Then, months later, Julia’s purse was found on the riverbank downstream, a small denim backpack of a purse that she’d always carried. It held her license and a waterlogged lipstick, the zipper still closed. It still hadn’t been enough for the police to charge anyone. That was when the rumors in town had started. Fae was unhinged. Fae had been driven insane by Brackenhill. Fae had killed Julia in her sleep, for reasons unknown. What else could have happened? When her mother had told her that, years later, Hannah had laughed. The whole idea was preposterous.
Upstairs, she skipped Julia’s room entirely. Instead, her hand settled on the doorknob between Stuart’s room and her own and found it locked. It had always been locked, she remembered.
“I don’t have keys, but I’m sure they’re somewhere,” Hannah offered softly, the crystal knob still tight in her hand. Huck shrugged, asking only if the locked rooms were empty. Hannah had never known. She’d only asked about them once, never tried to pry open the doors.
“Julia knew, though.” Hannah closed her eyes, tried to remember how she knew that. Her sister had said it once: “I know what’s in one of the locked rooms.” Hannah hadn’t wanted to hear it. It was in that last summer of madness, Julia suspicious at every locked door, every whisper between their aunt and uncle. It had made Hannah crazy.
Back in the kitchen she stopped talking, the silence settling around them like a fog. The night had fallen, and the kitchen had grown dark, the only light emanating from the muted glow of the pendant above the sink.
Huck reached out his hand, cupping the steel knob on the basement door. “What’s down here?”
Her chest swelled instantly with fear, anticipation, excitement. The feeling preceding actual memory.
The labyrinth. Julia. The feeling of childhood, fleeting, magical, dangerous. What if she took Huck, descended the steps, and found a mundane set of rooms, immobile, perhaps odd or strange but not extraordinary in any way? What then? It seemed, at once, crushing and terrifying. She felt protective of the memory then. That afternoon with Julia, when reality had seemed to slip, when they’d both found magic at the same time and felt united in their excitement and shared terror.
She said the only thing she could that felt true. “We don’t go down to the basement anymore.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Then
June 1999
The door that led to the basement was in the kitchen. Aunt Fae and Uncle Stuart didn’t care if they played down there. The cement walls were painted white; the floor was packed dirt. It seemed unremarkable as far as basements went. The first few rooms held cardboard boxes stuffed to the gills with picture frames and old notebooks, cookbooks, smaller boxes. Things they didn’t know what to do with. Seemed a lot like their basement at home.
The rooms in the basement were small, about the size of a large closet. But the thing that made it interesting was that there were just so many of them. Like little horizontal blocks stacked sideways, connected in a multitude of ways so that each room might have two or three doors in it. Which made no sense—why not just have one large room? Or even, like upstairs, one hallway with storage rooms on either side?
“Who would build a basement like this?” Hannah asked. She was so close to Julia that when Julia stopped, Hannah would bump into her back. She could hear her sister’s huffs of frustration every time she gave her a “flat tire” by stepping on the heel of her sneaker.
They were trying to get to the “end” because they never had before. They’d push through two, maybe three doors before doubling back, squealing in terror. What was at the end of all the little rooms? They had no idea. What if no one knew? Hannah had wondered. What if no one had ever made it all the way through? Julia told her that was dumb, it was probably just a regular old cement wall, but the point was, Who knows?
At the foot of the basement steps, you could only turn left. To the right was a solid white wall. From there you could enter a succession of three sequential rooms, each with doors at both ends and one on the right or left wall. In the past, they’d split up and tried to find each other again.
They hadn’t yet gotten past the three sequential rooms because they hadn’t been lit. They would have had to bring a flashlight and more courage than either was prepared to muster. The second room of the three had four doors—four!—and if they each exited through the sides, they’d meet up in room three.
But the strangest thing: once they’d walked back to room two from room three, only to find the room now had two doors instead of four. The doors were all old, wooden, and paneled, with strangely fanciful door handles: some crystal, some shiny metal, some old, painted. Like they’d been installed at different times, different centuries maybe.
“Unless we screwed it up, right?” asked Julia, who was fourteen and, Hannah loathed to admit, smarter.
“We didn’t screw it up,” Hannah insisted and walked them back to the steps, to the starting point, again. Room one, room two (four doors), exit either side, meet in room three, and walk back to two. Two doors instead of four. It was difficult to envision what rooms existed beyond the walls of the small room they were in. But still, not impossible. They were smart children; everyone told them that.
“Let’s just go straight through until we can’t go straight anymore and see what happens,” Julia suggested, and so Hannah followed her sister. They pushed through one door, then another, doors alternately on the right and straight ahead, until it felt like they were going in circles. Hannah’s job was to count.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 . . . dead end, back to 6, 8.
“I fouled up the count,” Hannah said finally. Were they in room nine or ten?
Julia huffed at her, and they retraced their steps back to the beginning, to the staircase that led them upstairs to the library hallway.
“I have an idea!” Julia exclaimed and bounded up the steps, only to return a moment later with a stack of index cards and a marker. “I’ll hold the flashlight; you just number the cards and leave them in the room. When we come to the dead end, just call it whatever number and move on to the next number, okay?”
Julia really was the brighter one. So smart.
Hannah began again with counting, this time with documentation (a word Mr. Fare, her sixth-grade science teacher, had spent so much time on this year—she felt proud of using it over the summer). She wrote carefully, as her mother was always yelling at her for sloppy handwriting.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 . . . dead end, back to 6, 8.
Hannah pushed open the door on the far side of eight. Not the door they’d come through (six).
There was a card on the floor. Room five.
Not possible—they hadn’t gone in a circle.
“What the hell.” Julia let a rare curse fly out. They retraced their steps. Eight, six, and then three, four, one, two. Then the stairwell. It was all out of order. Either the cards had moved—stuck on their sneakers, maybe?—or the rooms had.
“I don’t understand what’s happening.” Hannah stomped a foot, dirt billowing below her sneaker. It made no sense. They collected all the cards and started over.
“This time, we won’t go backward. Only forward, okay?” Julia instructed. “We’ll get to the end and see what happens.”
Hannah renumbered the cards up to thirty and then ordered them so all she had to do was drop them. They started off again. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 . . . dead end. The air had begun to smell like must and something foul and felt still, cooler, like they’d been descending downward, except they hadn’t. She didn’t think so, anyway. Everything felt the same level. Back to 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 . . . dead end, back to 11, 13.
Thirteen was a quarter the size of the other rooms, barely enough space for both girls, and Hannah could feel Julia’s hot breath on her neck. The door shut behind them, and Hannah screamed. She could reach out, past her sister, with both hands and touch cool concrete in all directions. The flashlight dimmed and flickered, and Julia caught her breath, which was starting to come in funny starts a
nd stops anyway.
“Back out, Hannah,” Julia ordered, her voice pitched and wobbly with panic. The room felt like a coffin, and Hannah thought of a documentary about being buried alive she had seen on television once—how they used to attach bells to the outside of coffins. People could pull a string, and a gravedigger would come dig them out if the bell rang. She shuddered, and suddenly it was hard for her to breathe too. Hannah’s breath came in panicked gasps, and she started to cry.
Julia grabbed her arm. “You can be scared, but don’t you ever show it. You’re a rock, you hear me?”
Hannah turned, the doorknob right at her back. She tried to push, then pull; the doorknob wouldn’t give.
The door was locked.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Now
She woke at three.
Huck snored gently next to her, facedown, his arms under his pillow. The room was hot; the castle was not air-conditioned, and by August it could get insufferable. A breeze lifted the curtains, and Hannah had the sense of being watched. She sat up, eyes scanning the room. Everything looked as she remembered it: white chenille coverlet with long ivory fringe, deep-walnut four-poster bed with oversize armoires on either side of the room. The floor was heart pine—variable-width planks with square nails. The doorway was vaulted, and the heavy wooden door swung open, soundless.
In the doorway stood Uncle Stuart. Alert, awake, dressed in the way Hannah remembered him: khaki pants and a deep-green bush shirt, with Velcro pockets and sleeves rolled up to his forearms. He motioned to Hannah, Come here, his smile reaching his eyes. His hair gray, salt and pepper, not white. His face lined but not gaunt.
She stood and followed him down the hall, down the stone steps, and into the foyer. He moved with the grace of a healthy fifty-year-old man. He didn’t speak. She followed him through the kitchen and out the side door, into the courtyard. She double stepped to keep up, through the garden, down the stone path. Hannah walked quickly, her feet bare, her nightgown snagging on branches and sticks clinging to her hair. Stuart led her past the pool and to the edge of the forest to the path that led to the embankment and then the Beaverkill. He navigated the embankment deftly in his well-worn hiking boots, descending the way he’d shown her when they were small—sideways, long step, short step. She followed him barefoot and yet felt no pain.
The forest was dark, but she could see Uncle Stuart’s hair, bright in the moonlight.
“Uncle Stuart,” Hannah said, not sure what was real. Was this a dream? She tried to wake up.
He turned and smiled again, his eyes crinkling and the laugh lines deepening around his mouth. She felt a sting in the back of her throat and wondered if she’d finally, finally cry.
Slowly, he lifted his index finger to his lips, hushing her. With his other hand he pointed to the riverbank. The river was low; it hadn’t rained in three weeks.
On the sandy hill stood a girl. Her hair long and shining, blonde curls in ringlets, wild around her pale face. Even from this distance Hannah knew her eyes would be blue, her mouth shaped like a heart, her nose rod straight, without Hannah’s characteristic ridge. When Hannah stood in front of her, she could barely breathe.
“Julia,” Hannah said, her voice husky. She looked seventeen. She wanted to fling her arms around her sister but knew now it must be a dream. “You’re dead,” Hannah said, trying to wake herself up. She’d read that you couldn’t dream and feel pain. She pressed her toe into a pointed rock, felt the sharp sting.
Julia reached out, touched her hand, and tugged her gently into the river. The water in this stretch was pooling, slow and lazy. Rapids were upstream and down, but here, behind the castle, had always been meant for swimming.
Hannah felt the lump in her throat, larger now: What she wouldn’t give for the dream to be real. For Julia to be here with her. She squeezed her hand; Julia squeezed back. Touched her cheek. Her fingertips felt warm, substantive, alive.
Hannah turned Julia’s hands over and saw the dried blood, her fingertips raw, her palms shredded.
“Julia!” she exclaimed, but Julia gently pulled her hands away, a finger to her lips.
“Hannah, please,” she said, and Hannah felt the tingle of memory. Her sister’s dirt-streaked face, her hand on the white doorway, her mouth open, pleading.
Julia waded into the water, her dress, a pale-yellow bathing suit cover-up, billowing up around her. A laugh burbled out, and Hannah finally remembered her laugh, the thing she’d been trying to remember for what seemed like a year. Julia was her old self again, not the tightly coiled version of herself from that last summer. Not the secretive, angry, bitter sister. She kicked off the bottom of the shallow riverbed, the water spraying Hannah, and Hannah touched her cheek.
“It’s time for you to go now.” Julia stood in front of Hannah, somber, her hands on Hannah’s shoulders. She pointed into the distance, and Hannah turned to see Uncle Stuart lingering on the embankment, waving her in. Julia leaned in, kissed her sister’s forehead, and whispered, “Find the green door.”
“What does that mean?” Hannah asked, her mind racing. What green door? There weren’t any green doors in the castle. “Julia! What does that mean?”
Julia just pointed to Uncle Stuart and shooed Hannah with her hands. She smiled, waded back into the river, lay back, her hair floating around her. Hannah turned to see Uncle Stuart, arms waving frantically now, and glanced back at the river. Julia was gone.
Hannah followed Uncle Stuart back up the embankment, up the path, back to the pool, through the courtyard garden, in through the kitchen door. She followed him down the hall, through the foyer, up the concrete winding stairs to the second floor, down the hallway meant for cartwheels, to the turret room, her room. He opened her bedroom door, and she paused, gazed up at him, grateful and happy to be given the gift of her sister, even if only in a dream. Grateful for a few minutes with her dying uncle the way she remembered him: loving, robust, protective. Uncle Stuart kissed her forehead, bopped the crown of her head with a gentle closed fist, and she smiled. He turned and shuffled down the hall, back to his room.
Hannah crawled into bed, curled into the curve of Huck’s body, his steady breathing lulling her back to sleep in seconds. As she drifted, she wondered, What was real?
In the morning, Hannah woke to the smell of fresh coffee and a cool swath of sheet where Huck should have been. She checked her phone on the bedside table. It was ten o’clock, later than she’d slept in years. She had an appointment with Uncle Stuart and Aunt Fae’s estate lawyer today at noon.
Hannah tossed back the bedspread and quickly but quietly eased open the door. She crept down the hall and around the corner. The door to Uncle Stuart’s room was cracked, and Hannah nudged it, peering inside. Alice would be coming soon, if she hadn’t already. The steady hiss of a breathing tube, the click of the pulse-ox machine. She eased the door shut and padded back to the bathroom in her hallway. Hannah ran the water for the shower while sending Huck thought vibes to bring her a cup of coffee. In their house back in Virginia, she could have simply called down the steps. Not so much in the castle.
The dream was just a dream, then. Of course it was, right? What else would it be? She felt silly. She had wondered quickly if Stuart had died in the night, the dream his way of saying goodbye. She’d heard stories about that. It sounded nice, actually. Hannah had never had the opportunity. Maybe that was what the dream was about: a goodbye from Julia, seventeen years later.
She stripped off her nightgown and was stepping into the shower when she noticed her feet. She sat, hard, on the bathroom tile and looked at the bottoms, the heels, one and then the other. Caked in dirt and scratched, not deep but surface cuts, painless, thin streaks of blood from heel to ankle.
Like she’d been walking in the woods barefoot.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Now
Two days after Rink found the jawbone in the woods, Wyatt knocked on the front door with a warrant, as promised. Alone this time, for which Hannah was g
rateful. Hannah had never understood Reggie Plume, then or now, and he always seemed to demand something of her, something unsaid and primal. Hannah knew, or could sense, even as a young teen that what lay beneath his smooth exterior was not a good person, as if at a cellular level he was put together wrong.
Wyatt brought an excavation crew and a forensic team and talked amiably to Huck, who led his team back to the spot in the woods where Rink found the jawbone. Hannah watched the two men stride across the courtyard from her bedroom window: Huck towering a foot above Wyatt, Wyatt motioning with his hands and speaking with muted purpose. Hannah felt the swirl of emotion in the pit of her stomach: fear of what they’d find in the woods, years and layers of earth being turned over and unburied, secrets exposed—amid a rush of love for Huck, who had only risen to each occasion since he’d been here with the grace and humility she’d come to expect, and an uneasy longing to know the person Wyatt had become, the man he’d grown into. Wondering how different he was from the boy she had known.
After that first day at the pool, Hannah and Julia had ridden into town every day, parked their bikes outside the diner, chained them to a light post, and walked with bathing suits, towels, and beach bags to the pool (Wyatt’s pool, as Hannah had come to think of it). Julia dropped her stuff in a heap and wandered off to find her friends, leaving Hannah to set up.
Hannah felt bereft at her sister’s sudden disinterest in her but also a building excitement at her own secret budding friendship with the redheaded boy in the refreshment stand. Her sister and her newfound friends wouldn’t touch french fries with a ten-foot pole, so it was easy to keep their meetings clandestine. She hadn’t pinpointed why she thought Julia would disapprove; Hannah just knew that she would. He was older, seventeen, she’d learned. But their friendship was so weightless, easy. The age gap felt like nothing. Julia wouldn’t treat it like nothing—she treated everything like something, especially when it came to Hannah. Even when Hannah had brought home a D on an algebra test, it wasn’t their mother who pitched a fit; it was Julia, ranting around her room. “A D! Do you know you need GOOD GRADES to get into college, and you need COLLEGE to be able to leave this dump of a town? I can’t take care of you forever. Get your head out of your ass, Hannah Marie.” Their mother had pressed her fingers down on the test on the table, tapping the red circled letter a few times, and said simply, “I want more for you, Hannah.” She’d pointed to her PJ Whelihan’s uniform, her name tag. “You are better than me. Don’t do this.” And then a crash from upstairs sent her scurrying up to Wes, who had fallen in the bathroom. His forehead spurted blood on the white linoleum while Hannah stood in the doorway, stunned at both the bright red against the dingy white floor and the idea that her mother could move so fast. She remembered wondering, in that moment, if her mother loved her stepfather or just felt obligated to keep him from killing himself.
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