Along the Indigo

by Elsie Chapman

  Later, biking home with Wynn as the Indigo curled its way alongside them and with Jude still at the edge of all her thoughts, she considered what she would have said to Abbot before they were no longer alone. How she would have defended herself against being the one to hurt him. To explain her confidence in him being fine after she walked away. That he would barely even notice, once he’d gotten what he needed from her and the covert.

  The answer, when it came, hurt.

  She already knew she was going to be sad to see him go, would start thinking of reasons for him to stay the day he was finally free to leave what had never been anything but temporary to him.

  Abbot assumed Jude was the one at risk.

  The truth was, Marsden was the one who was no longer safe.

  Don’t worry, Abbot.

  This time it’s Jude who gets to disappear on someone else first.

  nineteen.

  The shadows came in through the trees at a slant, hinting that daylight was leaving.

  They would have to escape the covert soon, before dark arrived.

  Marsden stepped over a gnarled, mossy root that stuck out from the ground like a finger from a grave. Likewise, Jude lifted the detector high enough to keep it from catching. Already, they’d mastered the odd dance the covert required for them to make it through while still being thorough—the contrived coordination of invading troops, the dogged determination of escaping ones.

  It was their second search in three days, and it seemed as if they’d come to some kind of agreement with the covert. The anguished land agreed to let them in, but they would not be allowed to stop, nor go back, nor rush ahead. What happened, happened; the covert would decide what it would finally give to them, and when.

  Time warped within that ancient wooden fence enclosing them from the world. Hours, like moments; moments, like days. It was like the story of Persephone, who was tricked into eating six pomegranate seeds, each seed cursing her to a month in the underworld. As the goddess ate those blood-red seeds, so Marsden’s great-great-uncle had spilled his family’s blood onto the covert’s soil, and prisoners were born anew to them.

  “Man, Rig coming in this deep?” Jude swung the detector over the wild ginger at their feet, the endless spools of spice. “As a kid? I bet most adults wouldn’t come this far. Kind of amazing what you can convince yourself to do when you really want something.”

  Marsden thought of her mother convincing herself right out of her own ability. How Star had called her a coward for doing it. They’d argued about it once, and Marsden had been in the same room, the almond cookies her grandmother had brought for her gone tasteless on her tongue. You’re so full of fear there’s no room for anything else, Star had whispered harshly to her daughter. Fear of this town, of yourself.

  “He was probably still really scared,” she said to Jude. “He just wanted to bury that tin even more.”

  “It made him brave. Braver than I was at that age.”

  “You were just a kid. You shouldn’t have had to be brave.”

  “Rig said Dad had a bad temper, even when my mom was still around,” he muttered, swirling over a patch of clover. As usual, there were no bees in sight, the insects permanently shy of the covert. Their instincts had long ago warned them to stay away, to instead drink only from clover grown in light, grown from soil without traces of tragedy. “Later, having two kids to raise on his own didn’t help it.”

  “Your mom died when you were just a baby, didn’t she?” It’d been cancer that had taken Isabel Ambrose, its ugly pull stronger than any of that of the covert.

  “When I was three. I can’t remember much—I need pictures to see her face. Apparently, she hated it here—back East, she was Isabel Ambrose, but in Glory, she was the black lady married to the guy who used to have a good job, you know?” He shrugged. “My dad tried—small things, like he picked out the cherrywood flooring in the house to match what we had before—but that’s just . . . surface stuff. Rig missed her all the time. I guess I got off easy, not remembering her.”

  Marsden held a tree branch to the side so it wouldn’t smack him in the stomach as he followed her through a thick knot of pines. “I think we forget for a reason. If you remembered every single bad thing that ever happened to you, you’d never stop being sad.”

  Her words had been impulsive, almost embarrassingly revealing, and she wished she could take them back—they came too close to spelling out her secrets. How she was trying to hear the dead just to prove it wasn’t her fault her father was gone. How that had made her say yes to Jude digging up the covert, but it’d been on top of feeling guilty about being a skimmer.

  “When I think about Rig being brave for my sake, the worst part is it was because he didn’t have a choice.” Jude swept, the detector a slow arc of silver. “My being around meant he had to be brave, all the time. What a damn heavy load for a kid to have to carry, right?”

  She took the detector from him, felt the high buzz of it in her bones as she took over. “It’s—you don’t question a load when you’re the only one who can carry it.” Wynn had always been hers, and only hers, to watch over—there’d been no one else. Only in her weakest moments, or her angriest, did Marsden sometimes let herself resent it. She wondered if it’d been the same way for Rigby. She saw the image of his eyes in the library again, how shuttered they’d been as he held Jude. Rigby, can you hear me? Are you here with us, anywhere? You weren’t evil for sometimes wanting to run away on your own, only real.

  “I asked Roadie once if he thought Rig was going to hell, handful of covert dirt dumped into his pocket or not.” Jude plucked a vine of ivy off a trunk as he passed. “He said he didn’t even believe in God, so how could he believe in hell?”

  She didn’t know what she believed. Because what kind of God would allow for a place like Glory, like the covert? “Do you agree with him?”

  “I kind of have to, don’t I?”

  She led them over more patches of wild ginger, the plants’ fragrance sitting on their tongues, the biggest component of their air. There was the occasional ping on the sensor that turned out to be coins or screws. And as they walked, her thoughts went from God to spirits. To the otherworldly. Special abilities had no place in reality now, not with technology what it was.

  But her family owned the covert, in a town where most of its folk still believed in guaranteed passageways to the afterlife. She grew up listening to Star tell her stories about ghosts and mediums and the dead as though they were the most normal things in the world. She’d never talked to anyone outside of family about their ability to hear the dead. But most of Glory knew anyway, just as thinking of Leo Ambrose naturally led to thoughts of booze and a short temper. But unlike Jude’s family’s history, that of Marsden’s was an older kind of knowledge, part of the town’s very roots, from Duncan and his gun to Star Liu’s death to Shine’s shunning of her own dark magic.

  Marsden slid Jude a sideways glance.

  How much did he know? Or believe? If he ever guessed how often she stood in the covert, listening and trying not to fail again, would he ask her to listen for Rigby? What would he say if she told him she already was, but for her own reasons, too?

  “Hey.” He stepped up on a small outcrop of rocks, slid back down. He stuck his hands in his shorts pockets and looked nearly sheepish. “Yesterday, after the Burger Pit, I went to see Theola down at her café.”

  Marsden stopped walking, and he did, too. In her hands, the detector ran on and on.

  Theola Finney. A reader of tea leaves and her grandmother’s best friend when Star had been alive. Theola used to let Marsden pick out free muffins and juice from behind the counter of her café whenever Star dropped by with her.

  Shine had kept her daughters away from the fortune-teller after her mother died. She warned them the old lady was full of strange stories, her head a nest of dangerous lies. That she would only try to fill their heads with those same lies if they weren’t careful.

  The tactic merely half w
orked. Wynn, by nature, was more curious than scared—being warned off Theola so consistently only made her enjoy walking past the café whenever she could, eager for a chance to speak to her grandmother’s mysterious friend. As for Marsden, who did do her best to stay away from Theola, her avoidance had nothing to do with Shine’s reasons at all and everything to do with her own.

  Her head was home to all her secrets.

  She could never risk someone peeking inside.

  “You went to see Theola Finney?” she finally said. “The town psychic?”

  “Yes. Also the closest thing this town has to a resident witch, apparently.” Jude stilled and then shifted his feet on ground made treacherous with its slippery layers of ginger plants. “I don’t mean your grandmother was a witch, though. Since, you know, they hung out together.”

  Marsden wasn’t surprised he knew about Glory’s hearer of the dead and its psychic being friends. The fact was just one more piece of town history.

  And do you think my mother is a witch, too? Me? Do you think me and Wynn can hear the dead, too? What else have you heard?

  “I didn’t know you were into the psychic scene,” she said.

  “I don’t know if I am, to be honest—it all seems kind of ridiculous and pretty hokey most of the time.” Fear flashed across Jude’s features, before slowly fading. “But this is Glory—nothing’s impossible.”

  Her grip tightened on the metal detector until her hands hurt. She swept low over weeds that were full of thorns. “You went to get your fortune read?”

  His face flushed, obvious even in the falling light that turned his wavy hair a dense black. “No, I went because . . . I wanted to see if there was enough of Rig left in me that she could read him still. If she could look into my head and see him there, so she could tell me why he did what he did.”

  “But, Jude, I don’t think—”

  “I know, I know. I just figured I might as well ask. She told me right away she couldn’t, so not to waste my money with a reading.”

  It would have been a waste. Theola was clairvoyant, her mind a tool that she used for a sixth sense, the same way one used a nose to smell. Reading leaves, or staring into someone’s eyes, she could tell the future, dig into the past, figure out things in ways that defied logic and science.

  But being clairvoyant didn’t always mean one could do all these things. And as far as Marsden knew, Theola had never claimed to see into the past, or to be able to read still-living minds as a gateway into those of people already gone.

  And that was what Jude so badly wanted.

  His disappointment must have been crushing.

  “But Marsden?”

  “Yes?”

  “Then Theola told me something anyway—and it made me run.”

  twenty.

  His words were ominous in the half-dark—full of grim promise.

  They made her want to run—from his story, from the secrets the covert held for him, from the danger that he held. She had enough of her own secrets, didn’t she? They filled her to spilling so she could barely keep up with hiding them.

  “She told me Rig had had an old soul.” Jude’s voice had gone cold, floating out to touch her in an icy wave. “How he’d been haunted by some load of guilt that she didn’t need to read to have figured out. ‘We all have our brand of self-torment, Jude Ambrose,’ she said, ‘but your brother Rigby had stopped being able to breathe through his.’”

  “We should leave now.” Marsden turned off the metal detector. A cage-like silence fell around them. “The light in here—it’s changed.”

  Jude ignored her. “She said she hoped people were being kind about his death.” He was little more than a smear of color against the wavering gray of the trees, as much phantom as not. “Because Rig . . . Everyone who knew him had liked him, you know?”

  She knew she would have. And everyone had liked her father, too, before they found him floating in the Indigo. But not enough to embrace his widow—her blood was still too mad, her ancestry too foreign.

  “Have they been kind?” she asked, suddenly needing to know, hoping Glory was mourning Rigby above anything when it came to how they were treating Jude and his father right now.

  His laugh was low but real. “Lots of casseroles.”

  She had to laugh, too. “Did you leave the café, then?”

  “I had to. Standing there, listening to Theola say all that about Rig like he’d actually told her stuff he couldn’t have told me . . . I ran out of there like the place was on fire.” Jude took the detector from her, fiddled with the knobs so he had reason to look away. “I was always supposed to know Rig best. But now, I wonder if I really knew him at all.”

  “You did know him. He was your brother.”

  “If I did, then it was only what he allowed me to see, and that’s not the same thing.”

  “Don’t we all do that?”

  He pushed his hair back, watching her. Then: “I don’t know. Do we?”

  Marsden was sure she was sinking, the ground suddenly gone as soft as freshly tilled earth. What could have been kept from her when it came to her parents’ relationship? Of her father and his demons and the moment of his death?

  “Maybe, in this town”—a wind rippled through the covert and she rubbed goose bumps from her arms—“it really is only the dead who can tell you the truth.”

  “What?”

  “Like with Rigby. Why you went to see Theola at all. And my dad.”

  “Your dad? It was an accident. In the Indigo.”

  She heard it in his voice, the town’s doubt, how it had its own version of Grant Eldridge. “But I know what everyone really thinks. And it’s what I think, too. You know why? Because the night he died, he looked right at me and said he’d never wanted the kind of life he was living.”

  In the dim, something brushed at her hand. It was Jude’s, his fingers cool and sturdy, and they slowly wound their way through hers.

  “Then your dad was a bastard for saying that.” His tone was a slow burn.

  Suddenly, there was a burst of sound—from behind, a sharp crack—and they both jumped a foot into the air before crashing back to earth. The detector flew free and landed on ginger with a soft thud.

  “Christ!” Jude’s fingers were still wrapped around hers. He leaned close. He smelled of sun and leaves and brisk evening air. “What was that?”

  It took her a handful of seconds and a few deep breaths to unlock her throat so she could answer, to wipe away the scenarios that came to mind and know they weren’t real. “A branch,” she murmured. “And probably a squirrel. It’s okay.”

  She was still holding his hand. Or he was holding hers. Whichever it was, Marsden knew she’d been right in deciding he had the kind of hands made for sketch artists. In her mind’s eye, she painted slowly, languidly—the bumpy mountain ranges of his knuckles, the long plains of his bones, the deep lakes that were all recessed dips and smooth swoops.

  Once she memorized him, she dropped his hand and took a careful step back. She couldn’t tell if he was more relieved or disappointed, or if he cared at all. Then she decided not knowing was probably for the best, for the both of them.

  “It’s nearly dark in here”—she knew she sounded brusque, wanting to promise him he would be fine: Don’t worry, Jude, no one at school will ever have to know you touched me—“which means we really do have to go.” After leaving the covert’s strange, haunted woods—its trees all tangled up, their shadows as dark as ink—time would go back to normal. It would go back to being late afternoon instead of feeling closer to midnight. Hours, rewound. Glory’s summer sun, still blazing hot and true.

  Jude nodded, the motion a blur. “For a second, I thought for sure it was a trespasser, maybe even a skimmer. And then I thought it was a gun, and . . . well . . .” His voice was small, young sounding.

  Marsden bent down, picked up the detector, and knew what she had to do.

  It was entirely wrong, considering what Jude had already trusted her with.<
br />
  But she’d only ever agreed to let him into the covert. Letting him into her head, to peek past all her defenses and weapons and discover what she had to hide? None of that had been part of their deal.

  “Jude, what I said about my dad a minute ago, can we forget it? Because I’ve never talked about it, and I didn’t mean to start now.”

  A long, long moment of utter silence, and then he finally said: “Okay.”

  She blinked. “That was . . . easy.”

  “Did you really think I would say no?”

  “Not really, I guess.”

  “Because I’m not an asshole, remember?”

  She laughed, making him laugh. And then his stomach growled, and they were both laughing again.

  “Okay, you’re right, we can barely see a thing and I’m starving,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Before Marsden could tell herself it was better to leave it alone—Hadn’t she just decided they were a terrible idea? How she was doing him the bigger favor by giving him an out?—she shot out a hand and touched Jude’s arm to stop him from moving past. Despite being in a place built solely on sad things, she couldn’t keep from liking touching him. Her blood flowed heavy in her veins, her stomach fluttered. It made no sense. She was going to make things even more awkward for them.

  In the half-dark, Jude had gone strangely motionless, an animal unsure of which way to turn. Which way was safe.

  Still, he didn’t pull away.

  “I have to ask,” she said. “What makes you so absolutely sure you’re right about Rigby having a time capsule and burying it here? I mean, beyond that book. Because I know there’s more than just you finding and reading it.”

  After so many hours of turning up nothing but junk, he only seemed more driven. She needed to know: Was pure faith really all it took, or was a touch of madness needed? How far could she let herself go in her own search for answers from the covert?