Ink and Bone(34)

He sat there for a long time, his thoughts dull and heavy, then chaotic. The man and the boy had both lost consciousness. Maybe they were dead. He was supposed to kill them and then hide their bodies. He knew a place where they wouldn’t be found. But he didn’t, couldn’t. Not again. He wouldn’t tell Poppa. Finley stayed with him.

When the sun got very low, he got up and followed Poppa and the girl.


*

And then Finley was back on the trail, finding herself on the ground. It was nearly dark, and Jones sat beside her as if he were waiting for a bus, untroubled. He was still shining his flashlight up into the sky. Why did he keep doing that? What did he think he was going to see up there?

“I thought you said you weren’t like your grandmother,” he said as she started to stir.

“What happened?” she asked. God, her head. It was pounding. Is this what it felt like? Is this what happened to her grandmother every time?

“You went boneless, kid,” Jones said. “You just—went down.”

There was a rock digging into her back. Jones had rolled up his own jacket and put it under her head. She struggled to sit. He took a mini-bottle of water out of his pocket. Had he had it all along? A big Boy Scout, always prepared. She cracked it open and drank a few sips.

“So what did you see?” he asked. She told him everything.

“The man and the girl went up that way,” she said, pointing north. “There was no vehicle. They were on foot.”

Jones stayed quiet, frowning.

“Someone else—a boy, I think—was supposed to come back and kill the brother and the father,” she said. “But he didn’t do it. They weren’t supposed to survive.”

Jones seemed to take that in, offered a slight nod. “I wondered about that. Why they had been left alive. Why didn’t he kill them?”

“He didn’t want to,” Finley said. “He said—he thought? Felt?—that he didn’t ‘want to hunt like Poppa.’ ”

The experience was already slipping a little, like a dream. Had she inhabited him? She wouldn’t have been able to explain it to anyone except someone else like her. And even then, there were no words to explain it. Either you understood or you didn’t.

“They couldn’t have gone on foot,” said Jones, with a shake of his head. “The search team went as far north as they could go into the woods. There was nothing up there.”

“They did,” said Finley. She was certain, though she couldn’t say why. Jones looked in that direction, as if he was considering.

“There’s something wrong with the kid,” said Finley. “He’s impaired—or something.”

Jones didn’t say anything, but he was watching her now, waiting for her to say more.

“What did they look like?”

It was fading fast. “I didn’t see the young man,” said Finley. “I was in him, seeing through his eyes.”

She described the old man, tall and thin but with a wiry strength. His face wasn’t clear, covered with white hair. He wore a hat that obscured part of his face.

“And what about the father and the little boy?” he asked when she was done. “The Gleasons?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “The faces were . . . fuzzy or something, hard to take in.”

Finley struggled for their features, something she could hold on to, but she couldn’t bring them to the surface of her consciousness. She just kept hearing the little girl, seeing her struggle to get free.

“She fought,” said Finley. “That’s why the man didn’t come back and kill the others himself. She fought him every step of the way.”





NINE


A man came in the morning. A stranger. At first, Penny wasn’t even sure what she was hearing, a loud crunching, the hum of something. Then she realized it was a car on the long drive. Penny felt a deep startle, a jolt of fear, as she stood at the pump. Then she ran to her hidden room next to the barn, as she’d been taught to do, and closed the door, watching through the gap.

The car pulled up slowly and came to a stop. A man sat at the wheel, staring down at something, then looked up and around him. She gasped as he got out of the car. It wasn’t her daddy, but he looked kind of like her daddy did—tall and strong, with clean clothes and shiny hair. He wasn’t dirty and wrinkled with a big gap in his teeth, and dirt under his nails, like Poppa.

He was more like the people she used to see in the world before. He had nice shoes and strong shoulders, shoulders you could ride on. And arms that hugged and never hurt. She knew she wasn’t ever supposed to show herself, to talk to anyone. If she did, Poppa said he would leave this place and find her mommy and daddy and kill them both. She knew he could do it. She’d seen him do things that she tried to forget as soon as she saw.

Even so, there was a voice in her head.

Show yourself to him, the voice said. Her feet moved, leaned toward the door.

Poppa came out on the porch, his filthy overalls hanging, his baseball cap askew. He had a face full of white stubble and cheekbones that jutted like cliffs and eyes that sunk like dark canyons into his head, and she knew he smelled rank when you got up close—sweat and cigarettes.

“Hey, there,” the clean man said. He lifted a hand, gave a nervous smile. “Sorry to trouble you. But I’m lost.”