But Finn was talking with his hands now, trying to make some sense. “We think that time moves forward, in a linear fashion. Yeah? But sometimes you get déjà vu, or there’s some mad coincidence that you can’t explain. I think time doesn’t move in a linear fashion, but in a spiral, and sometimes there’s echoes from the past. And a ghost is just an echo of someone.”
“And why would I see such an echo?”
He shrugged. “Now, that I’ve got no clue about. Maybe he was trying to tell you something.”
“He wasn’t a ghost, Finn. I touched him. He was a little boy.”
He lifted another wedge of plaster and dabbed it on the stone. “I’ve experienced odd things in my time. Stuff I couldn’t explain. I’ll tell you one coincidence that’s never left me.”
I sighed. “Go on.”
“Well, when Cassie was ill, and the doctors said they couldn’t do anything more for her, I got a call out of the blue from an old friend of my father’s. He needed me to do a bit of plastering for him. And even though I had to be around for Cassie, I said aye, I’ll do the job. It made no sense. The job was on Skye. I’d have to leave Cassie for three whole days. But I had this feeling in my gut that I needed to do this job.” He looked up at me. “I felt guilty the whole time I was there. The man just wanted his downstairs loo redone and knew I’d give him mates’ rates. I thought, What am I doing? I’m miles away from my wee girl while she’s knocking on death’s door, and all because this guy wants to save a few pennies on a toilet.”
“And what happened?” I asked, wondering where the story was going.
“So I’m packing up, about to leave, and he asks about Cassie. I tell him she’s got leukemia. Doctors have washed their hands of her. The guy makes a call to someone. Next thing I know, I’m on the phone to a doctor in Los Angeles who says he can help.”
“And he was the one who saved her life?”
He nodded and patted his forehead with a rag. “Now, I’m not a religious guy, but that wasnae coincidence.”
“Intuition, maybe?” I said.
“More than that,” he said firmly. “When I said I had a gut feeling about it, it was . . . like something kept badgering me. In the end, I only gave in to make it stop. And once I was on my way to Skye, I felt like . . . something left. The thing that had been bugging me wasn’t there anymore. Like it had done its job.”
He said this self-consciously, earnestly, and I bit my tongue. He was talking about his daughter and how her life was saved. I thought about my mother’s false narrative. For every birth, a death. We form stories about our lives to create meaning out of them—without meaning, they feel shapeless and without purpose. When something lies beyond the realm of meaning, it’s terrifying.
“But surely the police don’t believe in that?” I said. I’d told him about my visit to the police station and how Bram dismissed me. “They have a duty to investigate a reported missing child, surely.”
Finn’s face darkened. “Ah well, that’s a whole other level of batshit crazy, that is.”
“What is?”
He stepped closer, wary of his words carrying to other ears. “The problem with an island like this is that everyone knows everyone else. And that causes problems when, say, the chief inspector is married to someone who does believe in wildlings.”
I frowned. “But surely his wife’s belief systems don’t override his professional obligations.”
“Ah, now you sound like a townie,” he said ruefully. “Did you know we’re the only island in the small isles to have our own police department?”
I shook my head, unsure of his meaning.