Ink and Bone(36)

She could have chosen the Hampton Suites off the highway that led up to The Hollows. It would have afforded her a certain amount of distance, some anonymity. Instead she chose Miss Lovely’s Bed & Breakfast, a charming little guesthouse off the main square. She pulled into the small, gravelly parking lot as she’d been instructed over the phone, shouldered her small tote, and walked toward the entrance.

“How long are you going to stay up there?” Jackson had wanted to know at breakfast that morning.

“I don’t know,” she’d answered. “Until . . .”

What could she say? Until she found Abbey. Or something that told her that she’d never find Abbey. “I’ll come home on Thursday nights to spend the weekends with you.”

He nodded, pushed his glasses up his nose. “Maybe we could come up on the weekends and help.”

Jackson, unlike Wolf, wanted Merri to go to The Hollows. He’d go with her if they’d let him. As much as he wanted Merri to stay, he wanted someone to be up there looking. Families don’t give up on each other, he’d said when they first came back to the city. We can’t just leave her. His words, the shattering of his voice, had stayed with her.

“We’ll see,” she’d said this morning, ruffling his bangs.

They wanted him to go back to life. Maybe it was unfair, unrealistic to expect him to do that. But it was even less fair to allow him to think that there was anything he could do for Abbey.

“Dad said you loaded the New York Times app onto your phone,” Merri said after she forced down a few bites of granola.

Jackson didn’t look up from his bowl, clinking his spoon against the edge.

“We talked about this with the doctor,” she said.

He nodded. “Bad things happen in the world every day,” he said in bored monotone, the tired repetition of a phrase he’d been forced to memorize but didn’t believe. “Good things happen every day, too. There are no patterns.”

Since the day in the woods when a strange man shot him and his father, then took his sister, Jackson had been obsessed with the news. They’d catch him on his computer with ten windows open, shuffling back and forth between CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Hollows Gazette, BBC. Murders, abductions, terrorist attacks, mall and school shootings. He had developed the idea that by monitoring world events, he could make sure that their family didn’t fall victim to any more tragedies.

“The worst thing can happen to any of us any day,” their family therapist had told Jackson. “We can’t control how events unfold, even through constant vigilance. Watching and waiting will only serve to rob us of the joy of the normal, good days.”

But Jackson had an idea in his head that he couldn’t get out. He claimed that he knew something bad was going to happen that day in the woods. He knew because when the news had been on in the morning, there had been a story about two missing children who had never been found. And he’d had a feeling.

“It makes me feel better,” he’d said, rinsing his bowl in the sink and putting it in the dishwasher. “To know what’s happening.”

“I don’t think it makes you feel better,” said Merri.

In fact, it kept him up at night. It fed his idea that the world was a terrible and unsafe place, which was why he wouldn’t leave the house without one of them, couldn’t be alone in the apartment. It was lucky that Wolf’s parents were so present in their lives; otherwise things would be really hard. Harder.

“It does,” he said, solemn, certain.

She didn’t know what to say. She didn’t want to argue right before she was going to leave. So she decided to drop it, walked around to the other side of the island to rinse her own bowl and put it in the dishwasher.

“Mom,” he said, careful, tentative. “I saw something online last night.”

This was the other thing. He thought that by scanning all the various local and international news sites that he might find something that would lead them to Abbey. It was compulsive behavior, not pathological exactly. He didn’t have OCD, per se, according to their doctor. More like a mild case of PTSD. But both Merri and Wolf were against medication for him if they could help it. Nobody knew better than she did what a rabbit hole that was.

“Jackson.”

“Just listen,” he said. He had that kind of nervous energy that he got these days. He grabbed onto the hand she was reaching toward him. “Somebody else went missing up there.”

She shouldn’t ask, shouldn’t encourage him. But if another child had gone missing . . . “Who?”

“A real estate developer,” he said. He already had his phone out of his pocket, was holding it up to Merri. “He’s been missing a couple of days.”

She looked at the article, squinting and holding it away from her because she wasn’t wearing her glasses. A man in his late forties had left his office in Manhattan for a meeting in The Hollows for which he never turned up. There was a photo—smiling, clean cut, bespectacled.

She handed the phone back to her son. “It doesn’t mean anything, sweetie.”

They stood eye-to-eye, which was the weirdest thing. Jackson, her baby, would probably be taller than she was in a few months.

“It gave me a feeling,” he said. “It made me think about Abbey.”