“Jinny, I came to stay with Fae when I was eleven. Who would tell an eleven-year-old about the death of a child?” Hannah was exasperated. “How did she die?”
“That ridiculous castle she lived in. Over a hundred and fifty years old. No safety measures at all.” Jinny reached out, gripped Hannah’s hands, her long plum nails digging into Hannah’s wrists. “The poor girl fell out a second-story window.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Now
The night after Aunt Fae’s memorial, Hannah had another dream. This time, Julia appeared in her doorway, mostly silent again, her hair pulled back in a tight chignon, her skin seeming to glow in the darkened room. Julia led Hannah to the locked turret room, and they tried in vain to open it. Julia pulled bobby pins from her bun and wiggled the lock with no luck. The doorknob appeared stuck. In the dream Hannah kept saying, “This door isn’t green; are you sure it’s the right one?” She awoke standing in the hallway in front of Uncle Stuart’s door, listening to the rasp of the oxygen tank, the rhythmic beep of his heart monitor. She crept back to bed and woke in the morning before Huck, exhausted. At least this time she hadn’t ended up in the woods; she checked her feet and the hem of her nightgown to be sure.
Hannah hadn’t sleepwalked since she was a child, and now, suddenly, it was becoming a regular occurrence. When she googled it, she found correlations with stress and PTSD. She wondered if she was experiencing a small amount of latent trauma just from staying in Brackenhill. While she still felt uneasy in Rockwell, she was surprisingly comforted by the house, the memories of her aunt and uncle, even the memories of her sister. It hadn’t felt as traumatic as she would have expected. She felt more at home here than she ever had at her mother’s house, with the thin, mildewed carpeting and peeling wallpaper.
After breakfast, Huck took Rink back out in the woods. He’d been quiet at breakfast, his conversation surface and polite. She’d asked him, “Are you okay?” and he’d said yes, but quietly, his smile pasted on.
“You want to go.” She’d said it like a statement, but it was a question, and she held her breath.
“Whatever you need to do,” Huck said.
“I just have to find a place for Uncle Stuart, okay?”
He’d nodded and escaped outside. She resisted asking again, tugging his arm—No, really, are you okay?—because that had always seemed pathetic to her: begging to be seen. She should have told him about the sleepwalking. But he’d been oddly quiet since yesterday. Jinny’s bombshell about Ruby hadn’t helped. She’d brought it up on the truck ride back to Brackenhill.
“What do you think it means?” she’d pressed.
“It’s sad that their daughter died, Han. But it doesn’t change your childhood. Your life with Fae and Stuart. Your memories.”
It was so like Huck to paint over everything with a sunny brush. To make light of dark things. It used to be Hannah’s favorite thing about him. But here, when she needed a partner, someone to bounce ideas off, his optimism felt like a slap. It didn’t feel like support; it felt like a rebuke.
“It changes everything,” she’d snapped. Later, she’d apologized, and he’d hugged her. His mouth landed somewhere between her cheek and her ear in a distracted kiss before he disappeared outside again. He didn’t have the tolerance for this kind of thing: digging through dusty bedrooms, old secrets. His life was ordered, measured, line itemed.
When he was gone, she listened for a moment to make sure he wouldn’t return. She crept to the end of the hall, the turret room at the other end of her hallway, facing Valley Road. She tried the doorknob and found it locked, as she’d expected. The door was antique, and the lock would have been locked with a skeleton key, but despite a cursory search around the kitchen, Hannah couldn’t locate one. She found a small rusty screwdriver in the kitchen drawer, though, the wooden handle chipped and broken, and went up to jiggle it in the keyhole, pressing the tip of the screwdriver against the pin. The lock popped fairly easily, and the door swung open, banging against the wall before she caught it.
She felt immediately like she was doing something wrong. Like she needed to avoid getting caught. By whom? Alice, perhaps? Alice seemed to slip in and out of the castle soundlessly, appearing suddenly, without warning at the most unexpected moments. Well, so what? This wasn’t Alice’s house. It was Stuart’s now.
Behind the door was a child’s room, painted in bright periwinkle blue. The walls coated in a swirl of plaster, like clouds, the ceiling painted to mimic a bright summer sky. The bed had a canopy, white chenille coverlet, lacy curtains, and giant pillows with ornate ruffles. The bed held a throng of stuffed animals: bears and rabbits and puppies in shades of brown and gray. A purple plush blanket was folded neatly across a large cedar chest.
Hannah cracked the lid on the cedar chest a few inches and peered inside. Stacks of clothing and blankets. She moved to the dresser and armoire and opened the drawers: jeans and dresses and shirts and sweaters. Winter mixed with summer clothes. Small socks and little-girl panties. The armoire held the same—winter coats and bathing suits and sandals and boots. The room smelled musty, and everything was coated in a thin layer of dust. Not twenty-five years of dust—clearly Aunt Fae had cleaned the room periodically.
The dresser held a music box. A small ballerina twirled when she opened it, and she heard the opening notes of “Clair de Lune.” In the top drawer, Hannah found a small leotard, tights, ballet flats. Little Ruby had been a ballerina. The bookcase contained children’s books: Dr. Seuss and Berenstain Bears and Roald Dahl. An easel sat in the corner, untouched paints and dusty paper, a collection of paintbrushes in a pristine, seemingly unused mason jar.
Hannah didn’t know what she was looking for, exactly. She wanted to understand why she’d lived in this house for five summers after Aunt Fae and Uncle Stuart’s daughter had died and had no idea this room was here, no idea that Ruby had even existed. Aunt Fae had always been secretive, private, but Hannah’s room had shared a wall with a child’s room, and she hadn’t even known it. She could have read these books, painted on this easel. She chastised her own selfishness, but still, a strange feeling of abandonment persisted.
Hannah went to the window and looked out, wondering if Ruby had fallen out her own bedroom window. The window opened outward, joined in the center by an antique latch. She tried to turn the latch, but it seemed to have been either painted shut or cemented together with moisture and age. The windows were old: single pane, drafty. She gazed down at the cement patio below that led into the garden and tried to imagine a child falling. She couldn’t—didn’t want to—envision it. How had it happened? Had Fae been with her? Had she lived with guilt as well as grief?
The ballerina stopped twirling, the music stopped, and Hannah moved to the dresser to shut the music box. From underneath the ribbon-tabbed lid of a jewelry compartment, a corner of yellow stuck out. Hannah lifted the lid. A folded piece of paper. She opened it. A birth certificate.
Ruby Anne Webster, born February 2, 1991, to Fae Summer Turnbull (mother) and Stuart G. Webster (father).
Turnbull? Had Fae and Stuart not been married at the time of Ruby’s birth? Also, Fae and Trina were sisters; they shared a maiden name, and it wasn’t Turnbull. It was Yost.