“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