“Audrey, my phone’s about to die. Where did they take her?”
The second she took to start speaking was excruciating. “I don’t know, exactly. We were in their room, they were scaring me, and suddenly we were in a car. A nice car with tinted windows. It was like I passed out or something. The man and woman must’ve been in front, because it was just the three of us. My dad looked so sweaty I thought he was gonna have a heart attack, but your mom looked okay. She really did, Alice. She looked strong. She wasn’t crying anymore, she was sitting up and looking straight ahead. When they stopped the car and let my dad and me out—in some crap neighborhood in the Bronx, it took us forever to get a cab—she smiled at me. And oh, shit, she had a message for you. I don’t understand what it means, but maybe you will. Are you listening?”
“Yes. Audrey, yes, what did she say?”
“She said, ‘Tell Alice to stay the hell away from the Hazel Wood.’”
I mashed the phone against my ear, like that could make me understand. “Did she say why? Did she say anything else? Did you see which direction the car went?”
I was talking so loudly a man sitting on a lawn chair across the street was giving me the stink eye. There was a second of silence, then the sound of Harold’s unmistakable Jersey grumble.
“This is the women’s room, Dad!” Audrey shrieked. “I’m talking to Olivia!” His voice got louder, and the phone beeped atonally in my ear as Audrey hit numbers in an effort to hang up. Finally, the call disconnected. I didn’t want to get her in trouble, but I was powerless to keep myself from dialing again. It went straight to voicemail.
She wasn’t crying. She looked strong. Audrey made Ella sound like a general going to her execution. Even her message to me sounded like last words.
The door to the bodega jangled, and Finch came out juggling two water bottles and a paper bag. I told him, briefly, what Audrey had said, then folded forward over my knees.
“Hey … hey…” He put a hand on my head and left it there like a hat. I squeezed my eyes shut and panted, focusing on the iron smell of my scraped skin and the little island of Finch’s hand, warm through my hair.
After a minute he put his other hand on my shoulder and helped me gently upward, back against the brick wall of the bodega. “Too much blood to your head is a bad idea. Just breathe. And eat this.”
The cold bagel sandwich he wrapped my hand around might as well have been a block of wood. My throat made dry insect clicks as I forced down a few bites.
“She was acting like my mom was dead,” I said finally. My voice sounded so devastated it almost made me hyperventilate.
“Audrey is not the smartest girl,” he said carefully. “She’s not the queen of careful eyewitness testimony.”
I huffed a laugh into my hands. “We have to go to the Hazel Wood.”
His eyes widened. “Okay.”
“I don’t know what we’ll find there,” I warned. “I don’t even know if it’s still Althea’s. It could just be a bunch of new rich people living there, or it could be something much worse. You don’t have to go with me.”
“Yeah, I do.” He said it so simply. I knew he would.
That was when I remembered I had no idea where the Hazel Wood was.
“Um,” I said. “Slight problem.”
A flurry of cell-phoning confirmed the obvious: there was no listed address for the Hazel Wood. All I knew was that it was upstate … somewhere.
“Maybe it’s a test,” he said. “Like, only the true of heart can find their way in. That would be classic.”
“The true of heart? Guess I’m out of luck.”
“I’m serious. This is how we need to be thinking.”
“Come on. This is real life, not a fairy tale.”
He gave me what I was starting to recognize as a very Ellery Finch look, a level gaze that told me I was fooling no one. “You don’t believe that any more than I do.”
I didn’t. In my mind, the gates of the Hazel Wood might as well have been the side of a fairy hill. If my mom were in a place where she could call me, she would have. And if she were dead—I believed this to the bottom of my being—I would know it. She couldn’t die without it rending me in some way I would feel. If she were dead I’d be limping. If she were dead I’d be blind.
This meant she was either being held somewhere and kept from calling me, or she was in some faraway place that didn’t have phones. I wasn’t sure which was worse.
“Hey, wait a minute,” Finch said. “I might’ve found something.”
He crouched down to show me the Blogspot page pulled up on his phone, titled “Tripping Through the Dandelions.” I squinted at the photo of the blogger, someone named Ness, and groaned. She was in her early twenties, and had a pretty clear style obsession with Neil Gaiman’s Death. She also looked suspiciously similar to the grad student who’d accosted my mom at Fairway a while back, demanding information on Althea.
We moved to a stoop so we could read it together. His fingers were warm, sliding a moment under mine as I grabbed for one half of the screen. The post he’d pulled up was titled “Searching for the Source: Day 133.”
My research into and quest to find the home of trailblazing feminist author and recluse Althea Proserpine proved fruitful on its 133rd day, as I suspected it would. 1 + 3 + 3 is 7, a meaningful number to any reader of fairy tales.
I rolled my eyes so hard I saw my brain. Then I kept reading, because, hey, we were desperate.
I have long believed the Hazel Wood is as much a state of mind as it is a place. And ever since I had the good luck of studying Althea’s work under Professor Miranda Deyne, it has been clear to me that her work bubbled up from a spring fed as much by magic as by mind. I was unsurprised to learn that the Hazel Wood exists on no map, and is as estranged from Google Earth as true magic is from most university English programs today—hence the sad dearth of contemporary Proserpine scholarship.
As detailed in my post on August 11, I recently tracked down the author of Althea’s well-known Vanity Fair profile. Though she moved some years ago to an assisted-living facility, she was still quite sharp. Through her daughter she revealed she was never allowed access to Althea herself, conducting her interviews instead by letter and several odd phone calls. I went in search of the piece’s photographer, who was admitted to the Hazel Wood, hitting a dead end when I learned of his death overseas in 1989.
Althea’s first and second known marriages ended in widowhood, and she had one daughter, Vanella Proserpine. Little is known of Althea’s early life beyond that she was the only child of parents long dead. Vanella has no apparent fixed address and rejected my attempts to start a fruitful dialogue. This is unfortunate, considering what she may be able to offer to the criminally underpopulated field of Proserpine study.
I scoffed forcefully. “Ellery, I remember this chick. She’s a nut!”
“A nut who might’ve been to the Hazel Wood. Keep reading.”
I grabbed the phone and scrolled through more background and a few veiled pleas for funding, stopping short at this:
Armed only with the knowledge that the house is in upstate New York; that, according to Vanity Fair, it’s a five-hour drive from New York City and a ten-minute drive from an unnamed lake; and that it’s located just outside a township of fewer than 1,000 inhabitants as of the year the profile was written, I set out to find the Hazel Wood. I was accompanied as ever by my chauffeur and fellow graduate student, Martin.