Girls of Brackenhill

by Moretti, Kate

  At nine, Trina left for the bar, and Wes snored softly on the sofa. Julia had gone out with a friend—to the library, she’d said, but Hannah knew that was bullshit. Her sister was filled to the brim with secrets too.

  Hannah’s cell phone rang once, twice, then stopped. His signal. She crept downstairs to the front door and flicked the porch light.

  When she opened the front door, his smile took her breath away. He kissed her right there on the porch, so eager their teeth clashed together, and they both laughed. She shut the door softly and tiptoed right past Wes, who hadn’t moved, his eyes still closed, The X-Files playing on mute in the background.

  She hadn’t thought ahead to this part: to Wyatt seeing Wes, her little dump of a half-double house in Plymouth. Wes, his gross mouth open and the stink of his feet on her ratty plaid couch. Wyatt didn’t even flinch, just nudged her and grinned shyly. It made her blood rush.

  In her bedroom, Hannah jumped on Wyatt, her body suddenly, virulently on fire, a pulse between her legs, her hands running along his back, his backside, his legs. Hannah had never wanted so much in her life. He laughed at her, sweetly, his fingertips skimming her cheek, the nape of her neck. Innocent places that frustrated Hannah. Their kisses grew from giggly to deep to frantic.

  “I didn’t come here to get laid,” he gasped into her neck. Hannah didn’t even feel like she could talk. No one had ever done anything like this for her. Three hours in, three hours back, just for her? Trina complained she had to do it twice a summer. The simple kindness made her hormonal. Crazy for him. What she was doing to his body made her crazy for him. “Han, I don’t even have a condom.” He had taken her wrists in one hand and held them down, bent over to take a few calming breaths.

  “I can get one,” she said automatically. She knew her mother kept them in her bedside table. She couldn’t think about her mother that way—especially with Wes—but she’d seen them in there before.

  She jerked her hands out of his grip and, with a coy smile, pressed her palms against the bulge in his jeans, worked it through the fabric. He groaned, “Jesus, Hannah,” before kissing her again, tongue skimming her lips. “Okay, yes. Go.”

  In the hallway she scooted past Julia’s empty room, her footsteps silent. The door to her mother’s room was wide open, and the bedside table was closest to the door. She inched open the drawer and saw the foil squares, four in a strip. She eased out the whole strip—why not?—and slowly pushed the drawer back in.

  “What the fuck?” The voice came from the doorway. Hannah jumped back, her heartbeat wild. Wes stood in front of her, shirtless, barefoot, and Hannah looked down at his toenails, long and yellow. “Look at me. Are you stealing condoms from me?”

  “No. I was . . .” She couldn’t think. Wes barely spoke to either Hannah or Julia, rarely yelled at them. In fact, he scarcely acknowledged their existence, aside from his bedroom visits. Behind him in the hall, she saw Wyatt, eyes wide with fear.

  “You’re what? Sixteen?” She realized then that he was too drunk to know which sister she was. He covered the gap between them in a second and stood over her. He was taller than she remembered, probably over six feet. Hannah straightened her spine, met his gaze. “You’re a whore like your mother.”

  He said it quietly, which was why it came as a shock when he backhanded her in the face.

  Her jaw cracked, and she saw bursts of light. She dropped the strip of condoms and collapsed on the floor, on her knees. She heard a noise, a low keening that she realized was her own voice.

  Wyatt rushed at Wes, landed a right hook to his cheek. Wes stumbled once, his body cracked against the railing of the steps, and he fell to the ground unconscious.

  The rest of the night passed in a blur: Wyatt made her call Trina at work, who came home within the hour, mumbling about being docked pay, but stared at Wes’s limp form in the hall with a sneered lip. He hadn’t woken up.

  Wyatt had retreated to her bedroom, and Hannah claimed the punch. She even held her hand a bit for effect. It would help no one to have Wyatt discovered, Hannah reasoned to herself. Trina had enough on her plate. She doubted Wes would remember anything, and if he did and insisted that an unknown boy had hit him, Hannah would just play dumb. It wouldn’t be hard to make Wes look delusional. It would piss him off, though. Hannah bit her thumbnail.

  “What were you doing?” Trina asked Hannah, her eyes narrowed. By this time Julia had come home, and she watched the whole exchange with incredulity and horror.

  “I was looking for nail clippers.” The lie came out smooth and easy. Julia held ice to her sister’s cheek and let the tears fall down her own cheeks without wiping them away.

  “I should have been here,” Julia whispered. Hannah almost told her then. Almost confessed. To everything. Wes and his nighttime visits. Wyatt hiding in the bedroom.

  Wyatt wouldn’t leave until he was sure Hannah was okay. Hannah made every excuse she could think of to try to leave. She took ibuprofen. Let Julia fuss over her, blotting up the blood from her nose with a pile of tissues. Finally she pretended to be falling asleep on Julia’s bed, and Julia let her go.

  She found Wyatt in her bed, waiting for her. He held the ice to her face and brushed the hair from her eyes. She could barely look him in the eyes, she was so horribly embarrassed. She just wanted him to leave her alone. Leave this stupid, trashy little house. She wondered if he’d tell anyone where they lived. Wondered if they’d go back to Rockwell in June a laughingstock.

  “What will you tell your mom and sister when he wakes up?” Wyatt whispered.

  “It won’t matter. He never remembers anything. He’s falling-down drunk and knocked unconscious.” Hannah was immediately mortified at this obviously regular occurrence.

  She dozed off and on, waking only to apologize for the disaster that was her life. Wes hadn’t usually hit them—his anger was mostly aimed at Trina. Sometimes, though, he misdirected.

  “Hannah, I’m not leaving you,” he whispered. His arms came around her, and finally, she slept soundly in the circle of his body.

  When she woke up the next morning, he had gone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Now

  “I think they found Julia in the woods.” Hannah sat next to Uncle Stuart, who remained unmoving. “I think they found her bones.” She stroked his hand and remembered the scar near his ring finger, visible when he was younger but now hidden among paper-thin creases in his skin. The scar had come about the day he’d built them a tree house. It was more like a platform, not a full house, per se, in a maple fifty feet down the path that he and Hannah had picked together. He’d used a chain saw to cut a few larger branches to make room for the platform but reached for his trusty hacksaw to trim a few smaller offshoots. Julia had found them just as he started sawing, exclaimed, “Oh my God, don’t fall!” as Uncle Stuart balanced, a foot on each remaining bough. He turned his head, startled, and slipped, slicing his hand from second knuckle to wrist.

  Aunt Fae ran out, summoned by Julia, and met them in the courtyard, bandages and gauze in hand, barely batting an eyelash at the gushing blood. Hannah was reminded of Wes, the wound on his forehead pulsing red on the bathroom floor, and their mother, verging on hysterics, blotting his eyebrow with a red-soaked paper towel. Aunt Fae was impassive, clinical. She sent him back down the path with a bandaged hand and asked that he “please be more careful with a hacksaw, or you’ll chop your fingers clean off.” She’d retreated back into the castle, shaking her head.

  Hannah retold the whole story to Uncle Stuart, fingers seeking the scar, that raised red ridge, and finding nothing. She paused, let the hiss of his oxygen fill the silence. Then, “Today is Aunt Fae’s memorial. Do you know that? Can you hear me?” She studied his face. His skin was translucent, his eyelids fluttering. “Remember how I told you she passed away in a car accident?”

  His eyes opened, the whites milky, the blue almost gray, clouded with cataracts maybe. He wasn’t terribly old, but he looked skeletal. Hannah felt her br
eath catch, and her hand flew to her mouth. “Uncle Stuart, can you hear me?” she asked, louder. “It’s Hannah. Your niece?”

  Slowly his eyes met hers above the translucent green of the oxygen mask, and he nodded. Hannah reached out and squeezed his hand, and he almost imperceptibly squeezed back.

  “I’m sorry I stayed away so long,” Hannah apologized, but she wasn’t sure what for. She’d been a child. If anything, her aunt and uncle should have tried to call her, contact her. She’d still been a child. At least for a while.

  But Uncle Stuart was dying and had spent his whole life being deferential to his beloved Fae. It seemed likely their estrangement from Hannah had been Aunt Fae’s doing. But why? What could Hannah have done to drive her away, at only fifteen? She barely remembered the days between Julia disappearing, all the police combing the property, and Wes behind the wheel of the rattly Buick, coming up the driveway, stones kicking out from underneath the tires. Her mother conspicuously absent, and later, the Rockwell police making the trip to interview Trina and Hannah for the second (third?) time.

  It wasn’t until she was an adult that she’d asked herself why Trina wouldn’t have come to Brackenhill. She’d always grumbled about the drive—it couldn’t have been that, could it? Her mother rarely left the Plymouth city limits, aside from two yearly trips to Rockwell. She’d asked Wes, in the car, where her mother was, and he simply grunted, “She’s too sick to come.” Sick how? With grief?

  In the immediate aftermath, Trina refused to leave her bedroom. Then later, it seemed like she sometimes believed the narrative that emerged from Rockwell: Aunt Fae had killed Julia, but no one could prove it. The police never outright alleged it, but people talked: Fae, always eccentric and insular, had lost her mind in that stone castle and killed her niece. It seemed that Trina believed that story, too, no matter what Hannah said: “She ran away. She got scared of something; I don’t know what.” Hannah never saw anything in Aunt Fae that would lead her to believe she’d kill. Especially her niece. It never made sense. No, Julia left them. For reasons Hannah would never know. She’d long since accepted it.

  She’d stayed away initially out of deference—she thought it was what they wanted. Then after she went to college, moved away from her mother, it was out of rebellion. She’d turned angry at the long silence. After college she lived her life the way everyone does in their twenties: selfishly. Bouncing from job to job, apartment to apartment. Figuring out how to pay bills and make doctor appointments and keep plants and fish alive. Then she’d met Huck, started what felt like her real life, and thought, fleetingly, about calling them. Visiting. It always seemed like she had time to figure out her relationship with her past. It was muddled in her confusion over Julia, if she’d loved Hannah the way Hannah had loved her. There seemed to be so much to work out, so much fog to break through, that it had seemed insurmountable. And now it was silly how possible it would have been. One day, make the drive. A lifetime of questions answered.

  She should have come.

  Uncle Stuart shook his head, held up his right hand, bobbing it in the air. Hannah gently pulled the mask from his mouth so he could speak.

  “You,” he said. “You.”

  She thought at first it was an accusation, his index finger still bobbing.

  “Me, what?” she prodded gently.

  “You have nothing . . . to be sorry for.” He wheezed, his eyes fluttering. “We were so . . . very . . . sorry. It was . . . Ruby. Too much.” He fumbled with the mask, and Hannah replaced it, moved it over his mouth.

  Who was Ruby?

  His eyes fluttered shut, and she felt the loss suddenly. Intensely. An emptiness blooming in her chest. Uncle Stuart had given her a key piece to the puzzle she’d never solve now, with him barely able to utter a sentence and Aunt Fae dead. Who was Ruby? There was so much that stayed just out of reach, so many secrets to this castle, her family, her sister, her past.

  “Who’s Ruby, Uncle Stuart?”

  “She was a child. Just ten . . . an accident.” His voice garbled through the plastic.

  “Ruby was ten, Uncle Stuart? What happened to Ruby?”

  “She never got over what she did.” Uncle Stuart’s voice rumbled, barely audible, and his eyes were drooping shut. “She loved all of you so much.”

  Then he smiled.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Now

  Hannah had no idea what flowers you bought for an estranged and now deceased aunt. There wasn’t a stargazer lily specifically to say, I’m sorry everyone thinks you’re a killer, but I don’t. Not really, but maybe we should have talked about that.

  She stood in the florist’s shop—Pam’s Blossoms—the only one in town, with a clerk Hannah could only assume was Pam herself, and stared at the prearranged baskets. So many purple and pink carnations. Aunt Fae could do a better job herself. Hannah obviously should have done this earlier, but she’d never been in charge of a funeral before.

  Hannah checked her watch, an idea taking hold. Could she make it up the mountain and back down in time? Maybe. A bouquet from Fae’s own garden might be perfect if Hannah could pull it off.

  She left the shop, breathless, and ran directly into a wall of a man.

  “Whoa, slow down there. Where you rushing off to?”

  Reggie. His face broke out into a slow smile.

  “Hi, Reggie,” Hannah said, keeping her tone light. He was in black dress pants and a white button-down. A bead of sweat worked its way down his neck, behind his ear.

  “I’m glad I ran into you.” He gave a mirthless laugh. “Or you ran into me. I was hoping to get you alone for a minute.”

  “Oh? Why’s that?” Hannah checked her watch. She only had an hour before the service, and Huck was waiting for her back at Brackenhill. She cursed her own lack of forethought. She could have done this yesterday. The days seemed to be blending together.

  Reggie leaned forward, his shoulder touching hers. His breath smelled like mint and cigarettes. “I’ve thought about you a lot over the years, you know? The mysterious Brackenhill sisters.”

  “You don’t act like a cop,” Hannah said, her voice reedy, betraying her own nerves. Reggie always set her teeth on edge. His hooded eyes felt like they were dissecting her and finding her lacking. His permanently curved lips felt like mockery, except when his gaze got caught on her mouth. Hannah could never tell if he was trying to flirt with her or scare her. Perhaps with Reggie, the line between was too thin.

  “Well, I’m on your aunt’s case with Detective McCarran. Sorry, Wyatt.” His voice took on a sarcastic edge.

  Hannah put some distance between them until her back was flush with a lamppost, and she realized too late she was cornered. Reggie took a step forward, closing the gap.

  “There’s a lot I never understood about that summer. Wyatt is a steel trap about all of it.”

  Good, Hannah wanted to say but didn’t.

  Reggie ran his index finger down Hannah’s bare arm, bringing gooseflesh to the surface. He didn’t seem inclined to let her go anytime soon.

  “What did you want to know?” Hannah closed her eyes. If she told him what he wanted to know, would he let her leave? Why did Rockwell and all the people in it seem so intent on holding her captive?

  “For starters, were you and Wyatt really a thing? I always thought you made that up. A little girl with a crush.”

  “I was fifteen. Hardly a little girl.” Hannah hated the defensive edge in her tone, playing into Reggie’s mind games.

  “Then what your sister did was pretty low, even for her.”

  “What does that mean?” Hannah’s nostrils flared. The anger felt like a fist on her throat.

  “Well, it was no secret she was a bitch.” Reggie leaned against her, his lips to her ear. Much too close, too intimate. “But to kiss her sister’s boyfriend?”

  “She didn’t know. No one knew,” Hannah said, her voice tight and garbled. She felt paralyzed by Reggie, his bulk, his smell, her innate fear of him. She gently pu
shed him back with her fingertips, and he took her hint. Stepped out of her space, pushed his hands into his pockets, and cocked his head. And too late, she added softly, “He wasn’t my boyfriend, anyway.”

  “Right. And Wyatt didn’t tell anyone. Which is kind of . . .” He let his voice trail off. “Shitty, right?”

  “I don’t know, Reggie. It was seventeen years ago. I think I’m over it by now.” Hannah faked a laugh, trying to bring some levity into the conversation. She looked at her watch pointedly.

  “I wouldn’t be. I mean, how mad must you have been?” He smiled at her again, and she couldn’t help but notice how white his teeth were, how pretty he was. Like a movie star. She wondered if women still fawned over him the way all the girls had. His skin had kept the sheen of his youth. His eyes were bright green, his hair still thick and blond, his cheeks still ruddy.

  “I was mad at the time, Reggie, sure. But we were sisters.” Hannah shrugged as if saying, That’s what happens.

  “I wonder, though,” he said amiably, quietly, “were you mad enough to kill her?”

  Hannah recoiled in horror, turned her head away from him, the tears springing to her eyes hot and quick.

  “Is that what people think?” Hannah choked out.

  “I don’t know what everyone else thinks. People seem to buy into the theory that your aunt went crazy. Maybe she tried to run away, and your aunt found her and snapped.” Reggie’s voice was still lazy and slow. “People snap all the time for different reasons. We see it a lot.”

  “No one snapped.”

  “Are you sure? I mean, who could blame you.” Reggie stepped back, letting her go, finally. He removed a toothpick from his pocket and stuck it between his teeth. “I’ll see you at the service, I assume?”

  Hannah edged sideways, keeping Reggie in her peripheral view. Afraid to turn her back to him. Her car was parked right up the street. She could make out the back end, the curved taillights of her older Honda.