Huck stopped chopping. Turned to face her. “Then who is it?”
“They don’t know yet. It’ll be a few days.”
“That seems . . . bizarre, right? Unlikely?”
She felt herself turn on him, just that quickly. Stupid, really, but she couldn’t help it. “Well, unless Aunt Fae and Uncle Stuart were murderers.” It came out snappy, almost rude, and she felt immediately sorry. The underlying question had been undeniable, and of course it was unlikely. She shook her head in apology.
Huck held up a hand. “Of course not, Han.” Then, “How did you find out?”
“I saw Wyatt in town.”
“Wyatt, then?” If Huck had noticed the way she referred to Wyatt, not Officer McCarran, he hadn’t brought it up before. But now she could see it dawning on him, how personally she seemed to know him, how attached she might have been to this town and the people in it. He took a sip of wine, popped a slice of cheese from the counter into his mouth. Tilted his chin up to watch her, too carefully, she thought. “And who is Wyatt again? To you, I mean. Besides just the officer in this case. I know that’s not the whole story.”
Huck wasn’t a dummy and wasn’t jealous. There was no reason to keep their history from him, except that she already had. That was the only sin: she’d lied by omission once.
“Wyatt was my first boyfriend,” Hannah said, breaking a grape from its stem, squeezing it between her thumb and forefinger, going for nonchalance.
Huck played along, giving her a teasing smile. “Intriguing, Ms. Maloney. This is the first I’m hearing of this. Although I’ll be honest—I had an inkling. Y’all act like skittish mice around each other.”
“Well, I was fifteen. And it was only for two summers. We didn’t even keep in touch when I left.” Or was forced out, Hannah thought but did not say. She was intent on keeping up the act: Wyatt had meant nothing to her then, meant nothing to her now. She affected a look of boredom. Changed the subject. “It’ll be maybe two weeks until they can ID the body. Maybe more if they can’t find a hit through dental records in missing persons.”
“And then what?” Huck leaned back against the countertop, swirled his wineglass.
Now it was Hannah’s turn to play along, pretend they were casually discussing the weather, the lack of rain. “I don’t know. I mean, I can’t imagine this girl isn’t related to Julia’s disappearance.” Then, a quick thought: she hadn’t meant to hide it. “Huck, she was pregnant. When she died.”
“Really?”
“See, it’s connected. I can feel it.” Hannah shook her head, staring at the wineglass in her hand. “It’s connected to Julia.”
“How?”
She resented Huck pressing the issue. She wanted him to go along to get along, like he always had, always did with her. “What do you mean, how?” Sometimes she wondered if he was stupid. Quickly, she felt bad for thinking it. But honestly, “how”? Maybe she was just tired. She never used to be so impatient with him. She took a deep breath and a swig of wine. When she answered again, she kept her voice level. “Well, my sister goes missing. Seventeen years later they find the body of a pregnant teenage girl, killed around the same time my sister disappeared, on our family property. How can it not be connected, in some way? Seems like a no-brainer to me.”
“Only if your aunt and uncle are involved.” To Huck it was a thought exercise, a playful game; true for most things in his life.
Hannah felt another surge of anger, then tempered it. “No. You can access the castle grounds from the back, up the embankment on the west side. It leads down to a road.” She pointed south. Then pivoted, pointed west, toward the courtyard, where the sun was glowing gold through the trees. “The river is there.”
“So you think someone killed a teenager, then hiked her body up a steep embankment to bury her at Brackenhill. For what purpose?”
“I don’t know!” Hannah exclaimed, exasperated. “If I knew, obviously we’d know who it was, right? What if . . . this is crazy, but what if Julia killed the girl and buried her? And she ran away to hide from the crime? Or! What if someone else killed the girl and Julia saw it, then ran away to stay safe?”
“Like witness protection?” Huck turned his back, resumed his chopping. He seemed tired of the conversation. “I mean, maybe. Sure. Hannah, there’s something else we should talk about.”
She didn’t respond, didn’t have to. Knew where he was going before he said it. At her feet, Rink whined, and she scratched his ears.
“I have to go home.” He ran a hand through his hair, his back still to her. “It’s coming into fall planting season. I have clients to keep. The crew’s been keeping up with the maintenance clients: the mowing, hedge trimming, weeding. But there are incoming projects I have to handle.”
She knew he was right—Huck did a lot of the design work, and it was his business. She thought back to the first night she’d met him, at the bar. All his friends in suits and ties, working in finance jobs in DC. They’d been harried, lined in the face, their mouths pinched in permanent fury: at traffic, pedestrians, clients, the market, their bosses, their idiot bosses. And then Huck, his face relaxed, his nails dirty, his eyes laughing. He’d left their world, the suits and ties and washed-out faces, to pursue his own path, to be outdoors, his own idiot boss. He’d been one of them, once upon a time, in finance. He’d gone to college for business administration, taken the requisite associate job working sixty hours a week right out of school. Left to “dig in the dirt,” they’d mocked. Hannah had gone to dinner with the whole crew and their wives, new babies. They made twice Huck’s salary now and had all looked exhausted.
“I can’t leave yet,” Hannah said. She had a job to return to too. They’d been patient so far, but Patrice, her boss, had left her a slightly huffy voice mail yesterday morning, asking when she thought she’d be returning.
She and Huck had a life together in Virginia. They had a couple of friends. “Stuart needs placement. He’s on a waiting list. I can’t leave him alone in the house, even if they could afford around-the-clock care. I just can’t. And I have to see what comes of . . .” She motioned toward the courtyard, toward the embankment, the burial site.
“Right.” He turned to face her, eyes sliding sideways out the window across the garden. “I am having a little trouble understanding, I guess. I mean, if it’s not Julia, then why do you have to stay? Stuart I understand, but that could be wrapped up in a few days; who knows? But the body, well, that could be weeks.”
“Yeah, I can’t stay weeks,” Hannah agreed, but she knew as soon as the words popped out that it was a lie. She’d stay as long as she could, sacrificing her job, Huck, everything if she had to. It was a lightning-quick realization: She’d been so long in the dark, the events of that summer shrouded in secrecy and jumbled together in a confusing clot of memory, never knowing what was real and what was imagined or even wished for. The days immediately afterward a blur. Her clearest image was of her aunt and uncle, their faces stricken, out the back window of the car, growing smaller and smaller until they disappeared completely, as Wes sped away down the winding hill faster than necessary, her heart in her throat, unsure, uncertain, and wholly out of control.
She would not be made to leave again. Not without the whole truth.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Then
June 22, 2002
“I’m ready to go home,” Julia announced, standing in the doorway between their bedrooms.
“What? Why?” Hannah had been lying facedown on her bed, reading Little House on the Prairie for the eleventh time. It was a baby book, but she loved it. She’d read the whole series last summer and left all the books in her room at Brackenhill. Her eyes were drifting shut. She hadn’t been sleeping well: nightmares some nights, and others, well, she’d started sleepwalking. She was going to talk to Julia about it, except her sister already hated it here now. Hannah didn’t want to give her more reasons to want to leave.
“It sucks here this summer.” Julia pouted. Sh
e had a Blow Pop in her cheek and spun it so it clattered against her teeth. “Something is different. I hate it. Everything just feels wrong, and I think Aunt Fae hates us.”
“That’s the craziest thing you’ve ever said.” Hannah stared at her sister, who had a flair for the dramatic, her moods changing on a whim.
Julia sat on the edge of Hannah’s bed, her feet crossed daintily at the ankles. “No, it’s not. She’s mean, at least to me. And I can tell there’s something wrong with her. I swear to God, the other day she was talking to me about school, and she opened her mouth, and a fly came out.”
“Julia!” Hannah slammed the book shut.
“I’m more in tune with this kind of thing than you are. I can tell when people are wrong. Put together wrong.” She got up, walked to the window, turned the latch, and gave the glass a push. The windows clattered outward, against the stone. “I know you think I’m crazy. You don’t understand, though. I see things that you don’t. It started last summer. This place is not nice.”
“What do you see?” Hannah sat up, interested but not scared.
“People. Voices. I have dreams. Sometimes singing. Or laughing.” Julia’s voice was low, her hair lifting in the breeze. “Like children.”
“You’ve been listening to the kids in town too much. They say it’s haunted. That Aunt Fae is a witch.”
“Well, what if she is?” Julia leaned back against the window frame, posed just so, as though for a portrait. Julia always acted as though she were being photographed, tilting her head to display the strong jawline, her eyes downcast, her chin jutted out. Hannah thought it must be exhausting to live in a constant state of self-awareness. Worry about how every small movement would be perceived, when it was likely that no one was paying any attention to you anyway.
Julia was poised, dainty, while Hannah was robust, loud. Her mother sometimes called her a bull in a china shop, stomping her way through life.
Hannah sighed, flipped her book back open. “Aunt Fae isn’t a witch. You are not hearing children. You are listening to your dumb teenage friends, and you have an overactive imagination.”
Julia shot her a glare and stormed back to her room. Hannah heard her sister leave out the back door and hurried to the window in time to see Julia take off down the front path on her bike.
Aunt Fae would kill her if she knew she rode her bike into town alone. That path grew narrow and steep in the middle, and they had to hoist their bikes up the embankment over the guardrail and ride on the road, winding and no shoulder, for a quarter mile. Aunt Fae would flip out.
Hannah pulled a towel from the hall closet and ran a bath. Submerged up to her chin, she could think. Was Julia right? If she was honest with herself, did Brackenhill feel haunted? She thought about the labyrinth, the creak of doors and floors in the middle of the night, the red pool (which Uncle Stuart had explained but was still odd).
The water suddenly felt freezing, even in the un-air-conditioned bathroom. Hannah stood, pulled the plug, dried herself off, and stopped.
“Jules?” she called into the hall. The shifting air felt like a person in the room. The hum of a fan down the hall. In the distance, Uncle Stuart’s whistle: “I Wanna Be Like You,” Louis Prima, he would have told her. Jaunty and bouncy.
She blotted at her hair, walked back into her bedroom, and let out a single piercing scream.
On her bed, neatly in the center, was a white lace-up baby shoe. It hadn’t been there when she’d gone into the bathroom. In fact, she’d never seen it before in her life.
Aunt Fae rushed into the bedroom. “What on earth are you carrying on about?” she scolded, her voice impatient. “It’s always something with you!”
“Where did that come from?” Hannah pointed at the shoe, and Aunt Fae’s face went white.
“Where did you get that?” she demanded, her thick fingers snatching the white bootie off the bedspread and tucking it into her apron pocket.
“I didn’t get it anywhere! I went to take a bath.” Hannah felt indignant. Julia never got blamed for anything.
Hannah, did you break the vase?
Hannah, did you spill on the carpet?
Hannah, where is your sister?
Even when it was Julia, it was Hannah.
Aunt Fae propped her hands on her hips and glared at Hannah, her face twisted in anger. Hannah had never seen her like that, and she tucked the towel tighter around her chest, shrank back against the wall.
“I’ll trust you not to play a prank like that again; do you understand me?”
“I didn’t play a prank!” Hannah’s voice pitched up, louder than she intended, but it was so frustrating. If anyone had played a prank, it was Julia. And anyway, it was a pretty weird prank that didn’t mean anything to anyone.
Julia, who rode to town. After talking about child ghosts. A voice inside Hannah’s head would not shut up.
“Hannah, please,” Aunt Fae said, sighing. “Will you please just lower your voice?”
Julia, Aunt Fae, her mother. Everyone had a habit of sighing her name instead of saying it.
Aunt Fae turned and left then, her heavy footsteps in the hall and then the steps down.
“Yeah, well, Julia rode her bike into town!” Hannah called after her, which admittedly wasn’t helping her “Julia left the shoe” cause.
“That’s enough, Hannah!” Aunt Fae called back up to her.
It was always enough; that was the problem with Hannah.
She was so busy being angry with Julia that she never stopped to ask herself why Aunt Fae cared so damn much about the shoe in the first place.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Now
Hannah rolled the small canister of pepper spray between her thumb and forefinger and tucked it into her jeans pocket. The brown house next to the old railroad station. Looks like kindling.
The siding on the brown house was asbestos shakes, cracked and broken, hanging in some cases by a single tacked corner. The upstairs window was broken and covered with cardboard and duct tape. The porch, its middle sunken and uneven, creaked under Hannah’s weight.
She knocked, hesitantly at first, then increasing in volume and pressure until she was pounding on the door. She was crazy to be here, at Warren Turnbull’s house.
Then why was she here? She didn’t know. Rattling around the house, waiting to hear from hospice centers, trying to avoid Alice, and skulking around like a living version of a Brackenhill ghost was making Hannah crazy. All Huck wanted to do was read or cook or walk in the woods, and if she spent too much time with him, he’d start asking when they could leave.
Besides, Hannah was following the next logical step in what felt like a rogue investigation into her sister’s disappearance, her aunt’s possible murder, and the unknown remains in the forest. The only clue she had was Warren Turnbull, so here she was. Had he and Aunt Fae kept in touch? Why wouldn’t he divorce her? Huck would have told her, in no uncertain terms, that this was a bad idea. Warren was possibly violent, evil—what had Jinny called him? “Devoid of soul.” Well, so what? She worked in advertising.
“You won’t find Warren there, if that’s who you’re looking for.” The voice behind her was thin, reedy, and Hannah turned, her hand at her throat.
The woman was old, maybe in her eighties, and stood on the street with her hands on her hips. The closest house was a hundred feet away, a small gray peeling saltbox down the alley. From where Hannah stood, she could see the front screen hanging open, a black-and-white cat watching them.
“Why’s that?” Hannah asked, her hand dropped to her side, a throb traveling up her arm.
“He’s at Pinker’s down the river.” The woman shook her head. “Spends all day there and has for . . .” She looked up at the sky, calculating, then back at Hannah. “Over twenty years, I’d say.”
“Do you know Warren well?” Hannah took a step toward her, her eyes narrowing.
“Sure, this is Rockwell. We all know each other well. All our stories, all our tragedies. But
I know Warren better than most.” She eyed Hannah suspiciously, took in her jeans, her denim button-down, the thin purse slung over her shoulder. “You’re not a cop or something, are ya? He hasn’t done anything, has he?”
“No, I’m not a cop. I don’t know if he’s done anything. I wanted to talk to him about . . .” Hannah stopped, her voice fading. What exactly? Aunt Fae, sure. Ruby? Their marriage? Stupid to come without a plan, walking right into violence and rage and pure evil, according to Jinny, who could be powerfully persuasive. But also, a voice in her head whispered, a tad dramatic.
“About what?” Then realization dawned. “Fae Webster?”
It was Hannah’s turn to be suspicious. “How’d you know that?”
“Rockwell, dear. Fae dies; a stranger bangs on her Warren’s door a week later. I ain’t always the brightest bulb—and sometimes I play dumb just to mind my own beeswax, you know—but this one was a gimme.” She approached Hannah, studied her face. “You’re one of those nieces, ain’t ya. The one that didn’t get killed.”
“She ran away,” Hannah replied automatically, her heart at a standstill.
“Uh-huh. We’ve had a million of ’em. Runaways from this town. Mostly they come back. Did your sister ever come back?”
“No.” The lump in Hannah’s throat grew—she felt choked by it.
“Well then.” The woman nodded once as if that were settled then. “Do you want to come down for tea?”
“Tea?” Hannah repeated, dim witted and slow.
“Sure. You want to know about Warren. I’m an old biddy with nothing but time and no one who cares about all the gossip I know.” She winked then. Hannah realized she was a bit younger than she’d thought, maybe seventies. She was dressed in a T-shirt and jeans. In her hands she twisted a pair of gardening gloves. “Besides, Warren is my cousin.”
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