The Hazel Wood Page 10

  Perks slipped on white gloves that made him look like an off-brand Mickey Mouse. “The binding is in near mint condition.” He deftly flipped the book over and back again. “No foxing on the pages. Some discoloration, of course, but that’s to be expected.”

  As he opened the book, a scent rose from its pages, the homey must of old print and something else—something sweet. It was there and gone in an instant. Some yearning part of me wanted to believe it was Althea’s perfume.

  “This title’s first print run was quite small, as you probably know—” Perks began. He stopped talking as the book fell open to a Polaroid photo stuck between its pages. It was flipped so we could only see the white of its backing.

  He grinned. “Didn’t see that before. You wouldn’t believe the things you find in old books. When it’s a photo, odds are ten to one it’s an arty one, if you know what I mean. The young lady had better avert her eyes.”

  He flipped the photo in his Mickey hands and examined its front. Then frowned. His eyes flicked up to us, and back down to the photo. He shoved it over the counter. “What the hell is this?”

  It took a moment to understand what I was seeing. The photo was of us.

  Me and Finch, lying side by side in Courtney’s room—me on the bed, him on the floor. Judging by the angle and the thin, spangled light, it had been taken early that morning by someone standing at our feet. We were both asleep, Ellery’s arms thrown loosely over his head and mine pillowed beneath my cheek.

  My blood turned to ice water. Someone had been in that room with us, watching while we slept.

  Finch got his voice back first. “Sir, we have no idea how that…”

  “I don’t think so. What is this shit? You have your friend sell me this book, then you come back to buy it? Smells like day-old fish to me.” Perks picked it up roughly. “Is this even a real Proserpine?”

  “Please,” I said, my voice unnatural in my ears. “I’ve never seen that photo in my life, I swear, but please just sell us the book.”

  Perks shook his head, spastically. “This is too fuckin’ weird. Either you and the seller are in cahoots, or something else is going on, but either way you can march yourselves right outta my place.”

  “Look, we want to give you money.” Finch pulled out his wallet, opened it. “What you told me on the phone, plus an extra grand on top. I’ve got a blank check, we’ll wait while you cash it.”

  The old bookseller’s face flushed a dangerous red. “I never should’ve bought that book in the first place, not from that shady kid. I was glad to be getting rid of it so quick, but now I don’t care. You know the copy I saw, that first time?” He thrust a finger in my face. “Torched. And my buddy’s car along with it. Maybe by people like you.”

  “But sir,” Finch said. “We’re trying to buy it.”

  “I’d rather take it as a loss.” Perks shoved the Polaroid at Finch and jammed the book into its bag. “Get out, and don’t even think about trying to come back to steal this. It’ll be out of my shop in an hour. Someone else can deal with the cursed thing.”

  “You think it’s cursed?” I said, and Perks looked at me with something close to pity.

  “You seem like a nice girl,” he said, shaking his head. “Why do nice girls hang around with scummy boys like this? I’ll never understand it.”

  He wasn’t that tall, and for one mad moment I thought of pushing him aside and taking the book by force. But he ushered us out onto his stoop before I got up the nerve.

  “Dammit,” Finch said when the door had slammed behind us. “Why didn’t I grab it?”

  “That’s exactly what I was thinking.” Someone was in the room with us last night.

  “Who the hell took this photo?” Finch stared at the crumpled Polaroid in his hand.

  “No chance it was David, right?” Someone stood over us while we slept.

  “Guy can barely put on pants. He’s not up to planning this level of mindfuckery.”

  We were walking fast down the street, both of us looking every which way and not trying to hide it.

  “They broke in, took our photo, put it into the book, then sold it to this guy … so he could sell it to us. Why? Why not just…”

  “Just face you?” Finch’s hair seemed to have gained another inch in the last few minutes. Clearly it expanded with stress.

  “Take me. Like they did my mom. Why not just take me?”

  “Maybe…” He put his palms together like Sherlock, breathed out loudly. “Maybe it’s a fairy-tale thing.”

  “How so?”

  “Maybe they can’t touch you. Because you’re Althea’s granddaughter!” He was getting excited. “Maybe, like, since her blood runs in your veins…”

  “I’m not a fan theory, Finch! And they took Ella. They touched Ella. She’s more Althea’s than I am.”

  I turned my head sharply. I couldn’t look at him anymore. The day was overbright, thrumming with menace. I blinked at a girl across the street, wearing a long peasant skirt and walking a pot-bellied pig on a braided leash. On the other side, moving toward us, a man in a baseball cap carried a bouquet of white roses. As he got closer, I could see how they glistened with fake raindrops. An old woman watched us through the second-floor window of the nearest building, her underbite telling us to get off her lawn. The flower man had a camera in one hand. The girl looked at me as she unhitched her pig from its lead. The man lifted the camera to his eye.

  They were the Hinterland. They were all, all the Hinterland.

  A migraine exploded like a bottle rocket inside my skull. My knees went woozy and my teeth and knuckles ached. I smelled the dusty perfume of the book again and my vision went green, before a black crow’s wing obscured my sight.

  13

  It scared me, sometimes, how little I could remember. When I looked back over my life, it melted together into one long, soft-focus shot of rain through the windshield. Focus my eyes one way, I saw drops on glass. Focus them another, and I saw the wet highway stretching out ahead. The things that stuck with me were the in-between places, not the places we landed—highways, dirt roads, truck stops. Motels with puddle-warm swimming pools clogged with leaves. An orchard we stopped at once on our way to Indianapolis, to pick apples that tasted like bananas and candy and flowers.

  I remembered less from my own life than I did from the books I read. In Nashville I mainlined Francesca Lia Block. In Maine it was Peter Pan, then Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, then Peter and the Starcatchers. From the winter we spent in Chicago, while Ella worked as a custodian and apprentice costume designer at a tiny storefront theater, I remembered The Big Sleep, One Thousand and One Nights, and a cold so astonishingly complete it felt personal.

  Everyone is supposed to be a combination of nature and nurture, their true selves shaped by years of friends and fights and parents and dreams and things you did too young and things you overheard that you shouldn’t have and secrets you kept or couldn’t and regrets and victories and quiet prides, all the packed-together detritus that becomes what you call your life.

  But every time we left a place, I felt the things that happened there being wiped clean, till all that was left was Ella, our fights and our talks and our winding roads. I wrote down dates and places in the corners of my books, and lost them along the way. Maybe it was my mother whispering in my ear. The bad luck won’t follow us to the next place. You don’t have to remember it this way. Or maybe it was the clean break of it, the way we never looked back.

  But I didn’t think so. I thought it was just me. My mind was an old cassette tape that kept being recorded over. Only wavering ghost notes from the old music came through. I wondered, sometimes, what the original recording would sound like—what the source code of me might look like. I worried it was darker than I wanted it to be. I worried it didn’t exist at all. I was like a balloon tied to Ella’s wrist: If I didn’t have her to tell me who I was, remind me why it mattered, I might float away.

  Passing out felt like doing just that: givi
ng up, floating into the ether. Even the pain in my head faded away.

  But gravity was insistent. The world wanted me back.

  A voice lapped over me in slow motion. My eyesight returned in a paisley wash of swirls and blobs, before resolving into something true. Someone crouched in front of me. The sun at their back made them into negative space. My arm felt like a bag of wet flour, but I lifted it anyway, to touch the halo of their hair. The person grew very still as I tangled my fingers into the softness by their neck.

  “Mom?” I croaked.

  “No. Sorry.” Finch’s voice was careful and small. My memory came back with it. I dropped my hand, squeezed it into a fist.

  “You passed out,” he said.

  My back was propped against the low stone wall of a brownstone garden. The light had changed. It was hotter, more golden. After a couple of false starts, I spoke again. “What is it?”

  He was looking at me with an expression I couldn’t place. He looked like Ella after she ate pot brownies and took me to a show at the planetarium, his eyes all wide and reverent. He looked … he looked wonderstruck.

  I must’ve been misreading it—I couldn’t have looked that good passed out. I glared at him a little, and some of the shine went out of his eyes.

  “You weren’t out long,” he said. “You didn’t hit your head—you’ll be fine. You just need to eat something.”

  “The girl,” I said. “With the pig. And the boy with the camera. Where’d they go?”

  He frowned slightly. “I didn’t see them. I was busy with you, I guess.”

  The street was empty, but I still felt the presence of watching eyes.

  “I caught you kinda awkward,” Finch said. “You hurt your knees going down.”

  But the pain was good. It was something to focus on. My body had that horrible heavy post-nap feeling, where you can’t tell what day it is and you could almost cry. I wanted my mom, in a way you maybe can’t ever want anyone else. It was primal and sharp and it made me feel like a needle in the haystack of a cold and terrible world. I wanted my mom.

  “We have to go. I have to get out of here.”

  “Okay.” He lifted his hand like he was going to touch my face, then kept lifting and ran it through his hair. “We’ll go as soon as you can walk. Can you walk?”

  I could. A rush of pins and needles ran through my legs as I stood, and the fresh scrapes ached.

  We walked. Slivers of migraine stabbed the backs of my eyes every time I looked at a surface bright with sun. Finch saw me wincing, rummaged around in his bag, and placed a battered Rangers cap on my head.

  It was the sort of easy flirtatious move I saw guys make all the time, even at Whitechapel, but his fingers were gentle and the look in his eyes complicated. In the wedge of shade beneath the cap, my thoughts started to clarify. What had I actually seen on the sidewalk outside of Perks’s place? A photography student. A girl with an eccentric pet. This wasn’t Twice-Killed Katherine territory, this was plain paranoia.

  Paranoia so quick and overwhelming I’d passed out. How hard would Audrey mock me if she could’ve seen me swooning—and being caught by Ellery Finch?

  “Audrey,” I said.

  “What about her?”

  “She stopped her dad— I mean, he wasn’t going to—he wouldn’t have actually shot me, but she stopped him. Maybe if I call I can catch her alone, make her talk to me.”

  I waved him away, toward the bodega we’d stopped at to get food. My phone was nearly dead, but I dialed Ella for the thousandth time once Finch was out of sight, bracing myself to hear her voicemail.

  I didn’t. Instead there was a long pause and a distant click, and my heart swelled into my throat. Then a nice mechanical voice told me her number had been disconnected.

  I sat down hard on a Siamese pipe, pulling the brim of Finch’s hat over my face. I already knew the Hinterland could sneak in while we slept, plant creepy photos in books, and send crows to do their bidding, but turning off my mother’s number was so blunt, so rooted in the real world, it scared me more than anything.

  Before my heart had slowed I called Audrey, so certain she’d let it go to voicemail I was briefly speechless when she answered.

  “Alice?”

  “Audrey. You picked up.”

  “Oh, my god, I can’t believe my dad pulled a gun on you!” Her voice was high and fast. I pictured her face, mascaraed and alarmed between sheaves of shiny processed hair.

  “Audrey, my phone is dying and I need you to tell me what happened to my mom.”

  “I would’ve called you last night, but I couldn’t get away from my dad. He’s been, like, embracing his gun for the last twenty-four hours. I swear he’s gonna shoot himself in the balls.”

  I was heartened to hear her sounding like herself again, but didn’t have time for it. “Audrey, please focus for a sec. My mom.”

  “Oh, sorry. Sorry. I’m still freaked out. We’re on our way to our place in the Hamptons … oops, I shouldn’t have told you that. We stopped for lunch, I’m in this gross bathroom. I just ate, like, a nine-hundred-calorie lobster roll. Do you think I’m in shock?”

  I was holding my phone so tight I could feel ridges forming in my palm. “My mom, Audrey.”

  “God, I’m sorry! Okay, what happened was I went home over lunch because, well, I had to.”

  Audrey refuses to poop at school. Don’t ask me how I know this.

  “So when I got in I smelled this crazy smell—I mean, you smelled it. I thought Nadia had forgotten to take out the trash.”

  I made a frantic get on with it motion with my hand, even though she couldn’t see me.

  “Then I heard fighting—no big deal, considering it was practically divorce day. But then I heard Ella making this sound I’d never heard before. Like this hysterical babbling sound. I’m sorry, that’s what it sounded like. And she kept saying, ‘Please, please.’ And that’s when I started to think maybe she was talking to someone else.”

  The hairs rose on my neck. I wrapped one arm around the cold curling in my stomach.

  Audrey continued, in the most subdued voice I’d ever heard her use. “I went to their room. My dad was standing there looking horrible, just totally blank—like he’d been hit in the head. And your mom was crouching on the ground. And there were two, um, two others with them.”

  “Two others? Two people?”

  Her voice had hairline fractures in it. “Not really. I don’t think. Alice, they looked like people, but I don’t think they were. They were the wrong … they were just wrong. The man had face tattoos, he was kinda hot. But his feet, they were dirty and bare—disgusting. He smelled so bad I thought I’d die. And the woman, her eyes…” She paused. I could hear the flick, flick of a lighter and her sharp inhale before she spoke again. “Your mom … I think she knew them. They’d told my dad something about her—he won’t tell me what it was, but it’s something really bad. It made him hate her.”

  “Audrey, my phone’s about to die. Where did they take her?”

  The second she took to start speaking was excruciating. “I don’t know, exactly. We were in their room, they were scaring me, and suddenly we were in a car. A nice car with tinted windows. It was like I passed out or something. The man and woman must’ve been in front, because it was just the three of us. My dad looked so sweaty I thought he was gonna have a heart attack, but your mom looked okay. She really did, Alice. She looked strong. She wasn’t crying anymore, she was sitting up and looking straight ahead. When they stopped the car and let my dad and me out—in some crap neighborhood in the Bronx, it took us forever to get a cab—she smiled at me. And oh, shit, she had a message for you. I don’t understand what it means, but maybe you will. Are you listening?”

  “Yes. Audrey, yes, what did she say?”

  “She said, ‘Tell Alice to stay the hell away from the Hazel Wood.’”

  I mashed the phone against my ear, like that could make me understand. “Did she say why? Did she say anything else? Did you see
which direction the car went?”

  I was talking so loudly a man sitting on a lawn chair across the street was giving me the stink eye. There was a second of silence, then the sound of Harold’s unmistakable Jersey grumble.

  “This is the women’s room, Dad!” Audrey shrieked. “I’m talking to Olivia!” His voice got louder, and the phone beeped atonally in my ear as Audrey hit numbers in an effort to hang up. Finally, the call disconnected. I didn’t want to get her in trouble, but I was powerless to keep myself from dialing again. It went straight to voicemail.

  She wasn’t crying. She looked strong. Audrey made Ella sound like a general going to her execution. Even her message to me sounded like last words.

  The door to the bodega jangled, and Finch came out juggling two water bottles and a paper bag. I told him, briefly, what Audrey had said, then folded forward over my knees.

  “Hey … hey…” He put a hand on my head and left it there like a hat. I squeezed my eyes shut and panted, focusing on the iron smell of my scraped skin and the little island of Finch’s hand, warm through my hair.

  After a minute he put his other hand on my shoulder and helped me gently upward, back against the brick wall of the bodega. “Too much blood to your head is a bad idea. Just breathe. And eat this.”

  The cold bagel sandwich he wrapped my hand around might as well have been a block of wood. My throat made dry insect clicks as I forced down a few bites.

  “She was acting like my mom was dead,” I said finally. My voice sounded so devastated it almost made me hyperventilate.

  “Audrey is not the smartest girl,” he said carefully. “She’s not the queen of careful eyewitness testimony.”

  I huffed a laugh into my hands. “We have to go to the Hazel Wood.”

  His eyes widened. “Okay.”

  “I don’t know what we’ll find there,” I warned. “I don’t even know if it’s still Althea’s. It could just be a bunch of new rich people living there, or it could be something much worse. You don’t have to go with me.”

  “Yeah, I do.” He said it so simply. I knew he would.

  That was when I remembered I had no idea where the Hazel Wood was.