Girls of Brackenhill(42)
“So you think someone killed a teenager, then hiked her body up a steep embankment to bury her at Brackenhill. For what purpose?”
“I don’t know!” Hannah exclaimed, exasperated. “If I knew, obviously we’d know who it was, right? What if . . . this is crazy, but what if Julia killed the girl and buried her? And she ran away to hide from the crime? Or! What if someone else killed the girl and Julia saw it, then ran away to stay safe?”
“Like witness protection?” Huck turned his back, resumed his chopping. He seemed tired of the conversation. “I mean, maybe. Sure. Hannah, there’s something else we should talk about.”
She didn’t respond, didn’t have to. Knew where he was going before he said it. At her feet, Rink whined, and she scratched his ears.
“I have to go home.” He ran a hand through his hair, his back still to her. “It’s coming into fall planting season. I have clients to keep. The crew’s been keeping up with the maintenance clients: the mowing, hedge trimming, weeding. But there are incoming projects I have to handle.”
She knew he was right—Huck did a lot of the design work, and it was his business. She thought back to the first night she’d met him, at the bar. All his friends in suits and ties, working in finance jobs in DC. They’d been harried, lined in the face, their mouths pinched in permanent fury: at traffic, pedestrians, clients, the market, their bosses, their idiot bosses. And then Huck, his face relaxed, his nails dirty, his eyes laughing. He’d left their world, the suits and ties and washed-out faces, to pursue his own path, to be outdoors, his own idiot boss. He’d been one of them, once upon a time, in finance. He’d gone to college for business administration, taken the requisite associate job working sixty hours a week right out of school. Left to “dig in the dirt,” they’d mocked. Hannah had gone to dinner with the whole crew and their wives, new babies. They made twice Huck’s salary now and had all looked exhausted.
“I can’t leave yet,” Hannah said. She had a job to return to too. They’d been patient so far, but Patrice, her boss, had left her a slightly huffy voice mail yesterday morning, asking when she thought she’d be returning.
She and Huck had a life together in Virginia. They had a couple of friends. “Stuart needs placement. He’s on a waiting list. I can’t leave him alone in the house, even if they could afford around-the-clock care. I just can’t. And I have to see what comes of . . .” She motioned toward the courtyard, toward the embankment, the burial site.
“Right.” He turned to face her, eyes sliding sideways out the window across the garden. “I am having a little trouble understanding, I guess. I mean, if it’s not Julia, then why do you have to stay? Stuart I understand, but that could be wrapped up in a few days; who knows? But the body, well, that could be weeks.”
“Yeah, I can’t stay weeks,” Hannah agreed, but she knew as soon as the words popped out that it was a lie. She’d stay as long as she could, sacrificing her job, Huck, everything if she had to. It was a lightning-quick realization: She’d been so long in the dark, the events of that summer shrouded in secrecy and jumbled together in a confusing clot of memory, never knowing what was real and what was imagined or even wished for. The days immediately afterward a blur. Her clearest image was of her aunt and uncle, their faces stricken, out the back window of the car, growing smaller and smaller until they disappeared completely, as Wes sped away down the winding hill faster than necessary, her heart in her throat, unsure, uncertain, and wholly out of control.
She would not be made to leave again. Not without the whole truth.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Then
June 22, 2002
“I’m ready to go home,” Julia announced, standing in the doorway between their bedrooms.
“What? Why?” Hannah had been lying facedown on her bed, reading Little House on the Prairie for the eleventh time. It was a baby book, but she loved it. She’d read the whole series last summer and left all the books in her room at Brackenhill. Her eyes were drifting shut. She hadn’t been sleeping well: nightmares some nights, and others, well, she’d started sleepwalking. She was going to talk to Julia about it, except her sister already hated it here now. Hannah didn’t want to give her more reasons to want to leave.
“It sucks here this summer.” Julia pouted. She had a Blow Pop in her cheek and spun it so it clattered against her teeth. “Something is different. I hate it. Everything just feels wrong, and I think Aunt Fae hates us.”
“That’s the craziest thing you’ve ever said.” Hannah stared at her sister, who had a flair for the dramatic, her moods changing on a whim.
Julia sat on the edge of Hannah’s bed, her feet crossed daintily at the ankles. “No, it’s not. She’s mean, at least to me. And I can tell there’s something wrong with her. I swear to God, the other day she was talking to me about school, and she opened her mouth, and a fly came out.”
“Julia!” Hannah slammed the book shut.
“I’m more in tune with this kind of thing than you are. I can tell when people are wrong. Put together wrong.” She got up, walked to the window, turned the latch, and gave the glass a push. The windows clattered outward, against the stone. “I know you think I’m crazy. You don’t understand, though. I see things that you don’t. It started last summer. This place is not nice.”