Suddenly, he dropped the metal detector into the grass. He took out his truck key and began to carve into the wood of the fence, the biggest unmarked expanse he could find.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Changing things up. What’s your favorite flower?”
She thought of his doodle for Wynn at lunch at the Burger Pit, his bouquet of tulips and lilies and daises, and smiled. People never just doodled on the covert’s fence, they lamented, or wished, or mourned—but now it seemed Jude was doing just that. Doodling. On a fence that went back generations.
“Roses?” he asked.
Marsden laughed. “No.”
“Too cheesy?”
“Kind of. And too . . . perfect, I think. How about—” She frowned. She didn’t know flowers by heart, the way she knew spices, and salts, and sugars (death, even, she supposed). They had to be in front of her for her to name them. Her mind went back to yesterday. “How about sunflowers?”
It wasn’t long before the blooms darted their way in between all the crosses and sayings about heaven. Jude stopped when he ran out of room, and he shook out his hand, its fingers gone tight from clutching his key. He’d added not just sunflowers, but also wavering lines of ivy, firework-like knots of dandelions gone to seed.
Finding a nail with the metal detector, Marsden had joined in, working on a different section of the fence. She’d scrawled nonsense—stick figures, tiny hearts, tic-tac-toe—and it was nearly cathartic how easy it’d been to mark up the covert that way. How she could almost forget how ancient the wood was, how heavy the years accumulated in it, the number of ghosts it’d seen into existence—it was just a fence, just a piece of a long-dead tree, and it had no real power.
“We might have just unleashed a monster, you know,” she said, shaking her own hand out, leaving the nail on a post to be picked up on their way back out.
He laughed. “What, there’s some kind of covert fence protector spirit? And I thought I’d heard all the stories.”
She smiled. “Once Wynn sees this, she’s going to want to do the same. We might be out here all summer, inscribing our way around the whole thing.”
“I can’t tell if you’re happy about that or not.”
She wasn’t sure, either. To normalize the covert was dangerous, somehow almost disrespectful. But maybe she’d been wrong to never try to break down its odd legends, to try to lessen their grip. “Ask me this time next week. If you still need to be around.”
Jude picked up the metal detector, brushed bits of grass from the sensor pad, and then looked at her. His expression was both amused and dead serious. “Like you said, this place is bigger than it looks. Sorry if I end up being here all summer.”
“Well, there’s shade in there, anyway.” Marsden averted her eyes—she had no clue what he might see in them. That she really didn’t mind so much, his coming by every day until the fall? That she also dreaded the idea of it, the proximity to his danger an abrasion on her nerves, working away at her heart? “Ready?”
They walked into the covert, and instantly the sunlight dimmed by degrees. The smell of ginger enveloped them as they headed to where they’d last left off in their search.
It didn’t take long for Marsden to spot the thin white slash of kitchen twine in the half-light. It was tied around the trunk of a tree, and she’d gone back to mark off how much they’d covered the other day. She’d realized afterward how easy it would be for them to lose track, to simply end up going over old ground again and again. Jude never would be finished, then, forever caught in the covert’s spell, its toy as much as she knew she was. It was a fact she couldn’t change even if she wanted to—the place was in her bones, a part of her before she was even born. As tragic as Rigby’s dying here was, it would eventually be crowded away by all the deaths still to come. And Jude could move on. He’d leave his grief behind. He’d go east, find somewhere else to belong, make a life. The covert would fade for him. But Marsden—she would continue to live it.
She was still teasing apart the knot in the string with her fingers when he called her name.
“What is it?” she called back, pulling at twine. “Hold on a second.”
Silence.
“Jude?” She looked up to see how he’d gone just a bit ahead, that she could just see most of his dark hair, the jut of one shoulder, some of the wide plane of his back through the foliage of the trees.
“Marsden . . .”
He sounded farther away than she would have expected, his voice almost an echo of itself. As though the covert could bend space the way it could time, could stretch feet into miles the same way it made nights last nearly forever.
Her stomach lurched. She could still see him, but—
“Jude, wait up—this knot, I tied it way too tight . . .”
She trailed off as she watched him slowly back up. One step, then two. The metal detector was still in his hand, but forgotten, about to be dropped.
He turned to face her, and that was how she knew.
thirty-two.
Such long, blond hair.
The very first time she’d seen it on the newest girl to sign on with Nina, Marsden had thought of it as Alice hair, what the made-up girl from the made-up world of Wonderland had had. She’d been eleven when she’d thought that, but she hadn’t ever really stopped thinking of it that way, despite finding out not long after that the quiet girl’s actual name was Lucy. That she came from the very real place of Florida. That the Wonderland that had been her life was something she refused to talk about.
Such long, blond hair, worn in nearly the same kind of loose braid Marsden had woven for her with nervous fingers just yesterday morning.
But its crown had since been dusted with a generous handful of soil, its end now tipped with blood.
It was the first time in a long time the covert smelled of something more strongly than wild ginger.
She fell to her knees in front of Lucy’s body and tried to keep the world of the covert from swaying. Lucy’s wrists, the blackened soil at her sides, all still glistening with wet. Marsden swept the scene with eyes that moved jaggedly in their sockets, desperate to be wrong.
Lucy and all her sadness, the depths of which only she could see.
“Who was she?” Jude asked, his words faint. He was standing beside her, only inches away, but he might as well have been speaking to her from the other side of the forest, her shock a thick cocoon all around her.
“Her name was Lucy,” she whispered. “She lived at the boardinghouse with us. She worked for Nina.” Her chest hurt, an ache stinging her throat. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying so hard to hear her. She sent out her mind as though they were fingers, feeling the covert, touching all its trees, testing the wind. It hurt, how much she wanted to hear.
Lucy, you’re still here, right? Please talk to me.
“I’m sorry.” Jude’s voice floated out from the darkness behind her lids, from the deep silence of the covert behind that darkness. “Was she your friend?”
Marsden nodded, opening her eyes. Though, she wasn’t sure they had been, not really. Maybe at times, for moments and over the course of conversations, before Marsden hit reset. She knew no more about Lucy than she knew about any of Nina’s girls, had never been able to ask, just as Lucy had never shown signs of wanting to share. Lucy, in her own way, had drifted through the rooms and halls of the boardinghouse, just as Rigby had lived yet not lived in his own home. As she and Wynn sometimes lived in the boardinghouse—hidden while in plain sight, their existence carefully portioned out between kitchen and covert and away from the whole place, time spent with Shine and Nina and all the rest spread out thin, easy to tuck away.
Ghosts, all of them.
Barely thinking, Marsden pulled her gardening gloves from the back pocket of her shorts and put them on. She reached out, her hand moving automatically like a dowsing rod over fresh and untouched land. She checked Lucy’s clothing, saw the lack of pockets, saw how there was no purse or
bag slung nearby. She turned the girl’s hands over, pushed back the cuff of her sleeves—no rings, no bracelets, no watch.
Her necklace, though.
A dark silver chain that she’d worn for years, for as long as Marsden could remember.
She would have left it alone, the same way she always left jewelry alone. But because she knew the body, she knew the necklace—knew its meaning and significance. It was a match to the necklace Peaches wore all the time, the one piece of jewelry the other girl never seemed to tire of, for all the carefree ways she seemed to cycle through the rest of her belongings.
Marsden slipped the silver necklace from Lucy’s neck and slowly placed it over her own, settling it beneath her long, black hair. She pictured soft, white, greedy hands gathering pies off a plate and shuddered. There was no way to prevent Hadley from the body—she would have to call as soon as she got back to the house—but she would not leave the necklace to him.
She pulled the hem of Lucy’s dress lower over her legs and smoothed out the fabric.
She adjusted the dark framed glasses on her pale face so they weren’t so askew.
She moved the thick woven braid so it draped over her shoulder again, the way she recalled Lucy wearing it.
Done, Marsden slowly stood up. Slipping off her gloves, she was momentarily startled to see Jude there. He was watching her, his eyes dark and hollow and shadowed with his brother.
Panic was a bow in her blood and strummed her pulse into racing. He had just seen her at work, the unfeeling way she’d flicked on autopilot. Who else but a skimmer could ever do what she just did without going insane? Had he imagined that day his brother had come? Saw it the way she knew it’d been, the day she’d found Rigby in the covert, and felt all of it like a blow? The way she’d bent over him and had calmly dug through his pockets, her face as blank as a fresh canvas even as Rigby’s would have been blasted apart beyond recognition? How neither of them would have looked fully human?
She dropped her eyes as she shoved her gloves away. “I have to go back to the boardinghouse now.” She heard the odd flatness of her voice, the cold void of her words, and didn’t know how to sound different, better. Or had never learned, maybe, had always known what was required of her. “I have to call Hadley about the body. I have to tell Nina, Dany . . . Peaches.”
Jude’s expression was a slow migration of shock to confusion to a kind of quiet caution. Checking for bodies, skimming—she’d drawn the line between the two as fine as it could get. Only his being overwhelmed kept him from really seeing what she’d just done.
“Okay,” he said. “Can I walk you over?”
“No, I’ll be fine. I’ll meet you here tomorrow, though. Right by the fence, same as always.”
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 Shin
e, 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.
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