Girls of Brackenhill

by Moretti, Kate

  Hannah realized she’d misjudged everything, hadn’t asked the right question, the only question: “Is Fae going to die?” She had assumed it wasn’t serious. She’d thought a broken leg, an arm, a concussion, maybe unconsciousness. “A car accident” could mean myriad things.

  There was a beat where the woman didn’t speak, and Hannah felt the silence down to her bones, the chill instant, the phone still in her white-knuckled grip, and Huck, without speaking, placed a palm flat between her shoulder blades, rubbing gently. His hand moved up to her shoulder, and she gripped it there. In the dim light her engagement ring winked.

  “You should leave soon.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Ghost Girls of Brackenhill are an urban legend.

  Brackenhill was the name of a castle on top of a mountain deep in the woods in the Catskill Mountains. It was built in the 1800s by a wealthy Scottish immigrant named Douglass Taylor as a summer lodge. He built the castle originally for his wife, who was committed to a sanatorium shortly after the birth of her only child. Taylor himself then died young, and their daughter, Merril, inherited the land and the Taylor fortune. She married and lived in happy seclusion for years until she, too, was committed to a sanatorium shortly after the birth of her fourth son. Brackenhill was passed down from generation to generation in a family riddled with mental illness.

  It has been said that over ten girls went missing on Brackenhill grounds over the course of 150 years. Some were children living in the castle; some were residents of the village below. Brackenhill stole the sanity of women and the bodies of children. The children, ranging in age from seven to eighteen, have never been found. Some people think they’re all buried on the expansive grounds. Sometimes, especially when it rains (and no one knows why), you can hear their laughter as they play.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Now

  Grover M. Hermann Hospital was a half hour south of Rockwell, New York. Huck steered Hannah’s car into the brightly lit parking lot just before dawn on Friday morning. Huck, the saint, had driven the full six hours, letting Hannah doze in the passenger seat, violating Road Trip Rule #7: absolutely no sleeping. But those rules had been made for beach trips and summer getaways, not middle-of-the-night emergency trips to visit long-lost—and gravely injured—relatives.

  Hannah’s mother, Trina, had passed away a year and a half ago. Huck and Hannah had been new, and he’d met and charmed her only once. He tried to come with Hannah to the funeral, make the arrangements, see the house she grew up in. That sad little box house in Plymouth, Pennsylvania. She’d stopped him. She hadn’t needed him then. She wasn’t even sure that she’d cried. “You’re so strong,” he told her then. Proud of her, like strength was an accomplishment, something to strive for. It never occurred to him to question where it had come from.

  But this felt different. Heavier. They were engaged. It hadn’t even been a question this time: Huck was here. The thought made her hands clench. There was so much he didn’t know. Would he think she was strong this time? Unlikely.

  Hannah sat up, smacked her mouth. She dug around for a piece of gum and a dog treat. Rink slept soundly in the back, sighing softly, legs kicking at a dream. She turned around and tucked the treat between his nose and his front paws. He woke long enough to eat it and drifted back off.

  Hannah’s eyes burned, reminding her that her car sleep had been spotty at best. She dialed work and left a voice mail for her director. “I should be back on Monday; there’s been a family emergency.” She thought of her boss, Patrice, a severe, private woman who would scoff at the excuse. It was a hot, sunny Friday. Surely Hannah had just taken off for a long weekend with that “hunky fiancé,” as Patrice called Huck.

  Hannah was in charge of brochures: ad copy and placement of pictures of happy couples frolicking on beaches. She loved the idea of making life look wonderful and glossy. But still, she had the odd habit of trying to imagine her life like the pictures on a brochure: perfect boyfriend, pristine apartment, small yet loyal circle of friends laughing around a campfire.

  “Hannah?” Huck’s hand on her knee. She jerked her leg away and regretted it. She was jumpy, too little sleep, too much energy charging through her veins.

  Hannah reached out and gripped Huck’s hand. It was calloused, even in the summer—especially in the summer—because of his job as a landscape designer (the gardener, she sometimes called him, sexy and silly).

  Huck knew almost nothing of Aunt Fae and Uncle Stuart, aside from their names. He’d never met them. He didn’t know much about her childhood, and he knew nothing of the castle. He knew her mother had died. He knew very little of the summer of 2002. He knew she had an older sister who’d died when she was young, but not why or how. Well, no one knew how, Hannah supposed. He knew that she and her sister had spent summers at her aunt’s house in New York, but surely he imagined something normal: a cabin, a ranch, a colonial.

  Hannah knew so much about Huck’s life before her: his idyllic childhood, his four brothers, parents who swelled with pride for their children and love for each other. His whole childhood had felt like a slap. Even after meeting the whole brood, she’d glossed over her own childhood with a broad, shiny brush. Huck’s family was loud, raucous, ribbing each other at holidays. His mom sat at the head of the table, cheeks flushed. His parents lived less than an hour from them in Virginia. Somehow Hannah still managed to find plenty of excuses to beg off visits.

  Besides, they’d only gotten engaged three short weeks ago. They hadn’t progressed past the showing-off-the-ring stage of engagement. The word wedding had barely been uttered. They had time, Hannah reasoned. They should be enjoying this time. Not mucking it up with heavy pasts and childhood traumas.

  Would she have told him about Brackenhill eventually? Of course. Maybe. She’d rarely given it a thought in seventeen years. Except for the nights she woke up sweating, crying, the faint outline of a dream tugging at her subconscious. Her hands clenched until they cramped, a deep ache across her shoulders. A heavy refrain, the memory of a sound. Click, click, thump, thump. Once and only once Huck had found her standing in the living room naked, her clothes strewed on the floor. Hannah didn’t remember it, but Huck had told her she had clawed at the hardwood, crying.

  Later, when she woke up and he recounted the story, he’d laughed. “Like you were digging something up. It was bizarre.” At the time, she pretended to laugh with him as her heart raced. He hadn’t noticed. Sometimes Hannah thought what she loved most about Huck was his obliviousness. His willingness to not look too deeply.

  They’d met at a brewery in the next town over. Before Hannah worked in marketing for a PR firm, she’d tended bar in the evenings while she job hunted. Huck had come in with his rowdy friends, him in jeans and a T-shirt, them in suit shirts and loosened ties. His fingernails with their blackened crescent moons had struck her as odd among all the manicures. Bartenders noticed hands. The first words she spoke to him were “You don’t fit in,” and he’d grinned at her, thrown an extra ten on the bar top. Before he left, he slid his business card under the tip, scrawled neither do you on the back.

  “Are you okay?” he finally asked, the silence in the car wearing thin. He’d been more patient with her than required, but Hannah suspected this trip would try him. Huck hated messes, despised melodrama.

  And now he was about to get his trial by fire and perhaps more answers than he’d ever wanted. Hannah wondered if he’d be there at the end of it. Would he stay if he knew the whole truth? That last summer, her sister, Wyatt. The knot in her stomach tightened, and she stopped, swallowed back the panic in her throat.

  She’d worked so hard to relegate her childhood, her sister, and her aunt and uncle to the background of her life. She never examined her childhood in direct light, only in periphery—dreams where Julia was still alive, racing her back through the forest, the sunlight blinking between the leaves. And now they were going back. Her shiny new life, handsome fiancé, everything she’d ever wanted.


  She wanted to go home.

  “I’m fine,” Hannah answered quickly and pushed open the car door. “I haven’t seen her in seventeen years. I’m fine.”

  It was still cool, the sun barely cresting the horizon. They rolled a window partway down for Rink, who paced in the back seat, excited, whining. Huck let him out briefly to go to the bathroom, the leash taut as he sniffed around bushes on the hospital lawn.

  “I’ll come back if we’re in there too long,” Huck assured her when they locked the car door. He took care of things. He was the task man of their little team, always. What was Hannah? The compliant one, the go-along girl. Girl with big ideas, he sometimes called her, his eyes crinkling at the corners.

  She walked into the hospital a good ten feet in front of Huck (briefly reminded of Josh tagging along behind Julia all those summers ago), but she couldn’t have articulated why. Inside, she was directed by the administration desk to a family-crisis center. The room was small, a few couches and a chair. A round coffee table and a sideboard with a Keurig. She touched nothing and did not sit. When a woman entered and introduced herself as a crisis counselor, Hannah didn’t flinch. Huck tried to touch her again, a gentle palm against the small of her back, but she moved slightly out of his reach, so his hand was left dangling in midair.

  “I’m Claire McKinney.” The woman was older than Hannah, probably only by a few years, but her hair was streaked with gray. She took Hannah’s cue and also did not sit but instead held Hannah’s arm with both hands and spoke succinctly but kindly. “I’m afraid your aunt has passed away.”

  Hannah felt the punch in her lungs, heard the whoosh of air before realizing it was her own breath. Willed her brain to focus on the woman’s words.

  Claire McKinney told Hannah about the crash, the car moving too fast down the winding road, away from the castle, hitting a slick patch from recent rain, and pitching over the guardrail and into the ravine. Someone had come along and seen the lights in the car, the coiled smoke from the hood, and called 911, but Aunt Fae’s internal injuries were too serious. The rescue effort had been a bit of an undertaking. (Hannah remembered the steepness of that ravine on Valley Road, having flown away from the castle in a speeding car herself.) They were sorry, of course, but would Hannah be able to identify the body? No other family member was listed. (They were all dead now, see?) All Hannah could say was, “Absolutely, of course, anything for Aunt Fae.” Claire McKinney pushed an eight-by-ten photograph across the table—Hannah couldn’t recall sitting down—but she turned it over without thought and wished she had taken a moment to prepare herself.

  The photo was a close-up of her aunt’s face, black and white. In a split second she saw the deep grooves in her aunt’s forehead between her eyebrows, the shadowy wells under her eyes, a light but familiar birthmark in the curious shape of a butterfly on her temple that had darkened in death. Or maybe it was just that her coloring had gone gray, almost white as bone. There was thick stitching around the crown of her head, a leathery incision devoid of blood. She’d been wiped clean.

  “That’s her,” Hannah said, feeling like she was in a movie or a detective show and grateful she wasn’t standing inside a sterile morgue the way it was portrayed on television. She tried to arrange her face into something like sadness, as she imagined she was supposed to feel. Or maybe shock. Huck watched her carefully. She could tell he was trying to comfort her, that comfort was the normal, everyday reaction in this situation. That she should want his support. Later, maybe he’d tell her, You’re so strong, and she’d be pleased at that.

  It was over that quickly, and they were back out in Hannah’s car before Huck even had to check on Rink. There was an air of formality about the whole thing. Claire McKinney’s compassion had been an act, part of her job, nothing more or less.

  Hannah held a business card for a funeral home where Aunt Fae would be prepared for arrangements—which meant a viewing and a funeral, or perhaps a cremation. She supposed she should have known what her aunt’s wishes were, that the hospital would assume that as next of kin she’d spoken to her aunt during the past seventeen years.

  She’d call the funeral parlor in the morning. But it was morning, wasn’t it? The clock blinked 6:52. They’d been in the hospital for less than an hour, too little time for her life to be entirely changed. And yet lives were upended all the time in minutes and seconds, not hours. Hannah knew that. Also, it felt too dramatic: her life would not be changed. She’d do whatever she’d come to do and go home, back to Virginia, her career, planning the wedding.

  She’d escaped Brackenhill once. She could do it again.

  “What can I do?” Huck asked, and Hannah recognized the despair in his voice. Huck hated helplessness. He was an action person, a problem-solver. He admired this trait in her more than anything else: she was always fine. He’d complained of ex-girlfriends: needy, calling and texting at all hours. Her independence, even when it frustrated him, was attractive.

  “Nothing,” Hannah said, and it was true. She didn’t need anything from him, maybe never had. This time she almost asked him for one thing: Drive me home. He would have in a heartbeat. But she knew she had to head farther north, past Rockwell on the only road in, the switchback road her aunt had taken out. To her once-beloved uncle, who lay quietly dying. It fell to her to tell him about his wife.

  Hannah let Huck drive, the car winding around steep curves, her arm gripping the handle at the window, white knuckled and breathless, the fear starting as a steady thrum in her legs, a jittery helplessness. From the back seat even Rink whined as Huck punched the gas, the car stuttering up the steep incline. At the top, the first of the stone turrets came into view, and the car slowed as Huck’s foot faltered.

  For the first time in seventeen years, it was time to go back to the castle.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Then

  The castle sat high on a hill, shrouded by towering oaks and pines in Rockwell, a town in the Catskill Mountains. It had a name: Brackenhill. At the time Hannah thought it belonged in a fairy tale, which made sense because it was named after a castle in England. Before summers in Rockwell, she hadn’t known houses could have names at all.

  Hannah and Julia were driven up in the old Buick, their mother’s left arm out the window. She brought it in only to light one cigarette off the other, balancing the wheel with her knee. The fingers on her right hand held the cigarette while simultaneously tapping along to the radio, the ash flying. The Buick’s vinyl seats stuck to Hannah’s thighs. Her mother parked at the end of the driveway, and the girls clambered up the gravel drive, wriggling with anticipation, dragging suitcases on wheels that caught on the stones.

  Before they became part-time residents of Brackenhill, the sisters had not known the castle existed. They’d never been there, never visited their aunt and uncle. Their mother had said the drive was too far; her sister was unkind, she’d said. Then suddenly, one summer, for no obvious reason, everything had changed. Their mother had announced she couldn’t work at night, sleep during the day, and trust that they would behave themselves all summer. Julia, newly thirteen, had been caught sneaking a neighbor boy into her bedroom. Their mother, strangely pious when it suited her, had taken to praying about Julia’s virtue until she’d somehow stumbled on an elegant solution: the girls would spend the summer with her sister in the Catskills.

  That was Hannah’s first glimpse of the castle, and of Aunt Fae and Uncle Stuart, hands gripped together at the gate, mouths set in a line.

  Aunt Fae was Mom’s sister, and Mom spoke of her only in the pejorative, her tone lilting a bit, dragging out the -ae, mocking her in a way Hannah and her sister didn’t understand. Oh, you know Fae, she’d say, but in truth they didn’t. Not really. She and her husband had come to visit a handful of times in their lives. If asked, they’d have to concentrate to come up with their aunt’s and uncle’s names.

  They knew Aunt Fae was more rounded in the middle than Mom, who was bony and flat. After that first summer they knew
Fae would hug them in a way Mom never did. They knew Uncle Stuart would bop the crowns of their heads with a soft closed fist and a little pop of his tongue. They knew their aunt and uncle would laugh sometimes, shockingly, from the back of their throats, in a way their mother and stepfather did not. Yet Aunt Fae’s eyes were always a bit rheumy, like she’d just finished crying.

  But that first summer of 1998, all they knew was they got to live in a castle for almost three months. The castle was a square, with turrets at each corner and a courtyard at the center, bursting with flowers and arbors, stone walkways. It smelled like peonies and honeysuckle, the whole expanse of garden exploding with reds, yellows, pinks; deep-orange lilies; sedum and daisies; tall splashes of lupine and irises. Deep-green vines fingered their way up the stone walls, wrapped around lancet windows, their Gothic arches softened in the midday sun.

  Hannah took a room in the turret, the round expanse of windows looking out into that courtyard. She saw it all for the first time, flinging open the windows to smell the lavender, freesia. She hoped she’d never go home again, back to the powder-blue-and-white bedroom, the stale silence of her mother’s absence, and felt disloyal. Julia took the room next to hers, down the hall (what a long hall! Built for cartwheels!), but eyed Hannah’s exuberance enviously, a thirteen-year-old who wanted desperately to be a teenager and still a child at the same time. They discovered a door between their rooms—technically two doors, with a small space between them. Julia would sometimes leave Hannah notes or tiny gifts in that little space. At least, in the beginning.

  Hannah squealed with delight at her first view of the woods, trees and trees as far as she could see from her bedroom window—“A thousand acres in all,” Aunt Fae told her proudly—imagining hours of lost time, exploring, finding brooks, salamanders, tree hideouts, secret passageways. Nothing but her imagination, stretched far and wide, and her best friend, Julia. The Beaverkill River ran below Valley Road to the west, shallow and burbling in the dry July heat. The girls could hear it from the castle, an always-welcoming music box, mixed with the sounds of the birds, the silence of the mountains, and the smell of pine and something earthy and rotting.