Ink and Bone(12)

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.