The heat in her voice made me turn.
“We don’t lie to each other, you and me. Right?”
I shrugged and nodded. Her eyes were too intense, red in the corners like she’d rubbed them after chopping jalapeño.
And in a flash my tiny, self-centered world expanded outward: she hadn’t wanted to go, either. She’d put curtains up in the bungalow, and fixed the teetering ceiling fan.
I’d held on to that revelation and saved it to think about that night, turning it over in my mind like a worry stone while Ella snored softly in the next motel bed.
It scared me, but it also coaxed me closer to her. We’d been on two sides of a divide looking across at each other. Then I realized something that seemed so simple, but changed everything. It tilted the world so she and I were side by side again. There was us, there was the world.
And there was the fear, underneath it all, that the fault for our life was mine. Ella was easy to like, with a sweet, gravelly voice that hid a sharp sense of humor and an unforgiving eye for the ridiculous, and dark hair that grew out funny so it licked down her back like flames. I was irritable, prone to fits of rage, and had been told more than once I had crazy eyes. If one of us was the bad luck magnet, I was.
That fear was what kept me quiet, kept me from asking why. I was terrified the reason was me.
The dream played out in living color, before fading into a thin, restless sleep. I closed my eyes on moonlight and opened them on a sunlit collage of Lin-Manuel Miranda. The floor beside me was empty, and my phone was a blank—no messages from Ella, no missed calls.
Once I had a dream in which I walked room by room through an empty house, looking for my mom. Every room felt like she’d just been in it, every hall echoed with her voice, but I never found her. Now I felt like I was living in that dream.
I swiped at my hair and mouth, checking for cowlicks or drool, and slithered into my skirt beneath the comforter. I tried and failed to replicate the hospital-cornered perfection of Courtney’s made bed, before going to the bathroom to scrub at my teeth with a guest towel. My hair stuck up at odd angles, so I dunked my head under the tap.
Downstairs, Finch was tapping away at a laptop in a huge, open-plan kitchen, while David poured boiling water into a French press.
“You’re up!” Finch sounded like he’d taken a hit of helium. “I found it! I found a copy of Tales from the Hinterland!”
I squinted at him. “Found it like you’re bidding on it on eBay?”
“Found it like it’s here, in New York, and we can go pick it up now.”
The thrill that ran through me was as much fear as it was excitement. “No way.” I dropped onto the stool next to him. “How?”
“I called every rare book dealer in town. Not for the first time, but this is the first time someone’s actually had it.”
“I hope you like weird Scandinavian health toast,” David said, placing a plate of coarse brown rectangles in front of us, “because that’s all we have.”
I was too keyed up to eat, which made me drink more coffee than I should have, which made me even more jangled. But I didn’t care, because I was about to get my hands on the book that was haunting me. Possibly literally.
And drinking coffee was a good distraction from the sinking suspicion that this was a little too easy. That our sudden good fortune could be a trap.
I was rinsing my mug in the big farmhouse sink when something dark slammed against the window. I flinched away as a massive, raggedy blackbird flapped backward, then threw itself against the glass a second time.
“Whoa!” David hustled to the window. The bird was beating against it, a flurry of wings. “Hey! You’re hurting yourself, buddy!” He slapped his palm on the glass, jerking back when the bird’s motions became more frenzied.
There was something in its beak. I recognized its shape, an industrial rectangle that made my stomach lurch.
“Shit, man.” David looked back at us, his face troubled. “Do you think it’s blind or something? Should I—should I let it inside?”
“Don’t,” I said, my voice hard and quick. “Please.” David frowned at me but didn’t move. We watched silently as the bird charged the window with the last of its strength, before dropping out of view. The thing it had been holding snagged into a corner of the frame. I moved to the blood-smeared window and eased it open, carefully, snatching the envelope before it could come loose. My name was written across the back in a hasty scrawl.
The envelope held another soft, worn page with a freshly ripped edge. I lifted it enough to read the top.
The Door That Wasn’t There
Hansa the Traveler
The Clockwork Bride
“What the hell?” breathed David over my shoulder. “That’s your name on the envelope, right? Is that for you?”
The coffee tasted gritty and burnt on my tongue. Finch tried to meet my eyes, but I couldn’t look back.
*
We didn’t talk on the way to the subway. I felt stunned and flayed, a nerve ending exposed to cold sun. I refused to let Finch hail a cab, fearing whoever might be behind the wheel. The bookshop was a straight shot up to Harlem, but it was the kind of slow and halting train ride that makes you think something evil is set against you getting where you’re going, even on days when you don’t have a really, really good reason to believe that anyway.
The shop was at the end of a homey stretch of brownstones, tucked into a bottom story. The lettering on its sign reminded me of an old-fashioned candy store: Wm. Perks’ Antiq. Books &c., in a looping font.
“Do you think he paid his sign maker by the letter?”
They were the first words Finch had spoken since he’d touched my elbow and said, “This way,” when we got off the subway. I mustered a close-lipped smile. I kept seeing the bird’s flat black eyes.
Finch rang the bell beside the wrought-iron door. Half a minute later, we heard someone undoing a series of locks on the other side.
The man who opened the door looked less like an antiquarian bookseller and more like a bookie. His tie was a loud yellow, his suit an exhausted brown. He had a napkin tucked into his collar that appeared to be covered in barbecue sauce.
He squinted suspiciously at Finch—all wild hair, unzipped jacket, one restless hand stuck out for a shake. “You Ellery Finch?” he said out the side of his mouth, like he was trying to sell us drugs in Tompkins Square Park.
“I am. William Perks?” The guy agreed and finally took Finch’s hand, giving it two good pumps. I held mine out, but he kissed it instead. I resisted the urge to wipe it on my wrinkled uniform skirt.
“Come in, come in. Would you believe I just got the book you’re looking for this morning? I knew it wouldn’t be long before the collectors started sniffing me out—it’s the first one I’ve ever had in stock, and only the second I’ve seen. I’ll be damned if the quality on this one isn’t high, high, high.”
His patter made him sound like a county-fair auctioneer, but at least he wasn’t treating us like children. I’d anticipated a tidy little bookshop, lined with leather volumes and looking a bit like Finch’s library, but what I got was a mind-boggling riot of bookshelves that started a few yards from the door, standing at all angles and punctuated by free-range stacks rising from the ground, in a room that smelled like paste and paper and the animal tang of vellum. And barbecue. Perks led us to a glass case in the back, full of books lying open like butterflies. Finch frowned. “Bad for the spines,” he muttered.