twenty-three.
Staring out of her bedroom window, Marsden rubbed her eyes hard to make sure she wasn’t seeing things. Most people driving to her family’s land were careful to leave their cars parked farther up along the highway, so it wasn’t obvious right away where their owners had gone. Only once the covert revealed a body did a car get towed, the puzzle of the abandoned vehicle solved.
The brown sedan—sides filmed over with road dust, rust peeking out in spots—was parked only feet away from the gaping mouth of the covert.
She scrambled out of bed and into shorts and a T-shirt. After racing around to find them, she shoved her gardening gloves into her pocket. Wynn had stayed over Caitlyn’s house last night, now that her friend’s family was back from camping. It was why Marsden had let herself sleep in, delaying her dawn check of the covert, and now wished she hadn’t. Because Nina would know, too, as soon as she saw the sedan, what it meant. She would call Hadley. He’d beat Marsden to the body.
Her breath came in gasps by the time she reached the wooden fence of the covert. Sweat dotted her forehead. The air was already blazing despite the early hour, singeing the town.
It took her only minutes.
She rounded a stand of pine trees and stumbled right over him. Her gloved hands landed on his front, her fingers sinking into the fabric of his shirt. An older man, with a lined face. Beneath the dappled sunlight, the covert’s supposedly holy soil lay in a streak across his forehead.
Her hands worked quickly as she searched his pants pockets.
One held a handful of soil; the other, a wallet and two one-hundred-dollar bills. She tucked the bills into her own pocket with shaking hands. It was the most cash she’d ever skimmed from a single body.
The jewelry that he wore—a fancy-enough watch, a nice-looking gold ring—was likely worth something and yet completely useless to her.
For a moment, Marsden was furious that Hadley would profit. That Fitz would, too, however he might feel about it. She reminded herself that she only stole out of necessity, but her fury simply changed to a kind of queasiness that filled her throat.
And there was no gun in sight. No clear sign of injury. However he died would remain a secret, unless they revealed it in the paper or on the radio. They didn’t always do so, but sometimes it was included with the reports of his name, something she still needed.
She figured out a long time ago that a lack of answers could be just as hard to think about as finality. Because uncertainty always made her thoughts circle back to Grant Eldridge.
In an alternate world, this man might have been her father, the meaning of his death always to be a question.
In yet another, his cash might have been Rigby’s note.
I’m sorry, Jude, I never wanted you to know.
Those were Rigby’s words, what he’d scrawled on that small piece of paper.
Marsden could recite them by heart by now, so deeply were they burned into her memory from reading his note over and over again. She’d hadn’t known him, had never even spoken to him. But in her mind, he was another version of Jude, with the same lightly speckled eyes that hid secrets, except he’d be less angry and more sad and doing all he could to keep his little brother from hurting any more than he was.
I told myself it was Dad.
I didn’t want to stop.
But I didn’t mean to do it.
Jude reading those words might change him forever. Might make him think the way she thought. Might fill him as full of shadows as she was, so that he was as warped by the covert as she was. Because he would read those words about death and, instead of thinking about loss as anyone else might, he’d think of something darker, something closer to violence. It was what leaped into her mind—against her will, almost subconsciously—reading them.
It was also what convinced her that Rigby had never really meant for his brother to find his note, not deep down. He would have been distraught when he wrote it and then stuck it in his wallet, folded into bills like the secret it had been. He would have been confused and vulnerable, not thinking straight.
And what if someone else had found that note even before Jude or she had? Like another skimmer, who would have found it and discarded it.
She didn’t think Rigby would overlook that chance. Him writing that note, it’d been as though he’d confessed to a priest and that priest had then sworn to silence forever. Rigby had intended to die as thoroughly as though he’d disappeared into thin air.
So, fine, I’ll be your priest, then, Rigby, Marsden thought as she finally got to her feet. And I will not judge.
Making sure the scene was as she’d found it, she tucked her gloves away and walked back to the boardinghouse, thinking of what came next.
First, she would call Hadley and tell him the news. He would come to the boardinghouse and talk to Nina about the tragedy of yet another body. He would go to the covert, more likely than not to skim the watch and ring, and she wouldn’t be able to stop him.
Then she would find Peaches. She still needed to borrow her camera to take a photo of Brom . . . somehow. Marsden again heard Fitz’s recalling the night her father drowned, his report of a faceless man who’d been her father’s friend. The chill that ran its finger down her neck made her wish, for once, that the sun in Glory would burn even hotter.
She would make breakfast for the guests and then eat by herself—Wynn wouldn’t be back until late afternoon.
And then Jude would be over.
Just the other day, she’d blurted out that she lived crippled with guilt and that her little sister called her by a name she could never live up to. She’d held his hand and pretended to not know a thing about skimmers. And then she’d brought him home and made him waffles.
Waffles.
When she could cook a freaking fantastic meal for more than a dozen people on any given day and barely break a sweat.
But he hadn’t seemed to mind the meal in the least—or having Wynn around the whole time. And he’d been clear about not wanting to leave afterward. When they had finished eating and her sister had taken off to watch television to escape cleanup, she’d expected him to take off, too—Wouldn’t his father be wondering where he was? she thought. But he hadn’t, instead staying to help do the dishes. She remembered the shape and movements of his large hands as he washed and she dried, how nice his voice sounded in the wide depths of the kitchen, the laser beam of his eyes on her as she walked around, putting dishes away. And when Dany had come to tell him it was time for him to go home, his gaze—somehow devilish and soft and a bit perplexed all at once—locked on Marsden’s as he’d said goodbye, his smile painting itself onto her brain as he finally turned at the last minute and disappeared into the night.
As soon as the door shut behind him, Dany had come over to where Marsden was standing by the sink, squeezed her arm, and smiled so knowingly that the skin on Marsden’s arms prickled to life with goose bumps.
“Ever see a forest fire when it’s just on the cusp of really catching?” Dany had asked. “Right before it takes on a life of its own and it’s beautiful to watch but also frightening?”
Marsden shook her head and felt her heart twist.
“Watch Jude Ambrose’s eyes the next time he looks at you, and you’ll know what I mean.”