Girls of Brackenhill(43)

“What do you see?” Hannah sat up, interested but not scared.

“People. Voices. I have dreams. Sometimes singing. Or laughing.” Julia’s voice was low, her hair lifting in the breeze. “Like children.”

“You’ve been listening to the kids in town too much. They say it’s haunted. That Aunt Fae is a witch.”

“Well, what if she is?” Julia leaned back against the window frame, posed just so, as though for a portrait. Julia always acted as though she were being photographed, tilting her head to display the strong jawline, her eyes downcast, her chin jutted out. Hannah thought it must be exhausting to live in a constant state of self-awareness. Worry about how every small movement would be perceived, when it was likely that no one was paying any attention to you anyway.

Julia was poised, dainty, while Hannah was robust, loud. Her mother sometimes called her a bull in a china shop, stomping her way through life.

Hannah sighed, flipped her book back open. “Aunt Fae isn’t a witch. You are not hearing children. You are listening to your dumb teenage friends, and you have an overactive imagination.”

Julia shot her a glare and stormed back to her room. Hannah heard her sister leave out the back door and hurried to the window in time to see Julia take off down the front path on her bike.

Aunt Fae would kill her if she knew she rode her bike into town alone. That path grew narrow and steep in the middle, and they had to hoist their bikes up the embankment over the guardrail and ride on the road, winding and no shoulder, for a quarter mile. Aunt Fae would flip out.

Hannah pulled a towel from the hall closet and ran a bath. Submerged up to her chin, she could think. Was Julia right? If she was honest with herself, did Brackenhill feel haunted? She thought about the labyrinth, the creak of doors and floors in the middle of the night, the red pool (which Uncle Stuart had explained but was still odd).

The water suddenly felt freezing, even in the un-air-conditioned bathroom. Hannah stood, pulled the plug, dried herself off, and stopped.

“Jules?” she called into the hall. The shifting air felt like a person in the room. The hum of a fan down the hall. In the distance, Uncle Stuart’s whistle: “I Wanna Be Like You,” Louis Prima, he would have told her. Jaunty and bouncy.

She blotted at her hair, walked back into her bedroom, and let out a single piercing scream.

On her bed, neatly in the center, was a white lace-up baby shoe. It hadn’t been there when she’d gone into the bathroom. In fact, she’d never seen it before in her life.

Aunt Fae rushed into the bedroom. “What on earth are you carrying on about?” she scolded, her voice impatient. “It’s always something with you!”

“Where did that come from?” Hannah pointed at the shoe, and Aunt Fae’s face went white.

“Where did you get that?” she demanded, her thick fingers snatching the white bootie off the bedspread and tucking it into her apron pocket.

“I didn’t get it anywhere! I went to take a bath.” Hannah felt indignant. Julia never got blamed for anything.

Hannah, did you break the vase?

Hannah, did you spill on the carpet?

Hannah, where is your sister?

Even when it was Julia, it was Hannah.

Aunt Fae propped her hands on her hips and glared at Hannah, her face twisted in anger. Hannah had never seen her like that, and she tucked the towel tighter around her chest, shrank back against the wall.

“I’ll trust you not to play a prank like that again; do you understand me?”

“I didn’t play a prank!” Hannah’s voice pitched up, louder than she intended, but it was so frustrating. If anyone had played a prank, it was Julia. And anyway, it was a pretty weird prank that didn’t mean anything to anyone.

Julia, who rode to town. After talking about child ghosts. A voice inside Hannah’s head would not shut up.

“Hannah, please,” Aunt Fae said, sighing. “Will you please just lower your voice?”

Julia, Aunt Fae, her mother. Everyone had a habit of sighing her name instead of saying it.

Aunt Fae turned and left then, her heavy footsteps in the hall and then the steps down.

“Yeah, well, Julia rode her bike into town!” Hannah called after her, which admittedly wasn’t helping her “Julia left the shoe” cause.

“That’s enough, Hannah!” Aunt Fae called back up to her.

It was always enough; that was the problem with Hannah.

She was so busy being angry with Julia that she never stopped to ask herself why Aunt Fae cared so damn much about the shoe in the first place.





CHAPTER THIRTY

Now

Hannah rolled the small canister of pepper spray between her thumb and forefinger and tucked it into her jeans pocket. The brown house next to the old railroad station. Looks like kindling.

The siding on the brown house was asbestos shakes, cracked and broken, hanging in some cases by a single tacked corner. The upstairs window was broken and covered with cardboard and duct tape. The porch, its middle sunken and uneven, creaked under Hannah’s weight.

She knocked, hesitantly at first, then increasing in volume and pressure until she was pounding on the door. She was crazy to be here, at Warren Turnbull’s house.

Then why was she here? She didn’t know. Rattling around the house, waiting to hear from hospice centers, trying to avoid Alice, and skulking around like a living version of a Brackenhill ghost was making Hannah crazy. All Huck wanted to do was read or cook or walk in the woods, and if she spent too much time with him, he’d start asking when they could leave.