“They kept her back here,” Finley said. “There’s a hidden room.”
She hadn’t allowed herself to dwell on the horror of it. Abbey and how many others? Where were they, those “other girls like Finley.” Eloise always said that there were more people “on the spectrum” than anyone supposed. Finley hadn’t quite believed her; Finley had never met anyone with abilities except her grandmother. “There’s a cot and chains.” She felt her throat close up with sorrow.
“We were up here,” he said. His despair was obvious in the lines on his forehead and around his eyes. “This property was searched.”
“They must have been hiding her in that room,” she said. “Or maybe he kept her somewhere else like the mines until the search was over. The room is empty now. She’s gone.”
“There’s no one else in the house,” he said, looking back at it as if he couldn’t be sure who or what might be inside. In the light, he looked older, so sad. Fear had a way of aging people, making them look vulnerable.
“We’re too late,” said Finley. “He took her.”
“Who took her?” Jones asked.
She noticed the truck then, a green, beat-up old Ford. There was a white sign on the door: POPPA’S LANDSCAPING. In that instant, Finley remembered the man in the wide-brimmed hat, looking at her as he trimmed the hedges by the school. She remembered the strange heat of his gaze.
“The man who drives this truck,” she said. “He sees everything. But no one sees him.”
“Crawley,” said Jones, walking over to the truck. He rested his hand on the hood. “Abel Crawley.”
“You know him?” Finley asked.
“He does most of the landscaping in The Hollows,” said Jones. “Or a lot of it.”
“With a son?”
Jones seemed to consider. “There was a fire up here—a long time ago. A girl was killed, his daughter. But, yes, I think there was a child who survived. The boy’s name is—let me think—Arthur.”
“They call him Bobo,” said Finley.
“The family has been up here forever,” said Jones.
“Could that have been his wife, back in the woods?” asked Finley. “The woman who died tonight?”
“I don’t know. Could be,” he said. “She worked part time at The Egg and Yolk. In fact, I just saw her the other day when I was meeting with Merri Gleason.”
All this time, they were moving around The Hollows, landscaping, waitressing, while holding Abbey and other children back up in their barn. Everybody knows everybody in The Hollows; that was the famous phrase. Sometimes it’s when you think you know that you stop seeing.
There were sirens then and flashing lights as two police cars pulled in through the gate. Her body should have flooded with relief. The good guys were here. She’d done her job, hadn’t she? Using information and abilities that no one else had, she’d led the police to the people who had taken Abbey and maybe other lost children as well. That was her job. It was their job now, wasn’t it, to finally find Abbey and the others that might be buried there? She had to turn her attention to finding Rainer. Where was he?
He took us because we’re like you.
But no, that wasn’t all. You’ll know when you’re done, Eloise said. There’s an unmistakable sense of release, like letting go of a breath you didn’t know you were holding. Finley didn’t have that feeling. Not at all.
She pulled those pages from her pocket. If the maps were right, there was a mine head directly north of where she stood. As Jones walked off to greet the police, Finley walked in the other direction.
The wind was whipping through the trees, howling in that sad, angry way, as if no one could understand its sorrow. The snowflakes were no longer thick and fat. They had grown small and icy, hitting Finley’s face like tiny shards of glass. She wrapped her arms tight around her body, but everything was raw and painful—her exposed throat, her hands without gloves. Her thighs were numb and she couldn’t even feel her toes. She now understood how people died from exposure, how systems overwhelmed just started to slow down, then stopped altogether. The body freezes like every other thing left out too long. She needed to get warm, or at least dry, and soon.
There was a persistent, clinging smell of rot. It was a normal smell in the woods in summer, the scent of vegetation on the forest floor decomposing, returning to the earth. It was a warm smell, something for the months when things were green and alive. But now that the air and the ground was cold, the odor seemed odd, out of place to the point of being unsettling.