by Ana Barrons
John leaned toward Hannah. “What do you say we take a little tour of the house first, and then go up to the attic?”
Hannah nodded, too disoriented to take the lead on anything. What was she doing here? She wanted to ask the question out loud, and would have if Eleanor and her daughter hadn’t been there.
Mrs. Stockton rose and everyone else followed. “I’ll write down the numbers of the rooms that are occupied.”
“Is the master bedroom occupied?” John asked. He glanced at Eleanor. “The former master bedroom, I mean.”
The innkeeper and her mother exchanged a look.
“It is,” Eleanor said. “But I saw them go out after breakfast. We’ll get that room tidied up in no time, and then you can peek in there, okay? Meanwhile you can look at the other rooms.”
With the list of occupied rooms in hand—only two besides the master bedroom—John and Hannah climbed the sweeping center staircase to the second-floor landing. A tall Palladian window overlooked a small garden filled with flowers and a concrete birdbath that drew Hannah’s attention. For just a moment she was a little girl with her nose pressed up against the cold glass.
White foam is blowing up from the ocean a block away, soapsuds swirling across a slate-gray sky. Small branches and leaves from the old maple tree litter her yard and clog the concrete basin, and she is worried that the birds can’t get in there to have their bath. Her mother comes up behind her and lays gentle hands on her shoulders, then kisses the top of her head. The birds will be fine, her mother assures her. Now it’s time for her little birdie to go up for a bubble bath.
“Cold?”
John’s voice cut through the memory. Hannah shivered and realized she was hugging herself. “A little.”
“Look familiar?”
She nodded. “I remember the birdbath. And worrying about the birds during a storm.”
She turned to John and found him smiling. He looked so handsome and strong, standing there with one arm braced at the top of the window, that she wanted to sink into him. But she held herself back, hugged herself a little tighter. Her mother was gone, and the man she had fallen in love with had destroyed her trust. For all intents and purposes, he was gone, too.
They climbed the remaining stairs to the second floor and looked both ways down the corridor. Beneath their feet, a red oriental runner covered dark plank floors with a glossy finish. Across from the stairs, a large beveled mirror hung over a long buffet holding a basket of fruit, brass candlesticks and several antique books pressed between cast-iron bookends of children reading. Spaced evenly along the walls were watercolor paintings of wildlife, flowers and the ocean, all in simple wooden frames. The effect was charming and unpretentious.
The only things she remembered were the bookends.
Hannah ran her fingers over the head of one of the cast-iron children. “I remember wanting to play with these, like dolls, but they were so heavy. My father found me with them and got angry. I couldn’t understand why.”
“Were they always here, in the hallway, on this piece of furniture?”
She stared into near space, seeing her hand reaching for the bookends, pulling them down, crawling into the big closet where she liked to play with her treasures.
She’s lying on her stomach in her pajamas, the white carpeting thick and soft beneath her. Her hair, still wet from her bath, lies in one thick braid down her back. Angry footsteps. Her father walks into his bedroom and tosses his jacket on the bed. She scoots farther back into the closet and wishes she’d closed the door. But she forgot her flashlight, and she doesn’t like the dark. Then her mother’s voice, pleading, her father’s angry response, accusing her.
I don’t know who left them there, Martin. Maybe one of the college boys.
Do you really take me for a fool, Sharon?
The two iron children clank into one another and her father’s legs stalk to the closet.
How many times have I told you not to play in there, Hannah? He snatches the bookends in one big hand and pulls her up by her arm.
Ouch!
Stop it, she was just playing!
Keep the goddamn kid out of my closet.
“Hannah?” John’s voice was gentle. “Does it seem familiar to you?”
She pulled her hand back from the bookend and scanned the hallway before answering. How could she put into words what was going on in her head? She had never before experienced anything quite like this. “It isn’t so much the house itself that feels familiar. But I’m remembering things, here and there.”
John ran his hand over the bookend she’d been touching. “This guy triggered something, didn’t he?”
“I remember playing with them in the closet. My parents’ closet. And they came in.”
“Can you tell me more about that?”
She looked up at him. Dr. Daly, psychologist. “They were arguing. My father was angry. He was accusing my mother of something, and then I accidentally banged the bookends together and he heard me and pulled me up off the floor and told my mother to keep me out of his closet.”
John’s eyes narrowed. “What was he accusing her of? Do you remember?”
“She said she didn’t know who left them there, and he said something like, ‘Do you take me for a fool, Sharon?’”
John grabbed her wrist. “Was there more? Did either of them say who left what, where?”
She got it, suddenly. “No, I don’t remember any more. Do you think he was talking about…you know, the stalker, leaving something for her?”
“Tell me again what he said, just like you remember it.”
She repeated the snippet of memory.
“He said them. Who left them there.” John rubbed a hand along his jaw. “It sounds like your father was jealous, which is consistent with what my—” He stopped short.
Hannah felt the blood rush to her cheeks. “Consistent with what your father said. It’s all out in the open, John, remember? We both know exactly why we’re here.”
“I remember,” John said quietly. “Maybe he was referring to flowers.”
“Who?”
“Your father. In the bedroom. A man would be jealous if he found a bouquet of flowers at his house, especially if it had happened before. I was jealous when I saw that bouquet of roses in your office, the ones from Bradshaw.”
Hannah jerked back. “Jealous? Why on earth—?”
John’s expression turned bitter. “Oh, that’s right. You don’t believe I feel anything for you. I forgot.” He walked around her and started down the hall. “Do any of these doors stand out?”
She was too surprised to respond to his sarcasm. “Um, I don’t know. Let’s just open one and go in.”
He opened the door with a brass number three at the end of the hallway, and stood aside to let her go in first. She brushed past him and felt him stiffen, as though he didn’t want to be touched—as though he was angry. What did he have to be angry about? She wasn’t the one who’d lied and pretended to care. And he wasn’t the one who had fallen in love.
The high four-poster bed was placed catty-corner in a room that was very feminine. A little girl’s room. Stuffed animals lined the window seat, frilly old-fashioned cushions decorated the bed. Hannah walked toward the window and stood still in the center of the room. Instinctively she knew this had been her room, but the memory felt blocked by something she couldn’t climb over, knock down or burrow under.
“My brain won’t let me go back,” she said, almost to herself. “It’s like I know this was my room but it feels…off. Just like the whole house feels off. Like I know I should remember but I can’t retrieve the memory. It’s just stuck in there, caught in quicksand. I can’t think of any other way to explain it.”
John sighed, and Hannah knew he was disappointed. She supposed she should be, too, but at the moment there was no room to feel anything other than grief and an overwhelming sense of wrongness. She wrapped her hand around the cool mahogany bedpost and leaned against it, suddenly wearier than she could ever re
member being. John came up beside her but didn’t touch her.
“What are you feeling?” he asked.
She closed her eyes. “In a word? Surreal. Like my whole world is off center and I can’t grab on to anything or anyone that will pull me back. And even if there were, there’s nothing to go back to.”
“Like you felt when your mother was killed.”
“Yes.”
“And for years after.”
“Until Arthur and Bebe took me in.” She pressed her forehead into the post she was gripping now with both hands. “It took me awhile to get centered, but it lasted a long time. Until very recently, actually.”
“Until I came along.”
“Until Christian went to the hospital. That’s when it all started to fall apart. I didn’t know the truth about you until last night, remember?” She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Hard to believe, isn’t it? Barely twelve hours ago I was running through the woods—” Her eyes popped open. “That man.”
“What man?”
She turned to John and was shocked at how drawn and unhappy he looked. “The man who helped me over the wall. At Thornton’s house.”
“Someone helped you?”
She nodded. “Yes, he—”
“Room’s ready.”
They both turned their heads to the doorway, where Eleanor stood with one thick arm around a bundle of used towels.
“If you still want to go in there, that is.” She glanced around the room. “I kept the original bedspread on for years because of the matching canopy. It was so pretty, all that lace. But one of the guests burned a hole in it with a cigarette, so I took it off. Such a shame.”
Hannah didn’t know what to say. Yes, she knew it had been her room, but she was detached from the memory, as though she had watched another little girl live here for six years. Maybe when her mother was murdered, the piece of her psyche that held her early memories had split off, or gone into hiding. John wanted her to reconnect with it. She wasn’t so sure she had the emotional energy or stamina to do that.
They followed Eleanor down the hall and around a corner to a set of double doors that opened to a large room with a sitting area and windows that opened out to an ocean view.
“The guests are probably out for the afternoon,” Eleanor said. “But if they do come back… Well, let’s just hope they don’t.”
“Thank you,” John said with a smile. “You don’t know how much we appreciate this.”
“I’ll leave you two alone, then,” Eleanor said, and closed the door behind her.
Hannah felt acutely uncomfortable in the room. “Is it hot in here?”
“I don’t think so.”
“It’s oppressive. Let’s open the windows.” She walked over the blue-tone oriental carpet to the casement windows and saw that they were already cracked. She cranked them open wider, rested one knee on the padded window seat and put her face close to the screen. Sweat was streaming down her back, which felt strangely hot. She turned around and lifted the back of her sweater a few inches to cool down. Her gaze rested on the bed, a king-size four-poster covered by a quilt in the familiar wedding pattern.
“You okay?”
Her head began to swim and she sat down heavily. A second later John was beside her, his brows knitted in concern.
“What’s going on? Do you feel faint?”
“Yes, and kind of queasy. I don’t know.”
He wrapped an arm around her waist and she leaned against him, then began to lose sensation in her limbs and torso. Was she having a stroke or something?
“Oh, shit,” she mumbled.
“Talk to me. What are you feeling?”
“We shouldn’t have come here,” she whispered.
Damn it, she was going to puke.
John picked her up and whisked her into the bathroom, set her down gently on her knees in front of the bowl and held her hair away from her face while she vomited. When she was done, he eased her onto a thick rug and bathed her face and neck with a cool washcloth until her cheeks got some color back and she wasn’t so limp.
“That’s just what I did,” she whispered.
He stroked damp wispy bangs off her forehead. “When?”
“That day.” She swallowed, her eyes closed. “I know it. Just like I know this house and this room. It’s not like remembering. It’s like I dreamed it, but I remember the feeling without the details. You know?”
“Like a dream,” he repeated. “Like when you wake up and you can’t remember what it was about, but you go around feeling bad or weird all day. Like that?”
She nodded. “Why don’t I remember?”
He stroked a hand down her cheek and felt a wave of protectiveness so strong he had to force himself not to pull her into his arms and just hold her. But he was finally getting somewhere with her, and he didn’t want to ruin it. He let his hand drop.
“When the mind is confronted by something so horrible, so impossible to accept, it finds a way to protect itself. One way is to shut down, or to dissociate from the event.”
“Like Sybil?”
He couldn’t help but smile at her reference to the famous case of a woman so horribly abused as a child that her psyche split into multiple personalities. “That was a very extreme case, but yeah, that’s the general idea.”
She stared off into space for several moments. “I crawled out from under the bed and came in here and puked my guts out. Then I leaned back against the radiator for warmth, because I felt so cold…and I was afraid to go back in.” She closed her eyes. “My back got so hot, but I could barely feel it then. Later, like the next day, somebody noticed it was all red and blistery.”
She opened her eyes then, and they were filled with unshed tears. “I don’t want to think about it, John. I can’t go through with this. I’m sorry, I just…I can’t.”
Disappointment speared through him. They’d come too far to give up now. He would back off for a while, take her out for a meal and a walk on the beach, and then later on they could come back. Or better yet, give her a whole night to relax and come back in the morning. God help him if he traumatized her again. She’d worked hard to get her life straight, and he risked pulling the rug out from under her.
He lifted her gently to her feet and walked her through the bedroom to the door. “I think we’ve done enough for today,” he said.
They dropped in at a Starbucks for coffee and settled into overstuffed chairs in a corner to sip their lattes. Hannah’s body language said, “Leave me alone,” loud and clear, so he turned on his cell phone for the first time since they’d left Virginia. He punched in his pass code and saw he had six new messages. Four were from Walter’s cell phone, one from FBI Headquarters in Washington—and one from Thornton Bradshaw.
He had a pretty good idea what the FBI had to say to him, and it wasn’t going to matter a whole hell of a lot whether he listened to the messages now or later, but he had a bad feeling about the message from Bradshaw. He pressed the button and held the phone to his ear. The message was from Thornton Bradshaw, all right, but not the father. It was from Ty. His voice was breathy, nervous. Strained.
John, it’s me, Ty, the message began. Listen, man, I gotta talk to you. I did something real bad, and now I’m worried ’cause it’s… Oh, shit, I feel so stupid. It’s about Hannah, okay? I didn’t mean any harm, I swear to God.
John’s heart was pounding so hard he had to stick his finger in the other ear to hear what Ty was saying.
I just can’t go to juvie, okay? That’s the only reason I did it, ’cause I think Hannah’s really cool, and it made me sick to—God, I’m such an asshole. So can you call me back as soon as you get this? ’Cause the whole thing’s so fucking creepy, and I don’t know what the hell to do anymore. Okay? Bye.
John clicked the phone shut. Christ almighty. Could Ty be the one leaving gifts for Hannah? But that didn’t make any sense, unless he somehow knew about Belle. No, the boy had done something, but he wasn’t Hannah’s st
alker. As soon as they got back to Virginia, he’d get the whole story out of Ty, but for now he had other things to worry about.
He rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. If Hannah had seen the killer that day in her parents’ bedroom and could identify him from a photograph—assuming he had a police record—at least they could get the police to reopen the case. That had been his plan in the beginning, when he first read the letter from Regretful. That letter had given him the first glimmer of hope in twenty-three years of reclaiming his father’s freedom. It was a dim hope, to be sure, but it had grown brighter and then flared when he made the connection between Hannah’s stalker and her mother’s killer. Now that he was here in Marblehead and saw how difficult it was for Hannah to confront her past, he realized how naïve his original plan had been.
“What’s wrong?”
John raised his head and saw the concern in Hannah’s eyes. “Nothing.”
Her eyes narrowed. “What, did you get fired?”
“Probably. Most certainly.”
“Oh. Well. That’s too bad.”
He shrugged and took a long sip of his coffee. “I accepted that risk going in.”
“So, tell me this. You brought me up here to see what you could pull out of my head by forcing me to relive that…awful day.”
“Hannah—”
“You’re taking me apart like a jigsaw puzzle, piece by piece, hoping to find something—anything—that might help your father.”
He couldn’t deny it. Hadn’t he thought the same thing, earlier? “I guess there’s some truth to that, although—”
“When it’s over,” she said, holding his gaze, “and the pieces don’t fit anymore, who’s going to put me back together?”
Hannah slid into the passenger seat of the rented Taurus, leaned back and closed her eyes. They stung from too little sleep and too much stress. She didn’t have to tell herself not to think, as she often did when there was too much going on for her to relax, because at the moment her head felt empty. The experiences of the last twenty hours felt…surreal. Unreal.
It took her a few minutes before she realized they were going nowhere. She glanced over at John, half-expecting to find him slumped down in the driver’s seat, asleep. He had to be at least as tired as she was. But he was sitting up straight, staring at nothing, obviously deep in thought. She looked away before the sight of him made her feel what she couldn’t bear to feel. Not for him. Maybe not for anyone.