Ink and Bone (12 page)

She flipped open her laptop and logged on to the free wireless offered by the guesthouse. On the ride up, she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about what Jackson told her, about the missing man. It was nothing, of course. Jackson was a worrier, a ruminator like Merri. Still.

She found a small item in the
Times
. Real estate developer missing. Gerald Healy, forty-four, left his Manhattan office for a meeting with a construction company in The Hollows. He never arrived. His car hadn’t been found, cell phone signal lost. Family—wife and two small children—were pleading for any information. There was a picture of a handsome man with dark hair and glasses, wearing a bright smile and a green-and-white checked shirt. She felt a rush of impotent urgency.

The wallpaper on her laptop screen was an image of Abbey. She
was the wild child, the kook. When you first got to know her, you might think she was cautious, even fearful. But in her heart, she was an adventurer like her father, a warrior. After she’d hung back a bit and assessed the situation, she dove right in. The image was a shot from above with Abbey looking up at the camera, her mouth wide open in laughter, her purple skirt twirling. She was unabashed joy, raw energy in that captured moment. How could she not be here with them—all that wild love, all the crazy little kid energy? How could her Abbey, those other two children, this man, just disappear and not be found? It just didn’t seem right. Was the world that big, that dark, like a maw that could swallow you whole?

She scrolled through the few articles, which were all similarly lacking information. It was less of a news story when adult men went missing, probably more likely that he’d just abandoned his family than come to any harm. But he didn’t look like the type to run off. He had a goofy smile, was cute in a geeky sort of way. In fact, he reminded Merri of their friend Blake. Blake, who was the consummate good father, a loving and faithful husband, always honest and upright. In all their years of knowing him, Merri had never seen his eyes stray in the direction of a pretty waitress when Claire was around. It wasn’t even that he was
not staring
; it was that he did not notice. Not in the way that Wolf noticed every tight piece of ass within a certain radius, the way he was always browsing.

It was actually Blake whom Merri had met first on the night she met Wolf. She’d been getting her MFA at Columbia. Blake was studying law. And Wolf was at the journalism school. She was at some sports bar that she’d gone to with a guy she thought she liked. But he’d quickly revealed himself to be an arrogant asshole—like most male MFA students who invariably thought that they were going to be the next F. Scott Fitzgerald.

“No offense, but your date is a jerk.”

Her date—
What had his name been? So long ago
—had left her at the bar to go to the bathroom, and Blake had slipped in beside her.

“I couldn’t help but overhear,” Blake said apologetically. “His voice was
booming
.”

“Really?” she said. “Because I stopped listening an hour ago.”

Blake asked her what she was drinking and ordered her another vodka soda. Then they just started talking, and he felt strangely familiar, one of those people who feel like an old friend before you’ve even exchanged names.

“Don’t look now,” Blake had said. He nodded in the direction behind her with a mischievous grin. “But I think your friend has found a more enthusiastic audience.”

She glanced over and saw Bruce (yes, that was his name) leaning into a woman from their short-fiction class. The woman was as talentless and dull as he was; they were a perfect couple.

“Good for him,” she said.

“You can’t keep the pretty ones all to yourself, Blakey.” Wolf had joined them.

Just the sight of him, even that very first moment, lit her up inside. Those silky curls, those glittering eyes, those muscled forearms. Something else, too, of course. What had it been in him that made her choose Wolf over Blake? Was it something good? Or was it something bad?

Whatever it was, Blake, however sweet and good looking, immediately receded from her view. And it was Wolf she wound up going home with that night. Blake and Claire had broken up, just briefly. (He was single for the first time since high school the night they met.) The following week, however, Blake and Claire got back together. And they were married before Blake had graduated law school. Merri and Wolf were married two years later. But there had been one night when she could have chosen between them. She’d spent a lot of time over the years thinking about how things would be different if she’d kept talking with the man she’d
liked
, instead of sleeping with the man she
wanted
.

But then there would be no Jackson, no Abbey. And that had always given her comfort because her children were the center of her universe, the right things that made every other mistake and mishap okay. Until. Until their failings as people and parents were harshly punished with the loss of Abbey.

It was that thinking, that mental maze that had led Merri to her nervous breakdown in the months after Abbey’s disappearance. This idea that if she could atone for all the mistakes she made, maybe she could stop the fall of dominos or even reverse it. It was easy to see from which parent Jackson had inherited his obsessive thinking.

Her phone pulsed on the table, startling her.

Mom! Aced my math test. 99!

Good job, Jacko!!

She scrolled over to see him on the little map on Find My Friends. There he was, at school where he belonged.

Are you okay up there?
She could see his worried frown.

Don’t worry about your Mom, kiddo. Let me worry about you.

Okay. Love you.

She glanced back over at her computer screen. The missing man stared out at her. Merri’s psychiatrist told her that the most stressful condition for the human mind is simply not knowing. Even if the worst thing happens, the mind recovers eventually, returns to its natural baseline of happiness. But the wondering, the crushing weight of disappointments, the violent swing between poles of hope and despair. It’s almost more than a person can endure.

She was attuned now to the wobble, that edgy feeling that meant she was losing her grip. She forced herself to close the computer and lie down on the bed, breathe deep.
Let go. Let God.
It was such a simple phrase that did bring comfort if you let it. But not as much comfort as those smooth, fat white pills, which she still thought about every day.

ELEVEN

T
his Penny was different from the other ones. It took him a while to figure out what it was. He’d seen it the very first day when Poppa had noticed her in town. Poppa hadn’t
said
anything. He had just stopped his work and went very still, and Bobo followed his gaze to the family moving up the street. They drifted right past without even seeing Poppa and Bobo.

The pretty woman, with her raspberry-colored tee-shirt and faded blue jeans, holding the hand of a boy with white blond hair. The man had strolled up ahead, was looking in the window of a shop and pointing at something. The girl trailed behind, licking ice cream from a cone. She gazed up at the trees, spun around—daydreaming, in her own world. Then it was like she sensed him looking at her. She turned slowly, and she
saw
him. Looked right at him, not through him or over him or around him, like most people. She smiled, white teeth a little crooked. Then she ran ahead, back to her family, taking her daddy by the hand. She didn’t look back at him again, though Bobo kept watching her.

Poppa gathered up his things, even though they weren’t near done. He threw everything carelessly into the back of the pickup. Then they were driving slowly down the street, following a distance behind the family. Poppa smiled, waving to folks as they called out to him—the old lady from Orchard Street, the owner of the hardware store, Mr. Jenkins. Everybody knew everybody in The Hollows.

The family walked a while, and finally all piled into one of those big, expensive cars. It was shiny and blood red. They were like a tele
vision family, too perfect. They weren’t real. Especially the girl with her round cheeks and pretty mouth, golden hair. She was like a doll.

“You know how much one of those things cost?” asked Poppa. Bobo didn’t answer.

“You could feed a village in Africa for a year,” he went on.

Poppa couldn’t care less about villages in Africa. He just hated rich people, people who thought they were smart because they had money and lived in the city. People who came in from outside and bought land that they had no business buying and built big new houses that didn’t belong in The Hollows.

He followed them out of town. Poppa wasn’t worried about being noticed. Normal people didn’t think about being followed. And Poppa’s truck made him invisible; no one ever noticed them. The family drove slowly, then sped up, then slowed down again like they were looking for something. Finally they turned onto a drive that led to one of those new big houses.

Poppa kept driving, silent, his jaw working. He wore a faded blue baseball cap over his tangle of white and gray hair, which he pulled back into a ponytail when he was working. With his free hand, he twisted at the bottom of the full beard that was the shape and color of a gnarled old tree branch. Bobo knew just what he was thinking. Bobo was thinking about her, too. That little doll of a girl, that crooked smile that was pretty anyway. She wasn’t the first little girl Poppa had noticed.

They went back to work after that, worked until the sun started to get low in the sky. Doing what needed doing, then collecting cash at the end of each job.

Poppa liked to think of them as living “off the grid.”
We don’t exist,
he always said. They lived in a house that Poppa’s poppa had built with “his own two hands” on property that had been in his family since The Hollows was settled. They didn’t have a phone, or a computer, or a television. There was a generator and a fuel tank on the property, so there were no dealings with the electric company. In the winter, when the snows came, the roads became impassable except for Poppa’s snowmobile. He could get into town if he needed
to; but mainly they didn’t need to. They worked hard all spring and summer, and in fall stocked the food cellar. And Poppa liked to hunt.

Up way back in the woods, there were other people like them. Folks who lived off the land. They lived in houses that didn’t have a street address; they hunted, fished, and gardened for their food. They schooled their children, not just with books, but by teaching them how to survive like the men and women who first settled The Hollows. They buried their own dead. The townies called them hill people. But Poppa said that the people in the hills, they were “true descendants of our founding fathers.” The Hollows belonged to them.

New Penny cried at first, but not like the others. The others whimpered quietly, went limp with fear, obeyed right away, got used up and discarded. But New Penny, she screamed, she raged and fought. There was a something deep inside her that couldn’t be touched. Even when she had decided to be good, there was a wild sparkle in her eyes. Bobo liked her better than the others, even though she made more trouble. A lot more trouble.

But Momma and Poppa were getting tired of her now. She had been there longer than anyone. There had been another, too. But she was gone.

Poppa was angry about the man with the Bimmer, as Poppa called it. Poppa was skinny, so skinny that you could see the shelf of his collarbone and the dip behind it. His knees were rocks in a sock, elbows hard as hammers. But he was strong. He didn’t need any help lifting the stranger into the trunk of his car. There was a neat black suitcase in there, which Poppa took. He searched the stranger’s body, lifted his wallet from his pocket.

“There’s nearly five hundred dollars in here,” Poppa said, pocketing the cash. Bobo wondered if that would make him less angry at New Penny. But it didn’t seem to. In fact, it just seemed to make him more agitated.

“Real estate man,” he said. Though how Poppa knew that, Bobo couldn’t be sure. Maybe because all the new rich people up here were either buying, selling, or tearing down what was already here and building something new. “Developer.”

Up here that was the dirtiest word. Developers came up all the time, finding their way where locals from town wouldn’t even dare to go. These strangers offered big money for land, never understanding that the folks who lived here were
part
of the land. They could no more sell it than they could sell the skin off their bodies.

Poppa took the developer’s watch, too, a big glittery thing. And his belt and shoes. Those shoes that city people wore to the country, leather with big treads and fancy laces. Nice looking but not waterproof, not really.

Then they drove out to The Chapel (as the local kids called it) a run-down old barn out in the middle of The Hollows Wood. There were several long, wide trails behind the house on their property (one of several) that led straight to it. And Poppa did a good job of keeping the paths wide and passable for the truck and the snowmobile. So even a fancy car like the Bimmer could make it at least to the clearing. And since the ground was still dry because there hadn’t been as much rain this year, Poppa was able to drive it right inside the old barn.

It didn’t seem like the best hiding spot, because local kids came up here all the time. Bobo snuck out on full-moon nights and watched them smoking and kissing and more inside. Even though the place was so tilted and sagging that it looked like it could come down at any second, they came up here with six-packs of beer and cartons of cigarettes, sleeping bags. They made fires in the field, played music sometimes, and danced. There was a place in the back where Bobo could sit and watch them through a triangle opening in the wood. Whispered words, exposed skin, sometimes laughter, sometimes raised voices and tears. Bobo wanted to be one of them.

But there was no one up there now. Big fingers of sunlight streamed in through the gaping holes in the roof. That’s why Bobo thought of it as The Chapel, because it looked like church somehow. Like God was reaching down to touch it.

Poppa drove the car back as far as they could go into the shadows. Then he got out and started pacing, which he did when he was
thinking about what to do. Finally, he started taking things from all around—broken-up crates, pieces of wood that lay around. There was an old tarp by the door, a balled-up blanket in the corner.

They worked for a while to hide the car behind a pile of debris. From the door, where the car was parked toward the back, you couldn’t see it. And the kids didn’t do much exploring. When they came up here, they weren’t interested in the barn or the woods around it. They were mostly just interested in each other’s bodies, seemed like. The car might not be discovered for a good long while. And once the snow started falling, no one would come up here again until spring. It was supposed to be a long, cold winter, according to Poppa. And the way the air felt, it wouldn’t be long before it fell over The Hollows.

The walk back to the house was long, but Bobo didn’t mind. He wondered if Poppa noticed that they were leaving tracks in the field and on the trail. Tracks that would lead back to the house, if anyone was looking. Of course, he did; Poppa had taught Bobo all about tracking, about looking for the print on the soft ground, or the succession of broken branches, the nibbled berry or the scat in the leaves. Every creature left his mark, if you knew how to look. If you were quiet and patient, you could almost always find him. Poppa wasn’t being careful, because he knew that most people weren’t quiet or patient and certainly didn’t know how to look at the woods to see what had journeyed down the trail before them. That must be why.

*  *  *

When they got back to the house, New Penny was still on the ground where she’d been lying unconscious since Poppa took the belt to her. Poppa told Bobo to get her cleaned up. In the chair on the porch, Momma rocked wearing that blank look she often wore, as if she were looking at something no one else could see. Maybe she was watching. Maybe not. She could stay that way for a long time. Bobo carried New Penny to her cot, head lolling, blond hair wild and dirty. Then he got the chain and locked her up again.

New Penny was whispering something that Bobo couldn’t hear at first. When Poppa left, Bobo stood listening.

IhateyouIhateyouIhateyouIhateyouIhateyou

That
was the thing about New Penny that was different from the others. She wasn’t just afraid. She was full of fire. That’s why he liked her better than the others. She was angry, just like him.