“What about the skeleton! At Brackenhill!” Hannah would not be made to feel like she was crazy. She would not be gaslighted.
“Of course that’s being investigated. I know I floated the idea of it being Ellie, and that could still be true, but officially, on the books, Ellie is a closed-case runaway. We don’t have an identity, because frankly, these things take time. Even if we had DNA, which we don’t yet, like I said, there’s no giant DNA database where everyone is logged and accounted for. She’d only be in the system if she committed a crime after 1997. But to blanketly just say Warren is connected and these deaths are connected would be irresponsible of me; that’s all I’m saying.”
“Fine, you’re not saying it. I’m saying it.” Hannah huffed.
“I’m not saying they’re unrelated. You get that, right? I’m just saying we don’t know that.”
“Why else would Warren get so mad? Why would he threaten me?”
“I have no idea what you said to him. If you brought up Ruby and Ellie and Fae, maybe you just pissed him off. He’s not known to be warm and fuzzy. And that’s a whole lifetime of pain. He’s at a bar. In the middle of the day. People do that to drown out hurt.”
Hannah deflated. He was right, maybe. She spun the scrying ring around her finger. Wyatt reached out and gently pulled her hand to him, his touch sending jolts through her arm, down her spine.
“Where did you get this?” he asked, his eyes suddenly intense, his voice low and rumbling. Almost suspicious. Hannah focused on the feeling of her hand in his.
“I—I found it. In the shed.” Hannah felt a stab of guilt, like she was hiding something. Which, of course, she wasn’t, but something about the way Wyatt looked at her made her feel on edge. Like she should keep whatever secrets she had buried. But the truth leaked out to him anyway.
“At Brackenhill?” Wyatt examined it, turned her hand one way, then the other. He leaned toward her to get a better look. He smelled like laundry detergent and pine and trees and earth and dirt.
“Yes. Why?” Hannah moved to pull her hand away, but Wyatt wouldn’t let her.
“Can I see it? Can you remove it?” he asked softly, and she complied. He pulled out his phone, shined the flashlight on the ring, and studied it. After a few moments, he sighed.
“What’s the issue with the ring, Wyatt?” Hannah asked nervously.
“Don’t freak out, okay? But look.” He unlocked his phone and turned it to show her. It was an evidence baggie on a plain white dry-erase background. The number 72 was scrawled next to it. Inside the baggie was a ring, a twin to her own: obsidian stone, flat with a handmade band.
“Where did you find it?” Hannah whispered, but she knew the answer before he said it.
“On the finger of the woman buried at Brackenhill.”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Now
The bottom dropped out of Hannah’s stomach. “And you’re absolutely sure the remains aren’t Julia?” she asked again.
“We are one hundred percent sure.”
“But Wyatt, don’t you think this proves that Julia’s disappearance and this body, whoever it is, are linked? They both had scrying rings. I’m wearing Julia’s.”
“It’s possible.” He was maddeningly calm. “Listen, this doesn’t actually prove anything. Jinny sold those at her shop for five bucks, and every teenage girl in Rockwell had one. They changed with your mood. You could see the future. Conjure spirits. Some crap like that. We already know the remains are a teenage girl. I’m not sure it’s the smoking gun you think it is.” He looked impatient, his mouth set in a line.
Hannah shrugged, acquiescing, if only a little. She let the subject drop, but only for now.
Wyatt led her into the kitchen and insisted on making her dinner. She sat at the breakfast bar, watched him move around his small but functional kitchen.
“I like to cook, and it’s not like I do it for more than one person with any kind of regularity,” he offered as a reason.
Stainless steel appliances, a gas stovetop, a large copper sink, and cast-iron accents completed the cabin feel, but with more sophistication than she would have expected from a born and bred country boy. He had changed into jeans and kept the rumpled T-shirt with Hollins Ferry scrawled across the front in seventies cursive. She couldn’t bat away the sensation that this felt like a date.
“So no dates, then?” Hannah poured a glass of white from the chilled bottle and felt herself unspooling. Maybe Wyatt was right. Maybe the rings didn’t mean anything. Then again, perhaps they did, and she’d figure it out tomorrow. Either way, her stomach grumbled, and she was suddenly eager to relax. Forget rings and bodies and Warren and visions.
“Some.” Wyatt dipped his head as he seasoned the steak. She could see his small smile, perhaps at the fleeting memory. “I do okay for having such a small pool out here.”
Hannah was sure that was true. “Girlfriend?” she pressed, before taking a sip. She picked up her phone and saw a missed text from Huck. Sorry I’ve been MIA. It’s been a real mess to clean up here. Literally. Around tonight? I’ll call at 9-ish. Xo
Hannah muted the ringer.
“Not at the moment. I dated a woman for about a year. She was an emergency room nurse.” He picked up his phone and tapped into it. The room filled with music, some folk-rock mix she’d never heard. Mellow. A quiet rain pattered at the windows.
“ER nurses and cops make strange bedfellows. Was your pillow talk all crime and death?” Hannah mused, standing up. The kitchen was connected to the great room with only the breakfast bar between them. She could roam the entire downstairs, taking in the views, the art on the walls. Several framed album posters from seventies rock bands, an original watercolor of the exact view Hannah saw when she gazed out the north-facing wall of windows: a swirl of color, greens and blues and the gray ripple of the river, the sweeping orange sky of sunset. “Did you paint this?”
“Ah, no. That would be the ER nurse. She was—is—an extraordinary painter.” Wyatt looked up, met her eyes, and smiled ruefully. The way he said things—“extraordinary painter”—touched a buried spot deep inside her. Everything he said was saturated with passion—not for Hannah or the ER nurse, just for life, simple things like cooking and music and art. Things Huck never talked about. She hated comparing them, hated that she was even thinking that way.
“The nurse was a painter?” Seemed like different sides of the brain to Hannah.
“Sure. Don’t you have a hobby?”
Hannah thought of their nights, after work. Dinner and drinks at the pub, then back to their condo, where she and Huck would sit on opposite ends of the couch and watch nineties sitcom reruns with their own laptops flipped open on their laps. Hannah would spend the night getting the art and text positioned just so on whatever project she happened to be working on. Tweaking the copy, trying to reduce the word count to enlarge the font. Huck would be preparing invoices. The picture it evoked felt comforting to Hannah, but she knew out loud it would sound pathetic. “Just work,” was all she said instead. She loved her job, she thought. That was her hobby. But did she? persisted the small voice inside. Had she thought about it? Missed it at all in the two weeks she’d been at Brackenhill?