Girls of Brackenhill(41)

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Now

Huck had music playing in the kitchen when Hannah returned. Something with a jazzy beat, slow and easy. He’d fished a boom box out of the trunk of his car and hooked up his phone on the Bluetooth. He was puttering around the kitchen, torn basil and tomatoes from Fae’s garden on the chopping block. When Huck was restless, he cooked. He whistled, and when he saw Hannah, he twirled her around until they both laughed, and he kissed her. Gently, she nudged him back. His mood from earlier seemed to have dissipated, and Hannah chalked it up to frustration and isolation. She felt a pang of tenderness now, watching him. Out of his element and still making the best of things. For her. For them.

He resumed his chopping, his fingers long and practiced. It was Hannah’s favorite thing: just to be in Huck’s presence. So easy. He was almost always positive, optimistic. He always prodded her to look for silver linings, appreciate whatever she had, but not settle for anything less than she deserved. So different from Trina, whose whole life had been about settling. Keeping the status quo.

Hannah produced the wine out of a long paper bag, a cabernet from a Finger Lakes vineyard she’d never heard of. She showed Huck the label, and he nodded once, appraisingly. She turned the knob on the boom box; the sound lowered.

“It’s not her,” Hannah said, pouring two generous servings of wine into stemless Riedels that she found in the kitchen cabinet. The kitchen had been modernized sometime since she was a child, the cabinets white and the walls stone, but it was still more functional than beautiful. The floor was river stone, gray and smooth, while the walls were rocky, rough to the touch and stippled with white. Limestone? Hannah found herself wondering.

Huck stopped chopping. Turned to face her. “Then who is it?”

“They don’t know yet. It’ll be a few days.”

“That seems . . . bizarre, right? Unlikely?”

She felt herself turn on him, just that quickly. Stupid, really, but she couldn’t help it. “Well, unless Aunt Fae and Uncle Stuart were murderers.” It came out snappy, almost rude, and she felt immediately sorry. The underlying question had been undeniable, and of course it was unlikely. She shook her head in apology.

Huck held up a hand. “Of course not, Han.” Then, “How did you find out?”

“I saw Wyatt in town.”

“Wyatt, then?” If Huck had noticed the way she referred to Wyatt, not Officer McCarran, he hadn’t brought it up before. But now she could see it dawning on him, how personally she seemed to know him, how attached she might have been to this town and the people in it. He took a sip of wine, popped a slice of cheese from the counter into his mouth. Tilted his chin up to watch her, too carefully, she thought. “And who is Wyatt again? To you, I mean. Besides just the officer in this case. I know that’s not the whole story.”

Huck wasn’t a dummy and wasn’t jealous. There was no reason to keep their history from him, except that she already had. That was the only sin: she’d lied by omission once.

“Wyatt was my first boyfriend,” Hannah said, breaking a grape from its stem, squeezing it between her thumb and forefinger, going for nonchalance.

Huck played along, giving her a teasing smile. “Intriguing, Ms. Maloney. This is the first I’m hearing of this. Although I’ll be honest—I had an inkling. Y’all act like skittish mice around each other.”

“Well, I was fifteen. And it was only for two summers. We didn’t even keep in touch when I left.” Or was forced out, Hannah thought but did not say. She was intent on keeping up the act: Wyatt had meant nothing to her then, meant nothing to her now. She affected a look of boredom. Changed the subject. “It’ll be maybe two weeks until they can ID the body. Maybe more if they can’t find a hit through dental records in missing persons.”

“And then what?” Huck leaned back against the countertop, swirled his wineglass.

Now it was Hannah’s turn to play along, pretend they were casually discussing the weather, the lack of rain. “I don’t know. I mean, I can’t imagine this girl isn’t related to Julia’s disappearance.” Then, a quick thought: she hadn’t meant to hide it. “Huck, she was pregnant. When she died.”

“Really?”

“See, it’s connected. I can feel it.” Hannah shook her head, staring at the wineglass in her hand. “It’s connected to Julia.”

“How?”

She resented Huck pressing the issue. She wanted him to go along to get along, like he always had, always did with her. “What do you mean, how?” Sometimes she wondered if he was stupid. Quickly, she felt bad for thinking it. But honestly, “how”? Maybe she was just tired. She never used to be so impatient with him. She took a deep breath and a swig of wine. When she answered again, she kept her voice level. “Well, my sister goes missing. Seventeen years later they find the body of a pregnant teenage girl, killed around the same time my sister disappeared, on our family property. How can it not be connected, in some way? Seems like a no-brainer to me.”

“Only if your aunt and uncle are involved.” To Huck it was a thought exercise, a playful game; true for most things in his life.

Hannah felt another surge of anger, then tempered it. “No. You can access the castle grounds from the back, up the embankment on the west side. It leads down to a road.” She pointed south. Then pivoted, pointed west, toward the courtyard, where the sun was glowing gold through the trees. “The river is there.”