Huck stopped short at the sight of Alice and Wyatt and said, “Hi there, I didn’t know we had company.”
Wyatt stood, too, crossed the room and extended his hand. “I’m Detective McCarran, just doing some basic follow-up to Mrs. Webster’s car accident. I’m sorry for your loss.”
“I’m Detective Plume.” Reggie and Huck shook hands, and Huck’s gaze shifted to both men and back to Hannah.
Hannah realized that he cupped something in his left hand. “What’s that?” She pointed.
“Right. So look what Rink dug up.” He held up a stick. “I was down by the river, and he came running out from somewhere with this. He couldn’t have been gone for more than a minute. It was the damnedest thing . . .”
Huck held it out between his thumb and index finger. It was, at first glance, a curved piece of wood, jagged in the center and symmetrically bowed on either end. One half was chipped, with a long crack extending from the center to the left side; the other half was smooth. It was off white where Rink had carried it in his mouth but caked in dirt. Hannah said, “That looks like a—”
“Bone of some sort. Right?”
The floor shifted under Hannah’s feet. The room blurred, then focused.
Huck couldn’t have understood; he simply didn’t know enough. Hannah found herself staring at Wyatt, waiting for him to answer her unasked question. Huck continued, oblivious to the change in the room, the energy crackling between them all. “It is, don’t you think?”
Wyatt held out his hand—“May I?”—and Huck handed it to him. Wyatt turned it over and looked at Hannah. The implication was unmistakable, and Hannah sank back onto the chair. What kind of bone? A dog? A deer? Was it human?
Alice hovered in the doorway between the dining room and the kitchen, ready to leave the way she’d come in, late, impatient.
“It’s a jawbone. These were teeth.” Wyatt ran the pad of his index finger along the jagged center, and Hannah could see an incomplete set of molars. There were wells where the missing teeth would have been. Wyatt reached into his pocket and extracted a miniflashlight. He turned it on and aimed it at the bone, inverting it to look at the underside, a sharp bow, the ends flared like wings.
Both Wyatt and Reggie had been hunters at one time. Hannah didn’t have a reason to believe they’d stopped. They, if anyone, would know bones.
Reggie said quietly, “It’s definitely human.”
Hannah felt herself go cold, her lungs constricting, a sharp blade of pain.
Julia.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Now
Wyatt dropped the bone into an evidence bag he retrieved from his car.
“If it’s human, and I think it is,” he warned, “I’ll be back with a warrant, an excavation and crime scene team. We’ll have to run some tests first.”
“Do you really need a warrant? Can’t I just consent to a search?” Hannah wanted this over with as quickly as possible.
“You don’t own the property. You can’t consent to anything.” Reggie’s voice was sharp and—it could have been Hannah’s imagination—gloating.
Hannah rubbed her hand across her forehead, the events of the past few days catching up to her. Alice hung out a moment longer, caught in limbo, unsure what to do next, how to handle the bone discovery. Before she left, she whispered furtively, “Do you think the rest of it’s back there?” And Hannah’s face must have looked stricken, because Huck ran interference, walked Alice to her car.
Hannah had assumed Alice didn’t know the story, but of course, people talked. She imagined Alice, upon taking the job years ago, learning of the castle’s sordid history. She wondered if she’d been worried, scared? Perhaps she didn’t know that Hannah was the missing girl’s sister.
After everyone had gone, Hannah was instantly exhausted, her eyes drooping before she even reached her bedroom. Huck followed behind her, up the stone stairs, down the hall, and into the room they’d slept in the night before. It had been her room as a child, and it felt like second nature to take it back now. He dimmed the lights, closed the brocade drapes, and lay next to her.
“What do I do if it’s her?” Hannah whispered and felt Huck’s hand reach for hers in the dark. “What do I do if it’s not?”
Who else would be buried in Brackenhill? It could be anyone, Hannah reasoned. The property was almost two hundred years old. In fact, it seemed unlikely that the skeleton would be Julia at all.
But what if it was?
She pressed herself into the space between his chin and chest, his arm curled around her waist.
“Tell me about her,” Huck said softly and stroked her hair, winding it around his index finger.
It was like saying, Tell me about the ocean. Vast and consuming, stormy, complicated. How did you describe where it began and ended? Not knowing where to begin wasn’t a good reason to never begin at all.
“There’s so much, and still so little. She could be thoughtful and kind and funny. She could also be dismissive and cruel and cold. She was my best friend—for much of my childhood, my only friend. When we were small, my mother would never drive us anywhere, so while other kids got to know each other through playing and sports, I was home. Later, we had friends from school, but even then, we had to find rides places. I was with Julia more than I wasn’t.” Hannah closed her eyes, the smell of Julia hitting her memory: sweet and light and fruity, like gum and lipstick. Her voice drifted. “She was a writer. A lot of people didn’t know that. She scribbled in journals and loved pencil more than pen—so she could erase, make it perfect. She was a perfectionist. Everything in her room had a place; it had order. If it didn’t have a home, she threw it away. Nothing was sentimental. She didn’t get attached to things, she said.” So different from Hannah, whose spaces were always stormy—belongings strewed about, papers buried under clothing, subway tickets from vacations long over, small programs from museums, pamphlets from a whale watch she hadn’t even gone on. She tried to be tidy; it never worked. “She hated being alone. She was always looking for people, searching for something else, something better than what she had. She was an extrovert. She was funny. Always poking fun at people in a way that others called charming.”
“Like you,” Huck said, kindly. Too kind, really. Hannah’s humor ran more cutting, often called more bitchy than funny.
“No, people loved her. They tolerated me to get to her. Julia was everything more than me: prettier, funnier, kinder. I wanted to be just like her.” Hannah let out a short laugh, and Huck pulled her tight. Meant for comfort, but something about their newfound confidence made her heart quicken; she felt a pull down low in her belly, and she coiled a leg around his.
In the dark, Hannah’s mouth found the hollow of Huck’s throat, and he held her. He tasted of salt and skin, and she felt his sharp intake of breath. Her body moved to his, melted against him, and he whispered against her hair, her neck, “I love you, Hannah,” and she knew that he meant it. And that now, someday soon, he’d want to know all of her, the parts she’d kept secret: Wyatt. Julia and Aunt Fae and Trina. Wes. She’d never told anyone about her stepfather, not even Julia. She couldn’t imagine telling anyone now; it felt like it had all happened in another lifetime, to another person.
And still predominant, the circling uncertainty: Would Huck have loved her more had he never come to Brackenhill? Had he never seen with his own eyes the complications of her childhood, of her family? And what if he had never known the secrets of the castle, the ways in which this visit would change her, change them, because surely it would if it hadn’t already done so. She tried to push away this feeling—that this was an ending for them, not a beginning—and found she couldn’t. And maybe it was a necessary end: the end of false happiness. To be married, you had to be real. True. Complicated. Messy.
When they shed their clothes, Hannah had the disorienting feeling that she wasn’t in bed with Huck but with Wyatt. She remembered the first time, her first time ever, in Wyatt’s bed in his dad’s house, with the s
hades drawn in the middle of the day. She remembered the way he’d smelled—musky and woodsy—the way he’d moved, carefully, fervently, how fast it had been over. And the second time, that same day, hours later, when she’d climbed on top of him, clinging, desperate.
And now Huck whispering that he loved her as he climaxed. She felt the shame in that, thinking of another man during sex. Wyatt showing up at the front door had done a number on her.
She refocused on Huck, on his smile, a glint of something both loving and mischievous in his eyes. “I want to know all of you, Hannah,” he whispered. She let herself be pulled under, away from the castle, Uncle Stuart, the accident, the bone, to a place where nothing mattered, where her sister was alive and they were all happy and she could lie in the garden and see all four turrets in periphery and the sun beat down and she loved a man who loved her back.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Now
Hannah found Huck in the kitchen later, preparing a sandwich for dinner. She felt disoriented, hardly believing that Rink had found the jawbone this morning. That it was still the same day, even the same week.
A purple sky was a thin streak through the kitchen window. Twilight at Brackenhill. She remembered it. The smell of Aunt Fae in the kitchen, the house settling in for the night, the heavy anticipation as they’d prepared for the evening, Uncle Stuart washing his hands—long trails of dirt swirling in the porcelain sink. In late summer, the air felt pregnant with rain.
Still, even in the night, Brackenhill hadn’t scared Hannah. The pool, the basement—these things were thrilling. Terrifying in an exhilarating way. Hannah had never felt in danger. Julia would tremble at each creak and groan, but Hannah had blown it off, hardly noticed it. She’d accepted it when Aunt Fae had attributed the strangeness to the house’s age, its size, the wind, the mountain air.
Hannah slid onto a stool at the kitchen island. When Huck turned, he held out two plates, two sandwiches. He smiled at her, a dimple in his left cheek, and Hannah said, “Thank you.”
“You must have needed the nap. You’ve been asleep almost two hours. You never nap,” he teased her.
“It’s so weird. I don’t think I’ve been sleeping well here. I mean, when I wake up, it seems like I was knocked out, but I don’t feel rested.” Hannah took a bite, pressed her lips with a folded paper towel. The food tasted like dust. “That doesn’t make sense, I guess.”
She’d forgotten that she hadn’t slept well as a child. In Plymouth she’d always been listening for the creak of her bedroom door—something else Huck knew nothing about. Here, at Brackenhill, she used to sleep fitfully. Waking up all over the house, sometimes in the middle of tasks: making a sandwich or once, dangerously, starting a fire in the fireplace. The sleepwalking had only happened during the summer at Brackenhill. That last summer had been particularly bad, with episodes nearly every other night. Hannah had tried to tell Julia, but her sister had blown her off, acted like she was imagining things or like it hadn’t happened.
In Virginia, as an adult, she’d slept so soundly and peacefully she’d forgotten about her childhood insomnia entirely.
“What did Wyatt mean about Fae’s accident being irregular?” Hannah picked a line of crust off her sandwich. At the thought of eating it, her stomach churned, and she put it back on her plate.
“I think car accidents typically have a standard investigation, even when it’s only one car. Try not to read too much into it. At least, not yet.” Huck was so practical, steady. “You should eat, Han.”
“I just . . . can’t. What if it’s Julia? What if it’s not? What if someone ran Aunt Fae off the road? Why?” Hannah pushed her plate away. “Even the idea of eating is just . . . blech.”
“What if instead . . .” Huck’s voice caught, and he stopped. Then he took a deep breath, started over. “What if you gave me a tour?”
“A tour.” Hannah repeated it dumbly and looked around the kitchen. Trying to see the house, the castle, through Huck’s eyes. The wide old stove, the small square porcelain tile floor, the stainless steel worktop of the island. The hanging pots in the corner, near the back door. The outside had always been more impressive than the inside.
They stood, and he took her hand, as if trying to understand all the new things about his fiancée, this new place, a new piece of her history slotted into place, while simultaneously assuring her that he was there for her: a shoulder to cry on, to lean on.
Hannah could see his need, which should have been endearing. She preferred him when he was just there, rather than continually inserting himself. She didn’t need him to save her. This wasn’t fair—of course it wasn’t. They’d made love; he’d made her a sandwich. She could give him a tour. It was so little to ask of her. And yet Hannah was overwhelmed. At the same time, she was sure he didn’t want the full tour—all the ugly secrets and truths of Brackenhill. Of her.
Hannah started in the kitchen, tonelessly gesturing. It was the one room he was familiar with. As she warmed up, she started to remember.
In the living room: Uncle Stuart playing old records for her. Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller, the pop and crackle of a forty-five on the turntable (she’d never even seen records before Brackenhill) while Uncle Stuart and Aunt Fae showed the girls how to jitterbug, music and dancing well before their time, but Uncle Stuart had always absorbed musical decades until they were part of him: his marrow infused with everything from Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman to Elvis to the Rolling Stones and Ozzy Osbourne.
In the front hall, the chandelier glittering in the moonlight, and the tall windows stretched floor to ceiling on either side of the door, wavy leaded glass playing tricks on the mind. The woods beyond the drive, black in the deepening night. Aunt Fae on a tall ladder, cleaning the crystal, and Hannah watching, mesmerized, as it glittered and reflected rainbows of light onto the ceiling, walls, floor. Then, quickly, a scream. The ladder teetering. Uncle Stuart, seemingly out of nowhere, catching Fae as she fell, both of them landing in a heap. Hannah, stunned, never fully understanding what had happened, just that Fae would have been badly injured if not for Uncle Stuart. The incident cementing the idea that Uncle Stuart would always, whether he was there or not, come to save them.
Hannah told Huck these stories as they walked. He took her hand, his arm slipped around her waist. He gazed at her with wonder, as if this made her seem like a wholly new, exciting person—a whole life’s worth of experiences he’d never known existed. It was a shame how exhausting she found it.
“You’ve never said anything about any of this,” he said more than once.
Hannah could barely explain it. “I didn’t remember much. I feel like . . .” Her voice drifted as she pushed open the heavy double doors into the library. The library—one of her favorite rooms. Ceiling-high bookshelves. Ladders on each wall. Rich red velvet couches that you could sink into. Lose hours of the day in. “I feel like Brackenhill was always a dream. It was this place of safety.” She couldn’t tell him more without telling him about Wes, and something inside her resisted that. Halted, like a screeching car. “The days after my sister . . . ran away. I don’t remember them at all.”
She’d never said that out loud before.
She never talked about the morning after: Aunt Fae calling for Julia, up and down the halls. The frantic call to the police and then a man in their kitchen who looked remarkably like Reggie, and she’d had the realization that he was Reggie’s father. A distinct memory of studying his face—his skin peach and ruddy with a smooth sheen, like a doll. He’d smiled at her and said something in a sugary voice—she didn’t remember what. In retrospect, it was odd her mother never asked. Never said, Tell me every detail. Instead, Wes retrieved Hannah. Hannah told her mother Julia had left, she’d seen her leave and tried to stop her but couldn’t, and her mother went to sleep and never woke up again. Lived the rest of her life half-awake.
Hannah, on the other hand, was left with two memories: Hannah, please, her sister’s dirty hand on the doorjamb, her face white.
And the police officer with the shiny skin, speaking as though through water.
And then? Nothing.
A blank expanse of nothingness where her sister should have been. What had happened in those four days? She couldn’t seem to remember. And then watching the shrinking castle out the back window of the Buick, memories slipping from her mind like a slow leak of water.
She’d been questioned at some point, and she told the truth: she and her sister had fought, and her sister had run away. She didn’t tell them Julia had returned, dirty and pleading. She wasn’t sure if it was real. She’d had so many nightmares, sleepwalking episodes, and half-awake delusions that summer.
There had been flashes of Brackenhill in her life, even when she actively tried to avoid it: A Beatles song would bring with it the clarity of Uncle Stuart’s hands in a clay pot, a glare of concentration on his face. The smell of fresh basil would conjure Aunt Fae chopping chiffonade for a salad. But if she tried to invoke the days after Julia left, the blank nothingness would return.
The police questioned her. Her mother pleaded, quietly, desperately. She used to close her eyes at night, willing her mind to bring forth the days after Julia left. She had other snatches of memory: Aunt Fae crying, frantic, calling into the forest. Uncle Stuart, pale and stooped, coming in from outside and shaking the rain off his shoulders, eyes closed as he shook his head. Hannah didn’t remember if she herself had ever looked for her sister. Scoured the woods, their hiding spots, the trails, the river.
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