thirty-six.
She said goodbye to Peaches and left the bedroom. Walking down the hall toward the lobby, Marsden shivered despite the summer heat that simmered through the walls.
Since yesterday’s discovery of Lucy’s body in the covert, a kind of uneasy edginess had burrowed its way into the boardinghouse. It was as though whatever invisible boundary had kept the two places distinct was slowly falling away, letting both sides bleed into each other. Nina’s girls, normally a chatty, giggling group, went quiet and thoughtful. It’d been Lucy who had fallen prey to the covert, one of their own, a reminder that living in the boardinghouse didn’t mean they were any safer from the woods’ darker side than anyone else in Glory.
Reactions inside the house varied.
Peaches, of course, was leaving.
To keep Wynn from the covert, their mother signed her up for afternoon swimming camp. Wynn had barely reacted to the sudden loss of freedom, she’d been so shocked about Lucy.
Aside from quietly serving last night’s dinner after returning from the market and then eventually emerging from her room that morning to help serve breakfast, Dany claimed migraines and asked to be left alone.
And Marsden had gone to Jude’s house and kissed him until he filled her mind and left her incapable of thought.
Only his father coming home had separated them.
The sound of the front door had barely swum through the haze in her brain, until she finally pulled away enough to say, “Someone’s here.”
“No, there isn’t.” His mouth was heated and everywhere.
Her skin was equally hot as she chased him back down, wanting to block out the world that existed outside his bedroom.
Then the louder slam of the front door, followed by the muffled sound of Leo’s voice. Jude? You home?
They had hastily climbed off his bed, doing their best not to laugh, their hands smoothing down each other’s clothes.
Jude’s father’s face was absolutely blank as they’d gone out to the front room to meet him, as Jude introduced her in a rough rasp of a voice that told her he would have given anything to be back in his bed with her, that he would have rather kept her from meeting Leo Ambrose entirely.
His father slowly set his briefcase down on the coffee table, rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, loosened his tie. She looked at his fists and winced inwardly for the little boys Jude and Rigby had been. Family bonds could be ugly. Sometimes they were chains.
“Hello, Marsden, it’s nice to meet you.”
She would never have guessed—Jude’s father could have been talking about the weather, his tone was so indifferent.
“Nice to meet you, too,” she lied. A partial lie, anyway. It was good to finally see him face-to-face, to finally be able to paint him as the mere human being he was instead of the nearly mythical power he’d grown to be in her head.
Still, she tried not to squirm as he glanced from his son to her, and then back again. Two minutes in his presence, and she longed for escape.
Did Jude feel as trapped living here as she did in the boardinghouse?
But he was no longer a little kid. He was just as tall as Leo, his shoulders as broad. Rigby had waited for that. He’d waited until Jude could hold his own.
“It’s a work night for me, Jude,” his father said. “No one over in the evenings, remember?”
Jude’s mouth twitched. “We were . . . reading.”
Marsden coughed.
“Well, it’s getting late now,” Leo said.
She didn’t miss the hint.
Before Jude could say anything that would likely make things harder for him later—that he would take her home, that she could stay for dinner, that he actually didn’t give a crap if it was a work night—she strangled out an explanation about having to leave anyway, touched Jude’s arm, and stumbled her way through the front door. She grabbed her bike from where she’d leaned it against the house, headed down the block, and turned onto the highway in the direction of the boardinghouse.
The just-about-cool evening air had washed over her as she’d biked along the river, calming her inflamed and wound-up nerves deep inside even as it tortured her still-tingling skin. She kept looping it over and over again in her mind—the press and feel of Jude’s mouth on hers, his gently curious fingers.
He’d tasted like cinnamon.
She hadn’t seemed able to get enough. And it had relieved her, that intense and delicious want. Living at the boardinghouse and knowing what Nina’s girls did every night with their johns, a small part of her had always been unsure, full of questions. What if she’d come to hate kissing and being touched and just hadn’t figured it out yet? What if having sex one day only disgusted her instead of being something she wanted?
The ache that filled her at having to stop kissing Jude—it was as good an answer as any.
It wasn’t until she’d caught sight of the boardinghouse down the highway, its peaked roof sharp in the fuzzy evening light, that thoughts of Lucy began to creep back into her head, unraveling the thick knot of sadness in there so that it started to seep again. Marsden had barely known her, considering they’d lived in the same house for years, but Lucy’s absence still loomed large, paving paths full of questions and regrets.
Once inside, she’d found Wynn watching television with their mother, the scene so rare Marsden had had to stare for several moments, processing it as real. Then she went to bed early, trying to forget about Nina’s heartless ruthlessness in the name of business, how she didn’t have long before she had to go to her mother’s boss and admit she was hers. The gaping emptiness of both her boots left matching hollows inside her gut. By the time she’d fallen asleep, it’d been to thoughts of life and death in other ways—of a tall boy with a wicked slash for a grin and whose eyes contained a forest fire, of a girl with Alice in Wonderland hair whose wrists spilled blood onto heart-shaped leaves.
•••
She’d spent longer talking with Peaches than she’d thought, and the lobby was already filling with guests waiting to check out by the time Marsden left the boardinghouse.
Brom’s photo burned like a brand from inside her shorts pocket.
Seconds. The one question she intended to ask Fitz. And if his answer didn’t bring her any closer to the answers she so wanted from her father—Why did you leave? Was it me?—then she told herself she would let it go. Just as Shine wanted. And then after Jude was gone, the covert would be simple again, even more so than before. No more trying to hear voices. No more wondering about her father. It would just be skimming from bodies and keeping Wynn away. There would be a new race to get away from Nina and their mother.
And she would be touched now. She would change and become someone different, someone she didn’t want to know. She had no clue how to stop it from happening, and she could already feel a scream building up inside of her.
She’d gotten her bike from the shed and was headed down the front drive when she got a glimpse of Wynn just outside the covert. The top of her sister’s head was a dot of black ink against the green of the forest.
“Mom’s going to be so mad if you pull a no-show on your first day at camp, runt,” she said as soon as she got close enough to be heard. “Aren’t you looking forward to it?”
“You mean swimming lessons in a wading pool in Mrs. Clements’s backyard?” Wynn made a face and swung her skipping rope harder at the ground. Shorn grass and dandelion bits littered the ground beneath her feet, a cascade of destruction. She was wearing her favorite blue terry shorts and a ThunderCats T-shirt—no hint of a swimsuit in sight. “No thanks.”
A smile nearly escaped from Marsden. “It’s not a wading pool—it’s got real stand-up walls. And it’s behind the school, not in Mrs. Clements’s backyard. Just because she’s a teacher there doesn’t mean it’s her backyard.”
“Who wants to go swimming in the river, anyway? It’s mostly mud.”
“It’s in case you fall in, to make sure you can swim out. Not everyone who goes in can come—” She thought of their father and let the warning peter away, unfinished.
“Mom just wants me to stay out of the covert.” Wynn looked up, and Marsden was surprised to see a hint of tears in her eyes. “Even though it’s not any more dangerous than it was before.”
Lucy, on her sister’s mind like a lingering nightmare. “She’s just worried about you seeing something in there one day.”
“She doesn’t stop you from coming here.”
“Because I’m older.” Because Shine knew she’d do it anyway.
“Dead bodies can’t hurt anyone. Besides, it’s the house that feels more dangerous now, not the covert.”
The hair on the back of Marsden’s neck stood up. “What do you mean?”
Wynn whipped her skipping rope and decapitated dandelion heads flew everywhere. “Because no one killed Lucy. It was her own voice, in her own head.” Now tears were streaming down her sister’s face, coursing over the speck of grape jam clinging to Wynn’s chin like a tiny bruise. “I wish she hadn’t listened to it, Mars. I wish she’d asked for someone else to start talking over it so she couldn’t hear it anymore.”
“I really wish she had, too,” Marsden said softly.
“Remember how I said I never wanted to live anywhere else in Glory but the boardinghouse? I changed my mind. Do you have enough saved up yet so we can move? We can share a bedroom again, if you want. I promise I won’t be so messy.”
Marsden’s heart twisted and sank at the irony. She’d always been terrified, waiting for the day Wynn would fight her in earnest on the idea of leaving. Now that her sister was all for it, Marsden couldn’t make it happen—not with Nina having taken all her money and nowhere else in town to get a job. Even giving in and becoming one of her girls didn’t mean Wynn would be going anywhere anytime soon.
They were stuck, tiny, awkward flies caught in a jeweled web.
“I don’t have enough. I won’t, not for a while.” The words lodged in her throat, weak and bitter. “I think . . . we have to stay. For now.”
Wynn stopped slashing at the dandelions, the carnage coming to a halt. “You were the one who wanted to go so badly. You even wanted to leave Glory altogether, remember? But then I said no so you said we’d just leave the boardinghouse. And now we’re not even doing that?”
“I know I said that. But we can’t go just yet. I’m really sorry.”
“Is it because of Jude?” The corners of Wynn’s mouth turned down as she lowered the skipping rope. Her dried paintbrush hair was wilder than ever that morning, and Marsden itched for a comb and barrettes—not so much to make it pretty but more to calm and soothe.
“Couldn’t he just visit you, wherever we move? Besides, he’s just a boy—they’re always around.”
“It’s not because of Jude.” Except that wasn’t entirely true, either, Marsden realized, something in her chest twisting anew. She didn’t know when exactly it happened, the idea of staying in Glory becoming acceptable as long as they didn’t have to also live at the boardinghouse. But she had to admit a lot of that changing did have to do with Jude. And she didn’t think it made her a bad sister as much as it made her human.
“We have to leave,” Wynn said. “If we stay here, what if you end up sad? And dead? Like Lucy?”
“I don’t know that kind of sadness, Wynn. It’s more complicated than that.”
“She always acted fine on the outside, but she wasn’t, not deep down.”
“She was really hurt, from a long time ago.” Marsden touched the fence and felt the rough edges of carvings of well-meaning messages press against her palms. She saw the flowers and nonsense doodles she and Jude had put there just yesterday—in the bright early sun, they already seemed faded. “And she felt alone, I think, even when she wasn’t.”
Wynn flung the skipping rope aside and ran to throw her arms around Marsden’s waist. “Don’t be sad like that. Ever.”
Marsden smoothed her sister’s hair as best as she could with her hands, her heart now squeezing with worry, with the future, and lied:
“I’ll think of something, okay?”
A muffled okay against her side.
“Keep away from Nina, and I won’t tell Mom you’re here hiding from swimming lessons.”
And that was how, while Wynn disappeared into the covert to avoid being dragged to Mrs. Clements’s wading pool—near the back, where she always insisted the wild ginger started growing in the first place; not because it was the thickest there, the leaves the largest and darkest that could be found, but “because that’s where the roots fight me the hardest when I try to pull them out”—Marsden biked toward Seconds.
The wind pushed her along.
A photo in her pocket fanned into flame.
She biked faster.
•••
Between Jude and their afternoons searching the covert, the work schedule that required her to be in the kitchen of the boardinghouse, and the times she spent with Wynn, Marsden supposed it wasn’t entirely unforgiveable that it’d taken her this long to get back to Seconds.
The urgency she felt now made up for it. As though the past eight years hadn’t even happened, as though her father could still be saved, as long as she finally got her answer.
Marsden opened the door and stepped inside.
It took her eyes five seconds to adjust to the dim lighting and make out Fitz behind the counter, leaning against the back wall. He was puffing away on a cigarette and reading that week’s TV Guide. When he looked up and saw her, he waved her over.
“A photo, right?” He set the magazine down on the counter and blew out a stream of smoke. “To see if I remember that one guy back at Decks.”
She nodded. “The one who knew my father.” She could only hope that Fitz would remember one way or the other as soon as he saw the photo: Yes, your mother’s lover was there that night; no, never seen him before. Yes, he might be involved in your father’s death; no, he couldn’t have been, he wasn’t even there.
Marsden tugged the photo from her pocket. It came out half-creased, rumpled. But still, Brom’s face was more than clear, even his oatmeal features made distinctive. She handed it over.
Fitz took the photo, stared at it through a cloud of cigarette smoke, and nodded. “It was him.”