Ink and Bone (30 page)

When Wolf came up behind her, she showed him. Even Detective Ferrigno stopped urging her to leave. Merri heard him say something into his phone. But she didn’t hear what. She was running up the path, calling her daughter’s name.

*  *  *

Finley ran from the barn in time to watch Jones step out onto the porch from inside the house, gun in hand. The snowfall was slowing.

“Did you see him?” he asked, looking out into the trees. His voice rang out, echoing.

“Who?” said Finley. She glanced around, peering into the dark spaces and shadows all around them. She felt like they were in a snow globe, held in an unseen hand, watched by some giant eye.

“The boy,” he said. Jones’s bearing was odd, his face slightly pale. “Not really a boy. A young man with a boyish face.”

Finley shook her head. She didn’t see anyone but the girl in the barn, and she wasn’t sure she could tell Jones about that. How much could he take? What would he believe? “I heard a gunshot.”

“He came out of the shadows,” said Jones, shaking his head and moving down the steps toward her. “I thought he was armed.”

“Was he?”

“He had something in his hand,” said Jones. She remembered the flashlight she’d seen in her vision, a large metal object that might easily be confused for a gun.

Finley went to meet him, concerned. He didn’t look right; someone so strong and sure of himself shouldn’t look so wobbly. “Are you hurt?”

“No,” he said. He brought his eyes back from the woods to Finley. “I opened fire. I shouldn’t have, but I did. When the gun went off, though, there was no one there. He
was
there. And then he wasn’t.”

“He must have run,” said Finley. She wasn’t sure what Jones had experienced, but she sensed he needed a real-world explanation to pull himself together, whether one existed or not. In Jones’s case, it probably did. He wasn’t a Seer or a Listener. The chances of him being open enough to have an experience were slim.

“Right,” said Jones. “It was dark.”

Finley nodded toward the barn.

“They kept her back here,” Finley said. “There’s a hidden room.”

She hadn’t allowed herself to dwell on the horror of it. Abbey and how many others? Where were they, those “other girls like Finley.” Eloise always said that there were more people “on the spectrum” than anyone supposed. Finley hadn’t quite believed her; Finley had never met anyone with abilities except her grandmother. “There’s a cot and chains.” She felt her throat close up with sorrow.

“We were up here,” he said. His despair was obvious in the lines on his forehead and around his eyes. “This property was searched.”

“They must have been hiding her in that room,” she said. “Or maybe he kept her somewhere else like the mines until the search was over. The room is empty now. She’s gone.”

“There’s no one else in the house,” he said, looking back at it as if he couldn’t be sure who or what might be inside. In the light, he looked older, so sad. Fear had a way of aging people, making them look vulnerable.

“We’re too late,” said Finley. “He took her.”

“Who took her?” Jones asked.

She noticed the truck then, a green, beat-up old Ford. There was a white sign on the door:
POPPA’S LANDSCAPING
. In that instant, Finley remembered the man in the wide-brimmed hat, looking at her as he trimmed the hedges by the school. She remembered the strange heat of his gaze.

“The man who drives this truck,” she said. “He sees everything. But no one sees him.”

“Crawley,” said Jones, walking over to the truck. He rested his hand on the hood. “Abel Crawley.”

“You know him?” Finley asked.

“He does most of the landscaping in The Hollows,” said Jones. “Or a lot of it.”

“With a son?”

Jones seemed to consider. “There was a fire up here—a long time ago. A girl was killed, his daughter. But, yes, I think there was a child who survived. The boy’s name is—let me think—Arthur.”

“They call him Bobo,” said Finley.

“The family has been up here forever,” said Jones.

“Could that have been his wife, back in the woods?” asked Finley. “The woman who died tonight?”

“I don’t know. Could be,” he said. “She worked part time at The Egg and Yolk. In fact, I just saw her the other day when I was meeting with Merri Gleason.”

All this time, they were moving around The Hollows, landscaping, waitressing, while holding Abbey and other children back up in their barn. Everybody knows everybody in The Hollows; that was the famous phrase. Sometimes it’s when you think you know that you stop seeing.

There were sirens then and flashing lights as two police cars pulled in through the gate. Her body should have flooded with relief. The good guys were here. She’d done her job, hadn’t she? Using information and abilities that no one else had, she’d led the police to the people who had taken Abbey and maybe other lost children as well. That was her job. It was
their
job now, wasn’t it, to finally find Abbey and the others that might be buried there? She had to turn her attention to finding Rainer.
Where
was he?

He took us because we’re like you.

But no, that wasn’t all.
You’ll know when you’re done
, Eloise said.
There’s an unmistakable sense of release, like letting go of a breath you didn’t know you were holding.
Finley didn’t have that feeling. Not at all.

She pulled those pages from her pocket. If the maps were right, there was a mine head directly north of where she stood. As Jones walked off to greet the police, Finley walked in the other direction.

The wind was whipping through the trees, howling in that sad,
angry way, as if no one could understand its sorrow. The snowflakes were no longer thick and fat. They had grown small and icy, hitting Finley’s face like tiny shards of glass. She wrapped her arms tight around her body, but everything was raw and painful—her exposed throat, her hands without gloves. Her thighs were numb and she couldn’t even feel her toes. She now understood how people died from exposure, how systems overwhelmed just started to slow down, then stopped altogether. The body freezes like every other thing left out too long. She needed to get warm, or at least dry, and soon.

There was a persistent, clinging smell of rot. It was a normal smell in the woods in summer, the scent of vegetation on the forest floor decomposing, returning to the earth. It was a warm smell, something for the months when things were green and alive. But now that the air and the ground was cold, the odor seemed odd, out of place to the point of being unsettling.

She didn’t see the opening at first, almost walked right past it. But there it was, obscured by trees that had grown around it, by snow-covered debris. It was the trail in the snow that she saw, a long, thick gully, as if something had been dragged. When she got to the crooked opening of the mineshaft, she saw a bent nail, red with fresh blood, the wooden slats tossed to the side. A vein started to throb in her throat. Not fear, but an urgency that was beyond fear.

There was a kind of warmth inside the shaft, a breath blown from the darkness. At least she was blocked from the wind. Finley followed the sound she heard emanating from deep inside the darkness. She should be afraid; anyone would be. And her heart
was
an engine in her chest, pulse pounding. But it was as if that fear dwelled on another level of her awareness. What her body knew to fear, her mind did not. For better or for worse, she was exactly where she needed to be. She used the light from her phone to guide her way.

TWENTY-NINE

S
he’d never heard a man cry before. It was a strange sound—ugly and hopeless. Sometimes her dad got a little watery in his eyes when he told her that he loved her, or that he was very proud of her. But sobbing, moaning? No. Not even when he’d been shot had he cried. Then, he’d just been yelling for her to get away.

So the sound was weird in her dream. In it, there was a bear, a great snorting bear, wobbling toward her. She could smell it, a musty, sweet-foul odor that climbed up her nose and stayed there tickling. She felt bad for it. The way it was wobbling, she could see that it was unwell. But she knew, too, that it was dangerous, that one swipe of his great paw would slice her open. It was coming on fast, and there was nowhere for her to run.

“Go back!” she yelled. “Go away, bear!”

Then she was awake and it was dark. So dark that, for a long moment, she couldn’t tell whether her eyes were open or not. The wailing was nearby, echoing all around her. Where was she? She struggled to remember what had happened and slowly it came back—Real Penny, Momma, the voices in the woods. Her head was heavy with pain, and she felt so leaden and sick. Once she’d had the flu and her mother wanted to take her to the doctor, and she wailed, begging to stay in bed. She was so tired then, couldn’t imagine rousing herself. Her daddy had to carry her, and even that was hard. She felt like that. Worse.

The crying seemed to come from above her, from the right, from the left. Where was she? The ground beneath her was dirt, the air heavy, thick with a scent she couldn’t name. She never thought she’d
wish she were in her barn room on the hard cot. But she did wish that now. Even that was better than this.

“Mommamommamomma.”

Bobo. The sound he made, it was horrible. Once she’d heard a dog howling, a mournful, desperate sound. She and her daddy had been walking up Eighty-Sixth Street. He’d taken her for frozen yogurt at the deli, and they were licking big creamy towers and laughing about something when they saw the small, tawny dog shut inside a beat-up yellow hatchback. It was hot, the kind of day in the city where heat rose up off the blacktop and shimmered, and everyone was cranky and flushed. The driver’s side window was open, but just a crack. When they approached the car, the little dog came to the window and tried to push his nose out. She’d felt so bad for him that she gave him some of her frozen yogurt, his pink tongue slurping out the window crack.

“Don’t do that honey,” said her daddy.

Her father had called the police on his cell phone, and they’d waited as the dog continued to bark and howl, then went quiet. A man finally came out of a brownstone and yelled at them to get away from his car.

“You shouldn’t leave your dog in the car like that,” her father said. “I called the police.”

“You should mind your own business,” said the man, who wore a tank top and had so many tattoos on his arms that she couldn’t see any skin. He had an earring in his lip, too. A thin mouth and a long, mean nose. He climbed into his ugly car and drove off, the dog perking up instantly. But that sound, it stayed with her, the sound of something trapped, calling for help.

“Bobo?” she said.

“She’s dead,” he wailed. “Momma’s dead.”

She couldn’t see him, which she didn’t like. She forced herself up from where she was lying and pushed against the wall. Slowly she started to see shapes, light draining from an opening to her right. Was that him? That lumpy object on the ground? She started to move away, toward the light. That must be the way out.

And she had to get back, back the way she came in, back toward the lights and the voices of the men in the clearing. She stood and started edging along the wall. Where was she? In a tunnel? Something in the air tickled her throat. But then the flashlight came on and there was Bobo, face streaked with blood, eyes bloodshot from crying. She shrieked, a loud echoing sound that seemed to go on forever. She backed away from him.

Then she heard another voice, Poppa’s distant growl off in the distance toward the light. And something else, a scraping, dragging sound as if something large were being moved.

“He’s going to put you with the others,” Bobo said.

“No, he isn’t,” she said. She gritted her teeth. “No. He. Isn’t.”

When Bobo moved toward her, she drew her fist back and punched him hard in the face. Her fist landed with a hard crack on something that didn’t feel like a face, sending a blaze of pain up her arm. A warm sluice of blood splashed back at her. She wiped it from her eyes and saw that her own hands were caked with blood. So much of it, dried and caked under her nails. Where had it come from? There was a picture in her mind then, of Momma beneath her, and her own arm coming down again and again, smashing, breaking.

“You killed her,” said Bobo, standing to her right now.

“No,” she said. There was a notch in her throat. “You did.”

“No,” said Bobo sadly. “It was you. You were
inside
me. I
felt
you. You made me do it.”

She didn’t know if it was true or not. Once when she’d been very angry, so angry—what had she been angry about? She couldn’t even remember now—but the feeling had been so big, it didn’t fit inside her body.

“Sweetie,” her mother had said calmly. “You need to calm down and then we can talk about this.”

She had wanted something—what had it been? Then, it had seemed like the most important thing in the world. She
couldn’t
calm down. The feeling grew and grew, tumbled around inside her getting bigger, and she started shaking.

“Sweetie, relax,” said her mother. “You’re turning red. This is ridiculous.”

When the lights flickered, then went dark, then came up again, it had scared the anger right out of her. Startled, she’d looked to her mother, whose eyes were wide, lips parted with surprise.

She knew she had done that; that her rage had leapt from her like an electric current and caused something to happen. Maybe it was like that with Bobo. Maybe she had made him do what he did. She didn’t know and didn’t care. She was glad Momma was dead, and she wished Bobo was dead, too.

Should she move toward the light, or back into the darkness? She opted for the dark, since she suspected that Poppa was up ahead. The light flickered and danced like a flame. She knew now that Bobo wouldn’t stop her, that he couldn’t.

“Momma’s gone now,” she said. “Penny’s gone. You can go, too.”

“I can’t,” he whispered fiercely. “I have to stay until—”

Poppa loped out of the darkness, a ghoul, a breathing skeleton, and knocked her down hard; she fell like a rag doll. No muscle, no bone. The manacle of Poppa’s hand clamped around her ankle. And then Poppa was dragging her, pulling her toward the light.

She started screaming then, a squeal of rage and fear, the loudest sound she’d ever made. She clawed at the ground, looking for a hold.

Scream, make as much noise as you can.
And whatever you do, don’t let him take you. Don’t let him.

“Bobo!” she cried. “Help me!”

But Bobo was gone, as if he’d never been there at all.