The Hazel Wood (The Hazel Wood #1)(48)

She shrugged and turned back to her Redbook, flipping lazily through photos of celebrities who were over fifty and loving it.

We hightailed it out of there, leaving the flooded car behind. Finch’s bottomless wallet was coming in handy again—from an economic standpoint, he barely seemed to register the car’s destruction. At least I’d had my bag with us in the room. I shoved my arm all the way to its bottom, till my fingers ran over the feather, the comb, and the bone. But I didn’t pull them out.

It was good walking side by side with him, looking straight ahead. There was a strange new heat that ran through me like electricity every time our eyes met. Like our conversation the night before had tapped some hidden well of light in him, and now he was too bright to look at.

Was this what it would’ve been like? If Ella had never gone missing, and Finch and I had started meeting on purpose? My hand brushed against his, and I snatched it back, shoved it into my pocket.

“You tried your mom today?” he asked once we’d found our way to a wide, rutted road, where the air smelled like wet leaves and bait. If the clerk could be trusted, we’d find a filling station, a diner, and a bus stop at the end of it.

“No. Her number’s out of service, remember?”

He walked a few more steps before responding. “Of course I do. I’m sorry.”

“Are you okay?”

His gaze was fixed on the path ahead, but it looked like he was staring at the backs of his own eyes. “What? Yeah. Look, if we miss this bus, we’re stuck at the motel all day. And night. I can’t take another minute of the pee pillow, so let’s hurry up.”

“Have you called your parents?” I asked. “Made sure they haven’t had any problems with Twice-Killed Katherine, or anything?”

“They’re fine,” he muttered. “Twice-Killed Katherine would choke on my stepmother if she tried anything. Too many diamonds.”

There was a bitter filament in his voice that the joke couldn’t hide.

“But they know where you are? Or you made up some lie, at least?”

He jerked toward me. “Don’t worry about it, okay? If they notice I’m missing, which they won’t, they’ll think I’m staying at someone’s house. Or locked in the library. Anna might notice, though.” For a moment, he looked concerned, then shook his head. “Whatever. I’ll deal with it if I go back. When I go back.”

He snapped his mouth shut and looked at me fiercely.

“If you go back?”

“When. When I go back.”

“Not what you said.”

“Freudian slip, okay? I don’t want to go back, but I will. All my first editions are there. And my typewriter. And my, I don’t know, my cardigans. And my— Oh, my god, my stepbrother’s right. I am a hipster cliché.”

“You have a stepbrother?”

“I do. He lives with his dad, I only have to see him twice a year. He’s, like, a football player with a brain. You want to write the guy off, but then he opens his mouth and says something smart. It’s irritating, actually.”

The conversation was getting away from me. I couldn’t ask what I really wanted to know: why was he here? To help me, or to escape? And what did it matter, anyway? The end result was the same: rich Ellery Finch, financing my way to the Hazel Wood. I’d run the cash card Harold had given me before leaving New York, just to see, and of course it had been canceled. Without Finch, I’d be scraping the bottom of my Salty Dog savings already.

Maybe sensing me formulating another question, he took off at a run. “Bus stop!” he called over his shoulder. I sped up, grudgingly, my bag bouncing against my hip. He was full of shit—the stop was nowhere in sight—but after jogging behind him for a few minutes, I saw a cabin that turned out to be the diner. Beyond it was the filling station and the lot, where a knot of old men sat on folding chairs, fishing gear and coolers scattered around them.

Finch went over and conferred with the men, flashing me a thumbs-up as he jogged back.

“Bus comes in an hour, takes us right to Nike. Good fishing, apparently. Waffles while we wait?”

The diner looked and smelled like somebody’s musty living room. But the waffles were good, lacy and buttery and studded with pecans, and one of the old men gave us a beer to split when we rejoined them on the pavement. Finch was still acting tense, staring at nothing and bouncing on his toes while we waited. Finally I put a hand on his arm.

He jumped a mile. “God, your hand is freezing!”

I snatched it back. “Cold hands, cold heart.”

“I don’t think you have that right.”

“Believe me,” I said, “I do. You look like you’re about to crawl out of your skin. You okay?”

“Yeah. I’m just … I’m good. Sorry.” He looked around, then leaned in. “We’re so close, you know? The car thing, that’s, like, magic. Right?”

“Yeah. I guess it is.” That strange, radiant expression was back on his face. It made my neck prickle with mistrust.

“What do you think we’ll find there?” he asked. “In the Hazel Wood?”

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. My vision of it was like a fairy-tale collection on shuffle: Rusting gates creaking open, a castle covered in briars. Somewhere inside, Althea laid out in a glass coffin, like a sleeping beauty or a dead bride. Goosebumps rose on my arms, and I rubbed them away.