twenty-eight.
For the first time in a long time, she knew she was making a mistake by not listening to her mother.
Stay away from Theola Finney, Marsden. Do you hear me? I don’t care if your grandmother was friends with her. The woman is nothing but a fraud, twisting lies so they look like truth.
Shine’s warnings and distaste for anything to do with their abilities came as regularly as the tide, relentlessly and without real break. They, along with time, wore away Marsden’s simple memories of the psychic as a chain-smoking old woman, her laugh like a rusty trumpet, until she became someone with hidden layers, who might or might not wear masks. And after Marsden began to skim regularly, her head filling with more and more secrets, her mind stained with the unforgettable, she began to avoid Theola with true terror in her heart.
And now, here she was, standing in front of the Finneys’ café, risking the unraveling of all her work over the past seven years so Jude wouldn’t feel so alone.
He stared at the front door, still working himself up to go inside, his face pale beneath its natural brown-gold tones. The afternoon sun blazed down on them, nearly alive in its ferocity, but Marsden saw how the skin of his arms was puckered and riddled with goose bumps. It seemed his need for answers still warred against his fear of what Theola might reveal.
He probably wouldn’t have asked Marsden to come if he’d known the truth—that she was, for her own reasons, just as scared of Theola as he was.
On the sidewalk, the café’s sandwich board advertised that day’s discounted special of a muffin, coffee, and fruit combo. A customer just leaving walked past, carrying a grease-stained paper bag so that Marsden got whiffs of bacon, bread, and cigarette smoke. A strolling couple neared—she didn’t know their names, but she recognized them from school, graduates last year—and looked at her and Jude a beat too long, giving them a wide berth as they passed. Marsden would have been more flustered than the annoyed that she was, but for where they were, and that Jude hadn’t noticed. She knew that pause. It said she and Jude were lesser, were not like them. But Theola was their choice of battle today.
“You think Oliver might be around for once?” Jude asked now. He nearly had his nose pressed to the window, gazing at the last booth that Theola reserved for her readings. The psychic had never advertised her services, and no one had ever pointed them out. They didn’t need to when everyone in Glory already knew where to go.
Oliver Finney was Theola’s long-time husband. He co-owned the café with his wife, but no one in town ever saw him or had clear memory of last speaking to him. Stories ranged from his wife having secretly killed and buried him long ago to Theola keeping him locked up somewhere. Others said that he had simply ran one day, as likely to be completely mad as he was to be completely sane and carefully hiding from his wife.
Marsden thought Theola didn’t mind it one bit—the rumors of a murdered or trapped or escaped husband only added to her allure as Glory’s famed psychic.
“Oliver?” She shook her head. “I wouldn’t bet on it. Why?”
“Just that I’m looking for an excuse, any excuse, to tell myself I don’t have to do this right now,” Jude said. “The sudden appearance of a phantom would work.”
“Or, I could ask you out to lunch, at some place far away from this café,” she quipped, not minding stalling at all. “Would that work?”
He lifted a brow. “It’s a date. Where are we going?”
She had to laugh. Her cheeks burned. “You almost sound serious about wanting to leave.”
“I think . . . I almost am.” Jude frowned. Then his face lit up. “We could go to the movies. A matinee. Like a comedy.”
An Eddie Murphy movie. The one Jude would have seen with Rigby, which he’d let Owen and Karey take him to, because they understood.
“You’d see that with me?” she asked, a small, sweet ache uncurling in her chest. A part of her knew it was just a movie, while another knew it was so much more—Eddie Murphy like this, right now, was . . . Jude saying he trusted someone. Even when he was fragile.
He smiled. And his eyes did seem nearly serious, saying that she only had to say yes to continue the game, and he would play along and take her to the movies. He would damn whatever it might mean for him if kids from school saw, and Theola and whatever secrets she still had for him would be set aside for another day. Dark waves fell across his forehead as he nodded, as Marsden’s pulse danced despite it all being not real.
“Of course I’d take you,” he said. “Popcorn’s on me, too.”
She wanted to reach out and brush his hair away, for the excuse to touch. She had to stop letting her mind wander to the impossible. Her covert and Rigby’s death were why they were even talking at all. How could their normal ever be about things like movies and dates? How could he see her as anything but the girl whose family made Glory the death magnet it was? Even she couldn’t see past that. The thought was bitter.
“I actually prefer candy at movies,” she said, “and apparently the gross kind, according to Wynn.”
“Candy also works.” His smile was still there, still teasing, but his gaze was different now, more questioning, his eyes locked on hers. Was he feeling it, too? she wondered. Thinking about more, about what else there could be for them, when really they’d only come together to see about the dead? Thinking how once he found his answers, there’d be no reason to keep looking for her?
Marsden sighed and decided to save them from the moment. She did brush his hair back now, careful to do it briskly, with a purpose that said it was time. “Are you ready?”
He took a deep breath and pulled open the door to the café. “Probably not, but let’s go.”
It’d been years since she’d been inside, but little had changed—the same cracked, fake-leather booths; the black-and-white tiled floor; the chalkboard wall with the menu. She had vague memories of drawing on it while Star and Theola had gossiped, sketching out comically round moonlike faces with a fat stick of chalk—her mother, her father, their unsteady family of three.
The scents of the place were familiar, too, and they tangled in her nose—baked goods, cheese, coffee. The same kind of scents she knew from the kitchen of the boardinghouse, which tickled back to life the even fainter ones of the kitchen of their old duplex.
But there was also the zing of odd herbs, of fragrant tea with steeped leaves that told stories, secrets, truths. The smell of danger.
Theola was sitting at the booth in the back, doing a crossword puzzle and smoking. She looked absolutely harmless despite the eccentricity. An old lady with three cats at home, someone whose needlepoint was of swear words, whose collection of mugs had lots of Elvis ones. She wore what Marsden remembered as a typical Theola Finney outfit—oversize hat with feathers, a dress with a screamingly loud floral print, costume jewelry slabs of color around her neck and on her ears.
As a girl, Marsden had found her flamboyance amusing.
Now she found it deceptive, a disguise.
Theola Finney always had her finger on the pulse of the town—no one could read it as well as she could.
With dark eyes so sharp they seemed nearly shrewd, the town psychic watched Marsden and Jude as they slid into the booth across from her.
“You did tell me to come back when I was ready to talk,” Jude said mildly. “Though I’m still trying to figure out the invite.”
She winked at him. “And I like your face—can’t that be reason enough?” Her voice was pitted, a smoky rasp.
“Nope.”
She shoved a menu at them. “My treat—whatever you feel like.”
Jude picked it up, began to look at it as if he really did mean to eat, and Marsden wanted to kick him under the table.
“And haven’t you made yourself a stranger since your mother moved all of you out there to the boardinghouse on the other side of town, Marsden Eldridge.”
Reluctantly, she met the gaze of her dead grandmother’s old friend. “Hi, Theola.”
Theola signaled to the worker at the order counter with a hand while continuing to squint at Marsden through a billow of smoke. “How is your family? How is life working for Nina?”
Marsden felt about as scrutinized as the crossword puzzle on the table. She averted her eyes, folded her palms away, out of sight from Theola’s eyes. “Everyone’s fine, thank you.”
Jude must have sensed her unease. He slid the menu back abruptly. “It’s okay, we’re not here to eat. Tell me why you asked me to come back.”
The psychic blew smoke in his direction. The feathers on her hat bobbed—three of them, white as a dove’s, fake promises of peace. “Did I do that, or did I merely suggest you were welcome to come back when you were ready? It goes against my principles as a medium to solicit customers—it’s very pushy.”
“I think you want to tell me something.”
The worker brought over a teapot shaped like an elephant along with three teacups. Marsden felt a flush break out along her hairline as Theola poured out tea the color of weak grass. She placed a cup in front of each of them. “Thirsty?”
Marsden watched leaves swirl into the bottom of her cup, dancing as they sought to spin a tale. Panic was bees in her head, a thick roar—she had to remember to not touch the cup. To keep hiding her palms. “No, not really.”
“It was never about me, was it, the first time I was here,” Jude said. “All that stuff you told me about Rig . . . He came to see you.”
Theola took a slow sip of tea and set her cup down. “I have two confessions.” She held up a finger. “One: Rigby came to ask me about something, and it wasn’t for a reading. And two: I didn’t have to do a reading to see what I saw—that my telling him out loud what he already felt in his heart wasn’t going to change anything.”
The words sent a shiver through Marsden. Jude’s eyes were as black as jet.
She reached for his hand beneath the table before she let herself think twice. His fingers wove through hers, clamped tight.
“What did he ask you about?” he asked Theola.
The psychic let her gaze slide in Marsden’s direction before sliding away again. “He came to ask if I could hear the dead.”
Marsden’s whole body tensed up. Every muscle strained. Her hand squeezed Jude’s.
“Who was he wanting to hear?” His voice had turned fearful, a little boy alone in the dark.
“I didn’t ask, because hearing the dead isn’t what I do. Now, if he’d asked you, Marsden, then maybe he would have gotten the answers he needed so badly.”
Marsden’s breath was a knot in her chest. “I’ve never been able to hear the dead, even though I’ve tried. . . . A lot.”
“Bless that stubborn mother of yours, but she didn’t do you any favors, keeping you from using your ability when you were a child. Like pruning too early in the season, too aggressively—a plant might never recover.”
“She just wanted to be normal, to not stick out.”
“And yet she was born into a family whose main legacy is the covert.” Theola’s eyes flashed, reminding Marsden she was no harmless old lady. “Star was so disappointed that Shine wouldn’t embrace her gift. How she was making sure you wouldn’t, either.”
Gift.
Or, Marsden thought, curse.
She would have done nearly anything to be able to walk into the covert and be given answers. To be told she was no more at fault for her father’s death than she could have strode into the Indigo and pulled him out herself.
But what if the answers she got were the wrong ones? Ones she would never be able to unhear?
“What did you say to Rig, then?” Jude asked Theola. “Since you couldn’t help him?”
“Do you think people come to see me because they are looking for help? To tell them which path to take?”
“Yes. They’re scared of making mistakes.”
“I think they come because they want to hear they are already right.” Theola coughed her smoker’s cough. “Because deep down, people already know what they’re going to do. They just want me to tell them it’s not wrong.”
“Why couldn’t you tell him he was wrong?” His fingers had become a vise around Marsden’s, as though she’d become some kind of anchor. It paralyzed her, him thinking he could lean on her when she was as much of a fraud as Shine said Theola was, as much as Marsden said Shine was. “Because he was. He just needed to hear it from somebody.”
“Do you believe in God, Jude?”
“No, I don’t,” he said instantly. Marsden flashed back to the covert when he’d said as much, that his disbelief wasn’t a choice.
“I think we might be our own gods,” Theola said. “Our own voices will always be the loudest in our heads, telling us what we believe we deserve, deep down. And your brother didn’t come here looking to hear mine.”
“Then he heard the covert,” Marsden said softly, “if you believe what everyone in Glory believes. A hundred-year-old story, right? Touch its soil before you die, and you’ll still end up saved.”
“Whatever seed was planted,” Theola said, “it only grew because it could.”
“Did you know what he was going to do?” The question seemed yanked from Jude’s core, costing bits and pieces of himself he would never get back. “Even if you didn’t do a reading?”
Theola shook her head. “But neither was I surprised. I’m sorry.”
For a wild second, Marsden wondered if her mother had thought to ask that of Theola after her husband washed ashore, if she’d known. And if the psychic’s answer had anything to do with why Shine hated her afterward.
“So if he didn’t tell you anything, and you didn’t do a reading, I don’t understand why you wanted me to come back.” Jude’s confusion was encompassing, his frustration raw, swarming the room the same way wild ginger choked out the covert.
“Because what I saw in your brother’s eyes that day I also saw in yours that first time you came to see me.” Smoke from Theola’s cigarette curled around the three of them like vines. “What I still see in them now.”
“And what do you see?”
“Guilt. Enough of it to drown anyone if they go out too far.” And Marsden couldn’t mistake the message she saw in Theola’s gaze as it slid over to meet hers. And I see it in you, too, the guilt over your father.
But that was all she saw in the old lady’s eyes, and she shuddered, relieved. If that was the only guilt she revealed, then she hadn’t doomed Wynn—her being a skimmer was still a secret.
The psychic blew more smoke in Jude’s direction. “So maybe I just want to tell you it’s time you think about coming back in.”
“I’m not my brother.”
Theola’s laugh was just as raspy as her cough. “Then, like I said, maybe I just wanted to see your handsome face again, Jude Ambrose.”