Ink and Bone (26 page)

TWENTY-FOUR

F
inley and Eloise lounged on soft chairs, the sound of the ocean loud around them. The water was jewel green, white capped, lapping against sand as white as sugar. Finley wore a black bikini; Eloise was conservative as ever in a chambray skirt and cream sweater set.

“You asked me what it is,” Eloise said.

“You didn’t answer,” said Finley.

Finley’s legs were covered with tattoos—a girl dancing, a gun, a glade of towering trees morphing into The Three Sisters—none of which she remembered getting. She ran her hands along her skin, which was greasy and smelled of coconuts. She only remembered lounging on a beach in a bikini a couple of times—once in Florida, once in Hawaii, both trips that were characterized by her parents bickering and arguing from dawn till dusk. But today there was only silence, except for the white gulls and the sound of the surf.

“There is no answer,” said Eloise. She sipped from a straw punched into a hollowed-out pineapple. Finley had one, too. The drink inside was like nectar, sweet and refreshing, the most delicious thing she’d ever tasted. It made her relaxed and lightheaded.

“It’s something different to everyone,” Eloise went on. “Like life. You take from it what you bring to it.”

“But it’s not like other places,” said Finley.

“No,” said Eloise. She, too, looked peaceful.

“It wants something,” said Finley.

“We all want something,” said Eloise.

Finley was annoyed. Why must Eloise always be so vague? Maybe she didn’t have the answers, after all. When she looked over again, it was Abigail. The girl, with her wild auburn hair, wore that eternal blue dress, tattered and worn. She tilted her face toward the sun with a smile.

“Too many bad things have happened here,” said Abigail. The voice that came from her mouth was Eloise’s. “It might have started with just one thing, one tragedy or injustice.”

Finley closed her eyes. When she opened them, there was a little girl in an owl tee-shirt, the knees of her jeans ripped and bloodied. The voice was still Eloise’s.

“That anger was a seed that grew. The energy expanded and spread itself, like violence runs in families. Now a blockage has been created, and nothing can pass through as it must. It’s like a clogged drain. And the muck gathers, collects, rots, and festers.”

Finley listened, though Eloise’s voice was barely audible now over the sound of a strange whispering. And more so, Finley didn’t want to hear what the old woman had to say. She was tired of all the darkness. Why couldn’t she just stay here on the beach, with the sun on her skin? She looked down and it was all gone, all the ink on her arms, on her legs. Her skin was clean, clear of any marking. She felt such a tremendous sense of release, but loss, too.

“Someone at peace has to show them the way out,” said the little girl with the very old voice. “Once the negativity has been released, it won’t attract more.”

“I don’t know what that means,” said Finley.

She turned back to Eloise, but the woman was gone, her seat empty, her drink tipped, leaving a dark stain on the sand.

*  *  *

Finley had blood on her hands, and a long dark streak marred each leg of her jeans as if she’d tried to wipe it off there. Far from being warm, basking on some unnamed beach, her body felt rigid with cold, shivering from her core.
Where was she?
Awareness came in pieces. She was alone in Rainer’s car, engine running, sitting in the
driver’s seat. The car didn’t have heat, and her breath plumed out in great clouds. She gripped the steering wheel hard, as if she were bracing herself for a crash.

She was parked on a tree-lined street—Jones Cooper’s street. A light came on in an upstairs window. Shit. Her heart thumped; there was a big blank space where her memory should be. Panic beat its wings in her chest. What was the last thing she remembered? Think. THINK. A text from Alfie. Abigail in the mirror. Rainer’s hands on her body. The old maps of the iron mines.

Rainer. Where was he?

She felt around for her cell phone, finally fishing it out of her jacket pocket. It was a block of ice, and her hands were so chilled that she couldn’t get the touch screen to work. She blew on her fingers, rubbed them together, and then tried to call. It rang and rang. Then he finally picked up.

“Rainer?” she said. “Where are you?”

But there was only static over the distant sound of his voice.

“Down here—” That was all that she could make out, or something like it.

“I can’t hear you,” she said.

Then the line—infuriatingly—went dead. She tried again, then again. But the call wouldn’t go through. Why were they not together? Why did she have his car? Had she taken it? Was he back at the tattoo shop and cell phone reception was just bad because of the weather?

The snow fell in big fat flakes, powdering lawns and the trees. The world was a hush, a breath held, her own coming out deep and ragged.

How could she have driven to the Coopers’ and not remembered it? It was troubling. She rubbed her eyes hard, willing the last few hours back. Ironically, they’d just been discussing this in abnormal psychology class, about cognition in fugue states. Though the subject is functioning—even as in Finley’s case, driving—information that is assimilated during that period is generally not accessible once the state has passed. Finley couldn’t think of what she’d experienced
now, or the first time with Jones, as anything but a fugue. A separate part of herself was conscious. Last time, she’d remembered. Why not this time? She might never get the last few hours back. Why was there
so much
blood? A sweet, gamey smell sat thick on the air, sickening and yet oddly familiar.

The porch light came on, and the front door to the house opened. Jones stepped out onto the porch wearing jeans and a Georgetown sweatshirt under a barn jacket. He looked up at the falling snow, nonchalant, as if everyone popped out onto his stoop at three in the morning to check the weather, then he dropped a steely gaze across at the car.

Finley remembered the dark-tinted windows, the general condition of the vehicle. She opened the door and stepped out, waving her hand.

“It’s me,” she called. Her voice bounced down the street, sounding high and weak to her ears like the voice of a child. “Finley.”

He closed his eyes and bowed his head, then looked up with a deep frown. He moved down the path and up the drive.

When he reached her, “What the hell are you doing out here, kid? Whose car is that?”

“I—” she started. “I don’t know what I’m doing here. It’s Rainer’s car.”

“You almost got yourself shot.”

She wrapped her arms around herself, still disoriented and confused. “Why would you come to the door with a gun?” she asked. She looked for it, and saw the hard edge of it pressed against his sweatshirt.

His assessing gaze made her feel stupid—really stupid.

“Strange, beat-up old car, dark-tinted windows pulls in front of your house in the middle of the night? Cops never stop being cops, I guess,” he said. He peered inside the car, then back at her.

“What’s all over you? Is that blood?”

She tried to keep herself from shivering, but she couldn’t.

“He killed someone,” she said. It came back in a rush then—the raised arm, the heavy flashlight, the revolting sound of metal on
flesh and bone. But why was the blood on her? Had she been there, too?

“Who did?” he asked, alarmed. His hand on her shoulder now was warm and steadying, a bolster. In that moment, something about him reminded her of Eloise. He was someone who fixed, who helped.

“The boy who was in the woods, the one I saw,” she said. “He killed someone tonight.”

“You witnessed this?” A simple question without a simple answer.

She shook her head. “No,” she said. Then, “I don’t know.”

“Whose blood is that?” Jones said. “Are you hurt?”

“I don’t know.” She could hear the screaming.
Momma! Momma! “
No, I’m not hurt.”

“That’s a lot of blood,” he said, lifting her hands and looking at her palms. “Where were you just now?”

There was a flash. She fought for it. Where? Where?

“On the trail,” she said quickly. Yes, yes, that was it. “The trail you and I visited.”

“And on the trail you witnessed a murder?”

“No, not exactly,” she said. “I don’t know.”

He watched her a moment, shaking his head as if she were an equation he couldn’t solve.

“What were you doing up there, alone in the middle of the night?”

“After I left you, I researched the iron mines,” she said. She patted at her jacket and found the folded pages there. Fugue or not, at least she’d had the presence of mind to bring the maps. She handed them to him. “I found these.”

He took them from her and squinted at them. “These are too old to be useful,” he said. “Trust me. I grew up in this place and I was a cop here for a good long time. I’ve pulled kids out of those mines. There’s no accurate map in existence.”

“There was a man,” said Finley. “A guy named Michael Holt who dedicated himself to mapping out the mines. It wasn’t that long ago.”

“The guy you’re talking about was a nutcase,” said Jones.

“And his father before him,” she said. “He was a professor, wrote a couple of books.”

“Another crazy person,” said Jones. “He was a hoarder.”

Stubborn, Finley thought, holding on to fixed ideas that he didn’t want changed. Or was it that he didn’t want to think that they’d missed something when they were all looking for a missing girl? That they’d all been up there searching and she’d been there, just out of sight.

“Didn’t Michael Holt hide in the mines for a while?” Finley asked.

“He did,” Jones admitted.

“So it’s possible then that whoever took Abbey did the same,” said Finley.

Jones blew out that sigh again. “Even if he had, it was ten months ago.”

“But it would mean that maybe they didn’t have to go far,” said Finley. “That there was no car waiting. That
maybe
Abbey is still right here, in The Hollows.”

He looked at the maps, then up at the sky.

“All right,” he said after a moment. “Let’s head out there and see what you saw or didn’t see. We’ll take my vehicle because, I’ll tell you what, it doesn’t look like you should be driving. I’ll call Chuck.”

Finley guessed he was talking about Chuck Ferrigno, the only detective at The Hollows PD. There had been others, according to Eloise, but budget cuts had reduced the department to the bare bones, which is why Jones Cooper consulted regularly.

A pretty woman appeared in the doorway as Jones and Finley were headed over toward the SUV. He walked to her and they exchanged a few quiet words, a quick embrace, and she went back into the house, casting a motherly, concerned glance in Finley’s direction. Maggie Cooper offered Finley a wave, then disappeared back inside. She came back a minute later with a blanket and some towels, and handed them to Jones. After giving him a quick kiss on the cheek, she closed the door.

In the car, Finley used the towels and some antibacterial ointment Jones had in the center console to wipe some of the blood off her hands. Then she wrapped herself in the blanket, still shivering, foggy headed, afraid.

“There was a girl there, too,” Finley said, as he pulled out of the driveway. Finley could see her, slight and dirty, standing among the trees. Her face was a strange blur, in focus but not. A pulse of frustration moved through Finley.
What was happening to her?

“Are you sure?” he asked.

Finley nodded. She wasn’t crazy; she knew that much. Whatever she saw was real; she just couldn’t get the pieces to coalesce, couldn’t understand where she’d been when she saw what she saw.

“Who was she?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. How many times had she said that? She thought that she must sound like an idiot. She bet Eloise was never so uncertain. “Her face is unclear. They were deep in the woods.”

“How did you get up there?” he asked. “Did you walk from the path?”

She wasn’t going to say “I don’t know” again.

“Is there another way up into the woods?” she asked instead. “Is there a road that goes up to wherever someone who veered off that trail might go?”

Jones seemed to consider her question. “There’s a rural road that leads to private drives connected to old properties—all of which were thoroughly searched when Abbey disappeared.”

She’d never been up that way on her bike. “Who lives up there?”

Jones shrugged. “Back when I was a kid, we called them hill people. I suppose that wouldn’t be considered politically correct these days.”

“Hill people?” asked Finley. The phrase sounded strange, made up.

“Yeah, you know, folks who live off the grid. They have generators, hunt for their food, come into town to do odd jobs, get supplies. But mostly they stay up past The Hollows Woods.”

Finley tried to process this. It was totally new information to
her, something her grandmother had never mentioned, something she’d never read online. “You mean like a
Deliverance
kind of thing?”

“Well,” said Jones. “That’s a little oversimplified. They’re just people living the way folks used to live. They’ve rejected the modern world. Some might argue that they have good reason. Not everybody wants wireless internet, a smart phone, and a latte or whatever from Starbucks.”

“So they just live up there and never come down? The kids don’t go to school? What if someone gets sick, or dies? What if a crime is committed?”

Jones shook his head. “The kids get homeschooled, some of them. We’ve had a few people come down for medical care—but you know they don’t have money, insurance. Most of the babies aren’t born in hospitals. They bury their own dead up there.”

“Is that legal?”

“It’s legal to live the way you want to live,” said Jones. He had pulled out his phone and was dialing. “Within reason, anyway. This is America.”

“That’s not true,” said Finley. “You can’t just
not
have a Social Security number, not pay taxes, bury your own dead. Can you? Don’t the police ever go up there?”