The fish was so calm, its whiskery face so ancient-looking, I wondered if it was magic, too. What would it give me, if I returned it to the ocean? What power might I be granted if I ate it?
Finch held up the room key still dangling between his fingers. “You make some horrible coffee. I’ll try to get us another car.”
I said a silent apology to the fish and walked away.
* * *
It turned out there was nowhere to rent a car that we could get to without a car, and no cab service for miles. Finally we threw ourselves on the mercy of the motel’s desk clerk, a woman who could’ve been the night clerk’s twin sister.
“You could try the fisherman’s bus,” she said. “It stops about a mile from here. It’ll take you to Nike, just short of Birch.” She gave us winding directions to the depot, two miles away.
“If you hurry,” she added ominously, “you might catch today’s bus.”
Finch’s and my eyes met, panicked. “Today’s bus?” he asked. “Today’s only bus?”
She shrugged and turned back to her Redbook, flipping lazily through photos of celebrities who were over fifty and loving it.
We hightailed it out of there, leaving the flooded car behind. Finch’s bottomless wallet was coming in handy again—from an economic standpoint, he barely seemed to register the car’s destruction. At least I’d had my bag with us in the room. I shoved my arm all the way to its bottom, till my fingers ran over the feather, the comb, and the bone. But I didn’t pull them out.
It was good walking side by side with him, looking straight ahead. There was a strange new heat that ran through me like electricity every time our eyes met. Like our conversation the night before had tapped some hidden well of light in him, and now he was too bright to look at.
Was this what it would’ve been like? If Ella had never gone missing, and Finch and I had started meeting on purpose? My hand brushed against his, and I snatched it back, shoved it into my pocket.
“You tried your mom today?” he asked once we’d found our way to a wide, rutted road, where the air smelled like wet leaves and bait. If the clerk could be trusted, we’d find a filling station, a diner, and a bus stop at the end of it.
“No. Her number’s out of service, remember?”
He walked a few more steps before responding. “Of course I do. I’m sorry.”
“Are you okay?”
His gaze was fixed on the path ahead, but it looked like he was staring at the backs of his own eyes. “What? Yeah. Look, if we miss this bus, we’re stuck at the motel all day. And night. I can’t take another minute of the pee pillow, so let’s hurry up.”
“Have you called your parents?” I asked. “Made sure they haven’t had any problems with Twice-Killed Katherine, or anything?”
“They’re fine,” he muttered. “Twice-Killed Katherine would choke on my stepmother if she tried anything. Too many diamonds.”
There was a bitter filament in his voice that the joke couldn’t hide.
“But they know where you are? Or you made up some lie, at least?”
He jerked toward me. “Don’t worry about it, okay? If they notice I’m missing, which they won’t, they’ll think I’m staying at someone’s house. Or locked in the library. Anna might notice, though.” For a moment, he looked concerned, then shook his head. “Whatever. I’ll deal with it if I go back. When I go back.”
He snapped his mouth shut and looked at me fiercely.
“If you go back?”
“When. When I go back.”
“Not what you said.”
“Freudian slip, okay? I don’t want to go back, but I will. All my first editions are there. And my typewriter. And my, I don’t know, my cardigans. And my— Oh, my god, my stepbrother’s right. I am a hipster cliché.”
“You have a stepbrother?”
“I do. He lives with his dad, I only have to see him twice a year. He’s, like, a football player with a brain. You want to write the guy off, but then he opens his mouth and says something smart. It’s irritating, actually.”
The conversation was getting away from me. I couldn’t ask what I really wanted to know: why was he here? To help me, or to escape? And what did it matter, anyway? The end result was the same: rich Ellery Finch, financing my way to the Hazel Wood. I’d run the cash card Harold had given me before leaving New York, just to see, and of course it had been canceled. Without Finch, I’d be scraping the bottom of my Salty Dog savings already.
Maybe sensing me formulating another question, he took off at a run. “Bus stop!” he called over his shoulder. I sped up, grudgingly, my bag bouncing against my hip. He was full of shit—the stop was nowhere in sight—but after jogging behind him for a few minutes, I saw a cabin that turned out to be the diner. Beyond it was the filling station and the lot, where a knot of old men sat on folding chairs, fishing gear and coolers scattered around them.
Finch went over and conferred with the men, flashing me a thumbs-up as he jogged back.
“Bus comes in an hour, takes us right to Nike. Good fishing, apparently. Waffles while we wait?”
The diner looked and smelled like somebody’s musty living room. But the waffles were good, lacy and buttery and studded with pecans, and one of the old men gave us a beer to split when we rejoined them on the pavement. Finch was still acting tense, staring at nothing and bouncing on his toes while we waited. Finally I put a hand on his arm.
He jumped a mile. “God, your hand is freezing!”
I snatched it back. “Cold hands, cold heart.”
“I don’t think you have that right.”
“Believe me,” I said, “I do. You look like you’re about to crawl out of your skin. You okay?”
“Yeah. I’m just … I’m good. Sorry.” He looked around, then leaned in. “We’re so close, you know? The car thing, that’s, like, magic. Right?”
“Yeah. I guess it is.” That strange, radiant expression was back on his face. It made my neck prickle with mistrust.
“What do you think we’ll find there?” he asked. “In the Hazel Wood?”
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. My vision of it was like a fairy-tale collection on shuffle: Rusting gates creaking open, a castle covered in briars. Somewhere inside, Althea laid out in a glass coffin, like a sleeping beauty or a dead bride. Goosebumps rose on my arms, and I rubbed them away.
What I didn’t picture was Finch coming in with me. No matter what version of the story I imagined—fitting a golden key into a lock, scaling a wall crawling with thorns—I saw myself finding my way in alone.
“How far are you planning to go with me?” I asked abruptly. “All the way to the estate? Because you don’t have to.”
He looked at me blankly, betrayal blooming in his eyes. “Don’t play at that,” he said quietly. “Just be honest if you’re trying to cut me out.”
“Cut you out?” I replied, just as quietly. The blood started to hum behind my eyes. “This isn’t a heist, this is a search for a missing person. I don’t care what else I find there, so long as I find my mom. Alive and well.”
“Liar.” The word twisted in his mouth, came out almost sweet. “You want to know what you said this morning, while you were sleeping?”
I did, but I didn’t. I settled for cocking my head.
“You said, ‘The feather, the comb, the bone.’ I asked what you meant, and you repeated it. ‘The feather, the comb, the bone.’”
My breath caught, and Finch leaned forward. “Wait. Do you know what that means?”
“No.” It was only half untrue. “Except now I know you were lying when you told me I hadn’t said anything important.”
“Well, maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. But it’s total fairy-tale stuff. It’s got to mean something. Maybe it’s a clue—like, how we’ll get in.”
“Or else it was a dream.” My fingers itched to dig to the bottom of my bag, to assure myself I still had them. The feather, the comb, the bone.
“‘In bed asleep while they do dre
am things true.’” His voice was fervent.
“Don’t quote Shakespeare to me, Whitechapel,” I snapped. “And don’t quote me to me. Especially dreaming me.” Then, because I couldn’t help myself: “Is there something in the book about that? The feather, the comb, and the bone?”
“If there was, would it matter?” he asked, his tone light and his gaze anything but. “If it was just a dream, I mean?”
The bus pulled in before I could answer. It was smaller than I expected, somewhere between a Greyhound and a VW, and on the side it read Pike’s Trailblazers in army green. The driver clearly knew the fishermen but was unimpressed by us.
“You got no poles,” he said. “You hiking?”
“How much?” I gave him my flat New York subway face, which worked not at all to shut him up.
“You heard about the killings up this way? A lot of them young folks, mostly hikers. I hope you’re not planning on staying out on the trails after dark.”
“No, sir.” Finch glanced at me. “She’s— I’ve got family up there.”
“Up in Nike?”
“Up in Birch.”
“You know about it, then.” Satisfied, the driver closed the door and accepted Finch’s cash. “Don’t want to drop any city idiots up there unawares. So long as you know what to watch out for.” He dropped change in Finch’s palm.
“Watch out for murderers?” I snapped, still feeling jangled. “Is that what we’re watching out for?”
The driver woofed a laugh through his nose and waved us past.
The ride was just under an hour, we’d been told. The old men sat in the back, like the cool kids in every grade school Ella had ever enrolled me in, and we took a seat near the front. Finch dropped into sleep almost the minute we sat down, or at least faked it. As soon as I was convinced he really was out, I dug out the feather, the comb, and the bone. They looked prosaic in daylight. Even the bone didn’t look much like a finger anymore. I shoved them deep into my jean pockets, feeling better as soon as they were out of sight. I settled back and rested my eyes on the trees, watching them roll out like a tapestry.
The bus radio played the kind of country songs you can sing along to even if you’ve never heard them. I hummed quietly, letting my head tip back onto the seat’s sticky vinyl. A slow song came on, an echoing fifties crooner that made me think of dead prom queens. The vocalist sang about swaying and kisses and stars in an eerie feminine purr, and I wondered where I’d heard the song before.
“Look until the leaves turn red,” he sang, as the song shifted down into a speak-sing bridge.
Sew the worlds up with thread
If your journey’s left undone
Fear the rising of the sun
The words hit me like an ice cube down the back. It was the rhyme, the strange nursery rhyme Ness had recited to me. I froze, waiting to hear more, but the song ended. There was a staticky, record-player pause, and Waylon Jennings’s voice poured through the speakers like whiskey. The driver bopped his sunburnt head.
It was here, I thought. The Hinterland. Here, or close enough. I looked at Finch. His lips moved a little, and I thought about waking him—or talking to him, seeing if I could lead him into a dream conversation the way he’d led me. I did neither. I recited the rhyme to myself till it was etched in my mind, watching the trees for I didn’t know what. I didn’t see anything but leaves.
19
Finch woke up just as we hit Birch, sheepishly running the heel of his hand over his mouth.
“Where are we? How long have I been sleeping?” He peered out the window as the bus turned into a wide concrete lot encircling a shack-sized bait shop. “Oh. We’re here.” The jagged energy that had come off him in waves on our walk from the motel was back.
The old men pushed past us, sour-smelling and laughing at some granddad joke we hadn’t heard. The driver gave me a hard look as I left the bus. I glared at him, wondering suddenly if he was Hinterland. If he’d done something to the radio. He wasn’t, I decided. He hadn’t.
Behind me, Finch held back. “What’s your next stop?” I heard him ask, as I stepped out onto the pavement. “You turning right around and going back?”
“You bet. But you can’t chicken out on hiking now, son.” The driver leaned forward to peer at me. “Your girlfriend doesn’t look like she’d take it quietly. Just get out of those woods by dark, alright?”
Finch turned, his shoulders raised high, and wouldn’t look at me as he walked down the steps.
“What was that?” I asked.
Finch stared past me, to where the old men were filing into the bait shop. He started to say something, but shrugged instead.
I turned away. If he was going through some existential fan dilemma, I wanted no part of it. I still had to figure out how to shake him before we got too close to the Hazel Wood.
Through the trees at the back of the lot, I could see the hard glitter of water. It made me thirsty. “Want to find a convenience store before we walk to Birch?” I started, turning, then cut off. Finch was standing behind me, too close, eyes wide and jaw set. I startled away from him.
“Damn it,” I said, my heart hopscotching. “What?”
He smiled at me. He smiled like a dog who doesn’t want to get kicked but will take it if he is. “I messed up.”
Adrenaline made my stomach kick and my eyes go dry. “What do you mean?”
“We need to walk—we need to get to the highway.” His voice was high and too fast as he stared at the pavement where the fisherman’s bus no longer was. “Maybe we can hitch. We need to … if we can just get back to the city. I’ll explain on the way. I should’ve explained last night.”
“Explain what?” I planted my feet on the pavement, gripped his arm. “We’re standing here till you tell me.”
“I made a promise,” he said. “But I don’t want to keep it.”
“You need to stop threatening not to take me to the Hazel Wood. At this point I can find it on my own.”
“Not a promise to you,” he said. “A promise to them.”
Them. The word hit me like a blackjack. “What. The fuck. Are you talking about?” I grabbed the front of his jacket.
“I thought … I thought it might help you.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It is. You don’t understand yet. They told me not to tell you…”
“Tell me what? Who told you not to tell me what?”
“I can’t.” He looked around nervously, a tremor in his jaw making his teeth clatter. “They’re probably listening right now. We need to go.”
“Just tell me. No riddles, no excuses.”
He shrugged, the gesture heavy with disgust. “I wanted my life to change. I wanted for it to be real. And it is. But I don’t think this is worth it.”
It struck me, suddenly, that no amount of bottomless funds should’ve been enough to convince me to lead an Althea Proserpine fan to the Hazel Wood. It struck me, too, that I didn’t know that much about Finch.
I wrestled back my rage and sudden fear, trying to make my voice reasonable. “If you don’t tell me what you did, I can’t help you fix it.”
“Oh, no,” he said, the words bottomless and bleak. “They’re already here.”
His eyes flicked past me, just as I registered the quiet purr of an idling car. I turned and had time to see its bright paint job and the figure at the wheel—wait, there were two of them, someone was in the passenger seat—before Finch yanked me behind him, sending a hot pain through my shoulder.
“Go,” Finch said, his voice ragged. “Run!”
Off balance, I stumbled to the dirt.
The car exhaled heat like an animal from its yellow sides. It was the cab I’d seen creeping on me outside of Whitechapel. And there was its dark-haired driver, the boy from the diner. He pushed the hair from his face with a gloved hand.
His passenger stepped onto the gravel, staring at me with lantern eyes. It was Twice-Killed Katherine. She wore the same black gloves the boy
did.
I froze. I knew if I moved, I would give myself away—a shake in my knees, or my voice.
“I’m sorry,” Finch was saying. “I’m sorry. They just said to get you to the Hazel Wood. That’s all! You were going anyway, you asked for my help…”
“Don’t pretend this was for me. Since when? Since when were you working for them?”
The boy was watching us, amused. Katherine looked like she couldn’t hear us at all.
“Working for them? No, it wasn’t…”
“Since when?”
“Since the bookseller’s,” he said, small. “They talked to me while you were passed out. They kept you … they kept you under a little longer.”
“Thank you for your service, Ellery Finch,” the dark-haired boy said. “Ready for your reward?”
“No,” Finch said. His dark skin looked bloodless. “I don’t want it.”
“What reward?” I spat.
“What all children want,” the boy said mockingly. “Entrance to fairyland.”
My fault, I thought. My fault for trusting a fan.
Ella came to me then—the way she always looked for the good news in the shit sundae. Because maybe this wasn’t all bad. Finding these people, or whatever they were, was what I wanted, wasn’t it?
It was hard to remember that with Katherine’s eyes crawling over my skin.
I elbowed Finch aside. “I’m looking for my mother—Ella Proserpine. I know you have her. I want her back.”
“She thinks we’re mother-nappers, isn’t that funny?” the boy said.
Katherine sucked her teeth like an old woman. “You’re sure this is her? This little house cat?” She lunged at me, teeth bared, and I gasped.
She stopped short, laughing. “See? Skittish as a mayfly.”
But her lunge wasn’t why I gasped. I did it because of what she’d called me: house cat. Like she knew the sticky, long-ago insult that still swam in my brain.
I felt suddenly like a child, moving through a forest of adult knees, hearing their conversations far over my head. None of this made sense, none of it had any context. All of them, even Finch, were treating me like a child—to be protected. To withhold information from.
The Hazel Wood Page 15