Girls of Brackenhill(71)
“Wait, spouting nonsense about what? What investigation?”
“Into what happened to Ellie. Warren saw Ellie at Brackenhill; he followed her up there after an argument, he says. Then she disappeared into the woods, and he says Fae followed her. He tried to chase them down, but it’s thick back there, and he got turned around. Look, he was probably drunk as a skunk.” Joel’s voice was low, and Hannah had to lean forward to hear him.
“I don’t understand, though. If she ran away, what could he possibly be saying? What are the police investigating?”
“That night he saw them? Warren is convinced that Fae killed Ellie.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Now
Huck had left eight days ago. Hannah spoke to him once briefly on the phone. He hollered in the background to someone else: a worker, perhaps. “Sorry, hon, that’s just Dave.” Like she should have known who Dave was. Hannah played along (“Oh, right, Dave! Tell him I said hello”). When they hung up, she felt no more connected to him than she’d felt before the call. They might as well have not even spoken. The exchange was perfunctory, transactional.
They’d always been a tiny bit transactional. Can you pick up Rink’s meds? Sure. Sushi tonight? Yes, the place on Circle Drive. Hannah assumed most relationships fell into this pattern. She’d always felt a streak of pride in it: Look how functional we are! Trina had done everything; Wes contributed nothing. After Wes left, after Julia disappeared, Trina fell into a state of disrepair, and Hannah filled in the gaps. Her teenage years were benchmarked by dysfunction. There was something satisfying about her and Huck’s partnership—they were a well-oiled machine. No messy emotional glitches, no meltdowns on the bathroom floor, no shattered glasses against the walls. They didn’t even squabble about housework. What she couldn’t get to Huck would do, and vice versa. If she put laundry in, he’d hear the buzzer and deftly switch it. She’d come home from grocery shopping to find him folding her shirts the exact way she liked them—which was slightly different from how he liked them, but he complied.
They would have been perfect parents.
Would have been?
The thought jarred her. The engagement ring still glinting on her finger. The scrying ring on the other hand. The wedding date not set, the wedding itself rarely discussed in detail. The idea of a wedding so attractive to both of them—she assumed, anyway—but perhaps not the actual mess of it. He’d asked her once, “How many people on your side?” And that was all it took. She’d never brought the wedding up again. He had a list. He’d made it one night over wine. Aunts and uncles, cousins and childhood neighbors turned Thanksgiving tablemates. Some of them Hannah had met, but mostly not, and Huck regaled her with stories about drunk uncles at Saint Patrick’s Day parties and an older aunt who wrapped up half-used beauty supplies at Christmas: shampoo and blue clamshell bath soaps with dried bubbles still on them (once even the curl of a black hair, and Huck and his brothers had howled for years at the “pube-soap Christmas”). Hannah sat next to him looking at bouquets on her iPad, something innocently impersonal, and laughed hollowly at Huck’s stories and wondered if she’d feel this kind of joy once his family became her family.
And yet he didn’t ask. He didn’t ask how Stuart was or any details of the investigation. She should have told him the latest: that Wyatt thought that Fae’s accident hadn’t been an accident. It should have come out unprompted. That Warren thought that Aunt Fae had killed Ellie.
He’d talked about his work, how sorry he was that he’d had to leave. How he missed her. How he wished he could have stayed. He asked if there had been any word on the bones. She said no. He asked when she was coming home, and she said she didn’t know.
Then Dave interrupted, and Huck had to go, and that was the end of it.
Hannah snapped the leash on Rink, and he skittered to the back door, impatient. He hadn’t been walked for days. Hannah had let him out once to run, but afraid he would come back with another bone, she’d whistled him back after ten minutes, limp with relief when he’d returned empty mouthed.
She dragged Rink away from the courtyard, toward town. Away from the path that led to the river, away from the castle. A path on the north side of the castle had been overgrown. She remembered it well; it had been her preference as a child. One path led to the river, well traversed and visible from the castle windows. This one, hidden in the back, led nowhere.
What if Warren was right? What if Fae had killed Ellie? Wouldn’t that give Warren motive to do something to Julia? Or even Fae herself? But why almost twenty years later? What was the point of driving Fae off the road now?
As she pushed into a clearing, the greenhouse came into view. Hannah exhaled, remembering Stuart in there, surrounded by glass, the windows fogged and the top of his head only partially visible. She used to love to sit on a stool inside the greenhouse and watch him. The summer sun would beat down, the slanted roof that faced east gathering the morning and midday light, beaming onto her uncle’s head, making him bead up with sweat while he worked. A classic rock radio station would play on the transistor, and Stuart would sing softly to himself and to her.
“This is the Who,” he’d tell her. “Everyone knows ‘Pinball Wizard’ and ‘My Generation,’ but do you know ‘Tattoo’ or ‘Disguises’?” He’d wipe sweat from his brow, leaving a thick streak of dirt from forehead to ear.