Girls of Brackenhill

by Moretti, Kate

  “Well, I don’t know why. I’ve no reason to lie to you. I don’t believe your aunt had anything to do with Julia’s disappearance. And the only thing I think she had to do with Ruby’s death was folding laundry while her child played in a room with an unsecured window.”

  Hannah had been asking the wrong question. “What about Ellie?”

  “I don’t know who killed Ellie.”

  “You have a theory. A suspicion.”

  “I don’t. Even if I did, I wouldn’t share it. I have no proof of anything.” Jinny was starting to look like a trapped animal, eyes darting one way, then the other.

  “I heard that Fae said Ellie was there. The day Ruby died,” Hannah pressed, leaning closer. She could smell Jinny’s perfume, cloying and organic.

  “Fae said a lot of things. That didn’t make them true.”

  “But she was there, wasn’t she?” Hannah reached out, gripped Jinny’s skinny wrist.

  Jinny nodded.

  “Did Ellie kill Ruby? On purpose?”

  “I don’t know!” Jinny said finally. She stood up abruptly and scurried to the back room through a beaded partition. She reemerged with a yellowed envelope, folded in half and resealed with masking tape, careful and precise.

  “What’s this?” Hannah asked as Jinny handed it to her.

  “It’s a letter. The night before Fae died, she came to see me. She hadn’t come to town in months. She wanted me to have this; she said she was preparing for Uncle Stuart’s death and needed someone to guard her secrets.”

  “What secrets?” Hannah pressed, and Jinny’s face crumpled.

  “I don’t know! She asked me not to read it, just keep it. She said I could read it when she was gone.”

  “Gone where?” Hannah’s voice was sharp.

  “She meant dead.” Jinny’s chin wobbled, and she took a breath. “She wasn’t going to kill herself. I think she thought that without Stuart . . . she had no one to protect her.”

  “From who?”

  “I didn’t know! I was so thrown by her being in my shop. By how she looked—skinny and pale and her hair long and gray. I was consumed with my own guilt that I let her wither away up on that mountain.”

  “Why wouldn’t you give this to police?” Hannah asked.

  “Why would I? I don’t know what’s in it. I promised to protect my friend.” Jinny straightened her spine; her jaw jutted outward. “I wouldn’t let myself read it.”

  “Did Fae kill Ellie because Ellie killed Ruby?”

  “Hannah, hand to God, I have no idea. You have to believe that,” Jinny pleaded. Tears fell down her cheeks.

  “You don’t believe in God,” Hannah said before she stood up.

  She left Jinny at the table, crying.

  On the street, she looked one way, then the other. She unfolded the envelope. It was addressed to Fae Webster at Brackenhill. No postage. No return address. The blue ink on the front was young and bubbly but faded.

  In the distance, a shining black truck rumbled toward her. Wyatt. Hannah didn’t want to see him, talk to him. She didn’t want to relate what Jinny had told her or think about Jinny hiding Fae’s secrets for seventeen years. She tucked the envelope into her back jeans pocket and ducked into an alleyway a few buildings down. Hannah watched Wyatt as he parked the truck in front of the diner.

  She expected him to enter. Sit down, have a cup of coffee. She didn’t expect him to furtively glance up and down the street and, when he was certain no one saw him, open the door to Jinny’s shop and disappear inside.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  To Fae, from Ellie

  September 2001

  Dear Fae,

  I’m leaving Rockwell soon. I wanted to tell you that I was so sorry. I’ve thought of Ruby every single day for five years. You are the only mother I’ve ever really known. The only woman—person—who encouraged me, took care of me. But did you love me?

  I was jealous of Ruby. It wasn’t fair that she got you, and Stuart, and also got to be beautiful. When you would parade Ruby around town like she was a show horse, people would constantly remark on her strawberry-blonde soup-can curls, soft and shiny. The spots of pink on her cheeks and her full red lips. Mrs. Jinny asked once if Ruby was wearing lipstick. For God’s sake, she was five.

  I loved that you would pick me up at the little brown house and take me shopping. When Ruby was old enough to go, she would slide a little hand into mine and her skin felt squishy, like a puffy marshmallow. You’d introduce us as “Ellie and my daughter, Ruby.” I didn’t have a title.

  I’d pretend to be your daughter, but everyone knew the truth. I was no one’s child. I was motherless. My own mama was a ghost—I’d only met her a few times. Daddy said she was on drugs. Whenever I saw her, her breath smelled sour like garbage. She had stringy hair and skinny arms and a brown tooth on the side. You were warm and smelled like cookies.

  Mama hadn’t been back for a long time. Most of the time I couldn’t remember her face.

  I tried so hard not to love you, in case you didn’t love me back. I knew you didn’t have to. I tried to do all the right things. You called me a “mother’s helper,” and I liked to make you happy. I liked to wash dishes, fold laundry, play with Ruby. A mother’s helper seemed like a better title than nothing.

  For a while, I pretended Ruby and I were sisters. She was cute and funny. And I felt lucky to spend every weekend in a magical castle. I know I begged you to let me sleep over. I could tell that you didn’t want to say yes as much as you did. Maybe I was too loud or too hard or something else? I don’t know. I saw how you looked at Stuart and then would say my name, Ellie, like a little sigh.

  You put me in the room next to Ruby’s. There was a door between our rooms. I could sneak in there at night and we could play or talk. It felt like I had a real family, sometimes. Except on Sunday night, I would go back to the little brown house and Daddy would be passed out on the sofa and sometimes the lights wouldn’t work and I had to make myself butter sandwiches in the dark and I knew the castle was warm and there would be music and maybe cookies and spaghetti. I would just get so mad! I’m sorry.

  I wanted to move to the castle with you and Stuart in the worst way. But you had Ruby now and you were a family. You left me in the little brown house.

  I saw the bed on TV first. A commercial for Kmart. It was a canopy—pink and purple swirls of flowing fabric all around the bed like for a princess. I showed Daddy and he laughed. My mattress was on the floor, he said. Where would he hang that? I hated him so much! I asked for the bed for Christmas, even writing Santa letters (I was ten, I knew Santa wasn’t real). On Christmas morning, nothing was there. Daddy bought me a sweater.

  In the spring, after the snow melted, you came down to the little brown house and picked me up again. It was just you and we had the whole car ride back up the mountain together. You asked about school and soccer and my friends and we talked the whole time. I felt like I had a week’s worth of news just bursting out of me. You laughed in all the right places and I never wanted to leave the truck.

  We pulled in the windy driveway and the castle was lit up from the inside and I knew it would smell like spaghetti and there would be music playing on the radio and Stuart would pull a quarter out of my ear and we would laugh and maybe play Rummikub later.

  Inside, there was nothing on the stove and nothing playing on the transistor radio in the kitchen.

  “Come on!” you said excitedly, motioning for me to follow. “I want to show you what Stuart built Ruby.”

  I always felt a little stabbing pain right in my heart when you talked about Ruby. Your eyes would go all shiny and sparkly. I knew if I wasn’t nice to Ruby, I wouldn’t be invited back. I tried to make my own smile big and excited like yours.

  You hop-skipped up all the winding steps to the second floor and led me down the long hallway to Ruby’s room and when you flung open the door, Stuart stood in the middle, his face cracked open from smiling, holding his toolbox in one hand and a ham
mer in the other.

  Inside the room stood the most beautiful bed I had ever seen. It had a beautiful ring of pink and yellow flowers above it and hanging from the ring was a white canopy that went all the way to the floor and puddled at your feet. It was just like the bed from television. The material was see through but still silky and made for a princess.

  Everything inside me hurt and I thought I was going to cry and I absolutely did not want to do that so I said the only thing I could think of.

  “I think it’s ugly.”

  And you closed your eyes and sighed my name, Ellie, and you and Stuart left and went downstairs talking softly, probably about me, and I was so mad I started to cry. I knew I disappointed you and you would never, ever, ever love me. Not now, not in the future. That maybe you felt sorry for me, the way I feel sorry for stray cats and homeless people but I don’t love them.

  You didn’t love me.

  You didn’t love me.

  I don’t remember what I did, I just remember how I felt. How it pulsed like a drumbeat in my head. How I wanted to rip the whole thing down from the ceiling and feel the tug of the material in my hands as it came apart. I don’t remember doing it, I swear.

  I remember Ruby screaming at me. “I hate you! What are you doing? Mommy!”

  I wanted her to shut up. I knew I’d done something awful.

  I didn’t think, didn’t plan it.

  The windows in the castle were tall—almost to the floor—with glass panes that opened outward like a storybook mansion. It had been warm for April, so they were opened to let in the soft evening breeze.

  Later, I would say Ruby got tangled in the net. That I tried to catch her and that’s why it was ripped. No matter how hard I try, I can’t remember exactly how it happened.

  One second, Ruby was screaming. The next, she was gone.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  Now

  Hannah sat in Aunt Fae’s Volkswagen on Main Street, debating where to go next. On one hand, if she went back up to Brackenhill, she had the whole night ahead of her. She could go sit at Pinker’s. She could go to Wyatt’s.

  Her thoughts zinged around like Ping-Pong balls. She cruised Main Street twice. The teenagers would start coming out, walking up and down the main drag. Visiting Jinny just to say hi.

  Buck, who owned the hardware store, and Bo, who lived upstairs, had already set up lawn chairs on the front stoop, and Buck flipped the store sign to closed, as they’d done every summer night since Hannah was a kid. Hannah could hear the hiss-pop of a Bud Light from across the street. She turned off Main Street and headed down toward West.

  Hannah rubbed the letter between her index finger and thumb. She felt drawn to the little brown house, to Warren. To see where Ellie had grown up, the misery she’d lived in. What had compelled her to push a child? Hannah felt sick.

  Warren would probably be at Pinker’s, and she knew she had to stay far away from there. Three visits in a week might get her killed. She edged the Volkswagen down Henley Avenue, which ran perpendicular to West Street, and could see Warren’s truck parked in front of the house. What was he doing home? Hannah’s pulse picked up, a staccato beat.

  Hannah cut back and came up to the left of the house, past Lila’s, up the alley. She pulled behind the small shed in back of Lila’s and threw the car in park.

  It was reckless. And probably stupid. If he found her, who knew what he’d do. She thought, briefly, about showing him the letter. What would he say? What would he think? Did he know it existed? It seemed unlikely.

  Hannah eased out of the Volkswagen, shutting the door quietly behind her. She looked around—it was probable that someone was watching her from behind parted curtains. In Rockwell, watching the street was a pastime.

  In back of Warren’s, on the corner of the property, sat an old outhouse. Hannah stood behind it, catching her breath, trying to organize her thoughts.

  What exactly did she hope to find here? She wasn’t sure, but it felt safer, more comforting, to be standing behind an old shit house in Warren’s backyard than to go back to Brackenhill, alone, again.

  The back screen door creaked open and shut. Hannah’s throat constricted, and she squeezed her eyes shut, willing herself to become invisible. She pressed her back flush against the splintered wood. A woman’s voice. And Warren.

  Not yelling, but not friendly either.

  She couldn’t be sure, but it sounded like “fucked too.”

  If Lila came outside, even to simply take out the trash, she’d be screwed. If whoever was on Warren’s back step took ten steps to the left or right, she’d see Hannah immediately.

  Instead, the woman beelined straight for the alley, and instead of turning right, toward the outhouse, she turned left, toward the street. Hannah breathed a sigh of relief, counted to ten, and leaned forward to get a clear look at who it was.

  Alice.

  The nurse paused and looked left, then right, before darting across West Street and turning right on Henley. From half a block away in the Rockwell quiet, Hannah could just make out the sound of a truck engine turning over.

  Hannah’s heart thrummed in her throat, and she doubled back to Fae’s car, hopped in the driver’s seat, and threw the gearshift into drive. She followed the truck back up the winding road to Brackenhill, too late in the day to be tending to Stuart, staying far enough back that she dropped out of sight of the truck’s rearview around every turn.

  Alice’s truck eased into the driveway before she cut the headlights. Hannah parked on the edge of the property and made the reckless decision to follow her on foot. Why had Alice come back? She never came back at night. Maybe she’d forgotten a med? But then why cut her headlights?

  Midway up the driveway stood a little tower. As a child Hannah had always played in it, throwing notes and pebbles up and down with Julia. The tower contained nothing but a winding concrete staircase and a small, empty room on the second floor.

  Alice glided the truck behind the tower and slowly crept out of the driver’s seat. Hannah watched her from behind a thick oak as she switched on a lantern and followed a well-worn path from the tower.

  Hannah knew at once where it would lead and followed silently. She felt the creep of dread up her spine.

  When the shed came into view, she ducked behind an old tractor. Alice would have the advantage of a lantern. Hannah, the idiot, hadn’t even brought a flashlight with her. However, she had the element of surprise on her side.

  Something else clicked into place, then. A brown tooth.

  You leave her out of this, Warren had said.

  Alice slipped into the shed, and through the single two-by-two window, Hannah could see the soft lantern glow.

  Hannah placed her hand on the door and slid it open.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  Now

  Alice was spreading a blanket when she was caught by surprise.

  “Hannah!” Alice startled, her tone shrill. “I can explain. I was evicted yesterday. I just need a place to stay for a few days.”

  “Why wouldn’t you ask to stay inside?” Hannah’s voice sounded strange, even to her own ears. Strangled.

  “I didn’t want to bother you.” She lifted up her hair, twined it around her fist, and dropped it. Her long ponytail grazed her back, and Hannah could see the roots: a bright-auburn stripe around her crown.

  The gesture felt intimate. She’d studied it as a newly minted teenager, thinking at the time that it was hopelessly sensual, exposing that raw curve of neck, the glimpse of pale skin.

  Alice turned her head, and in the lamplight it was so obvious Hannah couldn’t believe she’d never seen it. That no one else saw it.

  “You’re Ellie’s mother.”

  Alice’s head whipped around; her eyes narrowed. She didn’t deny it. Her face transformed, hardening and taking on a wholly new shape: revenge personified. She dropped the blankets and from her bag extracted a hunting knife.

  Hannah’s heart hammered, but her thoughts were too s
low. She was too sleep deprived, too detached to assemble it all quickly in her mind. Hannah didn’t have anything to defend herself with—she hadn’t known she’d need it.

  She had to buy time.

  “If you’re Ellie’s mother, there’s only one reason you’re here.” Nothing about Alice being at Brackenhill was coincidental. She’d purposefully taken a job as Stuart’s nurse. Was she even a nurse? “You killed Fae.” It all seemed so glaringly obvious now. “You killed Fae because you think Fae killed Ellie.”

  “Fae did kill Ellie. I heard her confess to Stuart the night she drove away.” Alice’s face contorted. “Unburdening herself. Crying about it! Ha.”

  “You followed her.”

  “I confronted her.” Alice’s voice boomed now. She was yelling, angry, her hair slipping from the tidy ponytail. “I heard her tell that vegetable of a husband how sorry she was for what they did. How she ruined his life and their lives. What about my life? She killed Ellie just as I was getting sober. I was ready to form a relationship with my daughter. Do you know where Ellie was going the night she ran away? The night she came here first?”

  Hannah felt the answer flow through her like water.

  “To meet me. She was taking the bus to Tempe from Rockwell. Then we were both going to New York City. Figured we’d both waitress, get a studio apartment, start over in a place no one knew us. I didn’t have a car. We’d been talking on the phone. Writing letters. Warren had no idea, but he was an abusive, alcoholic drunk. I was trying to finally make things right for my daughter.” Alice dropped her head to her chest, caught her breath. “When she didn’t show up, I took a cab to Warren’s house. He drove up here to find her because I told him to. He was drunk, I wouldn’t get in the car with him, but it was the only chance I had. He came back with nothing. All he told me was he saw her run into the woods, and he saw that bitch Fae chase her.” Alice sliced the air with the knife, the serrated edge glinting in the dim light. “She never loved Ellie.”

  “How did you get this job?” Hannah felt breathless, almost paralyzed with fear, her legs shaking.