Ink and Bone(52)

“I, uh,” she said. “I just started working with a detective in town. Part-time.”

He raised his eyebrows, as if it were a different answer than he expected. “Doing what?”

The guy had a lot of questions. “I’m kind of an assistant.”

“Like it?”

She shrugged, glancing over at him. He seemed pale and tired, hungover maybe. “Too soon to tell.”

He turned off his iPad and stowed it in a battered old camouflage backpack. It looked military issue, with a big “US” embroidered on the flap.

He nodded sagely, then glanced down at the paper she held in her hand. “You got an A,” he said. “Good for you. ‘Jung and Psychic Phenomena.’ You believe in that stuff?”

She thought about how to answer. “Don’t you?”

“My mom had dreams, feelings, you know—vibes.” He wiggled his fingers a little to demonstrate. “She was right a lot of the time.”

Sadness etched its place into his brow and around his eyes. She wanted to ask him about his mother, whom he spoke about in the past tense. But something stopped her.

“Jung believed to some extent that psychic phenomena was an unexplored area of the human psyche,” she said instead. “That just because a thing was rare, or unprovable in the context of the scientific method, didn’t mean it wasn’t real.”

When Finley had first read this, it resonated with her as completely true. Because while she understood that other people might find her “ability” to be extraordinary, to her it was completely normal, nothing more exceptional than a musical or artistic talent, or a gift for numbers.

He leaned back against the tree. “Is that what you believe?”

“Yes,” she said. “It is.”

“Have you had experiences?” Wow. Jason was a very curious guy.

“I have,” she said.

“I’d like to hear about them sometime.”

Oh, Finley thought. He’s just trying to pick me up. Smooth. And I thought he really wanted to talk about Jung.

She stood, dusted the grass from her jeans. She liked his energy. He was easy and nice to be around. Cute, too, in a pale, overtired kind of way. Nice hands. But she had Rainer to deal with, and school, and now whatever she was doing with Jones Cooper.

“Sure,” she said. “Maybe sometime.”

“Oooh,” he winced. “Strike one. He hangs his head in defeat.”

She smiled, not just a polite one. He was funny, and the smile swelled from a place inside her. Maybe they could be friends.

“Seriously, though,” he said. But his smile wasn’t that serious, it was full of mischief. “I was thinking I could use a private detective.”

“Oh?” she said. “You have a mystery that needs to be solved?”

She waited for the punch line, but instead his expression darkened just a little. “Maybe,” he said. “Too soon to tell.”

“I’ll be in class on Thursday,” she said. “You can let me know then.”

“Cool,” he said.

She gave him a little wave and started toward her bike. She had the strange feeling that she should go back, that she should find out why he needed a PI. But the squeak-clink was starting up again, and the air was growing colder. And when she turned back to look at him, he’d shouldered his backpack and was walking off in the opposite direction. She let him go.





SIXTEEN


The sun was a white-yellow ball, fingers of its light spearing through the dark gray clouds. It was sinking low in the sky and soon it would be dark. It always amazed Penny how fast it dropped at the end of the day. If you watched, you could see it as it dipped below the tops of the trees. Once when she was another girl on vacation in Florida, she watched as it sank below the horizon, painting the sky purple, orange, and pink, the water growing dark, the air growing cooler. The sun was there one minute, then gone the next, like a Popsicle melted on concrete.

The golden light had washed all their faces and made her mommy look so young, and her eyes were smiley. She remembered that trip because her parents didn’t fight. They were relaxed, building sand castles with her and her brother, sleeping late. They hugged and kissed a lot, which they didn’t always do. She could feel how happy they were. It wasn’t just that they were “trying not to fight.” The energy was not tense or eggshell fragile. It wasn’t that they “had nothing left to say.” When that was the case, the air felt heavy and suffocating. Penny remembered how light and free everything felt on that sunset beach.

When the door opened to her barn room, softly, carefully, it wasn’t Bobo or Poppa. It was Momma. Penny nearly let go of a scream, but instead she sat up quietly and pushed herself as far back on her cot as she could with her leg chained. Which wasn’t that far. Momma stood for a moment, her spindly dark form just a shadow in the doorway. Then she stepped inside.

“No,” said Penny. But the word just stuck in her throat and sounded more like a cough.

Momma knelt down beside Penny. When the old woman looked up, the fading yellow sunlight lit up the details of her face—deep lines, and strong ridges for cheekbones and sunken holes for eyes, which were a strange gray-green.

“Don’t be afraid,” said Momma.

“I don’t want to,” said Penny.