CHAPTER ONE
September 2, 2001
I didn’t mean to kill the girl.
I found her skulking around the woods, hiding behind trees, darting behind the shed.
Hey, I called. Dizzy with panic when I saw who it was. I waved the shovel in her direction. I’d been turning over the compost.
I said, You aren’t supposed to be here.
My voice wasn’t nearly as strong as I’d hoped. I’d hoped to frighten her away. I sounded meek, terrified.
Oh, that’s right. I’m human garbage, she spat. I came to give you something!
She had a folded envelope, shoved it roughly into the pocket of my jacket.
It gave me a shock, really, that she would put her hands on me. Such defiance for someone so young. But then, she wasn’t that young anymore. How old was she? Sixteen? Seventeen? She’d be striking out on her own soon. Too pretty for Rockwell, not quite pretty enough for the city.
No human is garbage, I said. I tried to reason with her; truly I did. She carried so much anger inside her. Some people were just born angry.
She said hateful things: You never cared for me. You treated me like I was nothing.
None of that was true, of course.
After everything I’d done for her. How could she be so hateful? I’d done so much for her. I’d tried more than anyone. Even after.
Well, not after—I’ll be the first to admit that. But who would?
It’s time to go home, I yelled, and I was ashamed at how my voice shook. I was afraid of her.
I tried to hurry her along, despite the swell of adrenaline, so consuming that my vision blurred. I tried to breathe through the anger.
She wouldn’t leave me alone. She rushed at me, a wild thing, hair a tangled sight.
I wasn’t proud of the fact that my heart had hardened. I wasn’t proud that I’d run out of love for this lost girl.
I took the brunt of all her problems, you see? That night was a culmination of all the things that had ever happened to her, and I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
She yelled and ranted: You never forgave me. No one did. I was ruined.
I stood there and took it all, shoulders squared, legs solid. Absorbing her hate and her hurt and her words. Until.
Say something. Anything! She begged me to talk.
But I didn’t reply to any of it. Felt the mounting, growing rage deep in my gut. An anger I’d never known. A helplessness I couldn’t fathom.
You know what? I did it, she whispered right in my ear.
The rage overwhelmed me, and I closed my eyes and swung and felt the shovel in my hand connect with her skull, and she fell to the dirt, and oh God, there was a lot of blood, but it pulsed out onto the wet leaves, absorbed by the earth, and I watched her tremble and sputter out her last breath in a matter of seconds.
I didn’t mean to kill her.
But after it happened, I wasn’t sorry.
Not for a long, long time.
CHAPTER TWO
Now
August 15, 2019
The call came in shortly before midnight, as they mostly did. Huck slept like he was dead, but the buzzing phone gradually woke Hannah, first becoming part of a recurring dream. Hannah held a garden shovel; she was digging a hole, the dirt sifting over the metal, a feeling of dread deep in her chest, her shoulders aching. The smell of something rotting, soil and death, leaves and worms. Then, suddenly, the spade was a cell phone.
“Hannah Maloney?” the voice on the other end asked, soft and clipped.
“Yes. Hello.” She woke instantly, the number unfamiliar, a 607 exchange: New York. And she knew it all right away, like a vision. (Except not truly; she always had to clarify, if only to herself.) She nodded, her legs swinging over the side of the bed, before the voice on the other end even said the words: car accident.
She shook Huck awake. “We have to go. I have to go.” They didn’t have a polite relationship. They had a bathroom-door-wide-open-while-reading-the-obituaries-aloud relationship. Huck felt, at times, like an appendage: firmly attached, essential. It was natural for her to wake him at the first hint of disaster. It was equally natural for him to assimilate, even while half-asleep.
The woman on the phone said, “You were listed in her phone as ‘in case of emergency.’”
At the same time Hannah said, “I know.”
Hannah thought, What about Stuart? Is he alive?
She asked the woman on the phone about Aunt Fae’s husband.
A beat of silence, the faint rustle of paperwork before she came back on the line. “There was only one person in the car, dear. Your aunt Fae.”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can.” Hannah’s voice, to her own ears, sounded breathless, like she’d run miles. Her brain ticked through a frantic to-do list. The phone to her ear, she looked for her sneakers under the bed, then in the closet. She motioned to Huck to get up, and he nodded.
Rink, their Irish setter, stood alert at the panic in her voice. She patted his head, then stopped moving. “Does Uncle Stuart know? Does her husband know?” She imagined Uncle Stuart, what she’d seen in movies of people dying of cancer: gaunt figures under bedsheets in dark rooms. Raspy breathing. She’d heard from her mother, a year and a half ago, that the cancer had spread. She assumed he was still alive, assumed she’d be informed if he wasn’t. But who would have informed her? Her mother was dead, and Aunt Fae hadn’t spoken to Hannah since she was fifteen.
She imagined Uncle Stuart waking in the morning, no breakfast, no Fae, confused and hungry.
“We will send an officer to the house,” the woman said. “Is there a caretaker who has keys?”
“No. Fae is the caretaker. There’s a nurse who comes daily for meds. Or at least there used to be. I don’t know what time, though.” Hannah stuffed jeans and T-shirts into a bag. Huck was just standing up and flicked on a bedside lamp. She sat down, light headed. Too much, too fast.
“How long will it take you to get here?” The woman’s voice had softened, become kindly.
“I’m in Virginia.” She’d never driven to Rockwell from her new town. Their new town, as Huck gently reminded her every day. They were a “they” now. She stopped, took a few breaths. She wasn’t alone anymore. If you were lucky, fiancés were built-in assistants, therapists, and financial advisers all rolled into one. Hannah was lucky.
She did the math: three hours from Pennsylvania, plus three more.
“About six hours, I’d guess.” The woman on the other end beat her to it. A pause. “You should leave now, dear.”
Hannah realized she’d misjudged everything, hadn’t asked the right question, the only question: “Is Fae going to die?” She had assumed it wasn’t serious. She’d thought a broken leg, an arm, a concussion, maybe unconsciousness. “A car accident” could mean myriad things.
There was a beat where the woman didn’t speak, and Hannah felt the silence down to her bones, the chill instant, the phone still in her white-knuckled grip, and Huck, without speaking, placed a palm flat between her shoulder blades, rubbing gently. His hand moved up to her shoulder, and she gripped it there. In the dim light her engagement ring winked.
“You should leave soon.”
CHAPTER THREE
The Ghost Girls of Brackenhill are an urban legend.