Julia reached out, touched her hand, and tugged her gently into the river. The water in this stretch was pooling, slow and lazy. Rapids were upstream and down, but here, behind the castle, had always been meant for swimming.
Hannah felt the lump in her throat, larger now: What she wouldn’t give for the dream to be real. For Julia to be here with her. She squeezed her hand; Julia squeezed back. Touched her cheek. Her fingertips felt warm, substantive, alive.
Hannah turned Julia’s hands over and saw the dried blood, her fingertips raw, her palms shredded.
“Julia!” she exclaimed, but Julia gently pulled her hands away, a finger to her lips.
“Hannah, please,” she said, and Hannah felt the tingle of memory. Her sister’s dirt-streaked face, her hand on the white doorway, her mouth open, pleading.
Julia waded into the water, her dress, a pale-yellow bathing suit cover-up, billowing up around her. A laugh burbled out, and Hannah finally remembered her laugh, the thing she’d been trying to remember for what seemed like a year. Julia was her old self again, not the tightly coiled version of herself from that last summer. Not the secretive, angry, bitter sister. She kicked off the bottom of the shallow riverbed, the water spraying Hannah, and Hannah touched her cheek.
“It’s time for you to go now.” Julia stood in front of Hannah, somber, her hands on Hannah’s shoulders. She pointed into the distance, and Hannah turned to see Uncle Stuart lingering on the embankment, waving her in. Julia leaned in, kissed her sister’s forehead, and whispered, “Find the green door.”
“What does that mean?” Hannah asked, her mind racing. What green door? There weren’t any green doors in the castle. “Julia! What does that mean?”
Julia just pointed to Uncle Stuart and shooed Hannah with her hands. She smiled, waded back into the river, lay back, her hair floating around her. Hannah turned to see Uncle Stuart, arms waving frantically now, and glanced back at the river. Julia was gone.
Hannah followed Uncle Stuart back up the embankment, up the path, back to the pool, through the courtyard garden, in through the kitchen door. She followed him down the hall, through the foyer, up the concrete winding stairs to the second floor, down the hallway meant for cartwheels, to the turret room, her room. He opened her bedroom door, and she paused, gazed up at him, grateful and happy to be given the gift of her sister, even if only in a dream. Grateful for a few minutes with her dying uncle the way she remembered him: loving, robust, protective. Uncle Stuart kissed her forehead, bopped the crown of her head with a gentle closed fist, and she smiled. He turned and shuffled down the hall, back to his room.
Hannah crawled into bed, curled into the curve of Huck’s body, his steady breathing lulling her back to sleep in seconds. As she drifted, she wondered, What was real?
In the morning, Hannah woke to the smell of fresh coffee and a cool swath of sheet where Huck should have been. She checked her phone on the bedside table. It was ten o’clock, later than she’d slept in years. She had an appointment with Uncle Stuart and Aunt Fae’s estate lawyer today at noon.
Hannah tossed back the bedspread and quickly but quietly eased open the door. She crept down the hall and around the corner. The door to Uncle Stuart’s room was cracked, and Hannah nudged it, peering inside. Alice would be coming soon, if she hadn’t already. The steady hiss of a breathing tube, the click of the pulse-ox machine. She eased the door shut and padded back to the bathroom in her hallway. Hannah ran the water for the shower while sending Huck thought vibes to bring her a cup of coffee. In their house back in Virginia, she could have simply called down the steps. Not so much in the castle.
The dream was just a dream, then. Of course it was, right? What else would it be? She felt silly. She had wondered quickly if Stuart had died in the night, the dream his way of saying goodbye. She’d heard stories about that. It sounded nice, actually. Hannah had never had the opportunity. Maybe that was what the dream was about: a goodbye from Julia, seventeen years later.
She stripped off her nightgown and was stepping into the shower when she noticed her feet. She sat, hard, on the bathroom tile and looked at the bottoms, the heels, one and then the other. Caked in dirt and scratched, not deep but surface cuts, painless, thin streaks of blood from heel to ankle.
Like she’d been walking in the woods barefoot.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Now
Two days after Rink found the jawbone in the woods, Wyatt knocked on the front door with a warrant, as promised. Alone this time, for which Hannah was grateful. Hannah had never understood Reggie Plume, then or now, and he always seemed to demand something of her, something unsaid and primal. Hannah knew, or could sense, even as a young teen that what lay beneath his smooth exterior was not a good person, as if at a cellular level he was put together wrong.
Wyatt brought an excavation crew and a forensic team and talked amiably to Huck, who led his team back to the spot in the woods where Rink found the jawbone. Hannah watched the two men stride across the courtyard from her bedroom window: Huck towering a foot above Wyatt, Wyatt motioning with his hands and speaking with muted purpose. Hannah felt the swirl of emotion in the pit of her stomach: fear of what they’d find in the woods, years and layers of earth being turned over and unburied, secrets exposed—amid a rush of love for Huck, who had only risen to each occasion since he’d been here with the grace and humility she’d come to expect, and an uneasy longing to know the person Wyatt had become, the man he’d grown into. Wondering how different he was from the boy she had known.
After that first day at the pool, Hannah and Julia had ridden into town every day, parked their bikes outside the diner, chained them to a light post, and walked with bathing suits, towels, and beach bags to the pool (Wyatt’s pool, as Hannah had come to think of it). Julia dropped her stuff in a heap and wandered off to find her friends, leaving Hannah to set up.
Hannah felt bereft at her sister’s sudden disinterest in her but also a building excitement at her own secret budding friendship with the redheaded boy in the refreshment stand. Her sister and her newfound friends wouldn’t touch french fries with a ten-foot pole, so it was easy to keep their meetings clandestine. She hadn’t pinpointed why she thought Julia would disapprove; Hannah just knew that she would. He was older, seventeen, she’d learned. But their friendship was so weightless, easy. The age gap felt like nothing. Julia wouldn’t treat it like nothing—she treated everything like something, especially when it came to Hannah. Even when Hannah had brought home a D on an algebra test, it wasn’t their mother who pitched a fit; it was Julia, ranting around her room. “A D! Do you know you need GOOD GRADES to get into college, and you need COLLEGE to be able to leave this dump of a town? I can’t take care of you forever. Get your head out of your ass, Hannah Marie.” Their mother had pressed her fingers down on the test on the table, tapping the red circled letter a few times, and said simply, “I want more for you, Hannah.” She’d pointed to her PJ Whelihan’s uniform, her name tag. “You are better than me. Don’t do this.” And then a crash from upstairs sent her scurrying up to Wes, who had fallen in the bathroom. His forehead spurted blood on the white linoleum while Hannah stood in the doorway, stunned at both the bright red against the dingy white floor and the idea that her mother could move so fast. She remembered wondering, in that moment, if her mother loved her stepfather or just felt obligated to keep him from killing himself.