McKinney pushed an eight-by-ten photograph across the table—Hannah couldn’t recall sitting down—but she turned it over without thought and wished she had taken a moment to prepare herself.
The photo was a close-up of her aunt’s face, black and white. In a split second she saw the deep grooves in her aunt’s forehead between her eyebrows, the shadowy wells under her eyes, a light but familiar birthmark in the curious shape of a butterfly on her temple that had darkened in death. Or maybe it was just that her coloring had gone gray, almost white as bone. There was thick stitching around the crown of her head, a leathery incision devoid of blood. She’d been wiped clean.
“That’s her,” Hannah said, feeling like she was in a movie or a detective show and grateful she wasn’t standing inside a sterile morgue the way it was portrayed on television. She tried to arrange her face into something like sadness, as she imagined she was supposed to feel. Or maybe shock. Huck watched her carefully. She could tell he was trying to comfort her, that comfort was the normal, everyday reaction in this situation. That she should want his support. Later, maybe he’d tell her, You’re so strong, and she’d be pleased at that.
It was over that quickly, and they were back out in Hannah’s car before Huck even had to check on Rink. There was an air of formality about the whole thing. Claire McKinney’s compassion had been an act, part of her job, nothing more or less.
Hannah held a business card for a funeral home where Aunt Fae would be prepared for arrangements—which meant a viewing and a funeral, or perhaps a cremation. She supposed she should have known what her aunt’s wishes were, that the hospital would assume that as next of kin she’d spoken to her aunt during the past seventeen years.
She’d call the funeral parlor in the morning. But it was morning, wasn’t it? The clock blinked 6:52. They’d been in the hospital for less than an hour, too little time for her life to be entirely changed. And yet lives were upended all the time in minutes and seconds, not hours. Hannah knew that. Also, it felt too dramatic: her life would not be changed. She’d do whatever she’d come to do and go home, back to Virginia, her career, planning the wedding.
She’d escaped Brackenhill once. She could do it again.
“What can I do?” Huck asked, and Hannah recognized the despair in his voice. Huck hated helplessness. He was an action person, a problem-solver. He admired this trait in her more than anything else: she was always fine. He’d complained of ex-girlfriends: needy, calling and texting at all hours. Her independence, even when it frustrated him, was attractive.
“Nothing,” Hannah said, and it was true. She didn’t need anything from him, maybe never had. This time she almost asked him for one thing: Drive me home. He would have in a heartbeat. But she knew she had to head farther north, past Rockwell on the only road in, the switchback road her aunt had taken out. To her once-beloved uncle, who lay quietly dying. It fell to her to tell him about his wife.
Hannah let Huck drive, the car winding around steep curves, her arm gripping the handle at the window, white knuckled and breathless, the fear starting as a steady thrum in her legs, a jittery helplessness. From the back seat even Rink whined as Huck punched the gas, the car stuttering up the steep incline. At the top, the first of the stone turrets came into view, and the car slowed as Huck’s foot faltered.
For the first time in seventeen years, it was time to go back to the castle.
CHAPTER FIVE
Then
The castle sat high on a hill, shrouded by towering oaks and pines in Rockwell, a town in the Catskill Mountains. It had a name: Brackenhill. At the time Hannah thought it belonged in a fairy tale, which made sense because it was named after a castle in England. Before summers in Rockwell, she hadn’t known houses could have names at all.
Hannah and Julia were driven up in the old Buick, their mother’s left arm out the window. She brought it in only to light one cigarette off the other, balancing the wheel with her knee. The fingers on her right hand held the cigarette while simultaneously tapping along to the radio, the ash flying. The Buick’s vinyl seats stuck to Hannah’s thighs. Her mother parked at