood falling through some metaphorical hole in the pocket that was her brain. He’d spun in and out of her and Shine’s lives like a shifty alley cat, unsure if it lived indoors or out, if he belonged to them, or no one, or just himself.
She recalled him once playing tea party with her, patient enough to sip pretend tea and eat pretend sandwiches. His aftershave had smelled of the outdoors, had made her think of cool, gray flannel and winter mornings. He liked loud movies and songs heavy with guitar. His hair had been Crayola chestnut brown, his eyes a tint lighter than midnight black. He’d been tall. His laugh had come from somewhere deep.
Of that last day, though, she remembered him and Shine arguing explosively. His one retort that had stuck—ravaged, with a desperation so bleak her own chest went hollow with it—about being trapped. I never wanted this life! He’d looked right at Marsden as the words had ground from him. She remembered the sound of the flimsy screen door slapping back against the house as he slammed his way out, and how the smell of that evening’s terrible spring storm had rushed inward seconds later.
“A squirrel!”
Marsden squinted, saw a fat black shape rustle free from a nearby bush and run toward the last of the sun.
Wynn clambered off after it, clucking her tongue as she made her way toward the entrance. “I’ll meet you at the fence, okay?” she called over her shoulder. Her voice was muffled from the density of the trees, what had proven thick enough to swallow up the sounds of gunshots.
“Don’t head off anywhere else,” Marsden called back.
“I won’t!”
She followed in her sister’s wake, the scent of ginger freshened again from their steps. She wasn’t exactly reluctant to go, but sometimes it was being out in the open that made her feel trapped. Dread packed itself into the corners of her heart and filled her head with the most miserable of thoughts.
The boardinghouse, where Nina’s girls—including her own mother—wore clothes and makeup as colorful as candy, so they appeared just as delectable.
The town, bleached pale from the summer sun.
The future, laid out for her as surely as though it were already set in stone.