Girls of Brackenhill(52)

Had she talked to him? She searched her memory.

Hannah remembered the smell of his neck, damp with tears and summer sweat, as she sat curled against him on the swing of his front porch. He’d comforted her, but she hadn’t told him specifics about why she was upset. All the words she could come up with had been childish, juvenile. My sister likes Ellie better than me. Hannah, so aware of their age gap, so conscious of her perceived immaturity, had instead spoken in generalizations. She’s such a bitch lately. She’d called her secretive. Maybe even slutty. Thinking back, she remembered his surprise at that comment. It hadn’t registered at the time.

She wondered if he was thinking about that moment too. Or was he thinking of later, when she’d kissed him, straddled his lap, let her hands inch up his bare chest, fingertips pressed against the ridges of his shoulders, as she marveled about his body, the first boy body she’d ever seen, so wholly different from her own that she thought there should be different words for their parts: shoulder, chest, muscle, skin.

But all Wyatt said was, “I don’t remember you talking about Ellie specifically.” And then, “We’ll need to come back.”

“What?”

“We need to do another search of the property.”

“You think the skeleton is Ellie?” Her voice pitched up several octaves. Until that moment she hadn’t fully thought that Ellie could be dead. In Hannah’s mind, Ellie was just another runaway teenage girl from Rockwell.

“I don’t know. Like I said, it’s a hunch, based on what I remember. Based on interviews with other people who were kids with us at the time.”

Hannah frowned. She knew what she’d seen, and she remembered it as though it had been that day. “Could Ellie have been living on Brackenhill property somewhere?” She thought of all the outbuildings: sheds and storm shelters, a small barn, the tower with a turret roof that was always empty. If Ellie was buried at Brackenhill, then who had buried her? Who killed her?

“I don’t know. The winters here aren’t mild. She disappeared fall of 2001. She would have had to find shelter, food, without anyone seeing her. More likely that she stayed with someone who is either lying for her or is no longer around.” The implication was obvious, and Hannah felt the creeping dread up her spine. Would Julia have hidden Ellie in the castle? For a year? Nothing about that made sense. They’d gone back to Plymouth in August.

Wyatt stood to go. Opened and closed his mouth like he wanted to say more. Finally, “We’ll be back in a few days. I just need to assemble the right team. I’ll text you a time, okay?”

He didn’t hug her goodbye, and when his car backed out of the driveway, she felt disoriented, restless. Unsettled by the feelings Wyatt had stirred up, wishing Huck hadn’t left. She texted Huck but received no reply. He was probably still driving. It seemed impossible that he’d left only that morning. She thought about calling him, asking him to come back. Everything Wyatt had said had been true: her aunt and uncle, her sister, the body in the woods. It was a lot to process. Wyatt didn’t even know about the dreams, the sleepwalking.

For the first time, Hannah felt afraid and unsure. Huck had always had such confidence in her, an easy belief that she’d be fine. That he’d always be fine; they’d be fine. Vulnerability was a weakness; needing others meant you were failing yourself. It explained why he loved her. She’d been closed up and shut down. It was easy to love someone with no baggage. That part of her life, the needy, vulnerable childhood part, had been packed away in a dusty corner of her brain for so long that she hardly recognized herself now. She’d spent the last seventeen years moving forward, making her life.

Then why now, for the first time in as long as she could remember, when she was careening backward in time with Wyatt blowing the dust off her memories, did she suddenly feel alive?





CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Then

July 13, 2002

The river was high, thick with rain, and brown, rushing and loud. It swirled in yellow-white foam around her thighs, her nightgown pushed up to her waist. Floating, pillowing around her.

She woke up freezing.

The faint moonlight bounced off the water, the sky inky black and huge.

She hadn’t even been dreaming, but she woke up in the river. The river rushed around her, cold, gripping, and she felt frozen with fear.

She was going to die.

Hannah inched her feet along the bottom, felt the sand and pebbles shift under her heels. She could hardly see her hand in front of her face. The moon, waxing crescent, barely gave her enough light to get back to the beach, where she fell forward on her hands and knees. She was soaked and freezing, trembling with fear and exhaustion.

It wasn’t the first time she’d sleepwalked. It had started about a month ago, maybe more. Time was distorted at Brackenhill: a week seemed like a year, a month like a blink. It didn’t always make sense.

Last time she’d woken up in the basement. On the steps, in particular. She was facing the kitchen door and ascending. She had no memory of going down to the basement. She and Julia hadn’t gone downstairs since that second summer with the index cards and the moving doors. They’d been too skittish about it. After Uncle Stuart had to rescue them from the center, Aunt Fae forbade it. Said they’d “carried on too much about it.”

Hannah pushed her way up the embankment and through the woods. She had no idea if she was on the path back to the house or not—she had no flashlight, and under the canopy of the forest, she could barely see her hand in front of her face.