Turchen County was the second smallest county in the state, and Clearfield was the county seat. It boasted one school building for every level. Some kids rode the buses for an hour and a half every morning to get to school, then an hour and a half back home in the afternoon.
The high school kids had their own buses. But for three hours a day the middle school kids ruled the back of Bus 19 that transported the two lower levels back and forth along the rural roads west of town as far as Ashville Flats. It was their territory.
Early in the school year, he and the nine other sixth graders he’d ridden in the front of the bus with since kindergarten were still trying to find their place, and seats, among the seventh and eighth graders. They were all a little nervous. Even then they knew that this sort of thing could make or break your chances of being one of the cool kids at the middle school, and after that the high school.
Josh Greenborn was desperate to be cool. He wasn’t a particular friend of Grady’s, but he was tolerable if you didn’t mind his loud voice and remembered to put salt on almost everything he said. He didn’t lie exactly, but he blew things up, a lot. That fall he was particularly obnoxious—and he wasn’t fooling anyone. Looking back, it was pretty pathetic.
Unfortunately, before any of the eighth graders got around to assigning Josh his seat—mid-bus directly behind the grade schoolers—the Benson sisters got on the bus to go home.
Not that anyone noticed.
The Benson family was an insular unit that for years seemed resolute in the effort to stay cut off from the rest of the community. Little was known about them. The father was a surly sort who spoke to few and often hung out in the seedier establishments around town. A pious woman, the mother never missed church, avoided eye contact, and rarely said a word. And the two little girls—they could have been imaginary.
From time to time the Bensons were whispered about in adult circles. They were those people. Words like deplorable and shameful often slipped out to fall on young ears, but who paid attention to what adults talked about when you were a kid? Most of them, apparently.
It was no sin to be poor in Turchen County. Still, among those whose income fell below the Gross National Average there were poor people and poorer people, and the Bensons fell into the latter category. Which isn’t to say the girls wouldn’t have been reasonably acceptable kids if they’d been, say, funny or athletic or remarkably pretty . . . or they might have found a place for themselves with the kids who played in the band. But the Benson sisters weren’t anything.
That thought made him cringe now. But all it ever meant was that neither of them stood out as anything special. Just two little girls who got on and off the bus most days when it stopped at the end of the long gravel drive to their house. One, a contrast of black hair and white skin, the other smaller and . . . golden, with hair the color of a buttercup. Both were as faded as the hand-me-down clothes they wore and so quiet the wind seemed to pass straight through them.
Truth? Grady couldn’t swear that either sister registered on his radar as anything more than a phantom blip before Hannah Benson beat the holy living crap out of Josh Greenborn on the bus that warm, sunny autumn afternoon.
It wasn’t something one could overlook, even if Josh hadn’t first leaned over the seat in front of Grady to whisper, “Watch this.”
Absently, he watched Josh sneak up the aisle and into an empty seat three rows forward on the other side. He looked back to make sure he had an audience, smirked, then snatched the loose pink hair ribbon off the curly yellow ponytail of the little girl sitting in the seat directly in front of him.
The little girl’s hand shot out and up when her head jerked backed from the tug on her hair, but it was too late to catch the ribbon. She turned in her seat and saw it dangling from Josh’s fingers invitingly. She looked into his face with an almost blank expression, her pale blues wide and unblinking, skin pale; her little pink rosebud mouth solemn and set. Her gaze lowered to the ribbon, grew worried and fearful; the temptation to snatch it back drew a small pucker between her brows before she glanced at Josh again, then turned around and did nothing.
Josh turned and gave those watching a how-lame-is-that look. Stretching his arm forward, he wiggled the pink ribbon in the girl’s peripheral vision but she ignored him. The top half of her blond head above the seat didn’t budge. But the taller, black-haired girl beside her took note, turned her head, and looked back at Josh.
Hot blue. That was the impression Grady had of her eyes that afternoon. Like the blue flame on his mother’s gas stove—like laser beams maybe, and just as direct. The thrill of trouble brewing zipped through his muscles. Now Josh had his full attention. Though when Grady looked around in anticipation, he saw that most of the other kids had lost interest, had looked away or were talking among themselves. He nudged Max Bayan, sitting next to him on the aisle, and directed his attention back to Josh. He didn’t want to be the only one watching when the older Benson girl, with all that rage and fire in her eyes, tried to hand Josh his ass on a tray.
Not that there was much of a chance of that happening. Josh wasn’t that much bigger than she, but he was a whole year older and a boy. Hardly a contest, but it would likely be a while before they had this sort of entertainment on the bus again.
When he looked back, Hannah was sitting forward, the blond head of her sister bounced along the back of the seat toward the window, and then Hannah took her sister’s place on the aisle. Unfortunately, Hannah was as good at ignoring Josh as Ruth was. And while Grady might have tormented Hannah a little longer, knowing her to be the easier target, the one more likely to respond, Josh once again turned his attention to Ruth.
With his arm over the hand bar along the top of the seat, he dangled the pink ribbon on her face, it looked like, pulling it up slow and enticing, then dipping it again. Nothing. Minutes went by and neither girl responded. As Grady started to swallow his disappointment, Josh said something to them. He couldn’t hear what, but the older girl turned her head and looked at her sister. Then everything happened at once.
Hannah had Josh by the arm and with one ruthless jerk crashed his face into the metal bar on the back of the bench, turning in her seat and grabbing him by the hair with both hands. Girls screamed; boys shouted and whooped and started to laugh. Grady stared in awe as Hannah’s lips parted to show her straight white teeth and Josh’s head blurred with blinding quick movement as she drove and smashed his face against the metal frame of the seat and hand bar—again and again. Fluid sprayed and little red dots landed on the kids nearby. More screaming and yelling and everyone started leaving their seats.
Grady was vaguely aware of the bus pulling over to the side of the road and he couldn’t seem to do anything but sit there. Mesmerized. Shocked. He couldn’t see her eyes, her lids were lowered, her attention focused on her work. He’d never seen anything like it. He’d never been in a fight himself and the few he’d seen at school . . . well, they weren’t nearly as intense. And there was never any blood.
After what felt like several long minutes, but could only have been seconds in fact, she stopped. Josh’s head had gone heavy, hanging from her hands by his hair. Grady saw Hannah’s lips move and her sister reached up and slipped the pink ribbon that hung loose and tangled around Josh’s limp fingers into her lap. Hannah then tossed Josh back against his seat. He slid slowly to the left, toward the hysterical girl in the window seat. Hannah turned and sat back down.
Maybe more than the fight itself, it was Hannah’s cold reaction to what she’d done that was entrenched in his memory most deeply. While the bus driver screamed at her—before, during, and after she ascertained the extent of Josh’s injuries—Hannah sat in apparent calm, facing straight ahead. Grady thought she looked righteous, like she hadn’t done anything wrong. As if she’d given Josh the beating he deserved—and part of him agreed with her. Of course, she’d gone way overboard—and who would have thought she could?—but more than a small part of him thought it wrong when the driver forced Hannah to
get off the bus, on the right road but still three or four miles from home.
He admired the way she refused to let her little sister get down with her and a few minutes later he was impressed as hell, actually, to discover that her bravery was all an act.
After the driver closed the door on Hannah, she used the radio in the bus to report what had happened and that she’d be turning the bus around to take Josh back to town to the emergency room, and then she drove off.
Hannah stood alone, grasping the front straps of her back-pack, head bowed as road dust lifted from under the big tires. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. She looked so small and vulnerable. He turned his head and kept watching as the bus left her behind.
In the final second before the high cloud of grit and grime engulfed her, she looked up.
Even now he could see that dirty tear-streaked face in his mind; felt stunned and overwhelmed by the emotions exposed in it. Remorse and resentment—and fear. It made him feel sick inside, knowing she’d probably be in as much trouble at home as he would have been in if he’d been fighting on the bus. And it hadn’t been her fault, not entirely. Josh was a pain in the ass and she was defending her younger sister. Would her parents give her a chance to explain? He watched her until she disappeared in the veil of dust.
Only Ruth got on the bus the next morning. And two days later, if she noticed Josh’s two black eyes and the discoloration of his broken nose under the layers of tape, she gave no sign of it. She sat alone in the seat that she and her sister always shared. Weeks went by before Grady noticed Hannah getting on the bus with her sister again . . . and he noticed because she wore a royal blue sweater that reminded him of the color of her eyes that day, a sweater so big on her that it no doubt belonged to her mother—but it hid the cast on her left arm almost completely.
It didn’t occur to him to even speculate as to how she’d come to break her arm during her suspension from school that fall, but he didn’t have to guess now.
He glanced back in the rearview mirror a lifetime later. To his knowledge few people messed with Hannah or her sister after that . . . and she’d seemed as gentle as she was strong when they were together. But that lightning quick temper was something else he planned to check out before she left town with her niece.
“I can do this. I can. How hard can it be? I’m not signing any papers, I’m meeting her. That’s all.”
She turned left at the stop sign behind Grady and followed at a more than legal distance—in no hurry to get where they were going.
“Call Joe,” she said into the earpiece of her Bluetooth, worrying her lower lip as she waited.
Despite the amusing irony of Grady’s chosen profession, it made coming back to Clearfield more of a threat to her. She couldn’t afford to underestimate anyone. She’d gotten this far by telling herself that if she could keep certain things hidden for twenty years, she could certainly do it for two more weeks. But cops were trained observers. What good old Grady might have taken in stride, Sheriff Steadman was more than capable of stumbling onto and getting curious about.
She‘d have to be careful.
She was always a fast learner, quick on the uptake of a situation—survival skills. Grady’s voice on the phone two days ago was a crash course in false assumptions, namely, that the past she believed to be long dead and buried wasn’t. It was alive and well and going to high school. If a young, unknown girl could innocently breach the barrier between Hannah and the life she’d run away from, anything could.
She’d have to be very careful.
“Are you trying to undermine my confidence?” The soft tenor voice of Joe Levitz was a balm to her soul. “I’m old, but I can still sell insurance, you know.”
“What. No hello, how are you doing?”
“How could you be doing anything? You haven’t been gone ten hours yet.”
“I need you to remind me why I’m here.”
He made the soft, familiar scoffing noise she loved. “I should have written it down for you.”
“Just tell me. Again.”
“All right. You are there because you are a fine, good young woman with a wealth of love to give, and you are pouring some of it back into your family where it belongs. You have a deep sense of responsibility. And it is what you are meant to do.”
“How come that doesn’t make as much sense now as it did Friday or yesterday or even this morning?
“Because the closer you get to your true destiny, and to what is real and vital in your life, the harder the devil tries to tempt you from your path.”
Hannah wasn’t a religious person, but Joe was—and he and his life were the best things she’d ever known. Even second hand, his faith was an encouraging comfort.
“Could the devil disguise himself as a county sheriff?”
“He could. But with all the self-doubt you have already, why would he bother?” Good point. “Were you speeding again?”
“No. I ran into Grady. He’s a sheriff now.”
“Grady . . . the boy. He arrested you?”
“This would be a whole different call if he had. And he’s not a boy. He’s a big, tall man.”
“You like big, tall men. Many big, tall men.”
And Joe would be delighted to see her pick one and settled down like the classic Jewish princess she wasn’t.
“Yeah, well, this one makes me nervous.”
“Nervous is good.”
“Not that kind of nervous.” Not altogether. “What if he starts asking questions?”
He paused. “Then tell him the truth, Hannah. Make yourself free. It’s time.”
“I . . . had an attack. Like before.”
“The panic again?”
“Yes. But worse.”
“That makes sense, doesn’t it? First you face your fears, then you conquer them. A minor setback. Are you better now?”
“Yes.” But for how long? What else would sneak up and grab her unexpected? Could she fight it off again, or would it drag her into the madness forever?
“This is all good, Hannah. It’s time. Truth and peace, they are sisters.”
She shook her head, slow and doubtful. “I’ll do what I can for the girl because you think it’s important, but I can’t promise anything else.”
“Not because I think it’s important but because—”
“Yeah, yeah. It’s my responsibility. Because it’s what I’m meant to do.”
“And because you want to do it.”
“I do?”
“Deep down, yes. And because it will save me a great deal of time, in what few years I have left, not to have to listen to you whine about the regrets you would have if you stood by and did nothing.”
“So, once again, this is all about you?”
“Of course.”
“And you know me so well.”
“Also true.”
Hannah sighed and wished he had come with her. “In that case, wish me luck because I am about to meet her.”
“You don’t need luck, Hannah, you need faith,” he said, then he made it a wish. “Have faith.”
He disconnected and she flipped the cell and the earpiece back in her purse.
The most frustrating thing about Joe Levitz was that in all the years she’d known him, he hadn’t once ill-advised or misdirected her. That made telling him to stuff his opinions extremely difficult. To make it worse, he never offered them unsolicited. Oh, she knew the trick was to not ask him what he thought in the first place, but she couldn’t seem to help herself. Joe was more than simply her former boss and business partner; her mentor and her dearest friend. He was her savior, her confessor, the father she should have had . . . and he was always right—about everything.
Except maybe now. Hell of a time to start being wrong, Joe.
Have faith, he’d said.
Okay. So how hard could this be? Most people have families, and most of those involve children. She’d spent the better part of her life professing the importance of and selling the means f
or sound financial futures for them. She knew about kids. She’d heard all the boastful stories and seen the joy that most people share with their children. She knew they weren’t impossible to live with.
Living with a fifteen-year-old girl could not be worse than being a sixteen-year-old girl living alone . . . and somehow the thought comforted her.
“I can do this.”
But children were famous for their intuitive judgments of adult character. What if this kid sensed that Hannah wasn’t the purest soul on the planet and ran off screaming? Another rumor: They could sense fear like horses and dogs, in which case this . . . Anna would definitely have the upper hand.
“Be calm. Have faith.”
Caravanning behind Grady, they soon left tarmac for gravel and rumbled four more miles down the road before the house came into view. The sky was growing dark, but there were no dark billowing clouds hovering overhead, no lightning, no ominous thunderclaps from a B-rated horror movie.
It was just an old silver-gray farmhouse with a dull red roof and a wide front porch, left to weather and ruin by years of neglect. Smaller than she remembered. A matching barn stood off to the left at a distance, but barely. Hannah estimated that the next stiff wind would provide the new owners with enough firewood for the next thirty years. Two of the three smaller outbuildings were heading that way as well. There were three cows in the four-acre field west of the house and the rest had gone to grass, for hay perhaps.
Hannah caught herself holding her breath, anticipating memories that would launch up to stun and overwhelm her, memories to be filled to the gills with toxic emotions, but . . . Well, perhaps she was maxed-out emotionally and the house was the least of her worries. The strange fact was, all she felt as they turned into the drive was a detached curiosity—and nervous about meeting the girl.
The sound of their tires crunching across the gravel toward the house alerted those inside to their arrival. A light came on, bathing the porch in a soft welcoming bug-light yellow as a woman in a black skirt and sweater pushed open the screen door and stepped out. She stuck her head back in briefly, then let the screen door swing shut, and started down the steps to meet them.
What Happened to Hannah Page 4