forty-five.
The covert swelled and swam, and Marsden thought she was going to be sick.
“I wanted root beer floats that night, remember?” Jude’s words came fast, like he was worried she’d run before he could finish. “But it was already late, and there was that storm, and my dad had already had too much to drink. But Rig insisted that we should celebrate because of my project. He said we could go on our own, he’d just take the truck and he’d be extra careful about driving. But my dad lost it, the way he always lost it back then, and Rig just grabbed me and the keys to the truck, and then we were driving on the highway, along the Indigo.
“He just drove and drove, wanting to run away with me and not come back. And the storm—it was bad that night. I remember the wipers going so fast, this wild kind of drumming. I’d already fallen asleep in the backseat when Rig saw the man walking along the shoulder of the road. And that’s when he thought of money—if we were going to run away, we’d need money.”
Marsden shut her eyes. Her stomach was heaving, just like that same storm. Her father, coming home from Decks.
“My dad used to keep a pocketknife in the glove compartment,” Jude continued quietly. “For emergencies. Rig pulled over, got out of the truck, and told your dad if he didn’t give him his wallet, he’d have to hurt him. He was bluffing, he had no clue how to use a knife, but he was desperate. Your dad saw how he was still just a kid despite his size, and he said no and began to walk away. Rig decided that he was already in too deep to go back. So then he did try to stab your dad.”
She could see it. The thundering rain, the way it would have made the river roll and crash. A moonless night, a slippery road, a young boy’s blind need for escape in order to save his little brother—all of it coming down to the single stranger who stood in his way. Would she not have done the same for Wynn?
“It was along a part of the highway where the Indigo nearly came right up to it, the shoulder was so thin,” Jude said. “Your dad managed to wrestle the knife away, and then he tossed it into the river. He told Rig to go home or he’d call the cops, and then he turned to leave again. And Rig—he panicked. He’d just pulled a knife on someone who knew what his face looked like, and he just . . . panicked.”
Jude’s eye was a huge dark moon, and he was nine years old again, and Marsden saw him relive her father’s death as Rigby would have witnessed it. Rigby, who had now joined them at the fence of the covert, his ghost sitting beside Jude, telling him about the wild summer storm of Glory eight years ago.
“But just as your dad couldn’t have guessed how strong Rig was for a kid, neither did Rig. And when he pushed your dad to stop him from leaving, your dad’s head hit the ground hard enough that he stopped moving. Stopped breathing. So my brother . . . he dragged your father’s body over to the edge of the Indigo and waited until the river took it away.
“Then he drove home. He carried me into the house, and I kept sleeping. I kept dreaming about root beer floats and drumming windshield wipers and families who never fought. He told my dad, who was scared sober by the idea of anyone finding out—sober for a while, anyway. And then your dad’s accident was in the local paper, and that’s how everyone knew who was the latest to die.”
Jude finished talking then, the last of it an echo that rolled throughout the covert, as thick and heavy as the ever-present scent of wild ginger. Silence fell between them, an invisible wedge of shock.
Her father, dead because of Rigby, the one person Jude had ever relied on—not possible. It needed to be a lie. Better that it’d been Brom, an old friend willing to murder for money, or Grant Eldridge himself, who was already drowning while on dry land. And if Marsden had any part in his decision—well, the worst of the town’s madness circled back to her own blood, didn’t it?
There was no way she and Jude could ever be okay with Rigby and her father between them. He would change his mind about not hating her, the same as Shine did, as her father had, as even Wynn might one day, tired of having her life controlled.
“You’re wrong.” Her denial burst from her like a dam breaking. She felt unwound somehow, all parts of her trying to escape the moment. “They found his body. Washed up, drowned. They said it was clearly an accident. They said.”
“It was an accident.”
“There were no signs of that kind of struggle. There was nothing.”
“The rain, though. The storm. It would have washed everything away.” He dared to move closer. “I wish it hadn’t been Rig, either, but you need to know that whatever your father said to you before leaving, you had nothing to do with him dying.”
She let out a shaky breath, then another, unable to speak. She’d been waiting for years to hear those words, except always from the dead, not from Jude. Closure was a dream, still. How were they going to shake the ghosts they carried like a disease? Marsden felt the pull of the covert, of Glory as a whole, promising her and Jude they would never escape. She heard her father, his voice nearly drowned out by the storm. She heard Rigby, calling out from the woods for his brother.
“I don’t blame you if you hate Rig,” Jude said. “If you hate me for it being him.”
She shook her head, suddenly newly exhausted, all the way down to her bones. Rig had been made to live in a corner for most of his life, had only done his best to escape. And deciding to hate Jude would be like saying he killed her father—by always needing Rigby, by making his big brother think he had no other choice.
“He was just being your big brother,” she finally said, “and he was thinking of you. How could I not understand that?”
“It doesn’t change what he did. I’ll always love him, and he didn’t mean to do it, but it doesn’t change what he did.”
“I know.” Just as her father hadn’t meant to leave the way he actually did, hadn’t meant his last words to be the ones he actually said. “If I could, I would tell him I forgive him.”
Rigby, her father—she needed to forgive both.
And so she returned them—to her family’s covert, to the Indigo, to the places they’d chosen to rest—and she let them go. Into the trees, into the tide—the weight of years slid free of her heart and she blinked away tears.
Jude let out a soft sigh, tugged her closer. “Don’t do that.”
“Don’t do what?” She saw the way his gaze searched hers, as if trying to read her eyes the way Theola might have tried to read her thoughts.
“Make me no longer give a crap about moving carefully with you.”
She slowly slid her arms around his neck. She’d lived with caution and fear and the darkness of the covert for most of her life. But for this boy, who looked at her as if none of that mattered, she was tired of being careful.
Still, he was hurt, his mouth cut and bruised, and she hesitated.
Jude pulled her close and kissed her. She tasted the singing rawness of his lips, the taste of him beneath that, and didn’t want to stop. Couldn’t. So she didn’t, and neither did he, not for the longest time, and—
“Hello!”
From within his arms, Marsden jumped. She tugged her mouth free and looked up. “Wynn!”
“Hi, Mars.” Her little sister was smiling, frank curiosity all over her face. “Hi, Jude,” she said to his still-turned back. “Does this mean you guys are going out now?”
“Hi, Wynn,” Jude said mildly, his gaze remaining unmoving from Marsden’s face. “Come back later, okay?”
“But why? I just got here,” she said, laughing.
Marsden heard the affection for Jude in her sister’s laugh, liked how safe it sounded, and peered more closely at her. It was her first time seeing Wynn since finding out about Brom, and she couldn’t help but notice now. That where she and Wynn looked the same hadn’t changed, but where they’d always been different stood out more clearly now, more obviously. She wondered if, over time, she’d forget to notice, would unconsciously smooth out the fresh jaggedness of those differences until they blurred, became soft once again.
The corner of Jude’s mouth twitched as he continued to watch Marsden. “Just because.”
Aware of her little sister’s intense scrutiny, she gave Jude a fast kiss and got to her feet, adjusting her shirt while hoping her face looked nothing but calm. The whole time, his good eye continued to burn her skin, and she flushed at the unspoken words inside that flame—That’s not enough, not nearly.
Wynn was holding Rigby’s old metal detector.
Marsden frowned. The metal detector had come to represent too much of the covert—seeing it in her sister’s hands looked wrong.
“Where did you get that?” she asked.
Jude got to his feet beside her, swept aside her hair, and kissed the back of her neck. “It’s okay, Rig wouldn’t have minded. It’s meant to be used.”
Flushed again, Marsden looked over and saw Wynn, in no rush to answer the question, staring at Jude. She hadn’t seen his face with all its cuts and bruises yet. Her expression was a mix of surprise and awe.
“You got beat up!” she exclaimed loudly.
He grimaced as he reached up to touch his face. “Oh, yeah, this. Uh, I fell. Playing basketball.”
“So you aren’t very good?”
“Sure I am.”
“But you fell. And pretty badly, from the way you look.”
He laughed, and Marsden’s heartbeat did a little flip at seeing him so at ease with Wynn, when he could have chosen to merely tolerate her. “The pavement won,” he said. “But it’s okay to fall once in a while—just makes you tougher.”
“Did you need stitches?”
“Nope.”
“That’s good. I heard getting them hurts. Once, I cut my knee and I cried for hours because I was so worried I would need them. You know, if Nina had seen you and Mars kissing like that inside the house, she probably wouldn’t have liked it.”
“We thought ahead,” he said, smiling. His bruises and cuts rippled, the surface of a lake with a strong wind on it.
“Actually, if you’d even walked into the house looking like that, she would have asked you to leave. Mom, too—you really do look kind of scary.”
The mention of Shine reminded Marsden about Wynn’s new afternoon schedule, which her sister had obviously chosen to ignore.
“You’re supposed to be at swimming camp,” she said. “You already missed the first class. Maybe you should just tell Mom you really don’t want to go. I bet she’s looking for you right now.”
Her sister shrugged. She mimed sweeping the metal detector over the mix of ginger and grass at her feet. “I was in the covert, but then I got hungry and went to eat. I told Dany to tell her.”
She wondered how long Wynn had been sneaking the metal detector to use on her own—it was clear she’d been practicing for a while. How long do you stay in the covert on your own? What have you found? Who have you heard? “How often do you use the detector?”
“I don’t know. Just once in a while.” Her sister clicked it on and started scanning around her. Marsden saw the way she held it perfectly, neither too high or too low, and her unease grew, a kind of buzzing in her veins that matched the low hum of the thing’s motor.
“It was my brother’s,” Jude said. “His name was Rigby.”
Wynn glanced up, her expression suddenly fearful as she remembered just who Rigby was. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know it was his,” she half whispered. “I just thought it was yours.”
“It’s okay. He would have been happy to see you use it. He used to try to find coins with it, most of all. Every summer for a few years, he talked about trying to save enough for something big.”
Wynn nodded, concentrating. The motor hummed, ginger swirled, the sun shone clear and sharp. “I like finding coins, too, and old buttons. I even found an old bullet once—”
Marsden sighed. “Oh, Wynn.”
“—stuck in the base of a tree. Oh, and an old metal tin.”
Her nerves went taut and tense, and a current ran along Marsden’s spine—her pulse flew. Beside her, Jude froze.
“What kind of tin?” he asked Wynn, his voice tight.
“A cookie tin. Blue. You know, those round tins of butter cookies that everyone buys at Christmas. They’re not even that good, you know. Mars’s are way better.” She glanced up from the ground to search Marsden’s face and then Jude’s. “Is that what you guys have been looking for? I knew there had to be something since you were using this.”
“Something like that, yeah,” Jude said.
“I left it in there, if you want to go see.”
“You didn’t open it?”
“I couldn’t.” Wynn shrugged. “I was going to ask you or Mars to try later.”
Suddenly, Marsden was cold. “Where did you find it in the covert?”
“Near the back. You know, where the ginger started growing in the first place.” Where the roots fight me the hardest when I try to pull them out. Wynn wandered off around the fence, still waving the detector. As her small form disappeared, Marsden imagined Rigby as a little kid walking beside her, holding dying ginger in his arms, telling her it needed planting deep in the covert.
Jude touched her arm, and she turned to look at him, already dreading the question, knowing she couldn’t protect him from it anymore.
“The area Wynn’s talking about.” His eye was steady on hers, as dark as the Indigo at midnight. “It’s where you found Rig’s body, isn’t it?”
Marsden took his hand, careful of the cuts there. “Yes.”