Finch was waiting for me half a floor down, sitting on the stairs. He jumped up when he saw me.
“Well? Did you get the address?”
The question seemed so ridiculous I just stared at him, hearing Ness’s creaky voice singing the nursery rhyme. “No. I didn’t.”
“Oh. Shit. So what did you get?”
“Another person telling me to stay the hell away from the Hazel Wood.” As we walked down six flights, I relayed what Ness had told me. But I couldn’t really get the weird bits across—the eyes, the rhyme. The words of it clung maddeningly to the tip of my tongue; I couldn’t quite remember them.
“And her place was full of old newspapers and dust and crafty stuff. Just loads of unused art supplies.” Suddenly the idea of them was breaking my heart. Glitter glue and sequin strings to bring back the soul of a woman who’d lost it in one seven-year night.
Finch didn’t respond. When I looked back, he was biting the inside of his cheek, staring down at his shoes.
“What’s wrong?” I said, nerves making my voice sharp.
“Are we still going?”
I stopped, hard, on the final landing. “What?” When he didn’t respond right away, I charged ahead, into the thin blue light of afternoon.
On the sidewalk, I paced in place. The chilly air felt good on my skin after the close, hopeless heat of Ness’s apartment. Her words had scared me, but they also made me feel relentlessly alive. I felt October sharp in my nostrils, hunger curling in my stomach, the last of that morning’s caffeine jittering through my blood. The pain lodged behind my heart, that wouldn’t come unstuck until Ella was standing next to me again.
“So what’s up?” I asked when he joined me on the sidewalk. “Are you backing out now?”
“You misunderstand me. I’m just making sure you haven’t lost your nerve.” His words were lightly challenging, his eyes bright. “Your mom doesn’t want you to go, Ness apparently lost herself in the woods, we have no idea where to start. I want to make sure you’re not, you know. Changing your mind.” He bounced on the soles of his feet, like he was about to take off.
“And what if I was?” I asked testingly. “What if I think we should turn back now?”
He mulled my words, subsiding back to earth. “Then we will. Turn back. It’s your decision.”
His voice was steady, and he’d said the right thing. But I didn’t believe him. Something in his face made me remember not everything was about me. Maybe Finch wasn’t trying to be the sidekick in my story. Maybe he was trying to start one of his own. The Hazel Wood isn’t yours, I wanted to say. The Hinterland neither. Maybe I should have. But he was standing between me and being utterly alone, so I didn’t.
Ella’s car was trapped in Harold’s garage, so Finch got us a rental, going through his dad’s office to work around the fact that we were both seventeen. We drove to Target first, stocked up on granola bars and water and canisters of pistachios. I bought cheap jeans, a pack of underwear, and a black sweatshirt, and pulled them on in the bathroom. My uniform I balled up and chucked in the trash. I had a feeling my Whitechapel days were done.
Finch was waiting for me outside the bathroom, where he presented me with cop-style aviators. “Road trip classic,” he said.
I slipped them on. They tinted the world a cool disco blue. “You gonna make me play car games, too?”
“Only if you’re lucky.”
I smiled at him but didn’t reply. The strange, rubber-band intensity he’d shown outside of Ness’s had abated, but I was still feeling cautious. I’m watching you, my eyes said when I looked at him.
Right back at you, his replied.
We sat in the Target food court while we planned our next move, eating oil-soaked triangles of grilled cheese dipped in ketchup.
“Anna’s heart would break if she could see this,” Finch said, staring at his greasy hands like they were covered in blood.
“Sorry it’s not Jonathan Finch–approved,” I said, reflexively.
At the sound of his father’s name, Finch’s head stayed down and his eyes went up, holding a black weight I’d never seen in them. For a moment I felt what it must be like for a stranger to lock eyes with me.
“Sorry,” I said quietly, brushing crumbs off my new jeans. “I’m just … we still don’t know where we’re even going.”
“Up north, five hours away, somewhere near a lake and a tiny town.” Finch recited details from the blog. “It worked for Ness.”
“Whatever happened to Ness did not work for Ness.”
“You know what I mean. Let’s just leave the city, drive north, look for signs.”
“Signs like ‘This Way to the Hazel Wood’?”
“Signs like a Polaroid stuck in a book. Or a crow delivering a letter. Unless you have a better plan?” He gave the patented weapons-down smile that shouldn’t have worked on me but kinda did. It almost made me forget that flash of black in his eyes.
Anyway, he was right. That was the best plan we had.
By the time we got on the road, evening was coming down. Sitting in the passenger seat looking out at a sea of brake lights on one side, headlights on the other, felt like an outtake from my life with Ella. We never left town at opportune times. It was always at odd moments, when Ella’s latest job opportunity melted away like fairy gold, or the bad luck threw us one curve too many. Before dinner on a Tuesday. In the middle of the night, after a cigarette Ella swore she’d tamped out ignited a motel-room fire. I propped my temple against the cool of the glass.
“So. Wanna play a car game?”
I snorted. Ella and I had exhausted every car game known to man, and invented a dozen more.
“What? Come on, humor a New York kid. Driving anywhere is like a weird vacation for me.”
He did hold the steering wheel funny, I’d noticed. At ten and two, but in this super-self-conscious way, like he was holding up a confusing shirt.
“Yeah, alright. What do you want to play?”
I expected him to say Geography or the license-plate alphabet game, but he didn’t.
“Let’s play Memory Palace.”
I looked at him. “You made that up.”
“No, my mom did. I’ll go first, so I can teach you.” He cleared his throat. “Okay, the first item in my memory palace is a … map of Amsterdam. Because Amsterdam is where I lost my, um, my virginity in a public park.” He laughed self-consciously, like he was already rethinking his brag. “So, A is for Amsterdam. Now you say mine, then do a B, with a memory attached.”
Did he do it on a bench? Under a bush? Just out in the middle of the grass? I bet it was in a gazebo. I’d pictured Finch having sex with some long-legged Dutch girl five different ways before I realized I was taking way too long to answer.
“Okay. A is for a map of Amsterdam, because that’s where you lost your v-card.” I put air quotes around the phrase with my voice. “And B is for … Beloved, because I read it when my mom and I lived in Vermont.”
“Okay. A is for a map of Amsterdam because that’s where I lost my … v-card, and I’m already regretting picking that one, B is for Beloved, because you read it when you lived in Vermont, and C is for, let’s see, C is for crickets, because they scared the shit out of me when I was little.”
I didn’t make fun of him for that. Crickets were creepy. I named the three items in our memory palace, and paused. “Okay, D is for driving, because that’s what I’ve spent most of my life doing.”
“Nope. Has to be a thing. Like an object you can pick up.”
“Fine,” I muttered. “D is for Dazed and Confused, because I watched it in a motel room once.”
“A movie? Because you remember watching it?”
“Yeah,” I said defensively. “It’s a thing, and I remember it.”
“Fine, fine.” After listing A through D, Finch smiled. “And E is for eggs benedict, because it’s what my mom makes me when I’m sick. Made.”
For a moment, we both held our breath. Then his eyes flicked to the neck of my sweatshirt, where the top of my tattoo crawled toward my collarbone. “You’re up for F. F is for flower, right? I’ve always wanted to ask about it.”
I touched the inked blossom self-consciously, remembering the look on Ella’s face when I came home with it. A lost look, an anger I couldn’t place. I’d felt ashamed without ever knowing why. “Yeah. Maybe when we get to T.”
I did F, H, and J (falafel because Ella liked it, honey because I liked it, Jane Eyre because I’d read it in Tempe). Finch did G, I, and K (gingerbread because his mom used to make gingerbread mansions, icicles because freshman year he wrote an entire fantasy novel about a warhorse named Icicle, and Kit Kats because once his family lived on them for a day, when their car broke down in a snowstorm).
It was my turn again. L. I rapped out everything in our memory palace, feeling a goofy sense of satisfaction when I got it right. “Okay. L. L is for…”
“Don’t say a food because you’ve eaten it or a book because you’ve read it,” Finch said. “Give me, like, a real memory.”
I felt a flush of irritation, colored with shame. “Are you saying I’m playing your car game wrong?”
“No! I just … I thought I could get to know you this way. Like maybe you’d share something about your past. Your family.”
He said it lightly, without emphasis, but I knew what he wanted.
“You remember I’ve never met her, right?” I asked hotly. “Like, ever? Althea figures not at all into my life, and my mom hasn’t talked to her in sixteen years.”
“What about when you were little? Where you grew up? What do you remember about that?”
His eyes were on the traffic ahead, but his voice held a sharp, acquisitive note. Like he was collecting findings on me for a book. It would’ve pissed me off anyway, but what made it worse was his certainty. That everyone’s mind was flush with memories they could toss off casually. Half the shit I thought had happened to me happened in books. Or to Ella, in one of her stories about her early single-mom days, trying to make ends meet.
“I don’t want to play your stupid game anymore,” I said, turning toward the window. “And who uses a car game as an excuse to brag about having sex with some bitch in a park?”
“Some bitch? She was my girlfriend for eight months. It’s so ugly when girls call each other that word.”
“Oh, my god, Finch, go get a liberal arts degree.”
In a perfect world I would’ve had headphones I could put on right then, and a cigarette I could smoke in his airspace, but this was not a perfect world. I settled for turning my head and staring out the window, letting all the little alphabetized memories fall from my brain like snow.
The silence in the car stretched, stretched, and finally slackened, when it became clear nobody was going to break it. Good.
I was staring into the scrub by the side of the road when traffic let up. Finch eased ahead at a steady clip, and the radio turned into a soothing drone as I drifted into the fugue state of the emotionally exhausted long-distance traveler. Without distraction, Ella’s absence was settling back into my bones. As long as we were moving, the panic abated. Every time I saw brake lights, it kicked back to life.
Scrub turned into trees turned into a thin woods. We veered off the main road and onto something two-lane and winding. Dimly I saw a wobbling light by the side of the road ahead of us, and squinted toward it. A headlamp, on a man in ridiculous bike pants. He was jogging in place, fingers on the pulse beneath his chin. It looked silly, I smiled. Then a dark-skinned woman in a snow-colored dress materialized beside him and put her mouth to his throat.
The car flew past, road and jogger and woman hurtling into blackness behind us. “Did you see that?” I screeched. Finch jumped, the car swerving to the right.
“What?”
“That jogger—that woman—” What exactly had I seen? “Are there vampires in the Hinterland?”
His hands tightened on the wheel. “Oh, my god. Not exactly.”
“Turn around.”
Finch slowed and pulled a U-turn. As we retraced our path, I strained for the sight of a headlamp, or the hump of two shapes in the dim. But there was nothing to see. After five minutes of slow driving, Finch turned us around again.
“You’re sure you saw something? You were kind of drifting off, right?”
I gave him a dirty look, though it was true. Had my overwhelmed mind cooked up some waking nightmare out of scary stories and the dark? I remembered the article I’d ripped out at Ness’s apartment—left behind, along with my school uniform, in the Target bathroom.
“Pull over quick.”
His eyes flicked to the trees, shuffling their leaves in the navy near-dark. “Wait. Let’s get farther away.” He drove ten more minutes, leaving the site of whatever I’d seen far behind us, then pulled the car onto the shoulder and brought his hand down on the power locks. The car ticked to quiet and night pressed close against the windows.
I searched on my phone for deaths upstate new york. The first hit was the article I’d seen at Ness’s.
Police Launch Probe into Upstate Killings
The tiny hamlet of Birch, New York, has lately been at the center of a statewide investigation …
“What are you looking at?”
“Birch,” I said. “Birch, New York. That’s where we should go.”
“Why? What did you find?”
“The jogger murders upstate.”
His eyes went wide. “Hinterland?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised. They’ve been going on for months, and they’re all messed up in some way. Like, Twice-Killed Katherine messed up.” I hesitated, scanning the tree line. “What did you mean, not vampires exactly?”
Finch faked a shudder. “‘Jenny and the Night Women.’”
I remembered the name from Althea’s table of contents. “How does that one go?”
“Jenny’s a spoiled brat farmer’s daughter who doesn’t like the word ‘no.’ She meets a creepy little kid in the woods who tells her how she can get back at her parents—prick their heels while they’re sleeping, wash a stone in the blood, and bury it under their window. She does it, and it lets the Night Women in. Which is, you know, a pretty big mistake.”
Something was sparking in my mind, an ancient, paper-flat memory trying to rise. I ran a finger over the nick in my chin. “Is there a story about—” I tried to think, but reaching for the memory was like trying to catch minnows with my fingertips.
Chicago. The raking sound of Ella’s scream. Light around a door …
“A door,” I finished. “There’s a story in the book, something to do with a door. How does that one go?”
“‘The Door That Wasn’t There.’ Why that one?”
“Just tell me.”
He hesitated, ducking his head to look out at the trees. “Okay. Here’s what I remember.”