Ink and Bone (4 page)

When we’ve reached the end of our resources, we have no choice, do we?

I haven’t reached the end of my resources
, she answered.
I’m still breathing.

She never went back to see that doctor; he was her third. Wolf thought that they were all quacks, and he hadn’t seen anyone. He
was into dulling pain, not exploring it. He wasn’t doing any better than she was. But he was, she could see, letting go.

“You have arrived at your destination,” the navigation computer announced in its impassive way. It couldn’t care less whether you’d arrived at an amusement park or a funeral home or the last stop on a futile search to find your missing child.

Merri hadn’t made an appointment with the man she’d come to see, hadn’t even called. She’d read about him and his partner on the internet, and the idea of them filled her with a swelling, irrational hope. She didn’t want to be turned away on the phone. Wolf used to love that about her; that she never gave up. It was just one of the many things he disliked now.
Christ, Merri, it’s over.
She’s gone.
Of course, he’d said that when he was drunk and ended up weeping into her lap for the next hour. He wanted to move away from pain. But that was not an option for Merri.

She’d die before she gave up on Abbey.

Merri climbed out of the car and stood in the cool fall air for a moment. Adrenaline pulsed through her, putting butterflies in her stomach, causing her hands to quake. Then she walked up the drive and onto a narrow, shrub-lined path that led off to the side yard, finally coming to a structure that looked like it adjoined to the main house. She read the plaque mounted on the wall:
JONES COOPER PRIVATE INVESTIGATIONS
.

Please God
, she prayed. It was just something to say to herself. Merri believed in nothing except her own iron will.
Please
. She pushed through the gate.

THREE

B
y dinner the sound was driving Finley absolutely crazy.
Squeeaaak—clink. Squeeak—clink
. She’d successfully pushed it away all day, taken her exam, attended a class, and spent the rest of the afternoon studying in the library. She felt good about herself. Studious. Doing the right things. Jason, the guy she’d met before class, had left before she’d finished her test. Finley had halfway expected him to be waiting for her, and was relieved (and a little disappointed) to find he wasn’t. He was the kind of guy you could get in trouble with; she could just tell. She could just see herself, back at his place—some seedy studio somewhere—smoking a joint. So, better not to even have the temptation.

On the ride home, she couldn’t hear it at all. She drove around for a while, just for the pleasure of the silence inside her head. But that evening, when she was preparing dinner for herself and her grandmother, feeling the weight of mental exhaustion, the sound just grew louder.

At the table, she finally lost it, put down her fork with a clatter. “
What
is it?”

Finley didn’t even know what to call it. An auditory vision? There had never been just a sound before.

“I don’t know,” said Eloise. “But it’s
loud
. It must be important.”

Her grandmother was frustratingly calm, her eyes tilted up to the air as if considering a puzzling but benign trivia question. The world-renowned psychic, responsible for the solving of countless cold cases and the rescue of abducted women and girls, guest on
Oprah
, and Finley’s personal mentor should have more to contribute, shouldn’t she?

Of course, there was nothing about her gray-haired, bespectacled grandmother, who sat primly in a pressed denim dress and white cable cardigan, that communicated her sheer power and ability. And in truth, it was hard for Finley to think of her as anything but her kind and loving grandmother. Right now, though? She’d happily trade her adoring grandma for badass psychic medium
Eloise Montgomery—
if
she would help make the goddamn
squeak-clink
go away.

“What am I supposed to do with this?” Finley asked.

“You have to listen, dear,” Eloise said. She took a nibble of stir-fry. “Listen until you
hear
.”

“I
am
listening,” said Finley.

“Are you?” asked Eloise. “Or are you trying to make it go away?”

Finley blew out a breath and dropped her head into her hands. “I had other things to do today. I can’t give my life over to this.”

When Finley looked up, Eloise nodded in that way that she had, understanding and nonjudgmental, as if there was little she hadn’t heard before.

“In my experience, these events are like children. You may be able to delay attending to them, but they won’t grow any quieter from being ignored.”

This was a point on which Agatha and Eloise differed. Agatha Cross was Eloise’s mentor, the one who had advised Eloise on all things related to her abilities, helped her to navigate her new life after the accident that took her husband and daughter and left her with a gift she didn’t understand. And Eloise often directed Finley to Agatha when she felt the other woman had more to offer her granddaughter. Agatha was more about tough love;
they
get dealt with on
your
schedule,
they
don’t get to demand and dictate. (After all, Agatha said,
they
have all the time in the world.)

Eloise, on the other hand, felt that if someone needed her, it was her responsibility to give herself over, that there was no point in delaying it
. If you don’t give, they take.
Who was right? Finley had
no
idea, though she was well accustomed to two authority figures
having strong differences of opinion, thanks to her constantly arguing parents. The good news was that she got to choose a little from column A, a little from column B. No one was right all the time; sometimes you just had to trust yourself. Of course, that was the hard part.

The lights flickered a little. The wiring in the old house also needed addressing. But Eloise seemed content to let that go, too, as if it were too earthly a concern to trouble her. “I need your help,” said Finley. “I don’t understand this.”

“You will,” Eloise said. “And I’m here. You know that.”

She sounded so tired. There were blue smudges of fatigue under her eyes. And was it Finley’s imagination, or did Eloise look thinner?

“Are you okay?” Finley asked. Eloise hadn’t touched her food, had just pushed it around.

“Don’t worry about me,” said Eloise, rising quickly with her plate. “I’m fine, dear. Let’s worry about you and figuring out what they want.”

“How do I do that?”

“How do you find the answer to any of the questions you have?” asked Eloise. She cleared her plate into the garbage.

“Internet search,” said Finley.

“Okay then.”

“That’s it?” said Finley. “That’s your advice?”

Eloise offered an easy shrug, a self-deprecating smile. “That’s what
I
do when I’m lost these days.”

“Ugh,” Finley groaned, anything more articulate almost impossible. “I don’t even know what to search for.”

“It’s mechanical,” mused Eloise, now with ear tilted to the air as if that would help her hear the noise better. That was true; it
did
sound like the operation of some kind of mechanism.

“But it’s not totally rhythmic like a machine,” said Finley, glad to finally be talking about it.

“Hmm,” said Eloise. “But there
is
a rhythm.”

Finley’s phone buzzed on the table. There was a text from Rainer.

I’m thinking about you, Fin. Dirty things.
I get off work at 11.
A
chaos of emojis followed—a bikini, a pair of lips, a purple devil. She bit back a smile, quashed the rise of giddiness and arousal that he never failed to ignite.

“I thought you weren’t going to see him anymore,” Eloise said lightly. She hadn’t even looked at Finley’s phone. It wasn’t a psychic thing; it was a grandma thing.

Finley scrolled through a list of excuses:
He’s new in town, doesn’t know anyone yet; I feel bad that he followed me here; I’m trying to let him down easy.
But in the end, she didn’t bother. She just didn’t say anything. Besides, Finley wasn’t
seeing him
exactly. It was complicated.

“So how was the exam?” asked Eloise, maybe sensing the need to change the subject. Finley had put too much soy sauce in the stir-fry, so neither of them had exactly eaten with gusto. They would dutifully put the leftovers in a glass storage container, which would surely sit in the fridge for a few days and then get tossed.

“I feel good about it,” Finley lied.

She’d never been a great student in spite of best efforts and being reasonably intelligent. There was a lot of chatter going on in her head, a lot of distractions without. She was a notoriously bad judge of whether she’d done well or not. Finley and Eloise cleaned the dishes, listening to the sound, trying to figure out what it was.

“Some kind of pulley?” said Eloise.

“A gate opening or closing?” said Finley.

“A wheelbarrow?”

When Finley moved to scrub the pan, Eloise waved her away.

“Go figure it out,” she said. “It won’t stop until you do.”

Finley let her take the pan but lingered. It wasn’t like her grandmother to be so distant from the problem. Since she’d arrived in The Hollows, it was Eloise who had the visions or visits and Finley who supported, more like an assistant or apprentice. She had never felt like anything was her responsibility exactly. Why was this different?

“Grandma,” said Finley.

Eloise turned from the sink and dried her hands.

“I’m lost on this one, kid,” she said. She released a slow breath. “I think it might be up to you.”

Finley’s head was starting to ache.
This
was the kind of feeling, the kind of place where she got into trouble. Rather than deal, if she were in Seattle, she’d go out with her “friends,” drink too much, get into some kind of mess. In The Hollows, she had nothing to do and no place to go. She had no choice but to pay attention to the problem.

Finley reluctantly climbed the stairs to her room, the
squeak-clink
coming from everywhere and nowhere. In her room, she tried to do other things—make her bed (which she hadn’t made that morning, and she could just hear her mother nagging), put away her laundry. She took out a textbook to do her reading. But the sound wouldn’t be silenced. Finally, she sat cross-legged on her bed and opened her laptop.

She placed her fingers on the keys as if it were a Ouija board and eventually tapped “squeak-clink” into the search engine bar—for lack of any better ideas. Sometimes it
could be
as easy as that, Eloise had told her. The amazing thing about the internet was that it was alive with all the ideas and conversations and questions in the universe. One would be hard-pressed to enter a thought, question, or word and not find a hundred people already discussing it. Jung’s collective unconscious at your fingertips.

The first thing that came up was the call of the rose-breasted grosbeak, a North American bird—white, black, and red—with a melodious call of up to twenty notes similar but far more beautiful (according to some birdwatching blogger) than the call of a robin. When Finley listened to the call, it didn’t sound anything like what she’d heard. She bookmarked the page anyway. The bird lived up north in the summer and migrated along the east coast to South America in the winter. It might be something, a piece that would fit into a larger whole. It was too soon to tell.

Next, she typed in: “things that squeak.” An article from
Better Homes and Gardens
topped the list with a bunch of potentially squeaky things—the door, the floor, drawers, a bed frame, a mattress, a faucet. The faucet gave Finley pause, the image of the running water. She closed her eyes and saw a rusty stream of water pouring onto the ground. But was it connected to the sound?

Squeaking engine, definition of
squeak
(a short, high noise), bicycle noises, a common problem with the rear wheel of an Audi; the coins on the bus go
clink, clink, clink
—a children’s rhyme; the sound one blogger said the rusty wheel on his old wagon made. Finley chased links and read chats and articles and blog posts until hours had passed and her back started to ache from hunching over her laptop.

Finally, she closed the lid on her computer, her brain fried. How did it get to be ten thirty? She noticed then, with a giddy sense of relief, that the squeaking was gone. She got up from the bed and stretched high, hearing her neck crack. Then she walked down the hall.

In the bathroom, she looked at herself in the mirror, ran fingers damp from the faucet through her spiky pink and black hair. She put the glasses she wore for reading on the white porcelain of the old sink, lined her eyes with black pencil, put on some lipstick.

Back in her room, she changed from her cotton bra to a lacier affair, something her mother sent with a designer label and a big price tag. (Amanda was the queen of mixed messages. Really—what kind of mother buys her single young daughter lingerie after a lifetime of hammering into her the consequences of casual sex?)

Finley pulled on a tight black tee-shirt—cotton, not too sexy. Sexy enough. Still in jeans and boots, her jacket over her shoulder, helmet under her arm, she walked quietly down the hall. The television was on in her grandmother’s room, but Finley didn’t knock. She didn’t want
the look
,
the
not-saying.
Downstairs, the little boy was playing with trains in the living room. Faith—in her old-timey black dress, with her salt-and-pepper hair pulled tight into a bun and her perpetual disapproving frown—stood predictably by the door, that look of warning on her face.

“Go away,” Finley told her.

And Faith obeyed, but only to turn and clomp up and down the hallway, calling attention to herself. Finley really couldn’t stand her. Even though the woman had suffered and was ostensibly (according to Eloise) well meaning, she
really
got under Finley’s skin—for all sorts of reasons.

But then Finley was gone, straddling the bike, the engine beautifully loud in her head, traveling fast, too fast, up the long rural road into town.

*  *  *

Finley couldn’t remember how old she was when she first started seeing The Three Sisters. Young—maybe even as young as five. Or maybe they had always been there. However old she’d been, Finley already understood that there were people around her that were not visible to others. And she already knew better than to say anything about them, because it scared her mother.

There was a certain frozen look Amanda would get on her face when Finley asked about the old woman at the table or the girl sleeping under her bed. There was a blanching of the skin, a dropping of the jaw, kind of like the look her mother got when their cat Azriel brought dead mice or birds into the kitchen and deposited them on the kitchen floor. A gift certainly, but not the type anyone would ever want.

There’s no one there, Finley.

She’s right there in the blue dress.

Stop it right now. This is not funny.

Confused, Finley would fall silent. Thinking about that now—how her mother knew what Finley was and what was happening to her—still made her angry. Finley had been so ashamed and afraid, confused, had held so much in, when all Amanda would have had to do was pick up the phone and call Eloise.

She never wanted this—
for either of us
, her grandmother explained. Eloise was always making excuses for Amanda.

You can’t ignore a thing just because you don’t want it
, countered Finley.

Parents make mistakes, usually out of love.

Control is not love.

Oh, Finley.
A sigh.
There’s a lot you don’t understand about motherhood.