Ovenshine

12.

Indy stares at the words until they start to blend together on the page, and she can barely read them anymore. By then, Jude is leaning against the door of his car and giving her a funny look.

She pretends not to notice him as she fishes her phone from her bag and thumbs in the address. Immediately a tired sigh escapes her mouth. It's on precisely the other side of town, maybe half an hour away by car. There goes any chance of walking there.

"Indy," Jude says. "Are you going to tell me what's going on?"

She doesn't want to. After today she'd been thinking her involvement with the drummer would be over; she would no longer need him for anything, and he never needed her in the first place. Telling him this, however, involves him in things far more than she or anybody planned. The implication is a lump in her throat, making it hard to breathe. The second these words leave her mouth, there's no going back.

"Jude, I have to tell you something."

"I figured."

"But you can't look at me like you're looking at me right now."

"Like I'm—" He clears his throat, adjusting his stance. "Like how, exactly?"

"Like I'm crazy."

"Indy," he says, in a way that somehow verbally encapsulates the feeling of receiving a pity laugh. "I don't think you're crazy."

"Your face does," Indy says. "Change it."

He exhales, nibbling at the ring in his lip. The concerned look on his face hardens into something that resembles focus. It's exaggerated, terribly so, but it'll do.

Indy nods her head at the car, and the two of them hop inside, Indy waiting until the doors are shut and they're closed in the car's cloudy darkness before she speaks. "The journal isn't mine," she tells him. "I found it in Elizabeth Dobbs's place."

She pauses to give him a chance to react, to squawk and bug his eyes like her friends had done when she'd presented the journal to them on DuBois's dusty top floor. Jude does neither of these things, however. All he does is raise his eyebrows and whistle a breath out through his teeth. "I won't ask what you were doing there. Frankly, I don't wanna know. But there's gotta be a good reason besides all that that you didn't turn it in, right?"

Indy draws her legs up into the seat, folding them underneath her and poking a nail into the runs in her tights. She stares at her nail as it wiggles underneath the elastic, instead of at Jude. "Elizabeth Dobbs is leaving me notes. She told me that Lamar Pine was innocent, and now I think, with this address—she's telling me where to go to find proof."

"Hm." Jude rakes his fingers back through his hair, only for it to flip right back over into his eyes, tousled now. "That is—huh. Hm."

"Jude."

"No, I mean, you're right. That's a good reason to hold onto it."

"You don't have to believe me," Indy says, resting the journal on her lap again and flipping through it until she finds the freshly inked page. She runs her fingers over the ghostly words, tracing every loop and dot and curve. A part of her wonders at the mechanics of how one writes from another world, but the other part of her is happy just to fall in love with the mystery, the magic of it. "Just drop me off at this address, okay? I need to check it out."

Jude says "Hm" again and Indy worries she has broken some integral part of his brain.

Then he yanks his car keys from his pocket with a harsh jingle and starts the car, the engine coughing and sputtering like a pneumonia patient as it starts. He was right. Dog does make a lot of weird noises.