Girls of Brackenhill(76)

“Her ex-husband,” Hannah repeated dumbly. “You mean Warren.”

“Is that his name?”

“You know it is, Alice. Do you know Warren?”

“I—I don’t.” Alice’s hand encircled her throat, fingers pulsing at the neck.

“I think that’s the truck that ran Fae off the road,” Hannah said, sliding the blade under the carrot slices and pushing them into a pot on the stove with her fingertip.

“Someone ran Fae off the road?” Alice asked in a pitchy tone. She moved her hand to the back of her head, pulled her hair off her neck, twisted it before letting it unwind like a serpent. The gesture felt familiar, and Hannah stopped chopping, watched her, interested.

Finally, Hannah shrugged. “They aren’t sure. I think so. Wyatt isn’t positive.”

“Wyatt? You mean Detective McCarran.”

Hannah met Alice’s eyes. Saw something hard flicker there. “Yes. That’s what I mean.”

In the dream, Hannah smelled the fire. It became part of the sequence—first she was running through the woods, away from the blaze, and then she was running toward it, the heft of a child on her hip. She couldn’t see the child’s face, just a blonde curl, a wisp that kept blowing across Hannah’s cheek. The girl’s shoes were patent leather, white. She squealed in Hannah’s ear.

Hannah sat up, her heart pounding, and for a moment, she was relieved to wake up in the same place she’d gone to sleep. Not in the forest or in the courtyard or thigh high in the Beaverkill. She thought, for a moment, she was still in bed.

Then the smoke.

She didn’t ask herself until later how or why she could smell the smoke before she felt the heat of the blaze, before she saw the flames lick from the bottom of the room to the top.

She just knew she was in the greenhouse, and now the greenhouse was on fire.

She pushed against the door, but the door seemed to be stuck or locked, the metal frame red hot to touch. The smoke was starting to fill the small space, crowd out the oxygen in her lungs, make her feel light headed, and sting her eyes. The upper windows, usually slanted open, had been shut.

Hannah slapped her pockets and blessedly found her cell phone in the pocket of her hooded sweatshirt. She dialed 911 before she remembered that Rockwell had no 911, and then she just gave up and called Wyatt. When he answered in a husky, sleepy voice, she coughed into the phone that she was stuck in the blazing greenhouse. She realized then that the east-facing wall of windows was not burning. The wooden frame was blackened and crackling but not engulfed.

Through the window, backlit by moonlight, was Alice. Her normally slicked-back hair was wild around her face; her eyes seemed to glow from the firelight.

“Help!” Hannah screamed it through the window, but Alice didn’t flinch. Didn’t move.

Hannah picked up a large galvanized watering can and swung it hard against the glass, splintering it into pieces. She was barefoot, she realized, but she’d have to take her chances. She used the bottom of the aluminum watering can to clear the jagged edges from the frame as much as possible, then launched herself out the window.

Hannah landed on the broken glass, but her feet felt no pain. It wasn’t until later that she’d even notice the blood. She ran to the clearing between the greenhouse and the castle and turned around to watch the fire. The structure burned brightly in its entirety like a round, glowing fireball. Like it had been set all at once, burning in uniformity. Even the glass was starting to buckle and crack.

Parked next to the greenhouse was Stuart’s truck, entirely engulfed in flames.

Hannah looked around wildly, but Alice was gone. Had she been there at all?

Hannah knew then that the fire had been set deliberately and was meant as a warning. Perhaps even to kill her. Wyatt would tell her later she couldn’t know that. That maybe she’d followed the smoke in her sleep. “You’ve been sleepwalking. Were you dreaming about starting a fire?”

In other words, had she set the fire herself?

Hannah would insist that Alice had been there.

“She lives in Tempe. Alice is at home,” Wyatt would say gently. Soothingly. The way he’d spoken to her that night at the fish fry, in that pacifying tone. Tempe was ten miles away.

Later, the fireman would tell her about the backdraft. When she’d broken the window, she’d created a rush of air. “Almost as powerful as a bomb,” he’d say. It was a miracle she’d made it out alive, really.

She stood alone in the clearing, first watching it burn, then listening to the crack as the rickety roof finally caved in on itself, and the wood beams seemed to give way all at once with barely a groan, just the folding of boards like dominoes down to the soft, wet earth, the glass popping.

By the time the firemen (all three of them) and Wyatt had shown up, with trucks and sirens, huffing down the path like drunken bears, the whole building had burned, taking with it the green truck, blackened and burned out. They found Hannah sitting on an old, rotted tree stump with her arms around her knees, her feet filthy, and her sweatshirt stuck to her skin with sweat.

Her head was bent low, and later, Wyatt would tell her he thought she was crying. Something wild and keening that cut Wyatt to the bone because it was wholly unchecked. It wasn’t until he tried to comfort her that he realized she wasn’t crying at all.

Hannah was laughing.