Ink and Bone(91)

“The man who drives this truck,” she said. “He sees everything. But no one sees him.”

“Crawley,” said Jones, walking over to the truck. He rested his hand on the hood. “Abel Crawley.”

“You know him?” Finley asked.

“He does most of the landscaping in The Hollows,” said Jones. “Or a lot of it.”

“With a son?”

Jones seemed to consider. “There was a fire up here—a long time ago. A girl was killed, his daughter. But, yes, I think there was a child who survived. The boy’s name is—let me think—Arthur.”

“They call him Bobo,” said Finley.

“The family has been up here forever,” said Jones.

“Could that have been his wife, back in the woods?” asked Finley. “The woman who died tonight?”

“I don’t know. Could be,” he said. “She worked part time at The Egg and Yolk. In fact, I just saw her the other day when I was meeting with Merri Gleason.”

All this time, they were moving around The Hollows, landscaping, waitressing, while holding Abbey and other children back up in their barn. Everybody knows everybody in The Hollows; that was the famous phrase. Sometimes it’s when you think you know that you stop seeing.

There were sirens then and flashing lights as two police cars pulled in through the gate. Her body should have flooded with relief. The good guys were here. She’d done her job, hadn’t she? Using information and abilities that no one else had, she’d led the police to the people who had taken Abbey and maybe other lost children as well. That was her job. It was their job now, wasn’t it, to finally find Abbey and the others that might be buried there? She had to turn her attention to finding Rainer. Where was he?

He took us because we’re like you.

But no, that wasn’t all. You’ll know when you’re done, Eloise said. There’s an unmistakable sense of release, like letting go of a breath you didn’t know you were holding. Finley didn’t have that feeling. Not at all.

She pulled those pages from her pocket. If the maps were right, there was a mine head directly north of where she stood. As Jones walked off to greet the police, Finley walked in the other direction.

The wind was whipping through the trees, howling in that sad, angry way, as if no one could understand its sorrow. The snowflakes were no longer thick and fat. They had grown small and icy, hitting Finley’s face like tiny shards of glass. She wrapped her arms tight around her body, but everything was raw and painful—her exposed throat, her hands without gloves. Her thighs were numb and she couldn’t even feel her toes. She now understood how people died from exposure, how systems overwhelmed just started to slow down, then stopped altogether. The body freezes like every other thing left out too long. She needed to get warm, or at least dry, and soon.

There was a persistent, clinging smell of rot. It was a normal smell in the woods in summer, the scent of vegetation on the forest floor decomposing, returning to the earth. It was a warm smell, something for the months when things were green and alive. But now that the air and the ground was cold, the odor seemed odd, out of place to the point of being unsettling.

She didn’t see the opening at first, almost walked right past it. But there it was, obscured by trees that had grown around it, by snow-covered debris. It was the trail in the snow that she saw, a long, thick gully, as if something had been dragged. When she got to the crooked opening of the mineshaft, she saw a bent nail, red with fresh blood, the wooden slats tossed to the side. A vein started to throb in her throat. Not fear, but an urgency that was beyond fear.

There was a kind of warmth inside the shaft, a breath blown from the darkness. At least she was blocked from the wind. Finley followed the sound she heard emanating from deep inside the darkness. She should be afraid; anyone would be. And her heart was an engine in her chest, pulse pounding. But it was as if that fear dwelled on another level of her awareness. What her body knew to fear, her mind did not. For better or for worse, she was exactly where she needed to be. She used the light from her phone to guide her way.





TWENTY-NINE


She’d never heard a man cry before. It was a strange sound—ugly and hopeless. Sometimes her dad got a little watery in his eyes when he told her that he loved her, or that he was very proud of her. But sobbing, moaning? No. Not even when he’d been shot had he cried. Then, he’d just been yelling for her to get away.

So the sound was weird in her dream. In it, there was a bear, a great snorting bear, wobbling toward her. She could smell it, a musty, sweet-foul odor that climbed up her nose and stayed there tickling. She felt bad for it. The way it was wobbling, she could see that it was unwell. But she knew, too, that it was dangerous, that one swipe of his great paw would slice her open. It was coming on fast, and there was nowhere for her to run.

“Go back!” she yelled. “Go away, bear!”

Then she was awake and it was dark. So dark that, for a long moment, she couldn’t tell whether her eyes were open or not. The wailing was nearby, echoing all around her. Where was she? She struggled to remember what had happened and slowly it came back—Real Penny, Momma, the voices in the woods. Her head was heavy with pain, and she felt so leaden and sick. Once she’d had the flu and her mother wanted to take her to the doctor, and she wailed, begging to stay in bed. She was so tired then, couldn’t imagine rousing herself. Her daddy had to carry her, and even that was hard. She felt like that. Worse.