The Hazel Wood Read online

  “Um,” I said. “Slight problem.”

  A flurry of cell-phoning confirmed the obvious: there was no listed address for the Hazel Wood. All I knew was that it was upstate … somewhere.

  “Maybe it’s a test,” he said. “Like, only the true of heart can find their way in. That would be classic.”

  “The true of heart? Guess I’m out of luck.”

  “I’m serious. This is how we need to be thinking.”

  “Come on. This is real life, not a fairy tale.”

  He gave me what I was starting to recognize as a very Ellery Finch look, a level gaze that told me I was fooling no one. “You don’t believe that any more than I do.”

  I didn’t. In my mind, the gates of the Hazel Wood might as well have been the side of a fairy hill. If my mom were in a place where she could call me, she would have. And if she were dead—I believed this to the bottom of my being—I would know it. She couldn’t die without it rending me in some way I would feel. If she were dead I’d be limping. If she were dead I’d be blind.

  This meant she was either being held somewhere and kept from calling me, or she was in some faraway place that didn’t have phones. I wasn’t sure which was worse.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” Finch said. “I might’ve found something.”

  He crouched down to show me the Blogspot page pulled up on his phone, titled “Tripping Through the Dandelions.” I squinted at the photo of the blogger, someone named Ness, and groaned. She was in her early twenties, and had a pretty clear style obsession with Neil Gaiman’s Death. She also looked suspiciously similar to the grad student who’d accosted my mom at Fairway a while back, demanding information on Althea.

  We moved to a stoop so we could read it together. His fingers were warm, sliding a moment under mine as I grabbed for one half of the screen. The post he’d pulled up was titled “Searching for the Source: Day 133.”

  My research into and quest to find the home of trailblazing feminist author and recluse Althea Proserpine proved fruitful on its 133rd day, as I suspected it would. 1 + 3 + 3 is 7, a meaningful number to any reader of fairy tales.

  I rolled my eyes so hard I saw my brain. Then I kept reading, because, hey, we were desperate.

  I have long believed the Hazel Wood is as much a state of mind as it is a place. And ever since I had the good luck of studying Althea’s work under Professor Miranda Deyne, it has been clear to me that her work bubbled up from a spring fed as much by magic as by mind. I was unsurprised to learn that the Hazel Wood exists on no map, and is as estranged from Google Earth as true magic is from most university English programs today—hence the sad dearth of contemporary Proserpine scholarship.

  As detailed in my post on August 11, I recently tracked down the author of Althea’s well-known Vanity Fair profile. Though she moved some years ago to an assisted-living facility, she was still quite sharp. Through her daughter she revealed she was never allowed access to Althea herself, conducting her interviews instead by letter and several odd phone calls. I went in search of the piece’s photographer, who was admitted to the Hazel Wood, hitting a dead end when I learned of his death overseas in 1989.

  Althea’s first and second known marriages ended in widowhood, and she had one daughter, Vanella Proserpine. Little is known of Althea’s early life beyond that she was the only child of parents long dead. Vanella has no apparent fixed address and rejected my attempts to start a fruitful dialogue. This is unfortunate, considering what she may be able to offer to the criminally underpopulated field of Proserpine study.

  I scoffed forcefully. “Ellery, I remember this chick. She’s a nut!”

  “A nut who might’ve been to the Hazel Wood. Keep reading.”

  I grabbed the phone and scrolled through more background and a few veiled pleas for funding, stopping short at this:

  Armed only with the knowledge that the house is in upstate New York; that, according to Vanity Fair, it’s a five-hour drive from New York City and a ten-minute drive from an unnamed lake; and that it’s located just outside a township of fewer than 1,000 inhabitants as of the year the profile was written, I set out to find the Hazel Wood. I was accompanied as ever by my chauffeur and fellow graduate student, Martin.

  There are recurring themes in Althea’s work that are disturbing to anyone who knows of her supposed self-imprisonment at her estate: of displacement, of abandonment and assault, of a sort of supernatural identity theft, and, naturally, of incarceration. The vessel of this imprisonment changes—the body, the tower, the marriage, the cave—but close reading has led me to believe Althea was foretelling her own incarceration—not merely a spiritual but a physical one.

  Yes. I have come to understand her not as recluse but as prisoner. I believe she’s being held in the Hazel Wood against her will. Martin agrees, but takes a pulp-fiction perspective: he imagines her held in place by creditors, or by some original teller of the tales she has made her name on (a theory I do not subscribe to). Of course, Martin has never read the stories firsthand, nor has he sat at the knee of Professor Miranda Deyne and labored to unpack them. I believe the backstory given by Althea in the Vanity Fair article is smoke and mirrors, just one more fairy tale told by a master of them—a master who has plugged herself into an ancient source of odd fables that feel like just one corner cut from the fabric of a much larger and stranger world.

  I believe it is a force from that very world that holds her prisoner. The true aim of my quest, which I have avoided revealing when it seemed too far from my grasp, is to reach and rescue Althea Proserpine from whoever, or whatever, it is that binds her.

  Martin and I left New York City on Wednesday, driving five hours north to start, then looping around area lakes. I admit we hoped for some clue to carry us forward, knowing that, otherwise, we were looking for a tiny pea beneath an enormous mattress. We both had a powerful sense of the Hazel Wood as being surrounded by trees …

  “Because it’s called the Hazel Wood, hack!” I couldn’t help yelling aloud.

  We both had a powerful sense of the Hazel Wood as being surrounded by trees, and nosed Martin’s Honda around many a large and isolated home in the wooded areas just beyond the state’s numerous lakes. The Honda took the brunt of several canine attacks, and I’ll admit I was surprised by how quickly New York’s upstate homeowners are willing to pull a gun on a scholar who seeks only information, and whose independent study relies on grant money and donations. (Click here to learn more.)

  On the third day—as I expected, owing to the importance of the number 3 in fairy tales—our luck changed. We stopped for breakfast at a diner owned by a woman who’d heard tell of an author who lived nearby, though she didn’t recognize the name Althea Proserpine.

  I scrolled through an extended rant on how unfortunate it was that every waitress and pancake-flipper in every truck stop from here to Mars haven’t heard of my grandmother, who was, let’s face it, a one-hit wonder whose book went out of print shortly after she went off the grid for good. Then there was this:

  Our instincts told us to turn down a dirt path lined with cherry trees blooming very much out of season. When, ten minutes later, we reached a pair of tall, green-metal gates, we knew we’d found our destination: the gates were decorated with a stylized hazel tree. I ordered Martin to park the car somewhere out of sight, though we didn’t see any cameras. When we exited the car, the air felt balmy—by my estimation, it was a full twenty degrees warmer than it had been when we left the diner.

  We looked through the gates, but could see nothing beyond a stand of trees about thirty yards in. As we circled the estate on foot, we discovered that cunningly placed greenery around the entire perimeter kept us from seeing inside. Martin attempted in several places to scale the fence, but discovered it was impossible.

  We had no breadcrumbs to mark our path out of the forest, and when I pulled up the map on my phone, it showed our location as being in the center of the Bering Sea. Martin’s told him we were on the grounds of Memphis’s Graceland.
Was it a cosmic joke, or a sign that we were on the edge of something bigger than we imagined? Somewhere, I was sure, Althea—or her captor—was laughing at us.

  Finding no way in, we had to leave the wood. I’m writing this now from my motel room, a forty-minute drive from the Hazel Wood. Tomorrow we’re getting onto the grounds, by hook or by crook.

  Ellery and I looked at each other with raised eyebrows.

  “She’s totally sleeping with Martin, right?” I said.

  “In Martin’s dreams.”

  But behind Ness’s silly self-interest, there might have been something real. An ancient source, as she said, of true magical weirdness.

  “The strangest part,” I said, “is the fact that she stalked my grandmother to her home because she thought she had to save her.”

  “No, the strangest part is the fact that this is her last blog post.”

  I checked the date: January 17. Nine months ago, just before Althea died.

  “How often does she usually post?”

  “Every day, almost.”

  “Huh.” I clicked on Ness’s bio, looked at a bigger picture of her, and read about how she liked fairy tales, themed dinner parties, and large-scale puppetry. “Think they sicced Twice-Killed Katherine on her?” I was joking, but not.

  “She’s not Katherine’s type, but I wouldn’t be surprised. And neither would you. What are you doing?”

  I’d gone back to the post and was typing into the comment box. “Asking her to contact me.”

  Hello. I’m someone you’ve tried to speak to about Althea in the past, I typed. I thought a moment. I’m ready to speak now. Reply w/email address?

  Before I could give the phone back to Ellery, a response bubbled up, its avatar showing Ness’s pale face. Is this who I think it is?

  My heart shivered against my ribs. “Um. That was fast.”

  Not quite, I typed with rubbery fingers. I wasn’t my mother, but I was the closest thing Ness was gonna get.

  I waited one minute, two, for her response.

  Are you in New York?

  Yes.

  A few seconds later, a Brooklyn address appeared in a new comment. I was trying to figure out what part when it disappeared again.

  “Shit, shit, remember this: 475 Honore Street, 7F. Got that? 475 Honore Street, 7F.”

  Finch snatched his phone and plugged the address into a ride app.

  My neck felt goosebumpy. “Was this woman just sitting by her Althea post waiting for me to call?”

  “Looks like it.”

  “Isn’t that strange?”

  He narrowed his eyes at me. “Strange in the context of the day we’re having? Not really.”

  He stood to wait for our car, and I tilted my head back to squint at the sun, letting the last flares of headache sear themselves like needles into my brain.

  14

  Ness lived in an ugly modern gray box at the end of a street of brownstones. I resisted the urge to look upward as we trudged toward her stoop. I didn’t want to meet eyes with a snarl-haired woman through a seventh-floor window. This visit was weird enough.

  Finch scanned the row of doorbells before punching the one for 7F. A few seconds later, something garbled came through the intercom box.

  “What do—sa wait—?”

  We looked at each other. Finch rang the bell again.

  This time, the voice on the intercom was clearer. It sighed.

  “What does Ilsa wait for?”

  “She waits for Death,” Finch said smoothly, speaking into the box.

  A pause, then the nasal screech of the buzzer. Finch kept peeking at me from the corner of his eye, looking smug.

  “You can say it if you want,” I said. There was no elevator in sight, or even a lobby, just a narrow flight of stairs covered in sad gray carpet. Looked like we’d be huffing it to the seventh floor.

  “Say what?”

  “That your Hinterland knowledge got us in. I had no idea what Ilsa waited for.”

  He shrugged. “You could guess, though, right? When in doubt, the answer is always Death. With a capital D. That’s the trick of the Hinterland.”

  We didn’t talk again till we reached Ness’s floor, conserving our energy for the climb. On the final landing, I bent over to pant and curse Whitechapel for offering Mindful Breathing and Krav Maga electives rather than compulsory PE.

  “How you doin’, slugger?” Finch punched my arm lightly, and I waved him off. The door in front of us creaked open, just a bit, and we startled back.

  Though her face was washed clean of makeup, I recognized Ness right away. She stood wedged between the door and its frame, looking at us with unfocused eyes.

  She wore black jeans and a Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes sweatshirt, stained down its front with runnels of what I hoped was coffee. Her eyes were wide and cloudy blue, her hair a nest of dark curls shot through with gray, though she seemed a little young to be graying already. I was surprised, though, by how old she did look. Her bio pic must’ve been taken a decade ago. Her eyes ran vacantly over Finch and settled on me. I saw her fingers tighten on the door.

  “You’re the one who messaged me?”

  I nodded.

  “Althea’s … granddaughter, it would be? The one who threw an orange at me at the Fairway?”

  “Oh. Yeah. Can I come in?”

  “Just you.” She stepped back from the door, with a distinct air of It’s your funeral.

  I followed, giving Finch an apologetic shrug.

  “Hey, wait.” He wedged himself against the doorframe. “Alice.”

  “It’s fine, Finch.”

  “Is it?” His voice went low. His eyes—big, protective—made my neck go tight. This was what happened when you started to need someone: they got used to it.

  “I’m good,” I said tightly, and shoved him out of the way so I could close the door.

  Hopefully it felt like a friendly shove.

  Ness’s apartment made William Perks’s bookshop look like a Zen garden. The smell of it was a claustrophobic sucker punch of nag champa, old takeout, and dirty hair. Underneath it wound a base note of sage, familiar from Ella’s purifying rituals.

  Once I got over the reek, I started to take in the details. It was a studio, a big one. Most of the floor space was taken over by sealed-up cardboard boxes and stacks of books, and every spare surface—the dining room table, the bed, the sagging green velvet armchair—was covered in stuff. Balled-up clothes, pizza boxes, craft supplies. Lots of craft supplies. I hoped Ness was practicing art therapy; she looked like she could use it.

  “You want tea?” she asked hoarsely. She looked at me sidelong, her eyes darting skittishly away when I tried to look back.

  “No … kay,” I said, twisting my response as her eyes narrowed. She turned her back and stalked over to switch on the electric kettle balanced at the edge of her minuscule kitchen counter. I wondered but didn’t ask how long the water had been sitting inside it.

  As we waited for it to boil, I looked for a place to sit. There was a folding chair pushed up to the table that held nothing worse than a stack of newspapers, so I went to move them onto the floor.

  A headline on the top one caught my eye. Police Launch Probe into Upstate Killings. While Ness slapped a box of Lipton onto the counter, I sat down and began to read.

  The tiny hamlet of Birch, New York, has lately been at the center of a statewide investigation, following three unsolved killings over the course of seven months …

  “Lemon or cream?”

  My head snapped up. Ness’s milky blue eyes pinned mine. “Er. Sugar?” How old would the cream be? How shriveled the lemon? Sugar, at least, was safe.

  As Ness turned back to jiggle an open Domino bag over my cup, something made me rip the article from the newspaper’s front page and tuck it into my skirt pocket. When the tea was ready, Ness used her arm to sweep aside some of the junk on the kitchen table, and tipped the contents of a second folding chair onto the floor. She set a white-and-orange Za
bar’s mug in front of me and sat.

  “So,” she said. “What do you want?”

  Not small talk, any more than she did, apparently. “I read the last post on your blog, and I’m hoping you can tell me how to find the Hazel Wood.”

  “Hah!” She threw back her head and yelled it, like people do in books. “Tell me three good reasons you need to go. Three is a fortuitous number in fairy tales. But you already knew that.” She screwed her face up and glared at me.

  “What if I gave you one really good one?”

  The vacancy in Ness’s blue eyes was burning off like fog. “How old do I look to you?” she said. A non sequitur.

  I lifted one shoulder. If she wanted to be flattered, she was asking the wrong girl. “I don’t know. Thirty … five?”

  “I’m twenty-six years old.”

  I wrapped my hands tight around my mug and looked at her. The gray threads in her hair, the delicate lines around her eyes. I’d heard of people’s hair going white from trauma, but this was something else.

  “You got in, didn’t you?” My voice was hushed. “How did you do it?”

  Ness leaned forward, letting her hair fall over her face. “We got in,” she said tonelessly, “because they let us in. We’d have looked forever if they hadn’t. They killed Martin, but they let me live. I still don’t know why.” Something came into her face, the analytical light she must’ve once lived by. “Why didn’t they kill me? Why did they let me go?”

  “Who killed Martin?” I managed, leaning forward so the table’s edge pressed into my rib cage. “Was it the Hinterland?”

  She peered at me, her voice settling into a pedantic singsong. “When you spend a night in a fairy hill, you come out and the world is seven years older. But when the Hazel Wood let me out, nothing had changed. Only one night had passed. Our car was still there. With Martin’s … his coffee cup. In the holder. The coffee was still drinkable. But I was changed. I’d aged in a night—seven years, if I had to guess.” She touched her fingers to faint crow’s-feet on each side. “Just look at me.”

  I looked. It was all I could do for her.