Girls of Brackenhill

by Moretti, Kate

  “Fine, you’re not saying it. I’m saying it.” Hannah huffed.

  “I’m not saying they’re unrelated. You get that, right? I’m just saying we don’t know that.”

  “Why else would Warren get so mad? Why would he threaten me?”

  “I have no idea what you said to him. If you brought up Ruby and Ellie and Fae, maybe you just pissed him off. He’s not known to be warm and fuzzy. And that’s a whole lifetime of pain. He’s at a bar. In the middle of the day. People do that to drown out hurt.”

  Hannah deflated. He was right, maybe. She spun the scrying ring around her finger. Wyatt reached out and gently pulled her hand to him, his touch sending jolts through her arm, down her spine.

  “Where did you get this?” he asked, his eyes suddenly intense, his voice low and rumbling. Almost suspicious. Hannah focused on the feeling of her hand in his.

  “I—I found it. In the shed.” Hannah felt a stab of guilt, like she was hiding something. Which, of course, she wasn’t, but something about the way Wyatt looked at her made her feel on edge. Like she should keep whatever secrets she had buried. But the truth leaked out to him anyway.

  “At Brackenhill?” Wyatt examined it, turned her hand one way, then the other. He leaned toward her to get a better look. He smelled like laundry detergent and pine and trees and earth and dirt.

  “Yes. Why?” Hannah moved to pull her hand away, but Wyatt wouldn’t let her.

  “Can I see it? Can you remove it?” he asked softly, and she complied. He pulled out his phone, shined the flashlight on the ring, and studied it. After a few moments, he sighed.

  “What’s the issue with the ring, Wyatt?” Hannah asked nervously.

  “Don’t freak out, okay? But look.” He unlocked his phone and turned it to show her. It was an evidence baggie on a plain white dry-erase background. The number 72 was scrawled next to it. Inside the baggie was a ring, a twin to her own: obsidian stone, flat with a handmade band.

  “Where did you find it?” Hannah whispered, but she knew the answer before he said it.

  “On the finger of the woman buried at Brackenhill.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Now

  The bottom dropped out of Hannah’s stomach. “And you’re absolutely sure the remains aren’t Julia?” she asked again.

  “We are one hundred percent sure.”

  “But Wyatt, don’t you think this proves that Julia’s disappearance and this body, whoever it is, are linked? They both had scrying rings. I’m wearing Julia’s.”

  “It’s possible.” He was maddeningly calm. “Listen, this doesn’t actually prove anything. Jinny sold those at her shop for five bucks, and every teenage girl in Rockwell had one. They changed with your mood. You could see the future. Conjure spirits. Some crap like that. We already know the remains are a teenage girl. I’m not sure it’s the smoking gun you think it is.” He looked impatient, his mouth set in a line.

  Hannah shrugged, acquiescing, if only a little. She let the subject drop, but only for now.

  Wyatt led her into the kitchen and insisted on making her dinner. She sat at the breakfast bar, watched him move around his small but functional kitchen.

  “I like to cook, and it’s not like I do it for more than one person with any kind of regularity,” he offered as a reason.

  Stainless steel appliances, a gas stovetop, a large copper sink, and cast-iron accents completed the cabin feel, but with more sophistication than she would have expected from a born and bred country boy. He had changed into jeans and kept the rumpled T-shirt with Hollins Ferry scrawled across the front in seventies cursive. She couldn’t bat away the sensation that this felt like a date.

  “So no dates, then?” Hannah poured a glass of white from the chilled bottle and felt herself unspooling. Maybe Wyatt was right. Maybe the rings didn’t mean anything. Then again, perhaps they did, and she’d figure it out tomorrow. Either way, her stomach grumbled, and she was suddenly eager to relax. Forget rings and bodies and Warren and visions.

  “Some.” Wyatt dipped his head as he seasoned the steak. She could see his small smile, perhaps at the fleeting memory. “I do okay for having such a small pool out here.”

  Hannah was sure that was true. “Girlfriend?” she pressed, before taking a sip. She picked up her phone and saw a missed text from Huck. Sorry I’ve been MIA. It’s been a real mess to clean up here. Literally. Around tonight? I’ll call at 9-ish. Xo

  Hannah muted the ringer.

  “Not at the moment. I dated a woman for about a year. She was an emergency room nurse.” He picked up his phone and tapped into it. The room filled with music, some folk-rock mix she’d never heard. Mellow. A quiet rain pattered at the windows.

  “ER nurses and cops make strange bedfellows. Was your pillow talk all crime and death?” Hannah mused, standing up. The kitchen was connected to the great room with only the breakfast bar between them. She could roam the entire downstairs, taking in the views, the art on the walls. Several framed album posters from seventies rock bands, an original watercolor of the exact view Hannah saw when she gazed out the north-facing wall of windows: a swirl of color, greens and blues and the gray ripple of the river, the sweeping orange sky of sunset. “Did you paint this?”

  “Ah, no. That would be the ER nurse. She was—is—an extraordinary painter.” Wyatt looked up, met her eyes, and smiled ruefully. The way he said things—“extraordinary painter”—touched a buried spot deep inside her. Everything he said was saturated with passion—not for Hannah or the ER nurse, just for life, simple things like cooking and music and art. Things Huck never talked about. She hated comparing them, hated that she was even thinking that way.

  “The nurse was a painter?” Seemed like different sides of the brain to Hannah.

  “Sure. Don’t you have a hobby?”

  Hannah thought of their nights, after work. Dinner and drinks at the pub, then back to their condo, where she and Huck would sit on opposite ends of the couch and watch nineties sitcom reruns with their own laptops flipped open on their laps. Hannah would spend the night getting the art and text positioned just so on whatever project she happened to be working on. Tweaking the copy, trying to reduce the word count to enlarge the font. Huck would be preparing invoices. The picture it evoked felt comforting to Hannah, but she knew out loud it would sound pathetic. “Just work,” was all she said instead. She loved her job, she thought. That was her hobby. But did she? persisted the small voice inside. Had she thought about it? Missed it at all in the two weeks she’d been at Brackenhill?

  “Your hobby, then, is collecting obscure seventies band posters?” And her eyes settled on a guitar resting on a tripod stand in the corner: golden wood and gleaming black neck. “You play!” she exclaimed.

  He laughed as he chopped an onion. “Yes, I play. Have since before we knew each other. You didn’t know?”

  Hannah tried to remember a guitar in his old room at his dad’s house and could only conjure his bed, the darkness of his room, his bed seemingly halo lit. The feel of his mouth. She felt herself flush; the room spun quickly and righted itself. It must have been the wine. She wasn’t used to such a heady cabernet. At home, they drank pinot grigio. Cheap, light, readily available.

  Hannah returned to the breakfast bar, and they sat in comfortable silence, Wyatt humming softly along with the radio. The windows were open, the cool air smelling of summer rain. Hannah finally spoke. “Do you believe in that kind of thing? Scrying? Fortune-telling, seeing the future, or even connecting with the spiritual world? All the stuff that Jinny peddles?”

  Wyatt paused in his chopping. “Not all of it. Some of it, maybe. I mean, don’t you ever think about how ridiculous every technological advancement must have seemed before it came to fruition? When Galileo announced that the planets rotated around the sun, not Earth, he was ostracized and called a fool. Advisers to Tony Blair in the nineties insisted that email would never catch on. As a society, we’re insanely bad at predicting what the future will late
r prove to be fact. I’m always so hesitant to say anything unproven is . . . hogwash.” He had put the knife down and was gesturing with both hands as he talked. “Also, you’ve had some pretty unexplainable things happen.” He raised his eyebrows at Hannah. He meant Brackenhill. Things he knew about: the basement, the creak of doors, maybe the red pool—she couldn’t remember if she’d ever told him that. When they were young, he’d been infatuated with all things related to Brackenhill. Then a memory she’d long forgotten: Their first summer together, the light pebbling of rocks at her window. She’d looked out and seen him below, his bike gleaming in the moonlight. How had he ridden his bike up the mountain in the dark? She opened the window and yelled out, “That’s dangerous! You’re crazy!”

  “Come to the courtyard,” he said, his voice urgent, his eyes, even from two stories above, glittering. Hannah flew down the steps and through the castle on tiptoe, her insides flipping and her smile so wide it hurt. When she got to the garden, he was nowhere to be found. She walked all around the castle grounds, whisper-calling his name, until finally, she sat on the concrete bench next to the fountain and waited. She woke up in the morning curled on the concrete, her nightgown damp with dew. Later, she pedaled furiously to town, confronted him behind the pool snack stand, her hands in fists against his chest. He’d laughed at her. “Hannah, are you out of your mind? It had to be a dream. I didn’t come to Brackenhill last night.” It never felt like a dream.

  Hannah shook loose the memory. The wine, the rain, and the music were making her sleepy and happy. She didn’t want to unearth an old, silly fight. She felt like turning off reality. Shutting real life down like her laptop: control, alt, delete. She glanced over at her phone, lying facedown on the counter, but she did not touch it.

  Wyatt served dinner: Perfectly seasoned and broiled sirloin, sliced thin on a bias, red and warm in the center. Fresh pasta with red wine sauce, tomatoes from Wyatt’s garden. Caramelized onions and fennel. While they ate, she talked about her work. He talked about his daughter, Nina. He saw her three times a week and overnight every other weekend. They didn’t keep to a formal schedule, and his ex-wife gave him carte blanche to see her whenever he wanted, as long as he called first. When he spoke about her, his cheeks took on a rosy glow. He laughed easily.

  As they cleaned up, they got back to talking about Brackenhill. The mysterious history. Her childhood—but only the happy memories. She talked about Aunt Fae building faerie houses and planting bright, bursting annuals along the garden’s borders. How she and Julia had found the storm shelter, a secret room in the middle of the forest; was there anything more enchanting than that? How they had never gotten the chance to explore it. The basement, a labyrinth of rooms that had held so much promise when she was a child—how she had known, with certainty, that they were mystical. The rooms had moved on her, reconfigured as they ran through them, getting lost, panicking and laughing and gleeful and terrified and all things at once.

  Hannah felt her insides grow warm, slippery. Her heart seemed to expand in her chest, her fingertips buzzing. The basement had been terrifying, but it had been theirs. Hers and Julia’s. Hannah had never permitted herself to remember the magic of Brackenhill, just the tragedy, and certainly never out loud. Wyatt sat at the breakfast bar, transfixed, as she cleaned up and talked—she had insisted, as it was the least she could do for the delicious dinner.

  “I’ve never heard you talk so much at once,” he murmured, his voice thick in the small kitchen. “It’s like you’ve . . . come alive.”

  And it was how she felt. Aggressively alive. Vibrating with life, in fact. Every skin cell and every nerve ending seemed to pulse.

  She stood in front of Wyatt, and from his barstool, he gazed up at her. He was so beautiful, thought Hannah, and the guilt pierced her heart.

  “I should go,” she said regretfully. The sun had long set, the stars outside the windows brighter than in any night sky she’d ever seen.

  He nodded and stood, his face inches from hers.

  She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t concentrate on anything but his mouth, his eyes, so dark they seemed black. His breathing, fast and uneven, like he was trying to steady himself.

  “What if . . . I didn’t,” Hannah said, holding his gaze, not asking a question exactly. Posing it as a statement. What would happen if she didn’t leave?

  She lifted up on her toes and kissed him. She reached out, her hands on his hips, the slightly soft pad where his jeans met his skin, her fingertips grazing under his T-shirt. He groaned softly at her touch and seemed to battle himself, his fists clenched by his sides, fingertips flexing, as Hannah trailed kisses down the side of his face, his neck, his skin warm and smooth and smelling like shaving cream—he had shaved for her. Before finally bringing his arms around her, crushing her against him. She remembered everything. Every muscle, every line and curve of his body, held the glint of memory, the same but different. No longer boyish, clumsy, and eager. Confident, adult—the disarming patience of a deliberate man.

  His hand came to the side of her face, cupping her cheek, deepening the kiss, his tongue seeking hers, and she felt like her blood might actually be on fire. She wrapped her legs around his waist, and he carried her through the house to another darkened room, and she was overcome by déjà vu: this man, his bedroom, his smell, and his touch. It all came together in a paint swirl of memory, bursting with color like the sunset behind the mountains, too bright to look at directly, so instead she closed her eyes, felt his fingertips skimming her hips, his lips on her stomach, her breasts, a gentle kiss in the hollow of her throat that sent shock waves down her spine and her legs, turning her liquid. His hands slowly patching her back together. Making her feel whole, not for the first time.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Then

  August 1, 2002

  It was a terrible cliché that the worst fight of Hannah and Julia’s relationship would be their last one.

  “There’s a picnic in town.” Julia stood in the doorway between their rooms, wearing a white, gauzy off-the-shoulder dress and red wide-brimmed hat, looking like a model. Her hair was shining, ringlets cascading down her back. So different from Hannah’s floaty wave. “For the Rockwell Fish Fry.”

  Rockwell was a fishermen’s town. The Beaverkill was the most popular trout stream in the country, and Rockwell’s entire identity came from fly-fishing. The downtown contained fly shops and bed-and-breakfasts that catered to out-of-town fishermen. At the end of every summer, the town held a fish fry.

  Hannah had been lying on her bed, reading, and she looked up, startled at her sister’s sudden appearance. It used to be their normal, but lately, an unspoken wall had been erected. The doors between their rooms remained firmly shut. She didn’t know when the divide had happened. The first week of June had been joyful, pancake breakfasts with whipped cream and strawberries from the garden and quiet games of checkers in the evening, and then slowly, Julia had changed. By the third week in July, they’d barely been speaking. Hannah could never figure it out (and she tried plenty). Julia had turned sullen, quiet, moody. She was either gone, destination undeclared; hunched over a little brown journal; or secluded up in her room.

  Julia hadn’t asked Hannah to come to town with her in weeks. She ducked out after breakfast, leaving Hannah behind. Slipping back in right before dinner. Shrugging off any questions. Rolling her eyes. Acting in general like Hannah was a pest, which she’d never done before.

  “Okay,” Hannah replied cautiously, licking her lips.

  “Are you going?” Julia inspected her nails, painted bright red and gleaming. Manicures were things that they used to do together but that now Julia did alone and Hannah had no knowledge of. She’d always worn pale pinks, sometimes purples or blues, making her hands look like a corpse’s, and Hannah would make fun of her. Now, red. So many differences in such a short time.

  “Do you want me to go?” Hannah’s voice was small, wheedling, and she felt sick of herself. No wonder
Julia preferred her friend Ellie, with the wild red hair and skimpy bikinis, or even Dana Renwick, another girl in their group, with a short blonde asymmetrical bob and fuchsia lipstick: bold and confident, with a loud mouth and brash laugh.

  “Of course,” Julia said, like nothing had changed. Hannah thought of Wyatt. He’d kissed her, fingertips grazing the skin under her T-shirt, soft moans into her mouth, her back against the concrete of the pool snack stand in the early evening after closing. She’d been riding there for weeks, helping him clean the fryers, keeping up a steady stream of chatter. When they kissed, they both smelled like old grease.

  He found everything she said interesting, sometimes even asking her days later to retell a story, something about Trina or Julia, or that Tracy or Beth had said, or about boys at school (they all seemed so childish now). She told him about going out on Beth’s dad’s boat and catching a trout once. Beth’s dad showed Hannah how to hit it on the head with a pipe, and she was so horrified she cried, and Beth’s brother laughed so hard he fell off the boat. They ate the fish later, and Hannah couldn’t even take a bite, and Beth’s gross, acne-riddled brother chased her around their backyard campfire with a square of flaky trout wobbling on the end of a fork, held together with blackened silvery skin, laughing meanly, his voice cracking.

  Wyatt was riveted the whole time.

  She followed him home, curled up in his bed at his father’s little white cape cod a block off Main Street. They taught each other about skin and touch and warmth and want and, yes, sex, too, but other things that Wyatt had never known of and Hannah had only read books about. She wondered if Julia had done this yet, felt a man’s naked legs between her thighs, the downy coating of hair on his backside. If she’d ever known how powerful it sometimes felt just to be a woman. Because that was what she was now, not a child.