Hannah pushed through the green door and followed the tunnel that wound approximately a hundred yards. The length of a football field. A few months ago, she’d strung up heavy-duty construction lights. With the flick of a button, the tunnel illuminated, bright as a snowy Catskill morning.
As far as she could see, she’d dug wide holes—trenches, really. The floor of the storm shelter itself had already been completely unearthed, the newly turned dirt a raw reddish-brown color. She’d dug a perfectly measured four feet down.
It had taken her months. If she didn’t find what she was looking for in the tunnel now, she’d go back to the beginning, back to the shelter in the little hill, and dig another four feet down. If she had to.
She’d do it forever. She owed it to her sister.
She owed Julia that much.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
Nina
Spring 2020
Nina loved the sounds of the forest. There was a bird in the distance that called every afternoon. It sounded like a bike horn that Mom had gotten her for her tenth birthday. Hannah said it was a crane.
Nina sat on the forest floor in a clearing she’d found last weekend. Everything felt different. New and fresh and alive and magical. Like anything was possible here. She could forget about school, about Quinn Palumbo and her band of mean girls that stole the key chains off her backpack when she wasn’t looking. She could forget about her best friend, Abigail, who was sometimes nice and fun and happy and sometimes not. Dad said her parents were divorcing, so Nina should have patience with her.
Nina understood divorce. But now Dad lived here, with Hannah, who was her third-favorite person, and then on weekends, she sometimes got to live here, at Brackenhill, which had quickly become her absolute favorite place. Her bedroom had a princess bed with a canopy and everything.
At Brackenhill, she just got to be alone. She got to be herself.
Sometimes the girl would find her. She lived “down the hill,” the girl told her.
Today the girl found Nina lying in the middle of the clearing. Her eyes were closed, and she was waiting for the crane. Hannah had told her cranes were creatures of habit—they lived in the same places every year. Fed in the same streams and rivers. This crane felt like hers. She hadn’t seen it yet; she’d only heard it.
The girl lay next to Nina in the grass. They both listened for the crane, and when they finally heard its call, ehrrrrret-a-ret-ret, they gasped and laughed. Nina stood, brushing the dirt from her legs. She had to get back. Hannah would be making dinner. Hannah worried about her roaming the forest by herself.
She couldn’t explain how much she loved it. How alive she felt, for the first time, in the woods. How her skin prickled and the hair on the back of her neck stood up and the woods seemed to come alive along with her, breathing and laughing and whispering secrets that only Nina could hear. Secrets about other lives and magic and love, the air sparkling with mysteries.
She loved the girl too. The girl was older, at least sixteen. Nina didn’t dare ask her. She was thoughtful and listened to Nina blather on about school and Quinn or Abigail.
Nina was a little afraid of the girl too. She rarely spoke, just smiled. She followed Nina around the forest as they chased butterflies, shadows, and glints of light. As they ran along the riverbank watching a trout twist out of the winding water, a fly trapped in its mouth. As they hunted for morels (You’ll find them when the oak leaves are the size of a mouse’s ear, said Hannah) among the hickory and ash trees.
The girl had long, delicate fingers, and her voice was whispery. She painted Nina’s nails with polish Nina borrowed from her mother. The girl told her about the forest, the stories of the castle, the missing girls. It was supposed to be scary, but Nina never felt scared. She just felt welcomed. Happy. Home.
Sometimes Nina would brush the girl’s hair, braid it elaborately in a way her mother had taught her, winding it around her head like a princess crown.
She had the most beautiful red hair Nina had ever seen.