Before my heart had slowed I called Audrey, so certain she’d let it go to voicemail I was briefly speechless when she answered.
“Alice?”
“Audrey. You picked up.”
“Oh, my god, I can’t believe my dad pulled a gun on you!” Her voice was high and fast. I pictured her face, mascaraed and alarmed between sheaves of shiny processed hair.
“Audrey, my phone is dying and I need you to tell me what happened to my mom.”
“I would’ve called you last night, but I couldn’t get away from my dad. He’s been, like, embracing his gun for the last twenty-four hours. I swear he’s gonna shoot himself in the balls.”
I was heartened to hear her sounding like herself again, but didn’t have time for it. “Audrey, please focus for a sec. My mom.”
“Oh, sorry. Sorry. I’m still freaked out. We’re on our way to our place in the Hamptons … oops, I shouldn’t have told you that. We stopped for lunch, I’m in this gross bathroom. I just ate, like, a nine-hundred-calorie lobster roll. Do you think I’m in shock?”
I was holding my phone so tight I could feel ridges forming in my palm. “My mom, Audrey.”
“God, I’m sorry! Okay, what happened was I went home over lunch because, well, I had to.”
Audrey refuses to poop at school. Don’t ask me how I know this.
“So when I got in I smelled this crazy smell—I mean, you smelled it. I thought Nadia had forgotten to take out the trash.”
I made a frantic get on with it motion with my hand, even though she couldn’t see me.
“Then I heard fighting—no big deal, considering it was practically divorce day. But then I heard Ella making this sound I’d never heard before. Like this hysterical babbling sound. I’m sorry, that’s what it sounded like. And she kept saying, ‘Please, please.’ And that’s when I started to think maybe she was talking to someone else.”
The hairs rose on my neck. I wrapped one arm around the cold curling in my stomach.
Audrey continued, in the most subdued voice I’d ever heard her use. “I went to their room. My dad was standing there looking horrible, just totally blank—like he’d been hit in the head. And your mom was crouching on the ground. And there were two, um, two others with them.”
“Two others? Two people?”
Her voice had hairline fractures in it. “Not really. I don’t think. Alice, they looked like people, but I don’t think they were. They were the wrong … they were just wrong. The man had face tattoos, he was kinda hot. But his feet, they were dirty and bare—disgusting. He smelled so bad I thought I’d die. And the woman, her eyes…” She paused. I could hear the flick, flick of a lighter and her sharp inhale before she spoke again. “Your mom … I think she knew them. They’d told my dad something about her—he won’t tell me what it was, but it’s something really bad. It made him hate her.”
“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.