What Happened to Hannah (30 page)

Still, it was all she had. That and the conviction that being solely responsible for herself alone wasn’t something she’d tolerate in or around her life ever again.

By Wednesday, Hannah saw that even the most insurmountable looking projects were surmountable with a lot of help and stick-to-itiveness.

The dealers and auctioneers had taken all they wanted; secondhand stores near and far were stuffed to the windowsills with leftover Benson paraphernalia. The recycling center in Charlottesville would, she was sure, be sorry to see the end of Cal’s after-school deliveries.

It was a bright sunny day with the barest of breezes blowing the scent of spring through the air like expensive perfume.

With her track season in full swing, Anna went straight home to the James’s after practice to start her homework and Hannah met her there at six thirty, or whenever she got tired, for dinner. Cal and Biscuit came faithfully to help her at the farm after school—on Grady’s order she suspected, but hopefully with no resentment once she convinced them to let her pay by the hour (they did have a prom coming up). Her friends Sam and Jeremy Long came, too, their mother dropping them off to feed and water their cows and to help, and then picking them up in time for their own chores and homework and supper at home. Even Grady and his mother came from time to time to help when they could but . . . well, eventually there wasn’t that much to do anymore.

So she was alone at the farmhouse that day, refusing to feel or acknowledge any qualms at being isolated there. The house was nearly empty now, so in light of the fact that they hadn’t unearthed a single skeleton or glimpsed a solitary ghost, it was looking more and more ordinary all the time. More like an empty, rundown old farmhouse with dusty walls and floors and grimy windows . . . which she planned to sic her favorite teens on Saturday. Girls inside, boys outside, she decided, boosting every one she came to wide open.

With no drapes left, the sun filled every room in the house with cheery light—something that made her pause and wonder if there had ever been a Benson living there who might have appreciated such a thing, who took the time to enjoy the feel of the sun on their face. She smiled, closed her eyes, and let the warmth sink into her cheeks—if she wasn’t the first, she didn’t mind being the last this time.

As each room became emptied out—closets, furniture, rug, everything—she headed in to dust and sweep up the big chunks of debris and then went back to repeat her steps with her mother’s canister vacuum and warm soap and water—sucking up cobwebs and dust bunnies the broom scattered and missed; scrubbing the very top shelf in the closet, the light fixtures and anything else that needed it. By the time she finished, the room looked old and faded but clean and tolerable.

She’d finished two of the upstairs bedrooms the day before and another that morning with a huge linen/storage closet. According to her chore list she still had her mother’s room and Anna’s; and the attic had been reported empty and ready for her down-and-dirty brand of housekeeping.

“Great, I’ll take that one,” Grady said on hearing this, as if keen to get the cobwebs in his hair. “First thing Saturday morning, it’s mine.”

But when he wouldn’t meet her eyes, she knew it wasn’t the project he wanted so much as he wanted to save her the memories, from looking back again on the story she’d told him.

Standing at the bottom of the attic steps, broom and bucket of water in her right hand, the vacuum and its tubing in the other, she smiled at the idea of him trying to save her from her own thoughts.

But the attic was on
her
list, ready for her, and she was on a schedule. She’d have the entire top two floors finished and out of the way
before
Saturday if she stuck to her schedule.

Grady. He was a good man. Always. But he didn’t need to protect her—she couldn’t afford to let him try for fear he’d come too close to the truth. Still, it was kind of him to make the effort.

So, what sort of insanity did the women in Clearfield share that none of them had persuaded Grady to marry again? Her smile drooped and her brow furrowed. Come to think of it—and she was a little surprised she hadn’t before this—there had to be at least one woman in town he . . . associated with. Right? He was still a young man. He had needs . . . urges. Prostitution came to mind but there was the cop thing, and try as she might she simply couldn’t picture him paying for sex. The abstinence thing got a disbelieving mumble as she started up the stairs, and that left the last two alternatives: do-it-yourself or friends with benefits—her own answers to the dilemma.

So who was his lady friend?
She couldn’t help speculating as she came to the top of the stairs and set her cleaning gear down.

She realized she hadn’t been in the attic once since returning to Clearfield. She braced herself for a flood of emotion but barely a trickle got through. Maybe because it was empty now and someone had already opened the 18 x 24-inch windows on either end to let in fresh air. Perhaps because she’d come up voluntarily or because she was twenty years older now, hard to tell.

“Okay, then,” she spoke out loud, feeling confident. Using the wireless headset to her BlackBerry, she turned up the music and took the broom to the rafters.

She liked music and her taste was diverse—Queen, Sarah McLachlan, Abba, Coldplay, Garth Brooks, Bach, Rogue Wave, Rod Stewart . . . more recently the Jonas Brothers, to have something else in common with Anna. The trouble was that no matter how hip or harmonious the tunes were, they couldn’t occupy every corner of her mind, couldn’t keep it from wandering off task. And since the passage to the past was bolted and off limits, that left her with only two directions to go . . .

So who was Grady’s lady friend? Generation after generation of spiders lost their homes as she reviewed every instance of seeing Grady in public since she came back. She scanned each event mentally for any woman—not his mother, daughter, Anna, or herself—that he’d shown favor to or who had looked at him with longing. Surely, Anna or especially Lucy would have said something about a female friend he was partial to . . .

She sneezed, twice, and rocked her brain back on track.

Thinking about the present or the future didn’t involve thinking about Grady. Except for how to avoid him. It was none of her business if he had some mystery woman—who likely lived in a nearby town, most likely Ripley—who he consorted with . . . probably every chance he got!

She gasped and stood statue still until she had her thoughts where they belonged.

The girls. They were excited about their coming weekend in the city, and so was she. They were leaving right after school Friday and they’d be in Baltimore by ten o’clock. The decorator promised to have Anna’s room finished by then. Up early the next day for a surprise day of prom-dress shopping, dinner out, and maybe a play if Joe was able to get tickets for them at the last minute. If not, they could always take in a movie. Sunday morning they’d lounge around or do anything the girls chose, then start out around noon and get them back by six thirty or seven o’clock—Hannah loved a good plan, she genuinely did. And the only thing that could go wrong this time would be if they couldn’t find dresses they—

She felt more than heard the attic door when it slammed shut. It reverberated and the flow of the breeze in that direction stopped. It startled her. But it would have startled anyone.

She turned off the vacuum and the music and listened for a moment to the silence. The silence—and the chirping of the birds outside. Stepping over the long tubing she went to stand at the top of the stairs and looked straight down at the door—no shadows at the bottom, nothing hiding.

She skipped down the steps to open the door and could feel herself melting like a warm stick of butter when it opened with barely a touch.

She let out one large nervous laugh and it echoed in the hall. Silly. Ridiculous.
But understandable,
she thought, deciding to be kind to her psyche. She roamed in dangerous territory today, but she was okay and she’d stay that way—for Anna, but mostly for herself.

Resolute, she set the attic door wide open again and spun on her heel to go back up the steps. Nearly to the top, reviewing what she had left to do, the door closed with a bang again; a sound so loud it could have been gunfire.

Caught off guard and off balance she slipped on the step, grabbed the left handrail as she bumped her head against the wall, turned and lowered herself to the stair second from the top, her heart beating wildly under her palm. She cursed as soon as she could breathe again.

“Fine. We leave the door closed, then.” Shaking her head in resignation, she reached for the 2 x 4 handrail attached to the wall to haul herself up, reaching back with her other hand to push from the top step. That’s when she came across the rough grooves on the lip of the stair and let her fingers slip over them like brail. She recognized the code.

Crouching and sitting again she traced the etching with her fingertip and smiled a little—though she wasn’t sure why.

Dirty and dusty and old, the etching was barely visible but she remembered it, perfectly.

“Is it true, girl?” Mama was pale and bug-eyed when she opened her eyes, looking up at her from the kitchen floor where her daddy had left her. Her head pounding, she noticed the scarlet mark on her mama’s left cheek that was clear evidence of a recent slap. Ruth sat on a chair in the corner, her knees drawn to her chest, her arms holding them tight—she looked like she was trying to make herself so small no one would see her.

The moment she recalled what had happened, her heart sank and dread like thick, black crude oil coursed through her veins.

Buzz Weims told her daddy he’d seen her kissing Grady at school.

“Is it true, Hannah? You been kissing the Steadman boy?”

“What?” Not
what
like she misunderstood, but
what
had gone wrong because they were always so careful—stealing kisses, brushing fingers, they’d become experts at speaking with their eyes; and she always rode the bus home terrified of being seen with him.

Yet in that suspended moment in time, those were her regrets. If she’d known she was going to get caught anyway she would have kissed him every chance she got, held his hand every second of the day and night, and told him all the secrets in her heart without fear or reservation. She loved Grady.

She was a fool. She should have known that it was only a matter of time before their secret came to light. Eighteen months had passed since that first ride in the bed of Grady’s truck—she’d pushed her luck too far.

She struggled to her feet only to stagger from another blow to her left cheek that had her blinking through the stinging in her eyes as her mother shouted, “Do not lie to me. Is it true? Did you kiss him?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Did you . . . he do anything else?”

Some things—like the mating of two souls—were sacred and private . . . and might hurt Grady if anyone else knew.

“No, ma’am. Nothing else,” she said without compunction. “We hold hands, we kiss sometimes, mostly we talk.”

“You sure? Nothing else?”

“No. Nothing.”

“He can take you to a doctor. He can check. He will know.”

She’d cross that bridge if she made it over this one. “Nothing else.”

Perhaps wanting to believe more than actually be convinced, her mother sighed and stepped closer, put her hands on Hannah’s shoulders, scanned her face with troubled eyes. There were always a few strands of hair that escaped her dark braid at the end of the day—tonight there were more than usual—and Mama smoothed them back in place with a shaky hand.

“He . . . he’s gone after the boy. I doubt he’ll do him any harm. Tell him to stay away, most-like.” She glanced over at Ruth. “But I think it best if he don’t see you first thing in the door. Neither one of you. You go to your room and stay there,” she said to Ruth, who scrambled from her chair to obey. “Take a sandwich. And you,” she said, her eyes filled with the hopelessness she felt for her eldest daughter. “I’ll say I struck you, again, and sent you up there for the night with no food. I’ll say you swore not to see the boy again.” She hesitated. “You swear?”

If anything ever happened to Grady because of her . . . the decision was easy.

She nodded. “I swear.”

Turning in haste to the refrigerator, her mother opened the crisper on the bottom and removed an apple that had seen better days and stuffed it into Hannah’s hand.

“How could you have done such a stupid thing?” A rhetorical question that her mother didn’t expect her to answer. She shook her head and motioned with her arm the direction in which to exit. There was nothing left to say . . . no point in making recriminations. It was all in God’s hands now—God’s and Karl Benson’s.

And while she could easily confess to not understanding the ways of God at all, she understood her daddy better than anyone.

He was going to kill her . . . or get as close to it as he legally could, she determined, opening the attic door, stepping inside and closing it behind her like a trained mouse in a maze. She took each step slowly to the top and sat down to await her fate.

She played with the apple for a few minutes then set it aside. Her stomach was too tight to eat now. If she lived through the night she’d eat it in the morning or save it for supper if it looked like she’d be there the entire weekend. The most likely scenario, however, would be its becoming an unexpected treat for the mice.

If she lived through the night she’d run away, she decided—wanting to cry, wishing she could but feeling already dead inside. She’d go to Grady and they could run away together. If she lived and if she ran away, she’d never come back to this place. Never. Not for Mama. Not for Ruth. Not for anyone or anything. If she lived . . .

Inspired, she stood and blindly felt her way to the back of the attic for her emergency stash of a candle and matchbook and lit them. It was hard to tell if it was dark out yet or not—the windows having long ago been buried in junk to prevent that very thing—but she found what she was looking for and let the candle burn as she returned to the top stair, stepped down twice, and sat again.