How could she have driven to the Coopers’ and not remembered it? It was troubling. She rubbed her eyes hard, willing the last few hours back. Ironically, they’d just been discussing this in abnormal psychology class, about cognition in fugue states. Though the subject is functioning—even as in Finley’s case, driving—information that is assimilated during that period is generally not accessible once the state has passed. Finley couldn’t think of what she’d experienced now, or the first time with Jones, as anything but a fugue. A separate part of herself was conscious. Last time, she’d remembered. Why not this time? She might never get the last few hours back. Why was there so much blood? A sweet, gamey smell sat thick on the air, sickening and yet oddly familiar.
The porch light came on, and the front door to the house opened. Jones stepped out onto the porch wearing jeans and a Georgetown sweatshirt under a barn jacket. He looked up at the falling snow, nonchalant, as if everyone popped out onto his stoop at three in the morning to check the weather, then he dropped a steely gaze across at the car.
Finley remembered the dark-tinted windows, the general condition of the vehicle. She opened the door and stepped out, waving her hand.
“It’s me,” she called. Her voice bounced down the street, sounding high and weak to her ears like the voice of a child. “Finley.”
He closed his eyes and bowed his head, then looked up with a deep frown. He moved down the path and up the drive.
When he reached her, “What the hell are you doing out here, kid? Whose car is that?”
“I—” she started. “I don’t know what I’m doing here. It’s Rainer’s car.”
“You almost got yourself shot.”
She wrapped her arms around herself, still disoriented and confused. “Why would you come to the door with a gun?” she asked. She looked for it, and saw the hard edge of it pressed against his sweatshirt.
His assessing gaze made her feel stupid—really stupid.
“Strange, beat-up old car, dark-tinted windows pulls in front of your house in the middle of the night? Cops never stop being cops, I guess,” he said. He peered inside the car, then back at her.
“What’s all over you? Is that blood?”
She tried to keep herself from shivering, but she couldn’t.
“He killed someone,” she said. It came back in a rush then—the raised arm, the heavy flashlight, the revolting sound of metal on flesh and bone. But why was the blood on her? Had she been there, too?
“Who did?” he asked, alarmed. His hand on her shoulder now was warm and steadying, a bolster. In that moment, something about him reminded her of Eloise. He was someone who fixed, who helped.
“The boy who was in the woods, the one I saw,” she said. “He killed someone tonight.”
“You witnessed this?” A simple question without a simple answer.
She shook her head. “No,” she said. Then, “I don’t know.”
“Whose blood is that?” Jones said. “Are you hurt?”
“I don’t know.” She could hear the screaming. Momma! Momma! “No, I’m not hurt.”
“That’s a lot of blood,” he said, lifting her hands and looking at her palms. “Where were you just now?”
There was a flash. She fought for it. Where? Where?
“On the trail,” she said quickly. Yes, yes, that was it. “The trail you and I visited.”
“And on the trail you witnessed a murder?”
“No, not exactly,” she said. “I don’t know.”
He watched her a moment, shaking his head as if she were an equation he couldn’t solve.
“What were you doing up there, alone in the middle of the night?”
“After I left you, I researched the iron mines,” she said. She patted at her jacket and found the folded pages there. Fugue or not, at least she’d had the presence of mind to bring the maps. She handed them to him. “I found these.”
He took them from her and squinted at them. “These are too old to be useful,” he said. “Trust me. I grew up in this place and I was a cop here for a good long time. I’ve pulled kids out of those mines. There’s no accurate map in existence.”
“There was a man,” said Finley. “A guy named Michael Holt who dedicated himself to mapping out the mines. It wasn’t that long ago.”
“The guy you’re talking about was a nutcase,” said Jones.
“And his father before him,” she said. “He was a professor, wrote a couple of books.”
“Another crazy person,” said Jones. “He was a hoarder.”
Stubborn, Finley thought, holding on to fixed ideas that he didn’t want changed. Or was it that he didn’t want to think that they’d missed something when they were all looking for a missing girl? That they’d all been up there searching and she’d been there, just out of sight.
“Didn’t Michael Holt hide in the mines for a while?” Finley asked.
“He did,” Jones admitted.
“So it’s possible then that whoever took Abbey did the same,” said Finley.
Jones blew out that sigh again. “Even if he had, it was ten months ago.”
“But it would mean that maybe they didn’t have to go far,” said Finley. “That there was no car waiting. That maybe Abbey is still right here, in The Hollows.”
He looked at the maps, then up at the sky.
“All right,” he said after a moment. “Let’s head out there and see what you saw or didn’t see. We’ll take my vehicle because, I’ll tell you what, it doesn’t look like you should be driving. I’ll call Chuck.”