Ink and Bone(83)

She let herself fall to her side. Even though it was cold, it felt good to rest. She was about to let her eyes close when she heard voices. Not the voices in the trees, or calls on the wind. But real voices. Men. Deep and rumbling. A conversation, people talking to each other.

“Up here, to the right.” It was real and solid.

“There’s no way to get a car up here.” Another voice, breathless with effort.

She looked up and saw off toward the end of the path, a strange flashing red-and-white light. She almost got up and ran in the other direction, then she realized what it was. The police. Using all her strength to pull herself to her feet, she started to run, opened her mouth to scream for help when she felt strong arms on her, a hard hand over her mouth. A white-hot flash of pain took her words away. Then, there was nothing.





TWENTY-SIX


The bouncing light was gone, and Finley was alone in the dark, debris thick and slick beneath her feet, trees reaching, tilting into the sky. She kept moving, oddly sure footed. A calm, a new and yet familiar feeling, rose up from her center, giving off a kind of inner heat that kept the cold at bay. She’d heard Eloise describe this, a knowing beyond knowledge. It was a kind of engine that powered you through, even when you weren’t sure exactly what you were doing. Something glowed up ahead, diffuse and large. She moved toward that as quickly as she could, without quite knowing why.

Jones Cooper was behind her; she could hear him moving heavily through the trees, grunting like an old bear. She saw his flashlight and called out to him occasionally so that he would know where she was, though she assumed he was following her tracks. There was enough light to see forms and the way through the trees. The snow was accumulating, growing thick on the branches, powdery slick beneath her feet.

She knew the way as if she’d been here before many, many times—even though she had no conscious memory of when that might have been. Once, after she first moved to The Hollows, she found herself in a small graveyard deep in the woods. She had no idea how she’d gotten there, apparently waking in the night and riding her bike to the edge of the woods, then walking through the trees. Eloise had followed her and brought her back to herself.

Finley knew that Abigail had wanted her to see that place, the place where she, Sarah, and Patience wanted to be buried. But their ashes had been fed to dogs after they were burned as witches. There was nothing to bury. They were so tired, Abigail had told her, and they wanted to rest. How do I help you rest? Finley wanted to know. But no answer came then and it still hadn’t. But she kept finding herself back here in The Hollows Woods. What would Jung say? How would he explain what was happening to Finley?

She came upon the body first, nearly tripped over it. It was deflated, snow settling in the valleys of her eyes, in the folds of her clothing. Finley should have recoiled in horror, that would have been a natural reaction for someone who’d never seen a dead body before. But there was something so unreal about it, so curious, that instead Finley kneeled beside the woman with the ruined face.

Finley had been here when the woman died, when she’d been beaten to death with a flashlight. Not there, not in the flesh. But she had borne witness from some vantage point. Finley could hear the wailing she’d heard in her dreams, and the cracking soft thud of metal meeting flesh and bone. Was it this woman’s blood on Finley? She swayed between her dream memory and the present moment. The cold, the sound of Jones coming through the trees, the wind, that was now. She held on to it.

Jones came up behind her, his breathing labored with effort, and he shined his light on the corpse.

He came to his knees beside Finley and pointlessly put a hand to the woman’s throat. If there was ever a person more obviously dead, Finley didn’t want to see it.

“Who is she?” he asked.

“He calls her Momma.”

“Who does?” he asked.

“The boy from the trail,” she said. A name swam in her consciousness: Arthur.

“He killed her?” Jones already had his phone out.

Finley shook her head, not certain now. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe.”

She could see the flashlight coming up and down and hear him wailing. But it wasn’t a boy’s arm that she saw. It was a girl’s hand, small and pale but powerfully strong. She couldn’t explain what she was seeing. Was it memory or vision or some hybrid of both?

“We have a body up here,” said Jones into the phone. “I’ll send you a pin of my location. You’ll see my vehicle where we came in through the trees. It’s possible we have a lead on Abbey Gleason.”

He released a breath, listening to whoever was on the line. Then, “Don’t ask.”

His flashlight beam fell on the white trunk of a birch that was red with a dripping, bloody handprint. Finley could see the broken branches, a smear of blood on the next tree. She got up and started to move, Jones’s voice growing fainter as she drew away.

“Jesus, kid, where are you going?” he called after her.

But she didn’t stop to wait for him, kept moving toward that light.

“Head for the light,” she called back.

“What light?” he called. “Wait for backup.”

But he was already far behind her, and she kept moving. She heard the call of the rose-breasted grosbeak, even though she knew that they had long ago flown south to warmer climates. The only other sound was the crunching of her movements, the wind.