The Hazel Wood (The Hazel Wood #1)(14)
My mouth was dry as dirt. The redheaded man must’ve been here—must’ve done this. He had a copy of the book. He’d come back from god knows where to find me.
I had to get out of the apartment. Its walls were too close; they were curling in over me, watchful. I tucked the title page into my bag and ran for the elevator.
The doorman was still missing from the lobby, so I couldn’t ask if he’d seen Ella leaving. He tended to look at me like I’d come to deliver a pizza one night and never left, so I might not have asked him anyway.
I paced in tight circles around the lobby, keeping one eye on the street. Ella didn’t answer any of my next three calls. I cursed myself for not having the numbers of anyone she might be with—her coworkers from the catering job, maybe, though they’d fallen out of touch—and tried and failed to reach Harold one more time.
When I was little I became obsessed with the idea of my mom leaving me behind when she moved. When the fear got so bad I couldn’t sleep, I’d strap myself into the passenger seat of our car, so she’d be sure to remember me if she left before morning. Now I felt the sudden urge to make sure our car was still in Harold’s parking garage.
Harold hadn’t given Ella a key to the garage elevator yet—probably as worried she’d skip town as I used to be—but the doorman had one. I ducked behind his desk on the off chance there was an extra lying around.
His big mass of keys lay right next to a half-eaten takeout container of sushi. I turned quickly, expecting to see him coming back with chopsticks in hand, but the lobby remained empty. I held the keys against my shirtfront so they wouldn’t jingle and tiptoed over to the parking garage elevator.
The first time I’d seen it I’d expected Harold’s garage to be all white marble and inlaid floors. But it was like any garage I’d ever been in: echoing concrete and the wintry smell of exhaust. I could see our car from the open elevator doors, slumped among the Mercedes and BMWs. Some shitty rich kid had written CHOAD in the dirt on its back window.
I stared long enough to assure myself it was there, long enough for the shadows in the corners of the garage to sharpen and the taste of dust and iron to coat my tongue—the taste of bad luck. I stepped back into the elevator and stabbed at the Lobby button till the doors slid shut.
It was nearly five when I stepped onto the sidewalk, and New York was doing that perfect early evening thing where it plays itself. It makes you forget the trash piles and the twenty-dollar sandwiches and the time that guy showed you his dick on the F train, just by etching its skyline in gold and throwing the scent of sugared pecans in your face, right as someone who looks like Leonardo DiCaprio slouches by mumbling into his iPhone. Cheap trick.
Tonight it didn’t work on me, because I was zinging with adrenaline, and my brain kept peeling back the corner of a strange new world I couldn’t imagine living in, one where my mom was just gone. I was being insane. It hadn’t even been an hour. But the wrongness of the envelope in my room and the dread coiling in my gut told me I was right to panic.
The title page. Was it a warning? An invitation? A clue? The person who’d left it had been inside my room. His hand had hung over my pillow a moment before dropping the envelope.
Maybe it was a taunt: I see you, and locked doors and elevator keys aren’t enough to keep me out. But if it was a clue—if there was something in that story, some hint or message—I had to read it. And there was only one place I could think of where I might find a copy of Tales from the Hinterland.
I jogged the eight blocks there, because I wanted to jolt some of the spiky energy from my limbs. I knew where Ellery Finch lived because his dad was Jonathan Abrams-Finch, and richer than God, and therefore lived in a building that not only made ours look like a homeless shelter but had been written about twice in the New York Times style section. Not that I make a habit of reading about the lives of the rich, but Audrey does, and any mention of Mr. Abrams-Finch inspired her to loudly complain about extreme wealth being wasted on non-hot guys.
His doorman looked a lot like mine, but older. He scowled through his fancy gray mustache when he saw me.
“I’m here to see Ellery Finch,” I said.
He squinted at me. “Who?”
I sighed. “Ellery Djan, um, something Abrams-Finch?”
The man sighed back at me, like I’d passed a test he was certain I’d fail. “Whose name might I give?”
“Alice Crewe. Wait—Alice Proserpine. Tell him Alice Proserpine.”
The man picked up an old rotary telephone and hit a button, then I swear he started talking in a fake British accent. He apologized for my arrival and existence, letting his mustache droop with disappointment as the person on the other end agreed to come down for me.
I kept my eyes on the art deco elevator, so beautiful I wanted to cut it up into bracelets. Drama class felt miles away, but now it was creeping up on me: Finch’s question. My answer. The weird thrill and curious shame of it. What would he think of my showing up here?
I schooled my expression to flatness, but when the elevator doors slid open, my vision blurred over with tears. Finch’s familiar face looked like an island to a drowning swimmer.
His eyes widened and he made a move forward, maybe to put an arm around me. I put ice in my eyes and walked sideways into the elevator before he could.
“Thanks for, um. I can come up?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Of course you can, Alice.”