“I can’t leave yet,” Hannah said. She had a job to return to too. They’d been patient so far, but Patrice, her boss, had left her a slightly huffy voice mail yesterday morning, asking when she thought she’d be returning.
She and Huck had a life together in Virginia. They had a couple of friends. “Stuart needs placement. He’s on a waiting list. I can’t leave him alone in the house, even if they could afford around-the-clock care. I just can’t. And I have to see what comes of . . .” She motioned toward the courtyard, toward the embankment, the burial site.
“Right.” He turned to face her, eyes sliding sideways out the window across the garden. “I am having a little trouble understanding, I guess. I mean, if it’s not Julia, then why do you have to stay? Stuart I understand, but that could be wrapped up in a few days; who knows? But the body, well, that could be weeks.”
“Yeah, I can’t stay weeks,” Hannah agreed, but she knew as soon as the words popped out that it was a lie. She’d stay as long as she could, sacrificing her job, Huck, everything if she had to. It was a lightning-quick realization: She’d been so long in the dark, the events of that summer shrouded in secrecy and jumbled together in a confusing clot of memory, never knowing what was real and what was imagined or even wished for. The days immediately afterward a blur. Her clearest image was of her aunt and uncle, their faces stricken, out the back window of the car, growing smaller and smaller until they disappeared completely, as Wes sped away down the winding hill faster than necessary, her heart in her throat, unsure, uncertain, and wholly out of control.
She would not be made to leave again. Not without the whole truth.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Then
June 22, 2002
“I’m ready to go home,” Julia announced, standing in the doorway between their bedrooms.
“What? Why?” Hannah had been lying facedown on her bed, reading Little House on the Prairie for the eleventh time. It was a baby book, but she loved it. She’d read the whole series last summer and left all the books in her room at Brackenhill. Her eyes were drifting shut. She hadn’t been sleeping well: nightmares some nights, and others, well, she’d started sleepwalking. She was going to talk to Julia about it, except her sister already hated it here now. Hannah didn’t want to give her more reasons to want to leave.
“It sucks here this summer.” Julia pouted. She had a Blow Pop in her cheek and spun it so it clattered against her teeth. “Something is different. I hate it. Everything just feels wrong, and I think Aunt Fae hates us.”
“That’s the craziest thing you’ve ever said.” Hannah stared at her sister, who had a flair for the dramatic, her moods changing on a whim.
Julia sat on the edge of Hannah’s bed, her feet crossed daintily at the ankles. “No, it’s not. She’s mean, at least to me. And I can tell there’s something wrong with her. I swear to God, the other day she was talking to me about school, and she opened her mouth, and a fly came out.”
“Julia!” Hannah slammed the book shut.
“I’m more in tune with this kind of thing than you are. I can tell when people are wrong. Put together wrong.” She got up, walked to the window, turned the latch, and gave the glass a push. The windows clattered outward, against the stone. “I know you think I’m crazy. You don’t understand, though. I see things that you don’t. It started last summer. This place is not nice.”
“What do you see?” Hannah sat up, interested but not scared.
“People. Voices. I have dreams. Sometimes singing. Or laughing.” Julia’s voice was low, her hair lifting in the breeze. “Like children.”
“You’ve been listening to the kids in town too much. They say it’s haunted. That Aunt Fae is a witch.”
“Well, what if she is?” Julia leaned back against the window frame, posed just so, as though for a portrait. Julia always acted as though she were being photographed, tilting her head to display the strong jawline, her eyes downcast, her chin jutted out. Hannah thought it must be exhausting to live in a constant state of self-awareness. Worry about how every small movement would be perceived, when it was likely that no one was paying any attention to you anyway.
Julia was poised, dainty, while Hannah was robust, loud. Her mother sometimes called her a bull in a china shop, stomping her way through life.
Hannah sighed, flipped her book back open. “Aunt Fae isn’t a witch. You are not hearing children. You are listening to your dumb teenage friends, and you have an overactive imagination.”
Julia shot her a glare and stormed back to her room. Hannah heard her sister leave out the back door and hurried to the window in time to see Julia take off down the front path on her bike.
Aunt Fae would kill her if she knew she rode her bike into town alone. That path grew narrow and steep in the middle, and they had to hoist their bikes up the embankment over the guardrail and ride on the road, winding and no shoulder, for a quarter mile. Aunt Fae would flip out.
Hannah pulled a towel from the hall closet and ran a bath. Submerged up to her chin, she could think. Was Julia right? If she was honest with herself, did Brackenhill feel haunted? She thought about the labyrinth, the creak of doors and floors in the middle of the night, the red pool (which Uncle Stuart had explained but was still odd).
The water suddenly felt freezing, even in the un-air-conditioned bathroom. Hannah stood, pulled the plug, dried herself off, and stopped.
“Jules?” she called into the hall. The shifting air felt like a person in the room. The hum of a fan down the hall. In the distance, Uncle Stuart’s whistle: “I Wanna Be Like You,” Louis Prima, he would have told her. Jaunty and bouncy.
She blotted at her hair, walked back into her bedroom, and let out a single piercing scream.
On her bed, neatly in the center, was a white lace-up baby shoe. It hadn’t been there when she’d gone into the bathroom. In fact, she’d never seen it before in her life.
Aunt Fae rushed into the bedroom. “What on earth are you carrying on about?” she scolded, her voice impatient. “It’s always something with you!”
“Where did that come from?” Hannah pointed at the shoe, and Aunt Fae’s face went white.
“Where did you get that?” she demanded, her thick fingers snatching the white bootie off the bedspread and tucking it into her apron pocket.
“I didn’t get it anywhere! I went to take a bath.” Hannah felt indignant. Julia never got blamed for anything.
Hannah, did you break the vase?
Hannah, did you spill on the carpet?
Hannah, where is your sister?
Even when it was Julia, it was Hannah.
Aunt Fae propped her hands on her hips and glared at Hannah, her face twisted in anger. Hannah had never seen her like that, and she tucked the towel tighter around her chest, shrank back against the wall.
“I’ll trust you not to play a prank like that again; do you understand me?”
“I didn’t play a prank!” Hannah’s voice pitched up, louder than she intended, but it was so frustrating. If anyone had played a prank, it was Julia. And anyway, it was a pretty weird prank that didn’t mean anything to anyone.
Julia, who rode to town. After talking about child ghosts. A voice inside Hannah’s head would not shut up.