The Hazel Wood Page 7

  “And now this,” he said. “Now you bring this into my life. My daughter could’ve been killed.”

  “Killed?” I remembered Audrey’s phone, abandoned on the bed. “Are they hurt? Ella and Audrey?”

  “I’m supposed to believe you care?” He walked forward and took me roughly by the shoulder, gun still hanging from his other hand. I froze. Harold hadn’t touched me since we hugged to make Ella happy at the wedding. I felt Finch go tense as Harold glared down at me with his sad blue pirate eyes. He shook me, like I was something he was checking for leaks.

  “Don’t touch me,” I gasped, twisting away, right as Finch grabbed Harold’s arm.

  “Get away from her,” he said through gritted teeth.

  Harold made an anguished sound and lifted the gun. Finch and I startled back. “I loved her. I loved her so much, and she lied to me every day.”

  “Sir,” Finch said, and his voice was strong and even. “Point the gun at the floor. We’re going to turn around and leave, right now. Just please point the gun at the floor.”

  “We’re not going anywhere,” I said, my voice seesawing like the deck of a ship. “Not until he tells me where she is!”

  There was a clicking of heels on tile, and Audrey pulled up behind her dad, clutching a stuffed duffel to her chest and looking drawn behind her makeup mask.

  “Dad,” she said. All the sharp laughter and shiny bullshit had gone out of her voice. She sounded very tired. “Put that thing down.”

  For a second he didn’t seem to hear her. Then he dropped the gun to the table with a hard clack that made my back teeth hurt.

  “Your mom is gone,” Audrey said, in that same dead voice. “They took us, too, but they let us go. We only came back to get some stuff—we’re not staying, so you can tell them that if they ask. And don’t try to find us.”

  “Who took her? Who?”

  Audrey’s pupils were dilated, I realized, with shock or trauma. “The Hinterland,” she said. “They told us they were the Hinterland.”

  I wanted to collapse on the tile. The adrenaline of seeing the gun was ebbing, leaving my limbs gummy and jittering, and that word—Hinterland. Althea again.

  “What did they look like?”

  Harold put his hand on the gun. “Get the fuck out.”

  I didn’t think he would really shoot me. “Just tell me where they took her and I’ll go. Please.”

  “Get the fuck out.”

  Finch already had me by the arm and the waist, guiding me toward the elevator. It was waiting for us and opened with a chilly ping. “We’ll come back with cops if we have to,” he said quietly. “Or someone from my dad’s security team.”

  My eyes stayed on Harold’s as the doors slid shut between us.

  “No, we won’t. I’ll never come back here again.”

  8

  Finch could’ve walked away forever as soon as we hit the sidewalk. He could’ve put me in a cab, ignoring the fact that I had nowhere to go and he knew it. He could’ve used his bottomless bank account to get me a hotel room for the night if he really wanted to go all out.

  But he didn’t do any of those things. And somewhere beneath my gratitude and my fear, I couldn’t stop wondering why.

  “We have to call the cops. Your stepdad could’ve hurt you.”

  I looked at my stupid silent phone and pressed my hands to my chest. It felt like a room squeezing in on itself. “Mom,” I said, raggedly, to the air.

  Then Finch had an arm around me again, helping me sit on a low garden wall.

  “Hey. Hey. Breathe, okay? Breathe.”

  I took shuddering sips of air. I’d never had a panic attack, but Ella used to get them sometimes. She thought she hid them from me, but I knew.

  Finch crouched in front of me. “It’s okay. It’s okay. Just breathe.”

  His words turned into an irritant, and my body coursed with a sudden fire. I pushed him aside and jumped up, my hands clenching and unclenching and cupping themselves around a phantom cigarette. I saw Ella last night in her cocktail dress, Ella’s sleeping outline in the dark of my room. Ella driving and Ella laughing and Ella’s level brown eyes on mine.

  Ever since I was old enough for it, I was the vigilant one, always keeping an eye on the bad luck while Ella did her best to make our squats and claimed corners into a home. But I’d let my guard down. I’d let the bad luck take some unfathomable form and walk right in, and carry Ella away.

  “Audrey said the Hinterland took them. What the hell does that mean?”

  Finch shook his head apologetically. “I have no idea.”

  The street in front of Harold’s apartment looked transformed. The last of the light had died. Everything was shifting shadow, the smell of old smoke, the enervating rustle of half-naked trees. Terror lapped around me and threatened to pull me under. I held it back with motion, with rising anger, with magical thinking: If that light turns green on the count of three, my mother will walk around that corner. It did, but she didn’t.

  Finch stood, too, keeping his distance as I paced. “What if—” He stopped talking, waiting for me to ask.

  “Spit it out.”

  “You’re not gonna like it.”

  “There’s nothing here to like. Just say it.” Talking was good. Talking rooted me here, under this streetlight with Finch, instead of racing outward into a wild black galaxy where I couldn’t feel the tug of my mother anywhere.

  “What if when she said the Hinterland, she meant the Hinterland.”

  “Make sense, Finch. Please.”

  “The Hinterland. It’s the place where the stories, you know, connect. They’re all set in the same place.”

  He’d snapped into scholar mode, and it helped. The bronchitis squeeze in my chest subsided. “All fairy tales are set in the same place. Once-upon-a-time land.”

  “Not Althea’s. There’s a theory…”

  I groaned. I’d spent enough time on her message boards, where a mix of fans and folklore scholars swapped theories about the book, to be wary. You’d think she’d be too obscure to have an internet following, but obscurity was half of her appeal. “Oh, my god. You’re deep fan. You’re into the theories?”

  That one made it through his optimism. “Yeah, I’m deep fan,” he said sharply, “and suddenly that shit’s exactly what you need. You want to hear it or not?”

  I was taken aback, and not in a bad way. I nodded for him to continue.

  “So there’s a theory”—he emphasized the word—“about Althea’s disappearance in the sixties. That she was out somewhere collecting the stories, like Alan Lomax did with American folk music. That the Hinterland is a code name for the boonies in some northern country.”

  I’d heard that one. It seemed plausible, actually, which was probably why it annoyed me so much.

  “So what if that’s the Hinterland Audrey was talking about?” he persisted. “Maybe Althea took a story from someone who’s pissed, someone who wants credit for it, and…”

  “And now they’re stalking her family, forty years later?” I finished. “Some, I don’t know, Norwegian herdsman finally made his way to New York to take ancient revenge?”

  The redheaded man’s face flickered across my mind’s eye. I should’ve told Finch about him, but I kept thinking of the last part of that Nelson Algren quote: “Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.” I was about a mile from sleeping with Finch, but my troubles were becoming his anyway. I didn’t want to pile on more.

  He shrugged. “It’s just a theory. It’s got to mean something. They left a page from the book, for god’s sake. Maybe it’s a code.”

  “Look, you need to tell me about ‘Alice-Three-Times,’ in case there’s something in it. Any clue on what I’m supposed to do next.”

  “Fine. But let’s go somewhere we can be alone.” He saw my face and smiled, tight and brief. “Alone, like, not where my dad and stepmom can hear us. One of them could actually be home by now.”

  We ended up at a dine
r on Seventy-Ninth Street, the kind of place where even a bowl of matzo ball soup costs twelve bucks. That was what Finch ordered, plus a club sandwich with extra pickles on the side. I got pancakes drowning in blueberry syrup, because that’s what I ate at the diner with the red-haired man. They congealed fast on my plate, and failed to bring any repressed memories flooding back.

  I kept my phone on the table between us, my heart sinking a little lower every time I looked at its mute black screen. The whole world was bending around the absence of my mother, like light ricocheting off something too dark to illuminate. I saw my face in the bowl of the extra soup spoon the waitress had laid on the table. My eyes were shocked holes.

  Finch ate one pickle, put another on the edge of my saucer, and cut the last one in four and tucked each part into a wedge of his sandwich. “Okay,” he said. “Here’s what I remember about ‘Alice-Three-Times.’”

  His recounting was more detailed than I’d hoped it would be, though he kept second-guessing himself and tangling it with other tales. The basic shape of it went like this.

  9

  On a cold day in a distant kingdom, a daughter was born to a queen and king. Her eyes were shiny and black all over, and the midwife laid her in the queen’s arms and fled. The queen looked into the girl’s eyes, shiny-dark as beetle shells, and despised her on sight.

  The girl was small and never made a sound, not even a cry the day she was born. Sure she wouldn’t live, the queen refused to name her.

  At first her prophecy seemed true: the months passed, and the baby failed to grow. But she didn’t die, either. Two years bloomed and faded, and she was still as little as the day she was born, and just as silent, and she lived on sheep’s milk because the queen refused to nurse her.

  Then one morning, when the nurse went in to feed her, she found the baby had grown in the night—she was now as big as a child of seven. Her limbs were frail as a frog’s, but her eyes were still a defiant black. It was decided, then: she would live. The king pressed his wife to name her, and the queen chose a name that was small and powerless, an ill-starred name for a princess. The queen called her Alice.

  Alice spoke, finally, always in full sentences. She spoke only to other children, mostly to make them cry. And once again, she stopped getting bigger. The years went by, and the royal household started to believe she’d be a child forever, playing tricks on her siblings and scaring the maids with her black, black eyes.

  Until, on a morning so icy cold the breath froze on your lips if you dared to go outside, a nursemaid went to wake Alice, and found a girl of twelve sleeping in her bed. She was a creature of points and angles, a colt who could barely walk on her new legs. The servants whispered that she was a changeling, but her eyes were black as ever, and her temper the same: she didn’t talk much, and she appeared places she shouldn’t. The castle had trouble keeping servants, and the queen’s women gossiped that the girl was to blame.

  The nursemaid charged with raising Alice learned to fear the day when she’d again find a stranger in the princess’s bed. On the morning she discovered a black-eyed girl of seventeen waiting for her in Alice’s chamber, the woman whispered a curse and left the castle for good.

  The princess was young in years but had become very beautiful, and at least looked to be of age. The king, who’d rarely spoken a word to her directly, now watched her with an acquisitive eye. He gave her gifts not meant for a daughter: A dragonfly catch for her cloak, made of red metal. A blown-glass flower that looked like a scorpion striking. The queen made a decision: it was time for Alice to marry.

  Because she was the daughter of a king, in a world where these things were indulged, the girl set her suitors a task. Whoever could fill a silk purse with ice from the kingdom’s distant ice caverns and carry it back to her, she’d agree to marry. If they failed, they died. Of course most of the suitors were fools. They rode a day and night to bring the ice for her little silk purse, and it melted to nothing on the way. They brought ice from a frozen stream a mile from the palace, and she tasted their treachery in its familiar, scummy tang. Or they brought diamonds, hoping ice was a metaphor, and lost their lives for the mistake.

  The men who solved the puzzle were two brothers from the north, their skin nearly as pale as the ice they carried. They packed it in sawdust and carved it into bits before entering her father’s hall.

  When the older brother showed her it had been done, she went still. The color drained out of her face. It made him smile.

  “But which one of you will she marry?” the king asked.

  The brother smiled again. Everyone present was beginning to understand it wasn’t a nice thing when the brother smiled. “We don’t want a wife,” he said. “We want a housemaid. She’ll bake our bread, and clean our house, and bear the children who will serve us after she’s dead.”

  The girl said nothing. Instead, she took her little purse of ice and tipped it down her throat. In moments, frost bloomed on her arms. Her skin went blue, her eyes iced white, and she froze solid. Her father shouted, her mother screamed, and the two brothers argued, deciding finally to take her as she was, intending to decide what to do with her on the road.

  They set off that night, the two brothers and the girl, tied to a horse her father gave as her dowry. Her mother watched her go, and it was as if the sliver of ice that had lodged in her heart the day the girl was born melted away.

  The brothers rode until the stars were nearly faded, then stopped to make camp. They lay their bedrolls on the ground, and lay their stiff bride under a tree. They slept.

  The younger brother had terrible dreams, about a fox with holes for eyes, and a child who laughed while drowning in an ice-cold pond. As the sun bled over the horizon the next morning, he woke to find his brother dead. The man’s skin bristled with frost, and his mouth and eyes were frozen open in horror. The girl was as still as ever. Her cold body didn’t respond even when the remaining brother kicked it sharply with his boot.

  He thought fast. He left his brother where he lay, packed up camp, and tied the girl’s stonelike hands and feet with strong rope—just in case. He left her behind with his frozen brother, and rode away like the devil was after him.

  As he rode he kept hearing a sound like wind through icy branches, and thumps of wet snow sliding to the ground at night. He rode faster. When his horse was covered in froth, and he was too hungry and exhausted to continue, he stopped and made camp. He sat up all night holding a knife to his chest, keeping a small fire alive. Nothing came for him in the night, and he felt foolish.

  Until the sun rose and he turned and saw his horse. The animal was dead, its eyes colored over with a membrane of frost, and its mane had ice crystals in it.

  The younger brother continued his journey on foot. The trees he moved through were so thick the sunlight could barely break through them, and he met no one on his way. The air he breathed tasted frozen in his throat, and chilled his eyes till they ached, though it was spring thaw all around him. It was barely dark when he lay down to rest, so tired he couldn’t summon up the strength to feel afraid. When his eyes had closed, the princess came out from behind a tree hung with creeping vines. She laid her hands on his eyes and placed her mouth over his. When he was dead, she stood up tall. The ice was still in her, and her eyes swirled like cirrus clouds.

  She turned. There was a scent in the air of cold lilacs, a late freeze on an early bloom. It was the smell of her mother’s perfume. The black-eyed girl felt her parents’ distant castle like the pulsing heartbeat of an animal she wanted to kill. She set her path back toward it.

  10

  Finch stopped talking. The diner rustled around us, spoons chiming on cup brims and plates set to tables with a smack. I felt a sharp sting and looked down: I’d ripped the cuticle on my right index finger to bloody shreds.

  “Is that it?” I asked, finally.

  His eyes were worried, staring over my shoulder. “No, it’s just—” He half-stood, then sat again. “I thought I … never mind.”


  “What is it?” My head pulsed with a three-a.m.-black-coffee feeling, and my teeth chattered twice before I clamped my jaw shut. I jerked a look back over each shoulder but saw nothing out of the ordinary: three girls younger than us drinking coffee and wearing sunglasses at night, a table of old men in work jackets, a dark-haired woman biting into a sugar cube.

  “What did you see?” I whispered.

  He ran a hand through his hair, made it bigger. “Nothing. I’m on edge.”

  I took a last look around. Nobody looked back.

  “You remembered a lot,” I said.

  He’d jammed another wedge of sandwich in his mouth and was chewing mechanically, his eyes darting around. “When I love a book,” he said around the sandwich, “I read it more than once.”

  “How does the story end?”

  But Finch was out of storytelling mode, his eyes still flicking past my shoulder every few seconds. “Bloody revenge, obviously.”

  “Revenge for what?”

  “The usual. Neglectful mom, criminal dad. Shades of ‘Thousandfurs,’ in case I didn’t make that clear.”

  “Coffee?” Finch and I jumped as our waitress swung by with a fresh pot.

  “You’re more on edge now,” I said when she was gone. “Telling the story—it made you nervous.”

  “I’ve never told one of them out loud. It made me … it almost made me think I was seeing things.” His head twitched as he checked out the table behind us: a college-aged guy and a woman in her forties, neither of them talking.

  My own nerves were raw as rope, almost rubbed through. I couldn’t have him breaking down, too. “Fine, no more story time. Just … why do you think my mom named me after that story specifically?”

  “Maybe she didn’t. Maybe whoever left the page is trying to mess with you. She could’ve named you after, I don’t know, Alice in Wonderland. Or nobody at all.”

  He took a swig of his coffee, rolled his neck. Calm, laid-back Finch was returning, sliding into place over his skin. It bothered me that he got to see me broken and all I got was the same candy shell he showed everyone else.