thirty-three.
She kept pedaling, pushing the highway and the covert and the prison of her home behind her. The sun was getting lower, bouncing off the top of the river. She smelled the heat baking off the Indigo’s muddy shores, smelled its damp, marshy, tinny contents.
Lucy had died with the covert all around her. She died knowing she would never get out of Glory, or see Florida again, or do anything different than work as one of Nina’s girls.
Marsden pedaled faster, her legs burning. The echoes of Hadley’s familiar questions rang in her ears, the dullness of her own robotic responses as she’d held the phone against her cheek and tried to not think about Lucy.
Did you hear anything in the covert before you saw the body, Marsden? Or right afterward?
No.
Were you alone?
Yes. I was checking, as I often do.
Did you touch anything?
I . . . Her dress. I pulled the hem down. I knew her, and I didn’t think she would want . . .
I understand. Can you make a guess of how she might have done it?
A blade.
All right, I’ll head over immediately.
I’ll tell Nina to expect you.
And your mother, of course.
It was only after she hung up the phone that Marsden saw how she’d wound the cord so tightly around them that her fingers had gone purple. Behind her, the kitchen was empty, silent, chilled beneath the day’s collected heat. Dany, upon being told the news, would keep Wynn at the market until the last possible moment. Shine, pale and pinch-eyed and unapproachable, had lit a cigarette with white-knuckled fingers and said nothing as she waited for Hadley’s arrival. Peaches had barricaded herself in her bedroom. Nina was in the dining room with the rest of her girls, instructing them in hushed tones how business that night would go on as usual.
Marsden fumbled the cord away from her finger; the blood came back in a rush, and she wished it were as easy to sweep clean her mind. Those final images of Lucy—blue, bled-out, celery eyes forever shut—were embedded in her brain, splinters working their way in faster than she could pull them out.
She remembered that feeling, knew what it meant. As it was with Rigby, with Caleb Silas, she’d never be able to leave all of Lucy behind in the covert, would forever be marked with her tragedy.
Suddenly, she found the atmosphere of the boardinghouse absolutely smothering. She had to get away. She ran outside, grabbed her bike from the shed, and simply turned it onto the highway, almost dizzy with panic. The need for escape crawled over her, scraped at her insides.
Instinct, years worth of it, had her bike turning away from Glory, the front wheel wobbling as it sliced through the loose gravel on the road’s shoulder. Glory was about feeling desperate and trapped. It was her parents and Nina and all the bodies in the covert. It was all her money gone.
But Glory was also Wynn, and her little sister still needed her.
And Glory, against all logic and anything that made any kind of sense, had also, somehow, become Jude.
Marsden swung her bike’s front wheel free of gravel, turned onto the blistering pavement of the highway in the opposite direction, and began to pedal. The memory of his gaze as he’d watched her skim from Lucy, as she showed him just how mechanical she’d learned to be—sickness climbed her throat.
She got all the way downtown before realizing she didn’t know where exactly Jude lived. Like everyone in Glory, he would live within blocks of the Indigo, situated somewhere along the river’s curve like shingles along the line of a roof. He wouldn’t be very close to her—the boardinghouse had the east end of that curve to itself, and only a handful of houses lay scattered between it and the rest of town. After Duncan Kirby’s marking of the covert, Glory’s townsfolk built outward from it, far from where disease first sparked.
Marsden biked to a gas station. It was the same one where Red and Coop’s father worked the graveyard shift; the air hose on the side of the building was still out of order, his sons having broken it back in the spring. She saw the pay-phone booth on the side of the parking lot and peeked in through its dirty glass sides. There was a phone book hanging from a chain, and she went inside and found Jude’s address.
It took her another twenty minutes to bike there.
A small house, one level, its beige paint age-stained. Poured gravel for a driveway, and weeds splitting open the yard. A wraparound deck that had seen better days years and years ago, its wood now weathered and gray. There was a wooden chair and table set looking so beaten she was sure the next windstorm would see all of it collapsed, nothing but a pile of kindling. She saw a stand-up telescope in the corner, gone beyond pale with pollen and dust. Its original color was a mystery.
Her heart sank a bit for Leo Ambrose. To have come from vast money out East, and an executive position in a powerful company, to this, on nothing much more than a bad turn of the economy. He’d moved his growing family out for a fresh start, even if that fresh start would have no cushion to fall back on, even if the first hints of a thirst for the bottle were starting to show more and more. And then his young wife had died, leaving him with two young sons to raise. Bottles became escape.
Marsden had already sensed it—the similarities between Leo and Shine, their shared terrible luck as parents, as individuals. But whatever sympathy she could still feel for her mother was only marginally greater than what she felt for Jude’s father. Shine, like Leo, had become selective with her love for her kids—the amount of it, the price for it, the whens and hows and conditions of it.
The house had good bones, though, which still showed beneath the years. She imagined it with paint so pristine one couldn’t find a scratch for searching. She pictured Isabel Ambrose on one of the wooden chairs, not dying. She saw Jude and Rigby beside her, playing, or hunched over the telescope. Nighttime, the sky clear, Rigby pointing out to his little brother all the constellations he’d memorized from a book.
Living at the boardinghouse, Marsden was sometimes still able to see past Nina’s touches to the schoolhouse it’d once been: simple and uncomplicated—clean. Even Shine had her moments—when she sent Wynn to the store with a dollar for candy instead of a note and money and instructions to bring back cigarettes; when she asked Marsden to make Wynn’s favorite dessert; when she didn’t visibly flinch at being called Mom or Mother.
She leaned her bike against the front of the house and knocked at the door.
From inside, there was the muffled thump of footsteps. And then it was Karey standing at the door, his eyebrows lifting comically high in surprise at seeing her. But he was grinning within seconds, his long, blond hair shaggy around his face and his blue eyes warm. Marsden found herself smiling back despite her nerves.
“Hey, Marsden.” He opened the door and motioned her inside. “Jude’s just in the kitchen. Me and Owen are helping him clean out his fridge.”
Her mind scrambled, telling her she should reply even as she wanted a chance to look around the front room. This was Jude’s home—how hard would she have to look to see the things he wished he could hide? What he was okay with his friends knowing?
She saw the dents in the lemon-yellow wallpaper right away, like shifts in the late afternoon light—they would match the shape of fists. That same traitorous light glanced off the top of the coffee table and revealed the raised, blurred damage of old moisture rings, kissed from the bottoms of too many wet beer bottles. A pair of old, nautical-themed canvas couches, their cream stripes for the beach, blue for the ocean, cigarette burns on the fabric like boats blistering their way to shore. The dark cherrywood floors Leo had once ordered for Isabel in an attempt to make her feel at home, gone splintered and scraped in spots.
“You guys are cleaning out the fridge?” Marsden looked up at Karey, knowing she’d only repeated him, wondering what she might have missed.
A sun-kissed grin. “Too many well-meaning casseroles from too many well-meaning ladies—they’re going bad.”
Of course. After Rigby’s funeral and wake, the days immediately following would have been too full of difficulty and pain for his brother or father to even think about cooking. The town would have kept Jude and Leo fed out of the goodness of their hearts, because that’s what people did; they would have also wanted to get a glimpse of the tragic Ambrose household for themselves, because that’s also what people did. Glory brand kindness—it came with a price.
Karey motioned for her to follow him down a hall. “Ironically, Rigby hated casseroles. He’d be pitching in and helping us toss everything.”
Marsden heard some of Jude and Owen’s conversation as she and Karey neared the kitchen.
Jude first. “—talk about it. Not yet, anyway. It’s . . . complicated.”
“Isn’t it always?” There was the sound of cutlery landing in the sink with a plunk and then Owen continued. “She’s got a sweet face, but man, she sure does keep to herself.”
“Can you blame her?”
“Not really. So, when are you going to ask her out for real?”
Someone shook out what sounded like a large trash bag. “Drop it.”
“It’s not like we can’t already see it happening from a mile—”
Karey cleared his throat loudly as he stepped into the kitchen. Marsden followed, her face feeling like she’d just consumed an entire ball of fire.
“Marsden?” Jude held a casserole dish in one hand and rubbed his eyes with the other, as though he were just waking up or was seeing things. He blinked at her, his expression thoroughly confused. She thought he looked childlike, innocent, way too beguiling. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m sorry, I should have called first.” She took in the mess that made up the room. Black garbage bags were strewn all over the floor, some of them lumpy with contents, some still completely flat. The kitchen counter was covered with tin-foil containers full of food, the table with a plate and fork and even more containers. “I was just . . . out for a bike ride. And thought I’d drop by. To say hi.” She couldn’t have thought of a flimsier excuse if she tried, and she stiffened with embarrassment.
“And we were just leaving.” Owen, even more handsome than she remembered him, slid a pointed look in Karey’s direction and smiled at her. It was a nice one, real and open, but she didn’t think she was imagining the question there, the slight wariness that made her recall his twin’s words: Don’t be someone else disappearing on him. “Hey, sorry about this mess. Make sure Jude cleans it up on our behalf.”
She waved, did her best to smile back. “Really, it’s okay, you guys don’t have to leave.”
“Yes, they do,” Jude said mildly, his gaze on her blatant and direct and making her stomach slowly curl up in a semi-painful knot. He threw the entire tin-foil dish he’d been holding into one of the garbage bags, moved on to do the same with the rest of the containers on the counter, and smirked. “But first, Owen, tell Karey what you found.”
“Dude.” Owen picked up the dirty plate from the table and placed it into the sink. “That bacon and zucchini melt you just inhaled half of? We found blue fuzz on what was left.”
Karey snorted unconvincingly. Then he muffled a burp with the back of his hand and looked so queasy Marsden nearly laughed. “Seriously?”
“Like you wouldn’t believe.” Owen gathered all the garbage bags from the floor and finished clearing the table of tin-foiled sympathy. “How are you feeling? Want to go grab some air?”
“Air? I don’t want air. I want to puke my guts out.”
“Not in here, you’re not.” Jude shoved the now very full garbage bag at Karey. “Mind tossing this into one of the cans by the back door on your way out? Thanks.”
Karey took it with an overly morose look. “Can I at least grab my basketball? I left it over by—”
Owen shoved him toward the front room. “Tomorrow.”
Karey slung the bag over his shoulder and grinned at Marsden and then Jude as he headed into the short hallway. “Behave yourself, kids. And, please, Jude, keep my basketball safe until I can bring her home, where she belongs.”
“If you don’t stop,” Owen said as he walked out after him, “they’re going to give your basketball to the neighbor’s kids. The scissor-happy ones.”
Then the front door shut. Their voices faded through the open kitchen window. Other typical summer sounds trickled inward, breaking up the fresh silence that filled the kitchen—a dog barking in the distance, the faint shouts of kids running through a sprinkler, the low buzz of a neighbor’s lawn mower.
But there was a quiet that went deeper than that now, and it was wrapped around Marsden and Jude. It was the quiet of a house forever changed, its makeup altered without repair. It was also the very opposite of the boardinghouse, a hive kept busy with meals, Wynn, Nina’s girls, the push and pull of Marsden’s schemes against those of Shine’s and Nina’s. Jude must have noticed it over their dinner of waffles and too-sweet lemonade, and she wondered what had gone through his brain. If it’d been close to pain, or simple grief—if he’d even been able to let himself care either way.
Small but sure signs of Leo’s drinking also riddled the kitchen—missing panes of glass from the cabinet, a fist-size dent in the pantry door, a small, crescent-shaped gouge bitten into the outer corner of the wall that led to the hallway.
“A thrown beer bottle,” Jude said. She’d felt him watch her as she’d looked around the room, had seen her notice the curved indentation, had then obviously felt the need to explain. “My father’s way of asking Owen and Karey to leave. It’d been a long day at work.”
Marsden peered more closely at the drywall, and her stomach flipped. “Good thing he has bad aim.”
Jude touched the back of his head, the motion so practiced it seemed done without thought. Then he leaned against the kitchen counter, his hands sliding into his pockets. His face said he was still utterly surprised to see her in his house.
“Owen and Karey love thinking they’re funny,” he said, smiling, “but it’s pretty pathetic, right?”
She smiled back. “They are funny.”
“They wouldn’t even try if they thought you weren’t cool.”
Marsden knew she had never been cool. “Sometimes I forget we’ve known one another since we were all kids.”
His expression was neutral as he shrugged. “We all hung out in different circles.”
He wasn’t saying what they both knew—she hadn’t hung out in any circles except the one she kept closed to everyone else at school but herself. It’d been too crowded already, with her mother, her sister, everything to do with the boardinghouse and the covert.
Longing swept her then, an acute ache that beat painfully at her wrists, in the back of her throat, as she dared again to imagine the upcoming fall. They would be strangers to each other. Jude might wave as he walked past, or he might not. She might meet his eyes, or she might not. He would be thinking about schools in the East, how to best put distance between himself and Glory; she would keep stealing from the dead and surviving life in a brothel. How could there be room for anything else?
“Your dad’s at work?” Marsden guessed. Now that she saw firsthand how Jude lived, she wondered when Leo would be back. How long Jude could breathe freely each day.
“He works late on Mondays—catching up after the weekend.”
Her shoulders relaxed a fraction. Still, the rest of her remained as tight as a wound spring. She hadn’t pinpointed her reason for coming over until she was already here. And she still hadn’t figured out how to wipe away the person he saw in the covert, the monster who could touch the dead so coldly. She recalled the weight of Lucy’s blood-soaked braid and shuddered.
He moved from the counter to stand closer to her. Marsden smelled ginger and earth and him. “I didn’t know if you wanted me to say anything earlier, with Owen and Karey here, but I’m really sorry again. About Lucy.” Jude’s eyes were dark as he held hers, soft with concern. She felt them like a touch. That kindness—it could almost make her cry again.
“They’ll find out soon anyway,” she said. “If they know to look for that column about the covert that’s in the paper.”
“I don’t know if they do. Or they do, but they don’t check it.”
The idea of not checking was alien to her, but she also understood it. They didn’t live with the covert as she did—it didn’t shadow everything they did. Sometimes, she forgot that. How her land, as much as it colored and shaped Glory, was still only a single physical part of it. Why would two regular guys like Owen and Karey ever want to know what was happening in the covert unless they had no choice? They would have done it for Rigby, but that was all.
“Lucy . . . She and Peaches loved each other,” Marsden told him. Nina had insisted on being the one to tell her, and Marsden—cowardly, the feel of Lucy’s skin still on her hands—had let her. “And they were best friends.”
“How is Peaches?”
Broken. Lost. “Not really here.”
“I’m sorry.” Jude sighed. “She could talk to someone.”
Marsden knew he was remembering his own first days, after his brother. The way time must have stopped, even as it didn’t. How it might have been like trying to find your way out of the dark, with your eyes shut. “Who did you talk to?”
“No one, really. I didn’t want anyone but my friends. It hasn’t changed.” His gaze sharpened. “You, too. I want to talk to you.”
She nearly smiled. “Do you think you might need someone later?” Glory had its share of doctors hoping to help people like Rigby before it was too late, to help people like Jude when it was. They left flyers all over town.
He shrugged, frowning. “I don’t know. Maybe. I have the number for the school counselor if I need.”
“That’s really good.” Marsden pictured the school counselor, how she would see him at assemblies and in the halls, his expression as overwhelmed as it was welcoming, and somehow helpless. She wondered about Peaches talking to someone like that. Peaches, who always used clients as much as they used her. Now that Lucy was gone, Marsden could imagine Peaches coping simply by developing more teeth.
But Marsden hadn’t talked to anyone, either, after her father washed ashore. Or been made to talk to anyone, anyway, since she’d been a kid. She’d eventually gone to the covert, seeking answers there. Jude’s anger with his father had been shattered by Rigby’s death, and so he sought out his friends. He went to Theola, to her, to the covert to search.
Sometimes, Marsden felt the place breathe, made so alive by how much they needed it.
“Rig could have talked to me.” Jude’s voice was a harsh whisper. “Do you know how many times I’ve wished I’d been better at saying something to him when he’d been alive? How many times I said nothing at all when I knew?”
Marsden was the one who moved this time. She stood so closely, she could see each of his lashes. “I don’t know, but I’m sorry.” Had her mother sensed it in her husband? Had she, even as a kid, sensed it in her father in some small way?
“God, we’re both so full of sorrys right now.” His eyes crinkled just the slightest at the corners when he smiled, she saw. “I can’t imagine how hard it must be to listen to us.”
She had no choice but to smile back. “I’m counting on not having to say it much soon.”
“Hey, so why did you come over? Is it about tomorrow? I totally get it if you want to stay away from the covert for a while. I just feel bad that you didn’t call. You could have saved yourself a trip.”
“No, tomorrow’s fine. The covert—it’s always there, and so am I. It’s just . . . I was already out.”
Slowly, Jude leaned his forehead down against hers. “Marsden, why are you really here?”
The light in the kitchen had gone weak, melting its way toward dusk. It let shadows dance over Jude’s face and her head run wild with all the things she could not say but longed to.
What you saw today in the covert, I’m not the monster I might have looked like.
But when you find out what I’m hiding from you, I might as well be.
She fumbled for his hand and held on. “I felt like making you listen to some Shindiggs with me.”