From the back, through the kitchen, Hannah heard her name being called, and Huck burst through the door, filling the space with his presence and his smell and his bulk—broad shoulders and a slight outward curve to his belly, only a little, large hands and a thick neck and all the things that had made her feel small, dainty, loved, now seeming crude and boorish, which was ridiculous; Hannah knew this. But next to Wyatt, whose eyes were widening in surprise, his mouth open like the fish they’d caught in the Beaverkill, Huck looked like a caricature of a giant. Rink ran behind him, barking and growling.
Huck stopped short at the sight of Alice and Wyatt and said, “Hi there, I didn’t know we had company.”
Wyatt stood, too, crossed the room and extended his hand. “I’m Detective McCarran, just doing some basic follow-up to Mrs. Webster’s car accident. I’m sorry for your loss.”
“I’m Detective Plume.” Reggie and Huck shook hands, and Huck’s gaze shifted to both men and back to Hannah.
Hannah realized that he cupped something in his left hand. “What’s that?” She pointed.
“Right. So look what Rink dug up.” He held up a stick. “I was down by the river, and he came running out from somewhere with this. He couldn’t have been gone for more than a minute. It was the damnedest thing . . .”
Huck held it out between his thumb and index finger. It was, at first glance, a curved piece of wood, jagged in the center and symmetrically bowed on either end. One half was chipped, with a long crack extending from the center to the left side; the other half was smooth. It was off white where Rink had carried it in his mouth but caked in dirt. Hannah said, “That looks like a—”
“Bone of some sort. Right?”
The floor shifted under Hannah’s feet. The room blurred, then focused.
Huck couldn’t have understood; he simply didn’t know enough. Hannah found herself staring at Wyatt, waiting for him to answer her unasked question. Huck continued, oblivious to the change in the room, the energy crackling between them all. “It is, don’t you think?”
Wyatt held out his hand—“May I?”—and Huck handed it to him. Wyatt turned it over and looked at Hannah. The implication was unmistakable, and Hannah sank back onto the chair. What kind of bone? A dog? A deer? Was it human?
Alice hovered in the doorway between the dining room and the kitchen, ready to leave the way she’d come in, late, impatient.
“It’s a jawbone. These were teeth.” Wyatt ran the pad of his index finger along the jagged center, and Hannah could see an incomplete set of molars. There were wells where the missing teeth would have been. Wyatt reached into his pocket and extracted a miniflashlight. He turned it on and aimed it at the bone, inverting it to look at the underside, a sharp bow, the ends flared like wings.
Both Wyatt and Reggie had been hunters at one time. Hannah didn’t have a reason to believe they’d stopped. They, if anyone, would know bones.
Reggie said quietly, “It’s definitely human.”
Hannah felt herself go cold, her lungs constricting, a sharp blade of pain.
Julia.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Now
Wyatt dropped the bone into an evidence bag he retrieved from his car.
“If it’s human, and I think it is,” he warned, “I’ll be back with a warrant, an excavation and crime scene team. We’ll have to run some tests first.”
“Do you really need a warrant? Can’t I just consent to a search?” Hannah wanted this over with as quickly as possible.
“You don’t own the property. You can’t consent to anything.” Reggie’s voice was sharp and—it could have been Hannah’s imagination—gloating.
Hannah rubbed her hand across her forehead, the events of the past few days catching up to her. Alice hung out a moment longer, caught in limbo, unsure what to do next, how to handle the bone discovery. Before she left, she whispered furtively, “Do you think the rest of it’s back there?” And Hannah’s face must have looked stricken, because Huck ran interference, walked Alice to her car.
Hannah had assumed Alice didn’t know the story, but of course, people talked. She imagined Alice, upon taking the job years ago, learning of the castle’s sordid history. She wondered if she’d been worried, scared? Perhaps she didn’t know that Hannah was the missing girl’s sister.
After everyone had gone, Hannah was instantly exhausted, her eyes drooping before she even reached her bedroom. Huck followed behind her, up the stone stairs, down the hall, and into the room they’d slept in the night before. It had been her room as a child, and it felt like second nature to take it back now. He dimmed the lights, closed the brocade drapes, and lay next to her.
“What do I do if it’s her?” Hannah whispered and felt Huck’s hand reach for hers in the dark. “What do I do if it’s not?”
Who else would be buried in Brackenhill? It could be anyone, Hannah reasoned. The property was almost two hundred years old. In fact, it seemed unlikely that the skeleton would be Julia at all.
But what if it was?
She pressed herself into the space between his chin and chest, his arm curled around her waist.
“Tell me about her,” Huck said softly and stroked her hair, winding it around his index finger.
It was like saying, Tell me about the ocean. Vast and consuming, stormy, complicated. How did you describe where it began and ended? Not knowing where to begin wasn’t a good reason to never begin at all.
“There’s so much, and still so little. She could be thoughtful and kind and funny. She could also be dismissive and cruel and cold. She was my best friend—for much of my childhood, my only friend. When we were small, my mother would never drive us anywhere, so while other kids got to know each other through playing and sports, I was home. Later, we had friends from school, but even then, we had to find rides places. I was with Julia more than I wasn’t.” Hannah closed her eyes, the smell of Julia hitting her memory: sweet and light and fruity, like gum and lipstick. Her voice drifted. “She was a writer. A lot of people didn’t know that. She scribbled in journals and loved pencil more than pen—so she could erase, make it perfect. She was a perfectionist. Everything in her room had a place; it had order. If it didn’t have a home, she threw it away. Nothing was sentimental. She didn’t get attached to things, she said.” So different from Hannah, whose spaces were always stormy—belongings strewed about, papers buried under clothing, subway tickets from vacations long over, small programs from museums, pamphlets from a whale watch she hadn’t even gone on. She tried to be tidy; it never worked. “She hated being alone. She was always looking for people, searching for something else, something better than what she had. She was an extrovert. She was funny. Always poking fun at people in a way that others called charming.”
“Like you,” Huck said, kindly. Too kind, really. Hannah’s humor ran more cutting, often called more bitchy than funny.
“No, people loved her. They tolerated me to get to her. Julia was everything more than me: prettier, funnier, kinder. I wanted to be just like her.” Hannah let out a short laugh, and Huck pulled her tight. Meant for comfort, but something about their newfound confidence made her heart quicken; she felt a pull down low in her belly, and she coiled a leg around his.