Girls of Brackenhill(18)
“She was very humble.” Alice jumped in, her eyes tearing again.
Wyatt clicked a button on the recorder and opened a notebook. He asked the basic questions: names, ages, relationship to victim. Victim. The word sat in Hannah’s mouth like sour milk.
“Married?” Wyatt was looking at Hannah, unblinking. His expression remained unchanged. Hannah wondered if the question was truly standard.
“Engaged,” Hannah nearly whispered, and next to her, Alice said, “Yes.”
“When was the last time either of you saw Fae Webster?”
Alice said, “Two days ago.”
Hannah paused and then said, “2002.”
Wyatt finally reacted, snapping his head up and holding Hannah’s gaze. “Really?” He seemed to not believe her.
It was amazing how much he looked the same: same freckled skin, reddish-brown hair, but with a hint of graying around the temples—and what was it about gray that made men sexier? His hands, as he wrote, looked like his eighteen-year-old hands. She didn’t chastise herself for noticing his lack of wedding ring, but she should have. And just like that, a man she wouldn’t let herself think about for seventeen years was insistently, steadfastly here, to occupy her thoughts for the next however many days until she could get back home, with Huck—Huck! For a moment she’d forgotten about him—and Rink and her life, her real life. Her simple, predictable real life.
“Really,” she finally said.
Alice stood, and Wyatt and Hannah looked up, the spell broken.
“I have to go to my next appointment, if that’s all? Maybe we could continue this later?” She was brusque, done with both of them. “They’re expecting me”—she checked her watch—“a half hour ago.”
From the back, through the kitchen, Hannah heard her name being called, and Huck burst through the door, filling the space with his presence and his smell and his bulk—broad shoulders and a slight outward curve to his belly, only a little, large hands and a thick neck and all the things that had made her feel small, dainty, loved, now seeming crude and boorish, which was ridiculous; Hannah knew this. But next to Wyatt, whose eyes were widening in surprise, his mouth open like the fish they’d caught in the Beaverkill, Huck looked like a caricature of a giant. Rink ran behind him, barking and growling.
Huck stopped short at the sight of Alice and Wyatt and said, “Hi there, I didn’t know we had company.”
Wyatt stood, too, crossed the room and extended his hand. “I’m Detective McCarran, just doing some basic follow-up to Mrs. Webster’s car accident. I’m sorry for your loss.”
“I’m Detective Plume.” Reggie and Huck shook hands, and Huck’s gaze shifted to both men and back to Hannah.
Hannah realized that he cupped something in his left hand. “What’s that?” She pointed.
“Right. So look what Rink dug up.” He held up a stick. “I was down by the river, and he came running out from somewhere with this. He couldn’t have been gone for more than a minute. It was the damnedest thing . . .”
Huck held it out between his thumb and index finger. It was, at first glance, a curved piece of wood, jagged in the center and symmetrically bowed on either end. One half was chipped, with a long crack extending from the center to the left side; the other half was smooth. It was off white where Rink had carried it in his mouth but caked in dirt. Hannah said, “That looks like a—”
“Bone of some sort. Right?”
The floor shifted under Hannah’s feet. The room blurred, then focused.
Huck couldn’t have understood; he simply didn’t know enough. Hannah found herself staring at Wyatt, waiting for him to answer her unasked question. Huck continued, oblivious to the change in the room, the energy crackling between them all. “It is, don’t you think?”
Wyatt held out his hand—“May I?”—and Huck handed it to him. Wyatt turned it over and looked at Hannah. The implication was unmistakable, and Hannah sank back onto the chair. What kind of bone? A dog? A deer? Was it human?
Alice hovered in the doorway between the dining room and the kitchen, ready to leave the way she’d come in, late, impatient.
“It’s a jawbone. These were teeth.” Wyatt ran the pad of his index finger along the jagged center, and Hannah could see an incomplete set of molars. There were wells where the missing teeth would have been. Wyatt reached into his pocket and extracted a miniflashlight. He turned it on and aimed it at the bone, inverting it to look at the underside, a sharp bow, the ends flared like wings.
Both Wyatt and Reggie had been hunters at one time. Hannah didn’t have a reason to believe they’d stopped. They, if anyone, would know bones.
Reggie said quietly, “It’s definitely human.”
Hannah felt herself go cold, her lungs constricting, a sharp blade of pain.
Julia.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Now
Wyatt dropped the bone into an evidence bag he retrieved from his car.
“If it’s human, and I think it is,” he warned, “I’ll be back with a warrant, an excavation and crime scene team. We’ll have to run some tests first.”
“Do you really need a warrant? Can’t I just consent to a search?” Hannah wanted this over with as quickly as possible.