Along the Indigo

by Elsie Chapman

  “Hadley was the police.”

  “And he declared it an accident. I don’t want to relive this. Let it go.”

  I can’t. I need to know it wasn’t me. “Did you ever tell me about him winning money that night? Why don’t you care more about how it was missing?”

  Her mother shut her eyes, and when she opened them—wet with tears, dark with the exhaustion of a daughter who wouldn’t listen—she was again the Shine whom Marsden had come to know, her struggle everyone else’s. “Don’t you see? Your father always had a winning night. Even if he turned around and then lost it all, he’d still won that night, right? It was always what he told people, what he told himself—that it would always be a winning hand, eventually.”

  Marsden was frozen, hearing how her mother had hated her father as much as she’d loved him. “So you think he just . . . bet it away again. Before he died.” She didn’t want to believe it, but she also knew it made sense. Her father had gambled away their family long before that night, again and again—why would he stop then?

  Her guilt over his death shifted then, just the slightest bit, and made room for anger. How could he have been so stupid when winning that money would have gone a long in way in saving them?

  “Yes, I do think that.” Shine stood up unsteadily and dropped her still-burning cigarette into the toilet. “When he could have used it to pay off his loans, or even just bills. Anything but bet it away. But I can also believe it was simply lost in the Indigo—that was our kind of luck, you see. Now, I have to get back to Brom—it’s not polite that I’ve kept him waiting this long.”

  “You shouldn’t be with him out there.” Marsden’s face burned as she recalled the image of them sitting together and laughing, as though he were a suitor. And her father was on her mind, clearer than he’d been for a long, long time—yes, she was angry with him, but her anger didn’t change how he’d once been so alive, and it was somehow so wrong that he was no longer there. How could he not be on Shine’s mind? How could anyone want to be with someone like Brom? “You’re not even working right now, and he’s a john. Can’t you at least pretend you still plump pillows as a housekeeper instead of as a whore?”

  Tears gathered and formed pools in the corners of Shine’s eyes. “Let this town talk. You know it’ll say what it wants, no matter what we do.”

  Marsden stared at their reflections in the oval mirror on the wall. The pewter frame was ornate, full of scrolling curls, completely feminine. Inside it, her face was young and smooth, her mother’s pale and strained.

  “Wynn’s around, and she has no clue what you do,” she whispered, her chest tight. “What would you say if she saw you and asked about him? That he’s your boyfriend?”

  Shine came to stand behind her. She smoothed her daughter’s hair back from her face and leaned close. She smelled like smoke and a perfume that Marsden didn’t recognize, something Brom must have bought her. “Look at us. We look so alike, don’t we? More like sisters than mother and daughter.”

  They did, it was true. Beneath her mother’s fine lines and her own flushed youth, their bones were the same, their features nearly identical, Chinese in their skin and hair, all gold and black. But her own eyes were wide and alarmed, while her mother’s were glittery with desperation.

  “It scared me so much, those men asking Nina about you, and not me. Because I remember what it’s like to worry where your next meal is coming from, or if you’re going to wake up to no heat, no lights. And I swore to myself I’d never live without security again. I would never be alone. I would always be taken care of.”

  “So Brom is the answer?”

  “He has a steady job.”

  “What does he even do? Where is he from?”

  “He sells savings accounts for banks, for credit unions. He makes his own hours, which is why he can take a couple of weeks off every few months. He moved here from Seattle a long time ago. He enjoys me. And . . . I’ve known him a long time. From even before I started working for Nina. Your father knew him, too. They were friendly enough.”

  “And that’s why he’s been around for years.” Marsden felt faint, and well-played—would she ever be as good as her mother at pretending? Did she want to be? “As soon as Dad was gone and you were free, he was there, waiting. He just paid his way.”

  More tears gleamed in Shine’s eyes. “Do you want me to apologize? Would that help?”

  “I don’t know. I’m trying to not throw up.” She knew how her father had barely been around, and how the family bank account never seemed to have enough. Shine had told her millions of times how he had promised to change, except he couldn’t seem to give up Decks or any of the other card houses in town. He wanted a different kind of reality, Marsden. We were just kids when we had you, and he wasn’t ready to stop being one himself. Marsden knew she was supposed to feel sorry for her mother, to say she understood. But how much longer could she be the reason for Shine’s actions?

  “It can’t be shocking to you,” her mother said, “that I needed someone after your father died. How I still do.”

  “And Brom’s your way out.” From me and Wynn. How is that any different than Dad and his games of blackjack?

  Shine seemed to wilt. “What else am I supposed to do? I don’t have a lot of options. I’m not getting any younger.”

  Marsden tensed. She kept her eyes on her mother’s in the mirror. If Shine was still trying to trap her into her life, Marsden thought she might scream. “Don’t put that on me again.”

  “I managed to speak to Nina for you,” Shine whispered.

  Marsden almost told her she shouldn’t have bothered since Nina had already asked her again anyway. But she said nothing. Her mother had done something for her; she’d chosen her daughter over her boss. She blinked away tears—she had not really felt grateful to her mother since she was young. Since that futile trip to the bus depot, she supposed, when, for a day, Shine had managed to make the world seem bigger than Glory.

  “Thank you,” she said to her mother’s reflection. “For trying.”

  Shine’s fingers trembled just the slightest as she smoothed back Marsden’s hair once more. “She was not . . . happy.”

  Relief washed over Marsden in a wave, and she nearly smiled. “No, she wouldn’t be.” And she didn’t care. Nina could be as mad as she wanted, and it wouldn’t make a difference at all.

  “She said she wants to talk to you more about it before you make up your mind.” Her mother lit a fresh cigarette; it shook like a leaf in a windstorm. “For my sake, can you at least pretend to consider it some more?”

  Marsden got up, preparing to leave. She didn’t miss the irony in her mother being the one to ask her to pretend. “She’ll have to find me first, but okay, I can do that. And then let’s not talk about this ever again.”

  fifteen.

  The boardinghouse and the covert were on the opposite side of town from where Jude lived and worked, at the other end of the crooked bend of the Indigo.

  But the highway stayed faithful to the river’s course as it hugged the length of Glory, and Marsden waited at the fence as the black truck approached. The shop name, Evergreen, had been painted on the dirt-filmed sides in an emerald hue that struggled to show. Road dust petered out from beneath the truck’s wheels in puffy plumes the shade of wheat, lingering in the hot air, dry and smokelike.

  Jude pulled onto the shoulder of the road, cut the engine, and climbed out.

  He’d showered and changed while back at work—heather-gray T-shirt now, midnight-blue shorts, the same ladder of friendship bracelets—and his wavy hair was still wet, a deep black as he shoved it off his forehead. When he walked up to her, for a second, she smelled the Indigo on him, damp and marshy and metallic. And then it was all soap, all him, Ivory or Irish Spring or whatever it was he used.

  Marsden forced herself to focus on what he was holding.

  A metal detector, the length of it about the same as her arm, made of steel and plastic.

  “I
wanted one of those when I was little,” she said.

  Jude’s smile was questioning. “Not so much into dolls?”

  “Dolls weren’t going to make me rich. I imagined walking along the riverbeds, finding buckets of change. I stopped believing in Santa the year I saw it in the Sears Christmas catalog and didn’t get it.”

  He laughed. “I bet Rig had the same idea, but his wasn’t a gift.” He peered at the detector more closely, as though it was his first time seeing it, too. His expression switched between sadness and amusement, a leaf turning over and over as it whirled to the ground. “He found it behind the school field one day, just lying in the dirt. Still works, even now—I don’t know why someone would abandon it.”

  She took note of the rust that bloomed at the screws, the dents that pinged their way along the handle, the warped sensor pad, and tried not to doubt.

  “We’re expecting a lot from an old toy, aren’t we?” she asked as they walked toward the outer edge of the trees.

  Jude smiled. “If I tell myself it’s just an old cookie tin we’re searching for, it doesn’t seem so nuts.”

  Instead of a part of your dead brother, while I’m looking for a connection to finally hear the dead. “I’m just here for the ride.”

  “And it starts here?” Glancing around, his face was etched with uncertainty. They’d reached the fence, and wild ginger was already at their feet. It furled outward from its roots inside the covert, a roaming mass of green. “But we can still see the fence. You don’t think he’d have gone deeper to bury the capsule, just to avoid being seen?”

  Marsden shook her head. “I think it makes the most sense to start from the entrance and work our way in. Rigby would have been just a kid when he buried it, and somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be—he probably didn’t want to hang around any longer than he had to.” She pictured a little boy trying to stay upright on a bike while holding something close, something he needed to keep safe. “Do you think one of those cookie tins would have fit in a backpack?”

  Jude held out his hands so they were about a foot apart. “Maybe? But it doesn’t matter if he used a backpack or not. I just think he left something behind, however he carried it over. And I think we’ll find it in here.”

  Rigby had left something behind, of course. It’d been a note. The knowledge sat hot in her heart, uncomfortable. Well, whether or not he’d left more, they would soon find out.

  Marsden watched Jude scan the part of the covert he could see and wondered what he was thinking, if he was aware of the fear that glimmered in his eyes like an odd light. If he could already tell that the farther they walked inside, the denser the trees grew, becoming nearly impenetrable in some spots. How soon the sky overhead would narrow into nothing more than thin slashes of blue. How sunlight would slide into shade, heat into a simmer. How once someone got past a certain point in the covert, it grew hard to remember the open vastness of a summer day.

  He suddenly turned back to her. “Okay, what am I missing?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re more tense than I am, and you come in here in all the time. Should I be worried about something in there other than the given?”

  “The given?”

  “You know. Ghosts. Bodies. The police.” One corner of his mouth twitched and his brows lifted. It nearly made her laugh, her nerves on edge as they were. “Your mom yelling at us to get out.”

  A laugh did slip free at that, but it didn’t last. Marsden shook her head. You forgot secrets, Jude. I’m so full of them in here, and I can’t tell you any. “I was just . . . seeing the covert through your eyes.” This, at least, wasn’t a total lie. “As if it were my first time, too.”

  “And?”

  “I still think I’m right about Rigby staying close to the edge of the covert. Except maybe it wasn’t because of the size or weight of whatever he was carrying that day.”

  “No?”

  “I think it was because of fear of the covert. Same as what you’re feeling now.”

  Jude nodded. “I’m about to walk into the place where my brother died. I thought I’d be mostly sad, or angry—which I am—but I’m definitely scared, too.”

  A few seconds of silence passed, and then he gave her an uneasy smile. “Also, you kind of have to admit this place has a distinct vibe.”

  Vibe. Like the covert was an energy field, something with its own life force. “That word nearly makes the covert seem cool instead of creepy.”

  “Nah, this place will never be anything but creepy to me.” He pointed in the direction of the boardinghouse. “I was joking about your mom coming in, but can anyone really see us from there? What if she actually does? Or a guest?”

  “Most guests are gone during the day, off fishing or boating, or walking around town. And my mom knows I come here.” Marsden hesitated. “It’s more after dark that we have to be sure to be gone. Being in the covert at night, it can be easy to lose your way. And—well, your imagination takes on a life of its own.”

  Jude swept the detector haphazardly over the ginger at his feet. “It doesn’t even have to be at night for the impossible to get into your head. To try to convince you it’s actually not impossible at all. Way too many times I’ve talked myself into believing that Rig was just going to walk out of this place, still alive, and tell me it’s all been a mistake.”

  The presence of the hidden note fell from her heart and into the pit of her stomach. She said nothing. They continued to walk.

  “Do you see skimmers moving in here at night?” he asked suddenly.

  Marsden had to wait a few seconds to answer, smothered by the abrupt question, the quiet disgust she heard in his voice. She’d rather have been yelled at. “Trespassers, sure. Sometimes we see flashlights in here from the boardinghouse. Wynn says they must be like how fireflies move, darting throughout the trees.”

  “You make that sound nice.”

  She nudged at a dense bunch of ginger with the toe of her sneaker, not sure how to reply. She had made the covert at night sound nice—a charming image, completely harmless—and had no clue why she’d bothered. To make Jude feel better about where Rigby had died? So that if he ever found out that she was a skimmer, he’d remember that she wasn’t wholly evil?

  The harsh truth was, however nicely she or Wynn painted it, the reality of the covert wasn’t about lights at all. Instead it was about the shadows that existed in there, those that took the shape of fallen humans. It was about the people who had died and the people who crouched over them, pawing at their bodies for money and jewelry. Reality was Rigby never coming back. Reality was her father, also gone forever.

  “Hey, can I ask you something about finding his body?”

  Marsden glanced over at him, praying he saw nothing close to guilt on her face. “Okay.”

  “Do you think—” Jude broke off. Swore softly. Tried again. “Do you think his body had already been skimmed? That someone else had gotten to him first and stolen whatever he might have had on him?”

  Her heart skipped, tapped at her throat. The silence surrounding them was now pointed, the covert at attention. “I really don’t think so.”

  “Why not?”

  “I just don’t.”

  A muscle moved along his neck. “If you see skimmers in here at night, why don’t you guys stop them?”

  She slowly shook her head. A part of her wanted to run; another, to explain, in whatever way she could. “Even if we did, there’s always going to be more.”

  “What if you knew it wasn’t a skimmer or a trespasser, but someone who’s there because they mean to die? Shouldn’t you try to stop them from doing what they came to do?”

  She saw his dream unfolding in her mind as though he were asking for it to be her dream, too. And in this imaginary parallel world—made all the more painful because it couldn’t exist—instead of walking out of their house in the middle of the night for the last time, Rigby was walking back into it. In this dream, he would still smell of wild ginger
from the covert, but only a tiny bit, because the voices in the covert had refused to let him in. They had decided his sins, whatever they’d been, had to be fixed outside of it. In this dream, he would put the gun back in the kitchen drawer before shaking out the handful of covert soil he’d dumped into his pocket as his passage to peace. Then he’d go back to bed, and he would promise to try to get through another day once morning came.

  “So?” Jude pressed. He emitted sadness like a warning, his grief acute—it hurt her to look him in the eye. “If you knew, would you try?”

  Marsden thought of her father, of the insatiable pull of water, of a guy who liked games of blackjack more than having tea parties with his daughter, and said the only thing she could: “I think most people would try to stop them, if they knew, and if they could. The only thing is, sometimes we just don’t know. And sometimes we just can’t.”

  sixteen.

  They went deeper.

  Sunshine faded, fell weak in the air. The trees soared and their dusty, feathered tops turned spidery, full of traps and tangles. Patches of shade on the ground played tricks on their eyes, appearing as blood. The calls of crows overhead ballooned into shrieks. The scent of ginger was everywhere.

  Marsden knew if Jude dreamed anything that night, it would be of the covert.

  As they walked, a question stayed on the tip of her tongue, threatening to ask if he wanted to ask:

  Where did you find Rig’s body, Marsden?

  But he didn’t, and she was relieved. She knew he’d never unsee it once he knew. He’d replay what would have happened over and over again and would never stop questioning at what point his brother still could have been saved, at what point there could have been a change in angle or a turn of thought that Rig could put the gun down and still walk away.

  A couple of hours in, taking turns with the detector, they’d finally settled into a rhythm on how to best use it—long sweeps across the ground, in wide, even arcs. Hold it too high and the sensor picked up nothing; hold it too low and it would catch on the brush.