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