The Hazel Wood Read online

  I felt like she’d stripped me naked. In that moment, even the rising mercury of anger abandoned me. After a long, charged moment she reached for me, already crying, but I slid out of her grip and ran for the bathroom.

  I was dramatic and stupid; I made up a bed with towels in the tub just to put a door between us. But by the next morning, I’d decided: she was right. I was done holding a torch for a stranger.

  “I’ll stop.” That was all I said to Ella. She didn’t say Promise me or How can I trust you or anything like that. She’d just believed me, and that time I wasn’t lying. I gave Althea up like a drug, and I didn’t let her back in till the day my kidnapper showed up at the café with her book in his hands.

  “Alice?”

  I startled, looking back at Finch. “Sorry. What did you say?”

  “I asked if you heard what happened to the movie they made about it. About the stories.”

  “Just what was in the Vanity Fair piece. Disappearances, affair, all that.”

  “Okay, so the director died not long after it was made—you heard about that?”

  “Finch? You know more than me. Just talk.”

  He looked sheepish. “Sorry, I’m geeking out. Okay. So yeah, he died in a single-car crash, sometime in the seventies. His stuff was auctioned off, including the original reels for the Hinterland film. To a rich collector, who only showed them in private screenings. Then when she died, she bequeathed them to the American Film Institute, but they never showed up.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean they never showed up. They got lost, or destroyed, or are still moldering in a collection somewhere, but nobody has any idea where they went. It’s one of the few really lost films of that decade.”

  “But back to the book,” I said. “Did you make copies? Photograph the pages?”

  “I thought about it. Of course I did. But it didn’t feel right, sharing them like that. It would’ve been a violation.”

  “A violation of who? Althea?”

  “Of the stories,” he said. “There was like a … a covenant, among the people who’d read them. Either you found them on your own and were deserving, or you didn’t and you weren’t.”

  His face was so serious and noble I wanted to slap it. “Or, third option, your rich dad bought them for you and you didn’t have to worry about it either way.”

  That pissed him off—I could see it in his hands, tightening on the table’s edge. But he laughed, and he made it sound easy.

  “Look, losing that book was the saddest breakup I’ve ever had. At least I read the stories a million times while I still had them.”

  “So you remember how they go?”

  “Of course. I went straight home after the book was stolen and wrote their names down, too, so I’d never forget. You want me to tell you about them?”

  “‘Alice-Three-Times,’” I said automatically. “What does that mean? What’s it about?”

  “Oh, yeah, that’s a creepy one,” he said, then frowned. “Wait, your mom didn’t name you after that story, did she?”

  My eyes flicked to my phone, lying faceup and silent on the table. Not a word from her, or anyone else. “I didn’t think so, but now I’m not so sure.”

  He looked suddenly shy again. “Can I show you something? It’s something, um, I’ve been wanting to show you for a while. Except…”

  “Except I was a dick when you tried to talk about Althea?”

  Finch smiled but didn’t deny it. “You want to see it now? It’s about her.”

  “Yes. Definitely.”

  “Okay. It’s upstairs, in my room.”

  We walked up a winding staircase to the third floor, which was all Ellery’s. The carpet up there was Grover blue and felt awesomely thick through my shoes, and everything smelled better than I thought a boy’s room could. To be fair, it was more of a boy’s suite. The first room had a billiard/home movie theater setup, decorated with light-up beer signs I’d bet a million bucks were some interior decorator’s idea of High School Boy, not Finch’s.

  “Please ignore the Budweiser chapel,” he said, practically frog-marching me through it.

  The room beyond it said Ellery Finch all over. It was a high-ceilinged study with soft recessed lighting and a wide bank of windows on one side. A beautiful behemoth of a desk sat in the center, covered in books and a laptop and a green-shaded lamp that looked like it came from a pool hall. The room was almost empty otherwise, and it would’ve been monkish if the three windowless walls weren’t entirely given over to books.

  “They’re not all mine,” he said. “This room used to be a creepy fake library, with all these random leather-bound reference books bought by the yard, but I’ve been swapping them out for the real stuff for years.”

  I wanted to shove him out, lock the doors, and live in the room for a month. “Bought by the yard?” I managed to say. “That’s so weird.”

  “I know. It’s a thing they do for rich people who want the effect but don’t actually want to read the things. God forbid my dad crack a fucking book.” He paused and touched his fingertips to his mouth. “Mostly it’s almanacs and old censuses and stuff, but occasionally there’s something good. That’s what I wanted to show you, actually.”

  There was a door on the far side of the room that hung open a few inches. I bet it led to his bedroom, and I was almost let down I wasn’t going to see it. It’ll be a vintage My Bloody Valentine poster, an unmade bed, and an Underwood typewriter, I told myself. What’s there to see?

  Finch gently tugged a book from its place on the wall. Its green cover made my heart jump. But it was bigger than Tales from the Hinterland, the leather pressed and attractively cracked. He laid it carefully on the desk.

  The words My Hollywood Story swooned across the cover in loopy print. “Check out this cheeseball,” Finch said, turning to the title page. A black-and-white headshot of a Valentino type smoldered out at us from beneath a high double peak of glossy hair. He was wearing more eyeliner than Audrey after a cat-eye tutorial binge.

  “Vincent Callais,” Finch said. “French actor, did some American movies in the forties. He played Myrna Loy’s bad boyfriend once, so that’s pretty cool. His writing is hilariously terrible, but I’m a sucker for film history so I flipped through it.” He opened the book to the photos at its center. “So here’s poor old Vincent standing kinda near Anita Ekberg at a party … Oh, here you can see the netting of his toupee … But look—check this one out.”

  I leaned over the book. An elderly Vincent and his shit-eating grin sat at a restaurant table, looking greasy and overexposed. On one side of him, a blonde bunny smiled for the camera, all eyelashes and chest. On the other was a man with a perm and a boxer’s build, much younger than Vince. His eyes basically had comic-book arrows coming out of them, pointing toward the blonde’s chest. And next to him, looking like she was beamed in from another photo entirely, sat my grandmother.

  My eyes flicked down to the caption. L to R: Unknown woman, Callais, Teddy Sharpe, Althea Proserpine. 1972.

  My grandmother would’ve been twenty-eight then, her book a year old. I looked back at her face. Hers was the kind of liquid loveliness that held a secret: you look at it again and again, trying to catch it. That quirked brow, the lip with a nick in it, like maybe she’d fallen off her roller skates as a girl. She wore a sleeveless patterned top, and her hair was in a messy bob, dark bangs swept over her forehead. The fingers of her right hand touched her chin, absently. On her first finger, the same onyx ring she wore in her author photo. On her third, a coiled metal snake.

  “She looks like you,” Finch said.

  Not even close. If I was a house cat, she was a lynx. “My scar’s on my chin, not my lip,” I said, touching the white dent I’d gotten during a particularly ugly run-in with the bad luck.

  “You know what I mean. It’s the eyes, I think. You look like you’ve got a million things going through your mind, but you’re not saying them.”

  I hated unsolicit
ed compliments, if that’s what that was, so I kept my eyes trained on Althea. “Is there anything about her in the book?”

  “Nothing. This is how I discovered her, actually, this photo. I read the entire 1970s section hoping she’d show up.” He rubbed his chin with the flat of his palm, thoughtfully. “It was just … her face, you know? She looked like she was somebody I should know about. And that name. It’s a lot of name. Finally I Googled her, which I should have done first, and found out about the book. I couldn’t find it anywhere, not even reprints of the stories, just old articles and stuff. Not very long, except for the Vanity Fair piece. I became weirdly obsessed with reading the book, mostly because it’s impossible to find.”

  “Is it good?”

  “Good?” He thought for a moment. “Good isn’t the right word. It puts you in this weird headspace. I’d just gone through some family stuff when I read it. I was all messed up. Getting the book at that exact moment was just what I needed. It gave me a feeling like…” He stopped, narrowed his eyes at me. “Don’t laugh. It made me feel the way love songs do when you’re falling in love. Except in a messed-up way, ’cause that’s where my head was at. There’s a lot of darkness in them. I can’t remember now how much of that was in the stories and how much of it was mine. I loved them either way. I’m really sorry I can’t read them again.”

  “So am I.”

  He must’ve heard the trouble in my voice, because his changed, too, got more serious. “Why now? You don’t seem like … you don’t seem interested much in talking about her. Your grandmother. What changed?”

  I opened my mouth, and the awful confusion of it pressed in. The red-haired man, the stench, the empty apartment.

  “I got home from school today,” I began.

  Finch waited. We looked at each other in the warm library light. His eyes were brown and guileless.

  “I got home, and someone had been there—someone had broken in. There was this weird smell, and I could just tell.”

  “A smell? Was there—was that it?”

  “No, that’s not it. Whoever it was had left something for me. On my bed.”

  He recoiled when I said the word bed. “Oh, god. What was it?”

  I pulled out the envelope, flattened the title page onto the table. He grew still, then reached for it. He touched it like it was a relic. “No way,” he breathed.

  “And my mom.” Something in me didn’t want the words said aloud, like it might make them true. “She’s not there. I can’t reach her. I can’t reach any of them. I don’t know what to do. And weird shit has been happening, stuff that’ll sound stupid if I try to explain…”

  Finch’s eyes were trained on the page. He looked like he wanted to grind it up and snort it.

  “Finch?”

  He looked up at me and I saw the shift, when he went from geeked-out fan back to friend, I guess. “Wait, wait.” He grabbed my hand, gently. He wasn’t much taller than me—our eyes were almost level. “Someone broke into your apartment and left something very rare and, in context, very creepy in your room, and now you can’t reach your mom. What if she’s filling out a police report somewhere? I’m so sorry this happened to you, but I don’t think you have to panic. Have you thought about calling your grandmother? Just in case?”

  I pulled my hand sharply from his. “I can’t call her. She’s dead.”

  He startled back. “What? No. I would’ve heard something.”

  “Why would you have heard something?”

  “Because there’s this thing called the internet, and she’s famous. Or was. Everyone gets an obituary. She can’t be dead.”

  My chest burned. “I can’t have you telling me my dead grandmother isn’t dead right now, Finch. That’s like the second or third worst thing you could pick to argue about.”

  “Shit. You’re right, that was a stupid thing to say. This is very, very weird.” He stared at me for a minute, like he was calculating something. “Okay. Okay. Your mom is fine, I’m sure there’s an explanation.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “Well, no matter where they are, you shouldn’t go back to your place alone. Let’s go together—maybe they’re already back. Or maybe I’ll see something you didn’t.”

  And there it was. Behind his gentle expression of concern, a bright curiosity. A hunger. My vow to Ella kept me away from Althea fans, rare as they were, but that didn’t mean they kept away from me.

  “Forget it,” I said, standing suddenly. I lurched away from the table clumsily, shouldering my bag.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t talk to fans.”

  I thought the ice in my voice would make him shrivel, or tell me to fuck off, I’m just trying to help you. Instead, he looked confused. “Why?”

  I opened my mouth. Closed it. If talking to a fan was a betrayal, the betrayal had happened. It was too late to turn back.

  “I don’t know,” I said finally.

  “Then how about getting over it? I don’t think you have anyone else you can go to with this.” He said it gently, but I felt pinpricks of shame anyway.

  “That’s not true. I could go stay at my friend Lana’s.” I probably could, too, but Lana already lived with two other sculptors and half a klezmer band in a stuffed Gowanus flat. And calling her my friend was pushing it.

  “But you didn’t go to Lana,” he said. “You came to me.”

  In that moment, I wondered when the last time was that I’d made eye contact with someone for this long. Someone who wasn’t Ella. I wanted so badly to not need him, but the idea of going back out into the city alone sent a feeling of cold desolation blowing through me. In my mind Harold’s apartment was an alien landscape—something had passed through it, something that didn’t belong. I couldn’t be alone there with that feeling.

  I hated needing something from someone when I had absolutely nothing to offer back. You’d think, after the upbringing I’d had, I’d at least be used to it.

  “Fine,” I managed, relief crashing in. “Sorry it’s a school night.”

  Finch looked at me like I’d said something colossally stupid—which I guess I had, but it still rankled—then sprinted to his bedroom door. He slid through like he didn’t want me to see inside, which made me reassess my guess at what he was hiding in there. Bikini babes on Ferraris, lots of suspicious balled-up socks?

  Or, wait. That was the bad boy from a teen comedy, not a rich New York kid with a Vonnegut quote tattooed up his arm.

  I had to admit, I liked Finch’s tattoo.

  A few minutes later, he came out in a blue zip-up, a beat leather bag I recognized from school over his shoulder. “You ready?”

  I wished he didn’t sound so excited, and I told him so.

  “I sound excited?”

  “Yeah, you do.” I counted to three as I breathed in the peace, breathed out the rage, like Ella had been making me do ever since I broke a baton over a girl’s head in kindergarten. It helped, a little. “This isn’t an adventure, okay? This isn’t an Althea Proserpine thing. My mom is missing, maybe.”

  “Oh.” He looked down. “I really don’t mean to be excited. I’m just glad to be going somewhere with you.”

  Are you for real? I wanted to say, but some self-preserving instinct kept the words back. I did have some control.

  We traced my steps back to Harold’s, where the front desk was still unmanned.

  “That’s another thing—I haven’t seen our doorman since this morning. Weird, right?”

  “Definitely weird,” Finch muttered, his eyes zagging around the lobby. Now that we were in the building he was doing this thing where he walked in front of me with one hand thrown behind him, like someone was about to start shooting arrows at us.

  “Can you let me … dude, I have to open the elevator.”

  He fell back, sheepish, and I applied the elevator key. Harold’s elevator was a gas station bathroom compared to Finch’s, I couldn’t help but note.

  We rode up in prickling silence.
When the doors slid open, my body was tensed and humming. I was ready to scream, or gasp, or see my mom, my mouth already forming the words I’d yell at her for making me worry. But the foyer was empty.

  “God, that smell,” Finch whispered.

  Then I saw something that sent me flying out onto the marble: Harold’s briefcase, slung onto the table in the entrance hall.

  All at once I felt a rush of giddy relief expanding in my chest, coupled with crushing embarrassment that I’d made Finch come here. “Hello?” I called out. “Mom? Harold?”

  Silence, then the rapid sound of approaching feet. Harold came careening around the corner, his shaved head flushed. I never thought I’d be so happy to see him.

  “Harold! Where’s my mo—”

  The words died in my throat. Harold was holding a gun so blunt and iconic it looked like a toy, and he was pointing it square at my chest. Finch made a strangled sound in his throat, grabbed me roughly, and pulled me behind him.

  “What the hell, Harold,” I gasped, pushing past Finch. “It’s me!”

  “I know who it is,” he said. His voice was high, his lips so tight there was a taut ring of white around them. I could smell him from where I stood—cologne and a sickly sweat.

  My heart chugged, turning itself over like a broken-down engine. “Harold. Harold, where’s my mom?”

  “You looked at me like I’m the monster,” he said.

  “What?” My mouth was so dry I could hear my tongue.

  “Was any of it real? Ella—did she really…” He made a choked sound.

  All the bad luck I’d ever had was focused into one dark point, the black muzzle of the gun. “Please,” I said. “Please. What did you do to her? Where is she?”

  “Do to her? I did everything to make her happy—and you, treating me like I don’t belong in my own home, like I shouldn’t be allowed to touch her.” The gun was drooping, like his arm was a dying stem.

  You shouldn’t, I thought. But it was a dim, reflexive thing; the gun still hovered at his waist. If it went off, he’d hit my knees.