Girls of Brackenhill

by Moretti, Kate

  “Wyatt.” Hannah held up her hand. “I’m fine, okay? You don’t owe me anything. Young love”—she stumbled over the word, now when it mattered so much less—“is always fraught and messy. It’s how we all learn, how we form real relationships later.” She didn’t say it to wound him, even if that was how it came out. She had no idea if she hit the mark.

  Wyatt said nothing.

  “Are you married now?” Hannah asked, realizing she didn’t know. Knew so little about him now. Maybe had known so little about him back then.

  “Divorced.” He gave her a rueful smile. “So maybe I didn’t learn enough.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I was a decent father but a shit husband.”

  Hannah felt her head snap up at this. “You have a child?” She could easily imagine this with his moral compass and what she knew of him as a teenager: playful, fun, insightful, emotionally available.

  “I do. Her name is Nina. She’s ten. Knows everything about life and is trying to teach me. And mostly failing.” Wyatt half stood and reached into his back pocket; his shoulders strained against the fabric of his shirt. Hannah looked away. He produced a wallet, snapped it open to reveal a photograph. A child with dark hair, laughing in a field in a gingham dress. Holding a daisy. “My wife—ex-wife—does portraits every year. This was this past spring.” His voice lowered. “She’s amazing. Parenthood is amazing.”

  A pang right under her breastbone. Hannah could see it that quickly: Wyatt as a dad, a little ringleted girl on his shoulders, pointing out shapes in clouds, pushing her on the swings, never tiring of it.

  “And your ex?” Hannah prodded, then instantly regretted it. It was none of her business.

  “Liza? She’s great.” He shrugged. “I didn’t take marriage seriously. Probably didn’t take her seriously. We married too young, maybe.”

  Liza Rendell. Hannah vaguely recalled her from the kids in town. Pretty. Dark hair. Tall and gangly. Quiet. Kind. “You married local?” she teased.

  “Yeah.” Wyatt smirked at her. God, his smile was so nice. “Well, you didn’t stay. I didn’t have a choice.”

  The joke fell flat. Hannah wanted to say, I didn’t have a choice either. Instead, she picked a piece of honeydew melon from the bowl, studied it. Let the silence do its job.

  “Back to Ellie,” Wyatt finally said.

  “What about her?” Hannah turned her back to him, poured herself another cup of coffee, added half-and-half, a dash of sugar, all very deliberate and slow.

  “When do you remember seeing her last?”

  An easy one. “The summer Julia disappeared. Left. She was around all summer, off and on.” Hannah thought of Ellie in the garden at midnight. Hovering. Pulling Julia down the path.

  “That was . . . 2001?” Wyatt clarified.

  “2002,” Hannah corrected.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I think I’d know the summer my sister disappeared. Besides, it’s easily verifiable.” Hannah felt impatient.

  “Yeah, sure. I remember too.” His voice lowered. Hannah wasn’t falling for it again, the trip down memory lane, the husky voice, the implicit intimacy of mutual regret.

  She straightened her back, leveled her gaze at him. “But?”

  “Well, the thing is . . .” He coughed. “Warren filed a missing persons report on Ellie in 2001. There was an investigation, but all signs pointed to a runaway. She was on camera at the bus station buying a ticket with a thick wad of cash. The missing persons case was closed after that. No one reported seeing her again. No one but you, anyway.”

  Hannah straightened her back, indignant. “Well, I know what I saw. The summer my sister disappeared, she was with Ellie all summer. I was angry about it. Ellie was always here. I was left out and ignored.” She gestured across the island. “You remember some of it; you must. I talked to you at the time.”

  Had she talked to him? She searched her memory.

  Hannah remembered the smell of his neck, damp with tears and summer sweat, as she sat curled against him on the swing of his front porch. He’d comforted her, but she hadn’t told him specifics about why she was upset. All the words she could come up with had been childish, juvenile. My sister likes Ellie better than me. Hannah, so aware of their age gap, so conscious of her perceived immaturity, had instead spoken in generalizations. She’s such a bitch lately. She’d called her secretive. Maybe even slutty. Thinking back, she remembered his surprise at that comment. It hadn’t registered at the time.

  She wondered if he was thinking about that moment too. Or was he thinking of later, when she’d kissed him, straddled his lap, let her hands inch up his bare chest, fingertips pressed against the ridges of his shoulders, as she marveled about his body, the first boy body she’d ever seen, so wholly different from her own that she thought there should be different words for their parts: shoulder, chest, muscle, skin.

  But all Wyatt said was, “I don’t remember you talking about Ellie specifically.” And then, “We’ll need to come back.”

  “What?”

  “We need to do another search of the property.”

  “You think the skeleton is Ellie?” Her voice pitched up several octaves. Until that moment she hadn’t fully thought that Ellie could be dead. In Hannah’s mind, Ellie was just another runaway teenage girl from Rockwell.

  “I don’t know. Like I said, it’s a hunch, based on what I remember. Based on interviews with other people who were kids with us at the time.”

  Hannah frowned. She knew what she’d seen, and she remembered it as though it had been that day. “Could Ellie have been living on Brackenhill property somewhere?” She thought of all the outbuildings: sheds and storm shelters, a small barn, the tower with a turret roof that was always empty. If Ellie was buried at Brackenhill, then who had buried her? Who killed her?

  “I don’t know. The winters here aren’t mild. She disappeared fall of 2001. She would have had to find shelter, food, without anyone seeing her. More likely that she stayed with someone who is either lying for her or is no longer around.” The implication was obvious, and Hannah felt the creeping dread up her spine. Would Julia have hidden Ellie in the castle? For a year? Nothing about that made sense. They’d gone back to Plymouth in August.

  Wyatt stood to go. Opened and closed his mouth like he wanted to say more. Finally, “We’ll be back in a few days. I just need to assemble the right team. I’ll text you a time, okay?”

  He didn’t hug her goodbye, and when his car backed out of the driveway, she felt disoriented, restless. Unsettled by the feelings Wyatt had stirred up, wishing Huck hadn’t left. She texted Huck but received no reply. He was probably still driving. It seemed impossible that he’d left only that morning. She thought about calling him, asking him to come back. Everything Wyatt had said had been true: her aunt and uncle, her sister, the body in the woods. It was a lot to process. Wyatt didn’t even know about the dreams, the sleepwalking.

  For the first time, Hannah felt afraid and unsure. Huck had always had such confidence in her, an easy belief that she’d be fine. That he’d always be fine; they’d be fine. Vulnerability was a weakness; needing others meant you were failing yourself. It explained why he loved her. She’d been closed up and shut down. It was easy to love someone with no baggage. That part of her life, the needy, vulnerable childhood part, had been packed away in a dusty corner of her brain for so long that she hardly recognized herself now. She’d spent the last seventeen years moving forward, making her life.

  Then why now, for the first time in as long as she could remember, when she was careening backward in time with Wyatt blowing the dust off her memories, did she suddenly feel alive?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Then

  July 13, 2002

  The river was high, thick with rain, and brown, rushing and loud. It swirled in yellow-white foam around her thighs, her nightgown pushed up to her waist. Floating, pillowing around her.

  She woke up freezing.


  The faint moonlight bounced off the water, the sky inky black and huge.

  She hadn’t even been dreaming, but she woke up in the river. The river rushed around her, cold, gripping, and she felt frozen with fear.

  She was going to die.

  Hannah inched her feet along the bottom, felt the sand and pebbles shift under her heels. She could hardly see her hand in front of her face. The moon, waxing crescent, barely gave her enough light to get back to the beach, where she fell forward on her hands and knees. She was soaked and freezing, trembling with fear and exhaustion.

  It wasn’t the first time she’d sleepwalked. It had started about a month ago, maybe more. Time was distorted at Brackenhill: a week seemed like a year, a month like a blink. It didn’t always make sense.

  Last time she’d woken up in the basement. On the steps, in particular. She was facing the kitchen door and ascending. She had no memory of going down to the basement. She and Julia hadn’t gone downstairs since that second summer with the index cards and the moving doors. They’d been too skittish about it. After Uncle Stuart had to rescue them from the center, Aunt Fae forbade it. Said they’d “carried on too much about it.”

  Hannah pushed her way up the embankment and through the woods. She had no idea if she was on the path back to the house or not—she had no flashlight, and under the canopy of the forest, she could barely see her hand in front of her face.

  She was so tired. She hiccuped and realized she’d been crying. Sobbing, really. In the courtyard she sat on a bench to catch her breath. She hadn’t told anyone—not Julia, not Aunt Fae—about the sleepwalking for fear they’d send her to Plymouth to see a doctor or, worse, send her home for good. Julia had already been going on about Brackenhill being evil and wanting to go home. She had an overactive imagination. Did she really believe the nonsense she spewed about seeing things? About Aunt Fae? Hannah couldn’t leave. What waited for her at home? The creaking open of her bedroom door, even more fitful sleep, cold hands inching up her thighs. No. It was out of the question.

  Still, she was tired in her bones. She stood, wanting to get back to bed. The warmth of her comforter. It had to be two a.m.

  A shadowy figure at the mouth of the path caught her attention, fear instant and sharp in her chest. A blur of red shirt, black skirt, a cloud of hair. Ellie. Julia’s friend. The girl with the bright-red hair. Slowly, the girl raised her hand in a cautious wave. Hannah waved back. What was she doing here?

  “Hey!” Hannah called out, but Ellie turned and ran away, down the path, toward the river.

  She was gone.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Now

  “That’s a scrying ring,” Jinny said matter-of-factly. She was busy reorganizing a spice cabinet behind the counter, jars and bottles and tubes and shakers all scattered next to the cash register. Her long black-and-white hair was piled on top of her head and held in place with chopsticks. She had a ring on each finger. Most notable was an obsidian oval on her index finger set in a knotted wire. A twin for the ring Hannah wore on her middle finger, the one found in the corner of the toolshed. Hannah had recognized it as being similar to jewelry Jinny owned and thought perhaps she could point to its origin.

  “What’s a scrying ring?” Hannah asked warily.

  Jinny stopped wiping shelves and shut the cabinet doors. “Sit at the table.”

  Hannah pulled out one of the two chairs at the round table in the center of the room. The table held a lazy Susan of props: a glass gazing ball, a tea strainer, paper towels, tissues, handkerchiefs, and several rings similar to the one Hannah now wore, in both black and gold.

  Jinny sat opposite Hannah and splayed her hands. “You don’t believe in this hoopla. You’ve said so. Correct?”

  Hannah shifted in her seat. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe, necessarily. It was that she had little use for things that remained unproven. It seemed like a waste of time. She would never have the heart to say this to Jinny.

  Instead Jinny continued, “Or maybe you’re apathetic. You don’t so much think it’s beneath you as you don’t care enough about it.” And that was much more on the nose. Hannah winced, shrugged, but nodded. Jinny placed both hands on the gazing ball and set it in front of Hannah. “Scrying is just a meditation of sorts. If you relax your consciousness, let your own vision blur into the ball or the ring or sometimes a bowl of water, perhaps a polished crystal, you can access a plane of knowledge that most people on this earth have no idea exists. This is called the Akashic record. The Akashic record is a collection of all events, thoughts, words, emotions, everything that has ever happened to every person or ever will. It’s emotion. It’s spirituality. It’s facts and perception and truth and falsehoods. It’s overwhelming to think about. But allows us to understand our own existence and our loved ones more than we otherwise would. Do you understand?”

  Absolutely not. Hannah thought it sounded like insane babbling. She nodded anyway.

  “Don’t lie to me.” Jinny held up her hand, her voice firm. She stood, removed the tray, and set it down across the room. The table contained only the gazing ball, held on a pewter stand. “A crystal ball. Corny, yes?”

  “A little,” Hannah admitted.

  “Clichéd, maybe. But useful. Nostradamus used a bowl of water. I like the predictability of the gazing ball. It’s a classic.”

  “My sister used a crystal ball?” Hannah asked, incredulous.

  “No. She felt like it was too much. She liked the flat ring, how small it was. She could wear it, use it whenever she wanted. She became quite quick those last two summers.”

  Hannah tried to remember something, anything, her sister gazing into a ring and murmuring. But nothing came back. Julia had not been herself, for sure, but Hannah would have noticed a clear exit off the rails like that.

  “Let your eyes relax.” Jinny stood, turned down all the lights. Behind her, Hannah heard a click, and the candelabra that lined the shelves on either wall flared to electric life. Jinny motioned toward the small lights. “I stopped using real candles after the third fire. Dried herbs and old books burn like hell, you know.”

  Hannah felt a chill up her spine and shivered. She didn’t believe in spirits and ghosts the same way Julia had, and certainly not like Jinny did, but the room suddenly felt cavernous. She could only make out a bit beyond the table; the windows to the front of the store had long been blacked out.

  “Jinny, this seems unnecessary, truly.”

  “Do you want to know what your sister was doing? What she could do? Try it. Here’s the thing. I don’t believe that second sight is only available to certain people. Everyone has it inside them to believe in infinite possibilities. I believe that certain personalities allow for the ability to access what could be available to all of us. You don’t know all the rules of the universe, my dear. None of us do. Some of us go to church or pray to deal with that. Others scry and read tarot and burn herbs and talk to spirits—only in the loosest sense of the word.”

  Hannah jolted. “Can you talk to Julia?”

  “Ah, now you’re suddenly a believer. Most are when confronted with something personal. A possibility.” Jinny stood behind Hannah, resting her hands on her shoulders. She smelled of oil, something richly organic. Her voice dropped to a whisper as she pressed her palms into Hannah’s shoulders. “Watch the light in the ball, and let your eyes unfocus. Start with something simple: a blue dot, the size of a marble. Visualize it in the center; truly see it. Don’t just imagine it. Imagine it looks like the earth, swirls of white clouds and oceans and green mountains.”

  Hannah’s vision went blurry, the tears behind her eyelids sudden and unexpected. She wondered how many times Julia had sat in this chair. Could she see the blue dot? Had she laughed at Jinny, shooed her hands away? No. She’d believed in magic in ways Hannah never had.

  “Bring your mind back to the present; place your hands on the table. Feel the tablecloth beneath your palms. The table is tangible. Your mind is not. Close your eyes a
nd slowly open them. Take a deep breath.”

  Hannah tried to conjure a blue dot. She imagined a marble, swirled with green and white, like Jinny had asked of her. She placed the marble inside the gazing ball in her mind, turning it one way, then the other, until she felt as though it were possible that she was actually viewing a marble, not just imagining it. The marble moved from one side of the gazing ball to the other and then winked just out of view and back. In a blink, the marble had become real, trapped inside the shining glass of the gazing ball, which was once so clear but now almost black in the darkened room. Hannah felt the breath in her lungs, the blood in her veins, the table beneath her fingertips, the floor against the balls of her feet in her sneakers.

  And then. Julia. Not in the ball itself but suddenly filling the room, Jinny gone, the table and the floor vanished. Julia sat in the corner, against a wooden wall, her hair tangled, her knees bloodied, wearing a yellow bathing suit cover-up that Hannah remembered. She looked up and saw Hannah, opened her mouth to speak, but Hannah could hear nothing. Julia held up her hands to show her sister: blood running from her fingertips to her wrists and pooling on the floor around her, and she turned, pounded and pounded on what Hannah had believed to be a wall and saw now was a door, a rusty iron bar secured across the wood. Julia swung her legs around and, with incredible force, kicked the door with both feet. The door moved with every thrust but made no sound. It was as though Hannah were watching a silent film, a horror movie on mute. Julia looked seventeen, but her long hair was stringy and greasy. Other things Hannah noticed: Julia’s sunken cheekbones, a missing tooth, a gash across her protruding collarbone. She looked like she was starving. Injured. Hannah felt her heart constrict, and without volition her feet moved her toward the apparition. Her stomach lurched, and for a moment, she felt like she might vomit. She covered her ears, squeezed her eyes shut, and heard the moan of pain before she recognized it as her own: Stop! Her sister turned then, as though she heard Hannah. Julia met her eyes, stared right at Hannah, her mouth forming what could only be one word.