The Hazel Wood: Chapters 7–12

Gingerly I sat down on the bed.

The man picked up an old rotary telephone and hit a button, then I swear he started talking in a fake British accent.

Maybe in real life it was meant to be friendly, but names were dangerous in a fairy tale. I’d wondered before if that was why Althea had changed hers to something so outlandish.

The elevator doors shushed shut, sealing us inside a tiny, opulent room.

I’d shown up unannounced enough times in my life—with my mom, her face plastered with a smile, our suitcases tucked benignly behind our legs—to know what it looked like when someone wishes you hadn’t come.

It was disorienting to look out the high windows and see not the sweep of a rainy moor, but early evening advancing on Central Park.

Four years spent checking used bookstore shelves and searching out traces of her online, four years disdaining the books Ella tried to get me to read in favor of devouring fairy tales.

Fans was a word Ella spat out like a cherry pit. And it made sense: the ones I had met—my sixth-grade English teacher, the...grad student who accosted us at a Fairway during our first stint in New York, the biographer who tracked Ella down and tried to get to her through me, the worst possible move he could’ve made—were cartoons, nutjobs with bad breath and no lives of their own.

Landlords with a knack for stopping by too often, and always when one or the other of us was in a towel.

Then when she died, she bequeathed them to the American Film Institute, but they never showed up.

“I mean they never showed up. They got lost, or destroyed, or are still moldering in a collection somewhere, but nobody has any idea where they went. It’s one of the few really lost films of that decade.”

“There was like a...a covenant, among the people who’d read them. Either you found them on your own and were deserving, or you didn’t and you weren’t.”

It was a high-ceilinged study with soft recessed lighting and a wide bank of windows on one side.

A beautiful behemoth of a desk sat in the center, covered in books and a laptop and a green-shaded lamp that looked like it came from a pool hall.

A black-and-white headshot of a Valentino type smoldered out at us from beneath a high double peak of glossy hair.

I hated unsolicited compliments, if that’s what that was, so I kept my eyes trained on Althea.

His eyes were brown and guileless.

Finch looked at me like I’d said something colossally stupid—which I guess I had, but it still rankled—then sprinted to his bedroom door.

Silence, then the rapid sound of approaching feet. Harold came careening around the corner, his shaved head flushed.

I’d let the bad luck take some unfathomable form and walk right in, and carry Ella away.

Everything was shifting shadow, the smell of old smoke, the enervating rustle of half-naked trees.

You’d think she’d be too obscure to have an internet following, but obscurity was half of her appeal.

I was taken aback, and not in a bad way.

I’d heard that one. It seemed plausible, actually, which was probably why it annoyed me so much.

I got pancakes drowning in blueberry syrup, because that’s what I ate at the diner with the red-haired man. They congealed fast on my plate, and failed to bring any repressed memories flooding back.

The servants whispered that she was a changeling, but her eyes were black as ever, and her temper the same: she didn’t talk much, and she appeared places she shouldn’t.

The king, who’d rarely spoken a word to her directly, now watched her with an acquisitive eye.

I’d assumed Althea’s work would have a strong feminist message, allegorical undertones, a clear arc of story.

But the expression on her face was worse than anything. It was a kind of...selfish ecstasy.

“France, man. My little sister’s getting in trouble in boarding school over there. She’s like a crime kingpin in a uniform, man.”

The floor was spotless, the sleigh bed made up with swagged cream sheets, but the walls, teeming with bright celebrity teeth and yards of shiny hair, made the place feel hectic.

I dreamed about the day I realized we didn’t move for fun, or because she was restless. That she didn’t do it to ruin my life, or on a superstitious whim because she didn’t like the way an old woman hovered a hand over my forehead on the bus, drawing a helix in the air before hustling off at the next stop.

Then a look came into her eyes: fear and a spiky anger that yawned open like an aperture before slamming shut into something worse—hopelessness.

I swiped at my hair and mouth, checking for cowlicks or drool, and slithered into my skirt beneath the comforter.

I felt stunned and flayed, a nerve ending exposed to cold sun.

The man who opened the door looked less like an antiquarian bookseller and more like a bookie.

I’d anticipated a tidy little bookshop, lined with leather volumes and looking a bit like Finch’s library, but what I got was a mind-boggling riot of bookshelves that started a few yards from the door, standing at all angles and punctuated by free-range stacks rising from the ground, in a room that smelled like paste and paper and the animal tang of vellum.

Perks mulled it over.

My voice must’ve had a warning note in it, because Perks threw up his hands and smiled disarmingly.

He deftly flipped the book over and back again.