The Hazel Wood Read online

  I wasn’t pretty sure, I was certain, but felt glad I hedged my bets when Finch shot up to sitting. “Holy shit. Did he do anything to you?”

  “No, no way. He didn’t talk to me, he didn’t come near me. I just saw him. Then he ran away.”

  Slowly he subsided back onto his sleeping bag. “He really didn’t … I mean, when he kidnapped you…”

  “He never touched me. He asked me to get in his car, and I did. I was a kid. He told me stories and fed me pancakes.”

  Finch’s response was sharp. “What stories?”

  “I don’t remember. I remember liking them, though. And he told me he was taking me to Althea, so.” I thought of the things he’d left behind, now tucked into the bottom of my bag. The feather, the comb, the bone.

  “Shit. What if he was … what did he look like?”

  “Red hair, nice face. Smart-looking. He looked like an English teacher, but without the tweedy clothes. And he looks exactly the same now, ten years later. Like, ageless.”

  “Hinterland.” His voice wrapped around the word like it tasted good. It set my teeth on edge, made me want to hold my secrets closer to my chest.

  I was jealous of him, I realized. Jealous of the way he could love Althea—uncomplicated, a fan’s adoration. Envy lodged in my chest like a chunk of green apple. “Why do you love it?” I asked. “Althea’s book.”

  I heard him shift on the floor. It couldn’t have been that comfortable down there.

  “You know how fairy tales are, like, told and retold?” he said, his voice soft. “And they all fit into these certain types, and you can find a dozen versions of ‘The Twelve Dancing Princesses’ or ‘The Juniper Tree’ or whatever?”

  I nodded, because I did know. I’d read them all.

  “I always found that comforting. I liked formulas. I liked narrative arcs I could predict. I liked that my dad still kissed my mom when he got home, on the lips, like in a sitcom. I liked doing stuff the same way every day and reading stories I could take apart into pieces and never really being surprised by anything. I was anxious, I guess. I liked structure.”

  The rat-a-tat talk of Adult Swim bled through the floorboards. I could pick out a word here and there.

  “Then my parents got divorced, and my dad and my therapist gave me loads of books about kids with divorced parents, and kids who were mad at the world, but all that anger and uncertainty made it worse. And I thought, like, boohoo, my life sucks, all that. Can’t get worse. But haha, the universe was like ‘Fuck that,’ and she—my mom—she died. Um. She killed herself.”

  I knew it was coming, but the words still took a chunk out of me. I stayed very still when he said them, because I didn’t know what else to do.

  He breathed in and out, soft. “And my friends didn’t know what to say to me, and my dad didn’t know what to do with me, so it was pretty much me and books. But I didn’t want the touchy-feely tragedy crap my therapist gave me to make me feel like I was less alone. I wanted that distance. I wanted that uncaring, ‘here’s your blood and guts and your fucked-up happy ending’ fairy-tale voice. But, like, the Andrew Lang stuff wasn’t cutting it for me anymore.

  “Then I got my hands on Althea’s book. And it was perfect. There are no lessons in it. There’s just this harsh, horrible world touched with beautiful magic, where shitty things happen. And they don’t happen for a reason, or in threes, or in a way that looks like justice. They’re set in a place that has no rules and doesn’t want any. And the author’s voice—your grandmother’s voice—is perfectly pitiless. She’s like a war reporter who doesn’t give a fuck.” He breathed in like he was going to say more, then went silent.

  “It was nice of your dad,” I said, “to give you those other books. Even if you hated them.”

  He laughed, kind of. “That’s your takeaway?”

  “No. I just … I’ve spent so much time obsessing over Althea. Getting ready to meet her. Reading all kinds of fairy tales so I could impress her when I finally did. But she never called, and she never cared, and now she’s dead.” I’d never said any of this out loud, and doing it now felt like purging poison. “Some part of me has been defined by, like, her not being there, and now that she’s gone I’m being haunted by something she created.”

  “You really think she created it?”

  “Of course she did. What do you mean?”

  He was shaking his head; he sat back up on his sleeping bag. “I told you, she was like a war reporter. She didn’t write this stuff into creation—she wrote about something that was already out there. I used to think it was metaphors for something, but not anymore, not after seeing Twice-Killed Katherine.” He paused. “And Alice, don’t you wonder…”

  “What?”

  He flopped down again. “Never mind.”

  “No way. You’ve got to stop doing that. What were you going to say?”

  When he spoke, it was almost in a whisper. “Don’t you wonder if your mom’s not the one they want? What if you’re the target, and she’s the bait?”

  “Then they would’ve kidnapped me. It would’ve been easy.”

  “They did kidnap you—that man was Hinterland, you know it. Maybe it’s different now that you’re older. Maybe now you have to go by choice.”

  “Even if you were right,” I said slowly, “it doesn’t change anything. They want to get me to do something? They found the right way to do it. I’d follow my mom to hell if I had to. She’d do the same for me.”

  She would, too. Beneath the beauty and the charm and the sharp sparkle of her personality, she had a core of steel. She was like a blade wrapped in a bouquet of orchids. I hoped to god whoever took her made the mistake of underestimating her.

  Finch sighed in a way I couldn’t read. “Let’s try to sleep. Long day tomorrow.”

  Questions crowded at the back of my throat. Why are you helping me? Do you think I’ll find her? Was that really Twice-Killed Katherine? But he’d rolled away from me. A line of moonlight ran like a thin white road from the crown of his head down his back. The longer I stared at it, the more it made him look like he was splitting in two, revealing something shining beneath his skin.

  I rolled over and shut my eyes tight, but it was a long time before I drifted away.

  12

  I didn’t dream about Twice-Killed Katherine, like I worried I might. I dreamed about my mother. I dreamed about the day I realized we didn’t move for fun, or because she was restless. That she didn’t do it to ruin my life, or on a superstitious whim because she didn’t like the way an old woman hovered a hand over my forehead on the bus, drawing a helix in the air before hustling off at the next stop.

  I was ten, and it was our second move in less than eight months. I’d woken that morning in my trundle bed on the floor next to Ella’s, feeling a tightness in my scalp. When I reached up, my fingers found the coiled bumps of braids. My hair was wrapped in a tight crown of them around my head.

  But I’d fallen asleep with my hair shower damp and falling to my shoulders in tangles. “Mom,” I said, patting at my braided crown. “Why’d you do my hair?”

  Ella rolled over and blinked at me sleepily. Then a look came into her eyes: fear and a spiky anger that yawned open like an aperture before slamming shut into something worse—hopelessness.

  “No school today,” she’d said, rolling out of bed and going straight to the closet to pull down her suitcase.

  My rage that time had struck like lightning. While she was shoving our kitchen into boxes, I cut every pair of her jeans off just below the crotch, in protest over leaving town the day my fifth-grade reading teacher was bringing in Turkish Delight.

  It wasn’t until we were in the car, my body splayed against the seat like a shipwreck survivor in the wake of my tantrum, that I’d told her about the candy I was missing out on.

  “It’s not like you think it’ll be,” she said, the bungalow we’d spent half a year in shrinking in our rearview. “It’s chalky and it smells like flowers. You’d hate it.”<
br />
  “You’re lying,” I replied, turning my head to the window.

  Ella stopped the car dead, in the middle of the road. “Hey.”

  The heat in her voice made me turn.

  “We don’t lie to each other, you and me. Right?”

  I shrugged and nodded. Her eyes were too intense, red in the corners like she’d rubbed them after chopping jalapeño.

  And in a flash my tiny, self-centered world expanded outward: she hadn’t wanted to go, either. She’d put curtains up in the bungalow, and fixed the teetering ceiling fan.

  I’d held on to that revelation and saved it to think about that night, turning it over in my mind like a worry stone while Ella snored softly in the next motel bed.

  It scared me, but it also coaxed me closer to her. We’d been on two sides of a divide looking across at each other. Then I realized something that seemed so simple, but changed everything. It tilted the world so she and I were side by side again. There was us, there was the world.

  And there was the fear, underneath it all, that the fault for our life was mine. Ella was easy to like, with a sweet, gravelly voice that hid a sharp sense of humor and an unforgiving eye for the ridiculous, and dark hair that grew out funny so it licked down her back like flames. I was irritable, prone to fits of rage, and had been told more than once I had crazy eyes. If one of us was the bad luck magnet, I was.

  That fear was what kept me quiet, kept me from asking why. I was terrified the reason was me.

  The dream played out in living color, before fading into a thin, restless sleep. I closed my eyes on moonlight and opened them on a sunlit collage of Lin-Manuel Miranda. The floor beside me was empty, and my phone was a blank—no messages from Ella, no missed calls.

  Once I had a dream in which I walked room by room through an empty house, looking for my mom. Every room felt like she’d just been in it, every hall echoed with her voice, but I never found her. Now I felt like I was living in that dream.

  I swiped at my hair and mouth, checking for cowlicks or drool, and slithered into my skirt beneath the comforter. I tried and failed to replicate the hospital-cornered perfection of Courtney’s made bed, before going to the bathroom to scrub at my teeth with a guest towel. My hair stuck up at odd angles, so I dunked my head under the tap.

  Downstairs, Finch was tapping away at a laptop in a huge, open-plan kitchen, while David poured boiling water into a French press.

  “You’re up!” Finch sounded like he’d taken a hit of helium. “I found it! I found a copy of Tales from the Hinterland!”

  I squinted at him. “Found it like you’re bidding on it on eBay?”

  “Found it like it’s here, in New York, and we can go pick it up now.”

  The thrill that ran through me was as much fear as it was excitement. “No way.” I dropped onto the stool next to him. “How?”

  “I called every rare book dealer in town. Not for the first time, but this is the first time someone’s actually had it.”

  “I hope you like weird Scandinavian health toast,” David said, placing a plate of coarse brown rectangles in front of us, “because that’s all we have.”

  I was too keyed up to eat, which made me drink more coffee than I should have, which made me even more jangled. But I didn’t care, because I was about to get my hands on the book that was haunting me. Possibly literally.

  And drinking coffee was a good distraction from the sinking suspicion that this was a little too easy. That our sudden good fortune could be a trap.

  I was rinsing my mug in the big farmhouse sink when something dark slammed against the window. I flinched away as a massive, raggedy blackbird flapped backward, then threw itself against the glass a second time.

  “Whoa!” David hustled to the window. The bird was beating against it, a flurry of wings. “Hey! You’re hurting yourself, buddy!” He slapped his palm on the glass, jerking back when the bird’s motions became more frenzied.

  There was something in its beak. I recognized its shape, an industrial rectangle that made my stomach lurch.

  “Shit, man.” David looked back at us, his face troubled. “Do you think it’s blind or something? Should I—should I let it inside?”

  “Don’t,” I said, my voice hard and quick. “Please.” David frowned at me but didn’t move. We watched silently as the bird charged the window with the last of its strength, before dropping out of view. The thing it had been holding snagged into a corner of the frame. I moved to the blood-smeared window and eased it open, carefully, snatching the envelope before it could come loose. My name was written across the back in a hasty scrawl.

  The envelope held another soft, worn page with a freshly ripped edge. I lifted it enough to read the top.

  The Door That Wasn’t There

  Hansa the Traveler

  The Clockwork Bride

  “What the hell?” breathed David over my shoulder. “That’s your name on the envelope, right? Is that for you?”

  The coffee tasted gritty and burnt on my tongue. Finch tried to meet my eyes, but I couldn’t look back.

  * * *

  We didn’t talk on the way to the subway. I felt stunned and flayed, a nerve ending exposed to cold sun. I refused to let Finch hail a cab, fearing whoever might be behind the wheel. The bookshop was a straight shot up to Harlem, but it was the kind of slow and halting train ride that makes you think something evil is set against you getting where you’re going, even on days when you don’t have a really, really good reason to believe that anyway.

  The shop was at the end of a homey stretch of brownstones, tucked into a bottom story. The lettering on its sign reminded me of an old-fashioned candy store: Wm. Perks’ Antiq. Books &c., in a looping font.

  “Do you think he paid his sign maker by the letter?”

  They were the first words Finch had spoken since he’d touched my elbow and said, “This way,” when we got off the subway. I mustered a close-lipped smile. I kept seeing the bird’s flat black eyes.

  Finch rang the bell beside the wrought-iron door. Half a minute later, we heard someone undoing a series of locks on the other side.

  The man who opened the door looked less like an antiquarian bookseller and more like a bookie. His tie was a loud yellow, his suit an exhausted brown. He had a napkin tucked into his collar that appeared to be covered in barbecue sauce.

  He squinted suspiciously at Finch—all wild hair, unzipped jacket, one restless hand stuck out for a shake. “You Ellery Finch?” he said out the side of his mouth, like he was trying to sell us drugs in Tompkins Square Park.

  “I am. William Perks?” The guy agreed and finally took Finch’s hand, giving it two good pumps. I held mine out, but he kissed it instead. I resisted the urge to wipe it on my wrinkled uniform skirt.

  “Come in, come in. Would you believe I just got the book you’re looking for this morning? I knew it wouldn’t be long before the collectors started sniffing me out—it’s the first one I’ve ever had in stock, and only the second I’ve seen. I’ll be damned if the quality on this one isn’t high, high, high.”

  His patter made him sound like a county-fair auctioneer, but at least he wasn’t treating us like children. I’d anticipated a tidy little bookshop, lined with leather volumes and looking a bit like Finch’s library, but what I got was a mind-boggling riot of bookshelves that started a few yards from the door, standing at all angles and punctuated by free-range stacks rising from the ground, in a room that smelled like paste and paper and the animal tang of vellum. And barbecue. Perks led us to a glass case in the back, full of books lying open like butterflies. Finch frowned. “Bad for the spines,” he muttered.

  “So I’m gonna wash my hands real good, then I’m gonna bring you what you seek.” Perks put his palms together, bowed to us, and exited the room.

  “Do you think he really got it this morning?” I asked Finch, low.

  He shrugged. “Stranger things have happened. Like, recently.”

  Perks zoomed back in before I could re
ply. I had the idea he was as eager to sell as we were to buy.

  I was right, but not for the reason I thought.

  “Here she is,” he said softly, slipping the book from a paper sleeve.

  The sight of its embossed leather cover, dull gold on green, made my breath catch. It was the book at last, soft and inviting and perfectly sized for holding.

  Perks saw my expression and laughed. “I thought you were just along for the ride. But it looks like you’re the one who’s buying.”

  “Are there any missing pages?”

  The bookseller made a show of looking horrified. “Not on your life.”

  I relaxed, a little. “Did you really get it today?”

  “I did indeed, and within the hour you all called me looking for it. You might think it’s strange, but you get used to those karmic moments in the book business. Books want to be read, and by the right people. There’s nothing surprising in it, not to me.”

  “Who sold it to you?”

  “Someone who said he bought it at an estate sale. But I can’t double-check everyone’s story.”

  “What did he look like?” Ellery asked.

  Say he had red hair.

  Perks mulled it over. “He was young, almost as young as you. White kid, dark hair, mug on him like he’d sell you your own mother. And he was…” He hesitated, his eyes flicking between us.

  “He was what?”

  “An odd bird. A little shifty. He had that air to him, like a man out of time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  My voice must’ve had a warning note in it, because Perks threw up his hands and smiled disarmingly. “It’s the look these days—the train jumper look. That Brooklyn thing, girls your age must like it.” He beckoned our attention back to the book. “Want to take a look?”

  What I wanted was to know for sure if the boy who’d sold him the book was the same one I’d seen outside of Whitechapel, and again in the diner. And whether it was a different copy from the one I’d seen at my café, in the hands of the red-haired man.