By then I was old enough to know Althea wasn’t really watching me. But that was when I started to wonder if someone else was.
Ella didn’t ask about the black tape, but a week later I fell asleep in front of an open thread about Althea’s use of numerology, and woke to Ella’s intake of breath, her smoky black hair in my face as she leaned over me to slam the laptop shut with her fist.
“What. The fuck. Alice.”
Ella didn’t talk that way to me. She talked that way to drunk freshmen trying to get served at her bar, and boyfriends who got shitty when she told them we were gone. Landlords with a knack for stopping by too often, and always when one or the other of us was in a towel.
You never told me I couldn’t was the first stupid thing I wanted to say. But she hadn’t had to. The taboo was baked into me. It was in everything she didn’t say, the flinch in her shoulders and the way her head lowered like a boxer’s when people tried to talk about Althea.
In that moment I hated her, so I said something worse.
“Why are we alone?” It was a question that had lived in me for years; I didn’t think I’d dare ask it until I did. “Why are we alone if we don’t have to be?”
Ella’s mouth opened, soft and surprised. She sat down slow, like her bones hurt. Then, for the first and last time in my life, she was cruel to me.
“You think she wants to be your grandma?” she said, in a voice that wasn’t quite hers. “You look at her big house in that magazine you think I don’t know about, and you think, Oh, if only she’d ask me to come live with her?” She shook her head. “Not a chance. Althea doesn’t want you. So stop torturing yourself about what could be. In this life, it’s you.” She pointed at me, then stabbed her finger hard into her breastbone. “And me. Got it?”
I felt like she’d stripped me naked. In that moment, even the rising mercury of anger abandoned me. After a long, charged moment she reached for me, already crying, but I slid out of her grip and ran for the bathroom.
I was dramatic and stupid; I made up a bed with towels in the tub just to put a door between us. But by the next morning, I’d decided: she was right. I was done holding a torch for a stranger.
“I’ll stop.” That was all I said to Ella. She didn’t say Promise me or How can I trust you or anything like that. She’d just believed me, and that time I wasn’t lying. I gave Althea up like a drug, and I didn’t let her back in till the day my kidnapper showed up at the café with her book in his hands.
“Alice?”
I startled, looking back at Finch. “Sorry. What did you say?”
“I asked if you heard what happened to the movie they made about it. About the stories.”
“Just what was in the Vanity Fair piece. Disappearances, affair, all that.”
“Okay, so the director died not long after it was made—you heard about that?”
“Finch? You know more than me. Just talk.”
He looked sheepish. “Sorry, I’m geeking out. Okay. So yeah, he died in a single-car crash, sometime in the seventies. His stuff was auctioned off, including the original reels for the Hinterland film. To a rich collector, who only showed them in private screenings. Then when she died, she bequeathed them to the American Film Institute, but they never showed up.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean they never showed up. They got lost, or destroyed, or are still moldering in a collection somewhere, but nobody has any idea where they went. It’s one of the few really lost films of that decade.”
“But back to the book,” I said. “Did you make copies? Photograph the pages?”
“I thought about it. Of course I did. But it didn’t feel right, sharing them like that. It would’ve been a violation.”
“A violation of who? Althea?”
“Of the stories,” he said. “There was like a … a covenant, among the people who’d read them. Either you found them on your own and were deserving, or you didn’t and you weren’t.”
His face was so serious and noble I wanted to slap it. “Or, third option, your rich dad bought them for you and you didn’t have to worry about it either way.”
That pissed him off—I could see it in his hands, tightening on the table’s edge. But he laughed, and he made it sound easy.
“Look, losing that book was the saddest breakup I’ve ever had. At least I read the stories a million times while I still had them.”
“So you remember how they go?”
“Of course. I went straight home after the book was stolen and wrote their names down, too, so I’d never forget. You want me to tell you about them?”
“‘Alice-Three-Times,’” I said automatically. “What does that mean? What’s it about?”
“Oh, yeah, that’s a creepy one,” he said, then frowned. “Wait, your mom didn’t name you after that story, did she?”
My eyes flicked to my phone, lying faceup and silent on the table. Not a word from her, or anyone else. “I didn’t think so, but now I’m not so sure.”
He looked suddenly shy again. “Can I show you something? It’s something, um, I’ve been wanting to show you for a while. Except…”
“Except I was a dick when you tried to talk about Althea?”
Finch smiled but didn’t deny it. “You want to see it now? It’s about her.”
“Yes. Definitely.”
“Okay. It’s upstairs, in my room.”
We walked up a winding staircase to the third floor, which was all Ellery’s. The carpet up there was Grover blue and felt awesomely thick through my shoes, and everything smelled better than I thought a boy’s room could. To be fair, it was more of a boy’s suite. The first room had a billiard/home movie theater setup, decorated with light-up beer signs I’d bet a million bucks were some interior decorator’s idea of High School Boy, not Finch’s.
“Please ignore the Budweiser chapel,” he said, practically frog-marching me through it.
The room beyond it said Ellery Finch all over. It was a high-ceilinged study with soft recessed lighting and a wide bank of windows on one side. A beautiful behemoth of a desk sat in the center, covered in books and a laptop and a green-shaded lamp that looked like it came from a pool hall. The room was almost empty otherwise, and it would’ve been monkish if the three windowless walls weren’t entirely given over to books.
“They’re not all mine,” he said. “This room used to be a creepy fake library, with all these random leather-bound reference books bought by the yard, but I’ve been swapping them out for the real stuff for years.”
I wanted to shove him out, lock the doors, and live in the room for a month. “Bought by the yard?” I managed to say. “That’s so weird.”
“I know. It’s a thing they do for rich people who want the effect but don’t actually want to read the things. God forbid my dad crack a fucking book.” He paused and touched his fingertips to his mouth. “Mostly it’s almanacs and old censuses and stuff, but occasionally there’s something good. That’s what I wanted to show you, actually.”
There was a door on the far side of the room that hung open a few inches. I bet it led to his bedroom, and I was almost let down I wasn’t going to see it. It’ll be a vintage My Bloody Valentine poster, an unmade bed, and an Underwood typewriter, I told myself. What’s there to see?