by Lisa Unger
But when Penny told her that, Momma had fallen to the ground weeping, and when she recovered herself, she took a hold of Penny and brought her face in very close, so close that Penny could see the deep lines, the clumps of mascara on her lashes.
“You’re a liar,” she said. Her breath was hot and rancid. “A sick little liar.”
And in the blankness of the old woman’s face, she saw such fear and sadness, that Penny just lied from that day forward. She made up stories about Real Penny, how she loved to garden, and rode horses every day, how she ate all the ice cream and pizza she wanted. How she had friends and was with her grandma. And Penny knew these were the things Momma wanted to hear, even though she didn’t know how she knew them. And as long as she told Momma things that made her smile, Penny knew she’d be okay.
“She went riding today,” said Penny. “A big black horse with white socks.”
It was a picture she’d seen in Real Penny’s room. The picture was so old and yellowed, Penny figured it was safe to assume the horse was dead, too.
“Racer?” said Momma, with a pleased smile.
“That’s right,” said Penny, even though she had no idea.
That’s why they brought you here, Bobo had told her. Because you’re a Dreamer. Poppa can tell a Dreamer from a mile away. There’s a light that comes off, a golden shine. He collects Dreamers, for Momma, for himself.
Real Penny tilted her head back and her eyes were two black holes, empty, bottomless things. “Tell her to let me go.”
Penny closed her eyes, but she could still see two white spots looming like after you’ve looked at light that’s too bright.
“Tell her!” the girl shrieked, and her voice was like the sound of the wind wailing. Her mouth opened into a maw, and inside Penny could see the girl strong and alive, atop a great black stallion. Then Penny saw her kissing a boy with long black hair, watched as they got into his car. Then there was nothing.
“She says she loves you,” New Penny lied. “So much.”
Momma put her head to the ground and cried.
When Momma lets her go, said the voice, you can go home, too.
SEVENTEEN
“Is this the right place?” asked Finley. The house in front of her was isolated at the end of a long wooded drive. With the flowerbeds bare and the house in need of a coat of paint, the whole place had the aura of desertion, though a light burned in the downstairs bay window. A sadness hung around it like a fog, and Finley wrapped her arms around her center unconsciously.
“Yes,” said Jones, who was annoyed with her. He was about to open the car door, but he stopped and held her in that steely blue-gray gaze of his. “I can’t have you making a spectacle of yourself in there.”
Finley forced herself not to look away from him. He was used to making people squirm, and she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. Instead, she lifted her palms.
“What do you want me to do?” she asked. He came to her, after all. You can’t invite this kind of thing into your world and then hope to control it. Didn’t he know that?
“I wanted you to stay back at your grandmother’s.”
“I can’t do that,” said Finley.
She turned her gaze forward at the house, now. She knew she sounded as stubborn and intractable as Eloise could be. “I have to be here.”
“Your grandmother never comes along on interviews.”
“I told you,” she said. “I’m not like my grandmother.”
I’m not like anyone, she wanted to say but didn’t. Not my mother, not my grandmother. I am myself. Whatever that means.
Jones heaved the sigh of a man who was used to giving in to the will of women. A long-suffering release of the syllable “ha.”
“Well,” he said. “Let’s get to it then.”
He hefted himself out of the car and shut the door—slamming it a little harder than was necessary? She sat for a moment, looking at the gloaming and the towering trees, watching Jones as he approached the house.
*
When she’d returned home after her flight from Rainer (and everyone and everything else), Eloise was back, and Cooper’s SUV was in the drive, as well. She’d considered fleeing again—but she didn’t have anyplace else to go. So she’d gone inside to find them at the kitchen table. Jones had filled her in on his conversation with Merri Gleason and he told her that Abbey had experienced prophetic dreams, and had nightmares about coming to The Hollows.
“Is she a Listener?” Finley asked Eloise, surprised. Eloise had her own language for their thing. Finley and Eloise were Listeners, people who heard (and saw, and experienced) what other people couldn’t. Someone like Jones was a Sensitive—whether he knew it or not—someone with sharp instincts with the ability to see right through the layers of a person straight into their truth. In fact, Eloise and Agatha thought that everyone was on a kind of spectrum of psychic ability, from absolute Dead Head (Agatha’s word), to Listener or Feeler or Dreamer, depending on the particular ability. It was far from an exact classification system, more like a slang between them.
Thinking about this made her think of Rainer. And thinking of him made her tattoo ache, which in turn got her thinking about Abigail. What are you up to, girlfriend? Finley wondered. But Abigail was nowhere to be seen.
“I don’t know if she’s a Listener,” her grandmother said. She rubbed at her head with thumb and forefinger. “I’m not getting anything on this at all. It’s yours, dear. I’m sorry.”
Jones had handed Finley Abbey’s binky, a pink and gray puff as soft as powder. She held it to her face, but it was as devoid of energy as any of the old rags Eloise kept under the sink. She stuck it inside her jacket pocket anyway, found herself worrying it between her fingers.
“If she was a listener,” said Jones, “wouldn’t she just be able to reach out to you or something?”
“At her age? Probably not,” said Eloise. “Anyway, it doesn’t work that way. We don’t communicate telepathically. Whoever we are. If there’s a pattern to all of this, if there are rules and ways, I never learned them.”
They talked briefly about the missing developer and Jackson Gleason’s premonition based on the news story he’d overheard.
“Are there other psychics in the Gleason family?” asked Finley.
“An aunt,” said Jones. “Deceased.”
“Do they have any connection to The Hollows, other than the fact that they were vacationing here?” Finley asked. A picture was forming for her, something nebulous, unclear. The Hollows had tendrils; it reached out for its children in strange ways.
“I don’t know,” he said, scribbling in his notebook.
“Why did they pick this place?” asked Finley. “To vacation, I mean. What drew them here? It’s not exactly a tourist hot spot.”
Jones shrugged, wrote a little more. “I’ll ask.”
He looked up at her, tucking his notebook away into his pocket. There was something like approval on his face. “Those are good questions.”
She didn’t want to be pleased with his praise, but she was. He rose and pulled on his jacket.
“Where are you going?” asked Finley, feeling a flutter of urgency.
“Betty Fitzpatrick—the woman with the missing children Eliza and Joshua,” he said. Finley remembered their image in the newspaper articles Jones brought with him that first morning. “She agreed to see me.”
It was late, after eight thirty. “It’s a weird time to interview someone.”
“She says she doesn’t sleep anymore,” he said. “Nighttime is the hardest time to be alone with your thoughts.”
“I want to come,” said Finley, not even meaning to. It wasn’t even true, was it, that she wanted to go? She rose feeling her grandmother’s eyes on her, curious. “I think I’m supposed to go. The sound is gone.”
“That’s not a good idea,” said Jones. He looked to Eloise for help.
“You came to us,” said Eloise. “Finley has to do things her way.”
“Still,” said Jo
nes. “We talked about this.”
“What if we learn something because I’m there that we wouldn’t if not?” asked Finley. She had a low-grade buzz of unease, a sense of urgency. If he didn’t let her go, she was going to follow him.
Jones pressed his mouth into a tight line but raised his eyebrows in reluctant agreement.
“Get some rest,” he said to Eloise as he pushed through the kitchen door and headed down the hallway. Eloise gave him a quick, dismissive nod, and Finley saw how pale she was, that there was a dullness around her eyes. Some worry butterflies fluttered from her belly into her chest.
“Grandma,” she said. “Did you go to the doctor today?”
A look of surprise flashed across Eloise’s face but quickly passed.
“Just routine,” said Eloise briskly. “Off you go.”
“Don’t make me late, kid,” called Jones from the hallway.
“Kid?” whispered Finley. “Really?”
She and Eloise laughed a little. With a last look at her grandmother, Finley followed Jones out of the kitchen.
*
“Not too late to wait in the car,” said Jones now at the porch steps. He had this energy about him that he knew best and was waiting for her to come to her senses. It was pretty annoying.
“I won’t embarrass you, if that’s what you’re worried about,” she said.
“And if you pass out like you did earlier?”
But he was already ringing the bell, so she didn’t have a chance to answer. Anyway, she didn’t have an answer. Finley experienced a raw moment of self-doubt. What was she doing exactly? Why was she acting like a private detective, as if she wanted to be doing this?
She lingered, allowed herself to be aware that there was none of the usual restlessness she felt—in class, when she was studying, when she was trying to quiet the voices, keep her visitors at bay. Jones inspected a loose dowel on the porch railing as they waited. She half expected him to pull out some kind of tool and try to fix it. That’s what he wanted, to fix every broken thing. He caught her staring at him, and she looked away, sat on a porch swing that hung to the right of the door. It squeaked as she swung it gently.
“Got an oil can in your pocket?” she asked Jones when he glanced over at her.
He gave her a flat expression. “I have one in my car.”
“Of course you do.”
All the running away and acting out she did when she was trying to deny what she was, maybe all of it was just a reaction to that feeling, the one that was suddenly gone because she was here with Jones. Eloise was so big on advising her to follow her instincts. But Finley had never been quite sure what that meant. How did you know when you were following your instincts, versus your fears or your desires? Were they ever the same? Was the choice that scared you silly sometimes the right one? Did the thing you wanted more than anything sometimes lead you down the wrong path? Her grandmother always seemed to think that Finley would know when she was doing “what was right.” Finley understood, maybe for the first time, what that felt like tonight.
Jones rang the bell a second time. She rose and came to stand beside him again. Jones looked at his watch and seemed about to ring again when the door opened and a small woman stood behind the screen. She was younger than Finley expected. The pictures she’d seen of Betty Fitzpatrick had been grainy and taken on the worst days of her life. Finley just hadn’t expected someone so dewy and fresh, looking like she’d just finished a workout.
“Betty?” said Jones. The woman nodded.
“I just got in from my run,” she said apologetically, pushing a damp fringe of hair away from her eyes. She opened the door, and they walked into a pretty foyer, fresh flowers on the console table by the door. Jones introduced them, and she shook Finley’s hand with a cool but strong grip.
“Eliza loves tulips,” she said, following Finley’s eyes. Eliza, her missing daughter.
Finley nodded and looked into a living room where a fire blazed and a wall-mounted flat screen was on mute, tuned to CNN. The picture of the missing developer was there; the news story was heating up. Cell phone signal dead. No calls out in several days. No credit card usage. No big withdrawals of cash or debt or anything untoward. Car still missing.
“Can I get you anything?” Betty asked.
They both declined and took seats on the couch, with her sitting across in a big wingback chair. On the mantel, piano, and every surface were pictures of a white-blonde, freckled girl and a towheaded boy who was unmistakably her older brother.
Though lovely, there was an emptiness to the space, to the woman. Something gone that had left a dark, cold hollow. Finley felt Betty’s sadness, her anguish leaking into her own heart. It hurt.
“My husband came to take the kids for the day,” she began when Jones prompted her. “They were just going to town to get ice cream, then for a hike. Everything was normal.”
“But you were in a custody battle at the time?” asked Jones.
“Well,” said Betty. “The media made it sound worse than it was. He wanted the kids every other week with him in Manhattan. And I thought that was destabilizing for them, so we were working on it. Would he move here? Would we move back to the city? It wasn’t fun, but it wasn’t necessarily acrimonious. Our marriage had ceased to be a good and healthy thing, but we didn’t hate each other. He wouldn’t have done this. He wasn’t a controller or an abuser. He wouldn’t have taken them, or hurt them.”
Finley watched the woman. She seemed to deflate under the weight of the conversation. Much of the flush was gone from her cheeks. Finley could see her running, pushing her body to the edge of its endurance just for the fatigue that would follow. She didn’t run for her health; she ran to quiet the grief.
“It’s such a cliché,” she said. “The police assumed from the beginning that it was him, and I’m not sure that they ever looked for any other possibility.”
Jones made a noncommittal but affirming noise, and Betty turned subtly toward him.
“When the other girl—Abbey Gleason—went missing, they started to wonder if they missed something. But then they picked that family apart, too.”
Again, Jones gave a sympathetic nod. He wouldn’t trash the police work that was done, even if he didn’t agree with the way the investigation had been conducted. That wasn’t his way. Jones Cooper kept his opinions to himself.
“They reopened the investigation at that time,” Betty said. Finley noticed then a kind of flat, glassy quality to the woman’s eyes. She was on meds of some kind, understandably.
“You moved here about a year before their disappearance?” Jones asked. “Is that right?”
She nodded. “You know, the city is so expensive, we could give the kids a better life—all that.”
“What drew you to The Hollows?” Finley asked. They had that in common, the Gleasons and the Fitzpatricks—they were outsiders, come to The Hollows from elsewhere.
“My family is from here,” she said. “My maternal grandmother Hester Briar was born here. I never knew her, but I remembered visiting the town when I was a kid. When Jed and I were looking for a place to live, we came here and fell in love with it. I felt like I instantly belonged. Jed—not so much. I think it was one of the things that pushed us over the brink to divorce.”
There was a kind of ripple in Finley’s perception. And then the little girl appeared at her mother’s feet, brushing the hair of a Barbie doll. The boy was over by the television, holding a video game controller in his hand, tapping it violently and jerking his body side-to-side like he was driving a racecar. Then they were gone.
Finley looked at the Xbox, cords wrapped and stowed on a tidy shelf next to a stack of game sleeves. There were books in a basket under the coffee table, and a small wicker toy box in the corner. It was a room waiting for children.
“Do you mind an odd question?” asked Finley. She felt the heat of Jones’s eyes on her. But Betty smiled sadly and shook her head, as if there was no question that hadn’t already be
en asked of her.
“Did either of your children ever experience prophetic dreams? Or maybe play with imaginary friends? See people who weren’t there?”
Betty leaned back in her chair and looked up at the ceiling as if trying to retrieve the answer.
“Well, Eliza has a wild imagination,” she said. “She’s always making up stories, creating cartoon characters. I wouldn’t say she had prophetic dreams. But now that you mention it, there was an imaginary friend for a while after we moved here. We didn’t think much of it. Just her way of adjusting to a new life, missing her old friends and teachers.”
Betty’s eyes drifted over to one of the pictures of the kids on the mantle.
“Joshua, on the other hand, is all about math and science,” she said. “Not even much of a reader. He has an engineer’s mind, just like his dad. No imaginary friends for him.”
A tear escaped Betty’s eye, and she excused herself and got up, left the room. Finley and Jones sat awkwardly, waiting. Finley watched as the little boy returned, playing with his Xbox. He seemed familiar, not just from the photos she’d seen. Something about his energy was known to her. She watched as he rocked back and forth, his face grim with intent, his hands working at the game control.
“What are you looking at?” Jones asked.
“Nothing,” Finley lied.
Finally Betty returned, looking utterly composed and dry-eyed.
“Did they hire you to find Abbey?” Betty asked when she sat again. Her hands twisted in her lap, like she was working in lotion.
“We’re looking for Abbey,” Jones said. “Yes.”
“Then you’re looking for Eliza, Josh, and Jed, too,” she said. Even through Betty’s flat affect, Finley could see that she was still daring to hope that her family might come home to her.
“It’s not out of the realm of possibility that the two cases are connected,” said Jones with a careful nod.
“Did Abbey have dreams?” Betty asked.
“Her mother says that she did,” answered Jones.
Finley wondered how much he could tell or should tell about another client. She guessed he did what he had to do to make people comfortable, to get them talking without breaking important confidences. It must be a delicate balance.
