“Hey.” Wyatt’s tone was brisk, businesslike. “Are you at Brackenhill? Can I swing by?”
“Why? Is it Julia?” She hadn’t meant to sound so desperate, but it just tumbled out.
He was silent for a beat. “I’ll come to you, okay?”
“I’m actually in Rockwell. I was visiting Jinny.”
He laughed. “Did you get your fortune read?”
“Not this time—we had to burn sage and cedar for a smudge because I mentioned Warren Turnbull’s name.” She threw it out there to gauge a reaction.
Silence.
“Where are you, Han?”
“Standing in front of the diner. Want to meet me?” Her voice was shaky.
“Yes, stay put.” He ended the call.
While she waited, she thought about Wyatt’s silence at her question about Warren. Something about the name Turnbull pulled at her subconscious, but she couldn’t put her finger on it.
Wyatt came around the corner, intent on something on his phone, and his face broke into a smile when he saw her. She felt warmed by it and then hated herself. He leaned in, kissed her cheek. It was meant to be a casual greeting—something she’d seen others do a thousand times, hell, something she herself had done a thousand times—but his skin against hers sent a ripple down her spine.
He motioned toward the diner door and opened it for her. “After you.”
They took a seat in a back booth, next to the one where she and Huck had sat with Jinny only two days before. The memorial service seemed like ages ago. So much had happened since then.
They ordered coffee, and Wyatt ordered a grilled cheese, but Hannah’s stomach felt in knots.
“So tell me everything.” She knew why Wyatt had called her. He wouldn’t have called if he didn’t have news about the remains.
“Tell me first, why did you ask about Warren Turnbull?” He fiddled with a sugar packet and tilted his head.
Hannah found herself relaying the whole story: Uncle Stuart talking about Ruby, then Jinny mentioning the child, then the snooping through Ruby’s room and the study and finding the car title with Warren Turnbull’s name on it. Jinny’s assertion that they were still married.
“Did you know about Fae and Warren?” Hannah pressed.
“Me? No. At least not until recently. I mean, we’ve been running background on your aunt and uncle as part of the new investigation, and it came up.” Wyatt ran a hand through his hair. “They’re still married.”
“That’s what Jinny said too. Are the bones Julia’s?” Hannah’s skin felt stretched, her legs cramping. Every muscle in her body was taut with the strain.
“No.” Wyatt watched her carefully as he said it. “They’re not.”
She felt a swooping, dizzying relief. She’d always held the idea that Julia had run, had stayed away for seventeen years because of an unknown trauma, but would come home when she was ready. It was maybe a childish, outlandish fantasy, but she allowed it. The purse found on the riverbank was only a decoy—a way to throw them all off her scent. Julia was smart—if she wanted to stay lost, she would. Hannah had long, elaborate fantasies of their reunion. She had dreams so real they stayed with her for days. A body would end all that. Everyone talked about closure, but Hannah always felt like closure was a farce. Something people clung to not in their darkest moments but while witnessing other people’s darkest moments. People who’d experienced real grief would never wish for such a thing.
“Do you know whose they are?” Hannah asked quietly, not sure if she wanted the answer.
“Not yet; that’ll take some time. They’ve run the DNA through a federal database of missing persons with no luck there so far. Next, we’ll pull local missing persons and compare dental records or DNA if we have it. We don’t always have older DNA. It wasn’t standard procedure, say, twenty years ago. It’s the damnedest thing, though. They estimate they’ve been buried between fifteen and twenty years.” Wyatt took a deep breath before continuing. “And it’s a teenage female.”
“So around the same time that Julia went missing, another teenage female was maybe killed and buried at Brackenhill, without anyone knowing? That seems outlandish.” Hannah’s thoughts spun. Who would have buried a body at Brackenhill in the first place? And how? It didn’t seem possible. “Did you search the whole grounds? Maybe there was a murderer, some crazed madman, and they got Julia and someone else. She had friends, remember? Whatever happened to all of them?”
Wyatt covered her hand with his. She yanked it away. She didn’t need him gumming up her thought processes.
“I’m serious, Wyatt. What if someone in Rockwell was a serial killer?”
“Hannah, if that were the case, the first suspects would be your aunt and uncle. It’s their property.”
Hannah stopped. He was right. He was right, and that was ridiculous.
He continued, “And of course we searched the property. We brought in dogs that day—you didn’t see them? And they have a machine, kind of like a metal detector that looks for soil disturbances, although it’s more useful for intact bodies with some heft to them. It can miss skeletal remains—”
“Stop.” Hannah held up her hand. “Could it have been a mistake? Is there any way that it’s Julia and someone just got something wrong?”
Wyatt shook his head. “No. We did a dental comparison and ran DNA. Neither was a match for Julia.”
“Okay, but you have DNA; can’t you just . . . figure out who it is?” She was a bit shocked to realize she didn’t really know how that worked.
“No, it’s not like TV. There isn’t a master DNA database of everyone in the country. There’s a big one, but of known missing persons, criminals, and a little from ancestry websites, but that gets complicated legally. If someone isn’t in the system, we can’t just . . . conjure them.” He gave a laugh. “We aren’t Jinny.”
Hannah smiled. “So the body at Brackenhill wasn’t a known missing person or a criminal.”
“No.”
The waitress brought the coffee and poured it into mugs, and their conversation halted while they waited. She left, and Wyatt stirred cream and sugar into his cup, while Hannah took a sip of hers, black.
“Hannah, there’s more.” He kept his eyes down, on his mug, his spoon slowing. “I need you to think back, okay? The years you were in Rockwell and hung out in town.”
She felt a flush creep up her cheeks, immediately thinking of the stolen nights in Wyatt’s bedroom, wedged into his single bed, the windows flung open, their bodies damp in the nighttime dew. She remembered the way they’d sneaked around, how secretive and intimate it had felt. How their furtiveness had felt new, sexy, grown up in a way she’d never known before. Even Julia hadn’t known. Until she did.
“Not us, Hannah.” He read her face, her thoughts. He leaned back against the booth, his left arm draped over the seat. She couldn’t look directly at him. “I need you to think of the other girls—Julia’s friends, who she hung out with. Did you hear any rumors at that time? Did you hear anything about anyone being knocked up?”
“What!” she couldn’t help exclaiming. Her gaze snapped up, met Wyatt’s. He motioned gently with his hand, Keep it down. She would have heard something about that, she thought. Then again, that summer had been such a whirlwind, passing in a breathless fever dream, ending in tragedy. Would Julia have told her?