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.
What I didn’t picture was Finch coming in with me. No matter what version of the story I imagined—fitting a golden key into a lock, scaling a wall crawling with thorns—I saw myself finding my way in alone.
“How far are you planning to go with me?” I asked abruptly. “All the way to the estate? Because you don’t have to.”
He looked at me blankly, betrayal blooming in his eyes. “Don’t play at that,” he said quietly. “Just be honest if you’re trying to cut me out.”
“Cut you out?” I replied, just as quietly. The blood started to hum behind my eyes. “This isn’t a heist, this is a search for a missing person. I don’t care what else I find there, so long as I find my mom. Alive and well.”
“Liar.” The word twisted in his mouth, came out almost sweet. “You want to know what you said this morning, while you were sleeping?”
I did, but I didn’t. I settled for cocking my head.
“You said, ‘The feather, the comb, the bone.’ I asked what you meant, and you repeated it. ‘The feather, the comb, the bone.’”
My breath caught, and Finch leaned forward. “Wait. Do you know what that means?”
“No.” It was only half untrue. “Except now I know you were lying when you told me I hadn’t said anything important.”
“Well, maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. But it’s total fairy-tale stuff. It’s got to mean something. Maybe it’s a clue—like, how we’ll get in.”
“Or else it was a dream.” My fingers itched to dig to the bottom of my bag, to assure myself I still had them. The feather, the comb, the bone.
“‘In bed asleep while they do dream things true.’” His voice was fervent.
“Don’t quote Shakespeare to me, Whitechapel,” I snapped. “And don’t quote me to me. Especially dreaming me.” Then, because I couldn’t help myself: “Is there something in the book about that? The feather, the comb, and the bone?”
“If there was, would it matter?” he asked, his tone light and his gaze anything but. “If it was just a dream, I mean?”
The bus pulled in before I could answer. It was smaller than I expected, somewhere between a Greyhound and a VW, and on the side it read Pike’s Trailblazers in army green. The driver clearly knew the fishermen but was unimpressed by us.
“You got no poles,” he said. “You hiking?”
“How much?” I gave him my flat New York subway face, which worked not at all to shut him up.
“You heard about the killings up this way? A lot of them young folks, mostly hikers. I hope you’re not planning on staying out on the trails after dark.”
“No, sir.” Finch glanced at me. “She’s— I’ve got family up there.”
“Up in Nike?”
“Up in Birch.”
“You know about it, then.” Satisfied, the driver closed the door and accepted Finch’s cash. “Don’t want to drop any city idiots up there unawares. So long as you know what to watch out for.” He dropped change in Finch’s palm.
“Watch out for murderers?” I snapped, still feeling jangled. “Is that what we’re watching out for?”
The driver woofed a laugh through his nose and waved us past.
The ride was just under an hour, we’d been told. The old men sat in the back, like the cool kids in every grade school Ella had ever enrolled me in, and we took a seat near the front. Finch dropped into sleep almost the minute we sat down, or at least faked it. As soon as I was convinced he really was out, I dug out the feather, the comb, and the bone. They looked prosaic in daylight. Even the bone didn’t look much like a finger anymore. I shoved them deep into my jean pockets, feeling better as soon as they were out of sight. I settled back and rested my eyes on the trees, watching them roll out like a tapestry.
The bus radio played the kind of country songs you can sing along to even if you’ve never heard them. I hummed quietly, letting my head tip back onto the seat’s sticky vinyl. A slow song came on, an echoing fifties crooner that made me think of dead prom queens. The vocalist sang about swaying and kisses and stars in an eerie feminine purr, and I wondered where I’d heard the song before.
“Look until the leaves turn red,” he sang, as the song shifted down into a speak-sing bridge.
Sew the worlds up with thread
If your journey’s left undone
Fear the rising of the sun
The words hit me like an ice cube down the back. It was the rhyme, the strange nursery rhyme Ness had recited to me. I froze, waiting to hear more, but the song ended. There was a staticky, record-player pause, and Waylon Jennings’s voice poured through the speakers like whiskey. The driver bopped his sunburnt head.
It was here, I thought. The Hinterland. Here, or close enough. I looked at Finch. His lips moved a little, and I thought about waking him—or talking to him, seeing if I could lead him into a dream conversation the way he’d led me. I did neither. I recited the rhyme to myself till it was etched in my mind, watching the trees for I didn’t know what. I didn’t see anything but leaves.
19
Finch woke up just as we hit Birch, sheepishly running the heel of his hand over his mouth.
“Where are we? How long have I been sleeping?” He peered out the window as the bus turned into a wide concrete lot encircling a shack-sized bait shop. “Oh. We’re here.” The jagged energy that had come off him in waves on our walk from the motel was back.
The old men pushed past us, sour-smelling and laughing at some granddad joke we hadn’t heard. The driver gave me a hard look as I left the bus. I glared at him, wondering suddenly if he was Hinterland. If he’d done something to the radio. He wasn’t, I decided. He hadn’t.
Behind me, Finch held back. “What’s your next stop?” I heard him ask, as I stepped out onto the pavement. “You turning right around and going back?”
“You bet. But you can’t chicken out on hiking now, son.” The driver leaned forward to peer at me. “Your girlfriend doesn’t look like she’d take it quietly. Just get out of those woods by dark, alright?”