Few problems were unsolvable when you had boatloads of cash and a lifetime’s worth of rich friends. Finch made some calls, and an hour after leaving the park we were ringing the bell at a townhouse in Brooklyn Heights. The boy who answered had lank indie-rocker hair that fell to his chin. I could tell he was high even before I smelled the hot-box stink surrounding him.
“Ellery Finch!” he said, but with way more syllables.
“Hey, David.” Finch ducked his head, glanced at me. I’m not a smile-at-strangers type by nature, but life on the road had driven home the importance of being a gracious houseguest.
“Nice to meet you, David. I’m Alice. Thanks for putting us up.”
He grinned at me for a while, then nodded. I was pretty sure he’d meant to say something, but forgot he hadn’t.
David’s family had the whole building to themselves. It was a converted church, exposed brick and salvaged stained-glass windows everywhere you looked. I swore I could smell candle wax and old incense breathing out of the walls.
“Glad you could take us in, D,” said Finch. “Your parents are in Europe?”
“France, man. My little sister’s getting in trouble in boarding school over there. She’s like a crime kingpin in a uniform, man.” We’d interrupted him in the middle of eating a plate of greasy microwave nachos. I found it kind of endearing, even though the cheese was probably small-batch Normandy cheddar. He offered me a bite, and I turned him down.
“The guestroom is stripped. No sheets. You and your girlfriend can have Courtney’s room. Second door on the right, but you have to not mind Doctor Who and shit.”
Finch didn’t correct him on the girlfriend thing, just nodded. “Cool, man. Thanks a lot. We really appreciate it.”
David made a motion like he was balling up the thanks and jump-shotting it into a trash can. “Glad to see you, glad you could come. Want a nacho?”
We declined again. The two of them shot the shit for a while, discussing people they’d gone to junior high with, before David’s parents moved him to Brooklyn. I kept my eyes on the corners where shadows gathered, on the windows where the shades weren’t drawn. Waiting to see a girl with a birdcage, a boy in a cap. My hand was loosely cupped around my phone, set to vibrate. Every minute that passed without word from Ella made the chasm beneath my feet yawn wider.
I could sense Finch’s fatigue, and could barely hide my own. As soon as it was even a little bit polite, he did a yawn and stretch. “Cool if we turn in? We have to get out of here really early tomorrow morning.”
“Yeah? You leaving town?”
Finch flicked his eyes my way. “Not … uh, maybe. We’ll see.”
“Heading upstate, probably,” I said impulsively, then flushed. It was an idea from an alternate world, one in which my mom was still at Harold’s, and Finch and I were really together.
“Ahh, for the leaves and shit! Apple picking, man. Hayrides. Pumpkin carving. Scarecrows. Wax vampire teeth, dude!”
Before he could free-associate his way toward seasonal lattes and fisherman sweaters, Finch stood up. They did a chest bump thing, I gave David a half-hug, and we showed ourselves upstairs.
I checked out the darkened master bedroom as we passed. A wide window overlooked the East River, pinpricks of lighted windows winking at me from across the water. A fug of weed and socks and strawberry room spray announced which room was David’s, but his sister’s smelled pleasant and unpersonalized, like an expensive hotel. When Finch fumbled on the light, we gaped at the walls, then looked at each other and cracked up.
Before she was a boarding-school thug, Courtney was a fangirl. Her room was papered with magazine photos, Harry Potter posters, photos of her and her friends hanging out in diner booths. Broadway ticket stubs marched around the sides of the mirror attached to her spindly antique vanity, and a matching bookcase was filled half with colorful paperbacks, half with DVD boxed sets. Firefly sat next to Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes. Supernatural shared a shelf with Akata Witch. I scanned the case for Tales from the Hinterland, but it wasn’t there.
The floor was spotless, the sleigh bed made up with swagged cream sheets, but the walls, teeming with bright celebrity teeth and yards of shiny hair, made the place feel hectic. I thought Ellery felt the same, because he turned on a side lamp and switched off the overhead. The hot riot of faces receded into gloom.
“Who gets the bed?” I asked. Nice guys like Finch don’t let troubled girls like me take the floor, usually. But you never know.
He gave me a weird look. “You get the bed. Ten to one there’s a trundle under there. Or a Dora the Explorer sleeping bag in the closet.”
It was Betty Boop, but I still gave him credit. I washed my face and rinsed my mouth in the adjoining white-and-rose-gold bathroom, and contemplated a shower. But the idea of getting clean just to climb back into dirty clothes was too depressing. Once I was tucked into Courtney’s pretty bed, I wriggled out of my uniform skirt and folded it on top of the pillow next to my head.
“Lights out?” Finch said. He was lying on top of the sleeping bag fully clothed, his hands propped behind his head.
I nodded, and he reached back to flick off the lamp. The vaporous light of old streetlamps filtered in around the window shades. Somewhere in the house, a heater whooshed to life. The feeling of settling into an unfamiliar house was a familiar one. I closed my eyes and let myself pretend, for one long minute, that it was my mother lying on the floor beside me. The pain around my heart expanded, sharp and hot as a supernova, and I rolled over to breathe into the sheets.
I knew the sounds of someone trying to hold back tears in the dark, and I knew I was making them. If Finch tries to comfort me, I’ll smother him with Courtney’s Eiffel Tower pillow.
He didn’t. I counted to ten, twenty, fifty. The counting worked like Novocain, like it always did. Finally, I rolled onto my back again and stared up at the ceiling.
“There’s one weird thing I haven’t told you,” I said into the quiet.
Finch’s head tilted toward me.
“There’s someone else who might be following me.”
“Besides the guy at the diner?”
“Yeah.” I stayed quiet a moment, trying to decide how to say it without sounding melodramatic. “When I was little, a guy, um. Took me. Abducted me. He didn’t hurt me or, you know, anything. But I’m pretty sure I saw him at the café where I work.”
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.