“Where’s my daughter?” he managed. “Where is she?”
There was a blade in a young man’s hand. Was Finley in him? Beside him? Finley didn’t know. She could see his dirty, calloused fingers wrapped around the black handle, as if they were her own. Not a man’s hand, a boy’s thick, soft fingers. Oh, God, thought Finley. I don’t want to watch this. I don’t want to be in this.
You can look away, Eloise had said of her own visions. But if you do, you risk missing what you’re there to see and you’ll have to go back again and again until you figure out what you missed.
But whoever Finley was in (or near, or above, or what?) just sat down on the edge of the path, watching. He lay the knife down beside him. The little boy on the path closed his eyes after a time; he stopped whispering. The man on the hill stopped struggling, lay still. Do something!
But there was nothing she could do.
What do you see? Finley tried to quiet the roil of panic and anger, and be present. What do you see? The black-handled hunting knife. It’s late afternoon, the sun golden and low in the sky. She could still hear the girl screaming distantly, which meant that she and the old man were on foot. The man on the slope didn’t look like the pictures she’d seen of Wolf Gleason, but it was hard to tell.
Then Finley heard it, the sweet song of the rose-breasted grosbeak. It was quiet except for that, and the wind in the leaves.
His thoughts and feelings were hers. He liked to be alone in the woods, liked nothing better. He didn’t want to hunt like Poppa. He didn’t like to watch the light drain from things that never hurt anyone, that flicker of pain and terrible fear just before the end, the convulsion of life leaving. Where did they go? He had so many questions and never any answers. The world was such a confusing place and there was so much pain.
He sat there for a long time, his thoughts dull and heavy, then chaotic. The man and the boy had both lost consciousness. Maybe they were dead. He was supposed to kill them and then hide their bodies. He knew a place where they wouldn’t be found. But he didn’t, couldn’t. Not again. He wouldn’t tell Poppa. Finley stayed with him.
When the sun got very low, he got up and followed Poppa and the girl.
*
And then Finley was back on the trail, finding herself on the ground. It was nearly dark, and Jones sat beside her as if he were waiting for a bus, untroubled. He was still shining his flashlight up into the sky. Why did he keep doing that? What did he think he was going to see up there?
“I thought you said you weren’t like your grandmother,” he said as she started to stir.
“What happened?” she asked. God, her head. It was pounding. Is this what it felt like? Is this what happened to her grandmother every time?
“You went boneless, kid,” Jones said. “You just—went down.”
There was a rock digging into her back. Jones had rolled up his own jacket and put it under her head. She struggled to sit. He took a mini-bottle of water out of his pocket. Had he had it all along? A big Boy Scout, always prepared. She cracked it open and drank a few sips.
“So what did you see?” he asked. She told him everything.
“The man and the girl went up that way,” she said, pointing north. “There was no vehicle. They were on foot.”
Jones stayed quiet, frowning.
“Someone else—a boy, I think—was supposed to come back and kill the brother and the father,” she said. “But he didn’t do it. They weren’t supposed to survive.”
Jones seemed to take that in, offered a slight nod. “I wondered about that. Why they had been left alive. Why didn’t he kill them?”
“He didn’t want to,” Finley said. “He said—he thought? Felt?—that he didn’t ‘want to hunt like Poppa.’ ”
The experience was already slipping a little, like a dream. Had she inhabited him? She wouldn’t have been able to explain it to anyone except someone else like her. And even then, there were no words to explain it. Either you understood or you didn’t.
“They couldn’t have gone on foot,” said Jones, with a shake of his head. “The search team went as far north as they could go into the woods. There was nothing up there.”
“They did,” said Finley. She was certain, though she couldn’t say why. Jones looked in that direction, as if he was considering.
“There’s something wrong with the kid,” said Finley. “He’s impaired—or something.”
Jones didn’t say anything, but he was watching her now, waiting for her to say more.
“What did they look like?”
It was fading fast. “I didn’t see the young man,” said Finley. “I was in him, seeing through his eyes.”
She described the old man, tall and thin but with a wiry strength. His face wasn’t clear, covered with white hair. He wore a hat that obscured part of his face.
“And what about the father and the little boy?” he asked when she was done. “The Gleasons?”