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.
Brackenhill was the name of a castle on top of a mountain deep in the woods in the Catskill Mountains. It was built in the 1800s by a wealthy Scottish immigrant named Douglass Taylor as a summer lodge. He built the castle originally for his wife, who was committed to a sanatorium shortly after the birth of her only child. Taylor himself then died young, and their daughter, Merril, inherited the land and the Taylor fortune. She married and lived in happy seclusion for years until she, too, was committed to a sanatorium shortly after the birth of her fourth son. Brackenhill was passed down from generation to generation in a family riddled with mental illness.
It has been said that over ten girls went missing on Brackenhill grounds over the course of 150 years. Some were children living in the castle; some were residents of the village below. Brackenhill stole the sanity of women and the bodies of children. The children, ranging in age from seven to eighteen, have never been found. Some people think they’re all buried on the expansive grounds. Sometimes, especially when it rains (and no one knows why), you can hear their laughter as they play.
CHAPTER FOUR
Now
Grover M. Hermann Hospital was a half hour south of Rockwell, New York. Huck steered Hannah’s car into the brightly lit parking lot just before dawn on Friday morning. Huck, the saint, had driven the full six hours, letting Hannah doze in the passenger seat, violating Road Trip Rule #7: absolutely no sleeping. But those rules had been made for beach trips and summer getaways, not middle-of-the-night emergency trips to visit long-lost—and gravely