Ink and Bone(63)

Follow her lead and you’ll know nothing but heartache. Trust me, said Patience.

Shut up, said Abigail venomously.

“Go away,” said Finley. “I have to finish the test.”

She ignored them and went back to work, using all her mental resources to block them out. When she was done, she put her head down on her desk. She was so tired when the girls were around; they exhausted her.

She must have drifted off, and Mrs. Frazier was leaning over her, her walnut hair falling in a pretty sheet, her cornflower eyes thickly lashed and worried. “Finley. Finley? Are you all right, sweetie?”

Finley roused herself as if from the deepest slumber, disoriented, a little confused, and with the sense that something was terribly wrong.

“You must still be a little under the weather,” Mrs. Frazier said, putting a hand to Finley’s forehead. Finley had been sick with the flu for a week, that was why she had to make up the test. She didn’t feel totally better. “I’ll wait with you out front until your mother comes.”

Somehow—and Finley honestly and truly did not know how—those pretty, glittering rings wound up in her pocket. She must have gotten up from her seat, walked over, and put the rings in her pocket. But she had no memory of doing it. Had she discovered them herself, she’d have tried to find a way to return them without getting caught. Instead, they dropped out of her jeans when her mom was cleaning up her room that evening.

The shit storm that followed was epic. The suspension from school and grounding were bad enough. The disappointment of her parents and a beloved teacher was worse still. More than that, from that day forward Finley felt like she was a “bad kid.” Like there was something wrong with her that could not be fixed. She was a thief, a liar. Maybe that’s what attracted her to Rainer and his friends; they were bad, too. Her kid shrink believed Finley when she said she didn’t remember doing it. And he had suggested that it was some kind of fugue state, a dissociation, which in turn was a suggestion that Finley was seriously mentally ill. Which was scary enough that Finley tried to tell her mother the truth.

Naturally, her mother wouldn’t even hear her about The Three Sisters.

“Stop it, Finley,” she said. “Just stop it. You have to start taking responsibility for your own actions. I’m not buying this whole I-see-dead-people routine. It’s pure bullshit.”

What made it worse was that she knew her mother did believe her but just couldn’t accept that something she had tried so hard to control was beyond her abilities to manage.

“I want to go live with Mimi,” Finley had said miserably, using the name she’d used as a little girl for Eloise, during one of the million arguments that followed. “At least she understands.”

Finley still felt a pang when she thought about the look on her mother’s face—rigid with pain and anger, her eyes glittering with tears.

“Over my dead body,” Amanda had said softly, then left the room.


*

It was midnight when Finley knocked on Rainer’s door, fully aware of herself. He came to her sleep-tousled and let her inside. She shivered in the transition from cold to warm. She wasn’t dressed warmly enough for her bike, and she felt so stiff and cold that she could shatter like an icicle.

“You’re freezing,” he said. He shut the door and wrapped her up tight in his big arms. Despite all the drama that had characterized their relationship in the beginning, his friendship was the safest place in her life. He was wide open and always there for her. She’d pushed him away hard, but he’d followed after her just the same.

He let her go for a minute, then moved over to the thermostat and turned up the heat. When he returned, he proceeded to vigorously rub at her arms until she laughed.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I think so,” she said. “Yeah, I’m okay. I just had a weird night.”

She shouldn’t be here; she knew that. It was a mistake. Still, she found herself pouring out all the events of the day since she left him. She told him about her internet search and everything she’d found out about the mines. There was a lot of information—old drawings, unofficial maps, photographs posted by cavers and spelunkers, old news articles about kids falling in and getting hurt, town meeting minutes about making them safer. They sat cross-legged on his mattress, for lack of any other furniture, as she showed him everything and told him about the things that had happened. She held back the part about Abigail, about not remembering sending him the text. That was a little too weird, even for Rainer.

“So,” he said. He held the maps she’d printed. “Are you working with him now? Are you a private detective?”

“I don’t know what I am,” she said for the second time that night. “But it feels right, what I did tonight.”

“So then it must be right.”

“Yeah?” she said. “Is that how it works? If it feels right, it’s right?”

Rainer shrugged. “How else?”

She looked at his face, so earnest and innocent in his way. Rainer followed his heart, no matter where it led—even to The Hollows. He didn’t know another way to be. Maybe it was the right way to be, even when it hurt.

“I’ll go up there with you tomorrow,” he said. “If you want.”

“You will?”