What Happened to Hannah (21 page)

She was becoming very fond of Anna, but Anna didn’t know—no one knew. She was the last. And every day she was here she could feel the burden bearing down on her; her fear and guilt swelling, the strain threatening to shatter her sanity.

Chapter Twelve

M
aybe he should have been an actor, Grady thought as he gave her two full minutes before following her oh-so nonchalantly from the kitchen—a slice of pizza in one hand and two more on a paper plate in the other. Another Pacino, perhaps, as he took a blasé glance into the dining room and then the living room to see that not quite half the stuff had been removed—and that had been the furniture. Or what about a Hugh Jackman, whose smile he’d heard was irresistible—not unlike his own, he hoped, when he used it to ask permission to sit below her on the steps, facing her.

“You’d think they’d never eaten before.”

Her smile was small but it did reach her eyes. “Well, I never would have dreamed that I’d enjoy their noise so much. I love listening to them talk among themselves.” She caught herself. “Not what they’re saying in particular, I don’t eavesdrop on them, but the happy, comfortable buzz they make when they’re together. The sound of their friendship.”

He nodded his understanding and wondered which famous actor he should impersonate now, which one had the most charm and subtlety to slip by her defenses.

She took a bite, chewed and swallowed—and to his surprise spoke first.

“Ruth was afraid of mice. She thought rats and mice were the same thing . . . and spiders. She hated spiders. Anything she could hear or feel but not see in the dark terrified her.” He realized the story was being prompted by Lucy’s antics earlier in the day, standing on a chair, hollering for Biscuit and her brother to come save her from a small gray mouse. He saw, too, that her expression was amused for the moment, recalling a fond memory of her sister. “Spiderwebs that pulled at her hair or brushed across her cheek would send her into hysterics. And it was our secret for years and years.” She looked away and frowned. “I guess I’ll never know how he figured it out . . . that if he put us both in the cellar and removed the lightbulb at the top of the stairs, she’d scream and cry—but only for the few minutes it took for me to wrap her in my arms and convince her I’d protect her from everything that crawled down there.” Her eyelids took a long blink. “God, she was little.”

“How old were you?”

She shook her head vaguely. “Six maybe. Nine when he finally figured out he had to separate us to get the best results. I got sent to the attic. It was cold up there but there was an electrical socket in the overhead light fixture. He took out the bulb, but as you know, there’s more stuff in that attic than you can shake a stick at—and a window. Sometimes I had daylight. When I didn’t I had a small lamp that I covered with a piece of soft carpet that warmed and lit the little space I made for myself . . . and for which I got the third worst beating of my life because it was also a cozy little fire hazard up there.” An odd little smile rippled across her lips. “After that he strapped me to a chair up there to keep me out of trouble. For my own good.”

He could tell by the mocking look in her eyes that those had been her father’s words and she hadn’t believed them then any more than she did now.

“And Ruth?”

She looked away and shook her head like she might not answer. He watched her force the wedge of pizza in her mouth and bite down, chew, and do it again. As he was about to give up on the answer, starting to debate if he should ask the question again, her voice came soft and wispy.

“We all had our own special kind of hell here and the cellar was Ruth’s. If she wouldn’t go down on her own when he told her to, he’d simply pick her up—kicking and screaming—and take her down.” She started a new piece of pizza, like keeping her mouth full and the story coming in parts made it easier to tell. “I used to wonder why he didn’t just shove her off the top step when she cried and begged him not to make her go down there, but as I got older I realized that a fall could kill her and then all his fun would be over.”

She looked into Grady’s eyes, but he wasn’t sure what he was seeing. Her shields were up, protecting her as if she were merely telling a story—about someone else, someone she knew but not intimately anymore. “That’s what it was for him, you know. Fun. He loved hurting us and scaring us and controlling us. It made him feel important and powerful. Plus, it was just plain amusing, I guess. Ruth would cry and scream and shriek in terror for hours on end—beg him to let her out. He especially liked it when we begged. She’d find her way up the stairs to the door, and when he figured out she felt slightly safer there, up off the floor, he’d open the door and take her back down to the bottom . . . though he never tied her up that I know of . . .” She closed her eyes and leaned her head back, resting it between two railings. She shook her head. “I wonder why he didn’t. Maybe he was afraid she’d lose her mind and stop screaming, huh?” She shook her head again, dropped what was left of her pizza on the plate, and tossed it on the step above hers before looking at him again. “Is this the kind of information you keep following me around to find out? For your good-home-environment file on me? Think I’ll take Anna back to Baltimore and lock her in a closet now?”

“No.” He made his answer as clear and firm as he could make it. “But don’t try to tell me that growing up in this house didn’t affect you.”

“Of course it did.” She gave a soft, mirthless laugh and brought both arms up between them to display her naked wrists. “I can’t wear watches or bracelets . . . or cotton socks that are too tight around my ankles. And I wouldn’t recommend grabbing me by the wrists for any reason, because I fight dirty.”

“So noted.” His keen eyes caught a spark of evasion in her eyes as if he was a guard dog and she was tossing a bone in one direction while she escaped in another. “But that wasn’t your hell . . . being isolated, being tied up wasn’t . . .” Her blue eyes flashed. Surprise. Fear. A warning to back off before they looked away. But that wasn’t going to happen. He may not know this grown-up woman, Hannah, but the Hannah they were talking about he knew very well. “Your hell was having to listen.”

She sighed and closed her eyes, but she didn’t deny it. After a second or two she squeezed her eyes shut tighter and used both her hands to push her short, shiny hair away from her face. Then she laughed, sort of.

“He used to get so pissed at me.” Suddenly the threads on the worn stair runner needed plucking. “And I could never do anything right. I couldn’t cry when he hit me so he’d hit my mother instead. I came defective from the factory, you see. All I ever felt was anger and defiance. It made him
crazy
. That first night Ruth spent in the cellar alone I called to her. I figured if I could hear her, she could hear me. I told her to be brave. I told her the longer she cried the longer he’d leave her there. I told her that the mice were more afraid of her than she was of them. I told her to find something to beat the floor with like I showed her to keep the mice away. I told her she was a big girl, that she needed to be . . .” The loose thread on the rug broke free and startled her. “He wrapped duct tape across my mouth and around my head at least a dozen times and told me if I touched it before morning he’d leave Ruth in the cellar for a week.” She shrugged. “Mama pulled out half my hair trying to get it all out before school the next day. But I would have gone bald if I’d thought it would keep Ruthie out of the cellar.”

She dropped the thread on her uneaten pizza and sat up straighter, indicating she was preparing to get up—that what she’d told him was just an old story and he could take it or leave it.

“I believe you, Hannah.” His throat was tight so the words came out in a whisper. He wanted to shout it, to keep her there and talking to him, but she just nodded and asked if he wanted a cup of coffee for the road.

“No, thanks. Keeps me awake and I have a board meeting tomorrow.” He moved his legs and let her step by. Though she held on to the railing with her free hand, he automatically put a supporting hand under her forearm to assist; and despite the fact that he detected no overt shaking of her hands or arms, there was a distinct trembling within. The story had cost her. And the gift had been given to him.

Part of him was grateful, the other part wanted to dismantle something with his fists. An hour ago he’d thought he knew about her childhood. Horrible, shocking, unspeakably appalling and other such words that indicated he didn’t—couldn’t actually—comprehend the magnitude of it. Those few details made his blood run so cold it burned like fire, and still he couldn’t wrap his head around it. He was a man of the world. He’d seen things and he knew humans could be more vicious than animals. But how anyone could look into the face of a child and inflict that kind of cruelty was beyond him. So was the sort of strength required to survive it . . .

And whether Hannah told him professionally for his
home environment assessment
or personally because they’d once been good friends, it didn’t matter to him. She was talking and all he wanted to do was listen.

“I didn’t realize the sheriff’s department was run like a company with a Board of Directors,” she said on her way back to the kitchen. He hurried to catch up with her.

“Well, I hadn’t thought about it before, but I guess it is. We all have to answer to someone, I suppose. My board is the County Board of Supervisors and the County Administrator. They approve my budgets; keep me on the up and up—”

“Bitch him out when the deputies aren’t writing enough speeding tickets or fining people for being one minute late on their parking meter,” Lucy chimed in as they filed into the kitchen. “Or my favorite: running down jaywalkers on Main Street where the crosswalks are four blocks apart. And they refuse to even think about painting in two more to make it convenient for people. They
want
you to jaywalk, risk your own life, basically, if you were anywhere but here, just so they can make Daddy catch you and write you a ten-dollar ticket.

“He hates his job,” she announced. Hannah turned her head to look at him and he held out his hands—he couldn’t deny it. “He’d much rather be on patrol or even in investigations than pushing papers and fighting with the Board of Supervisors but a sheriff makes the big bucks, and he has mouths to feed.” She opened hers and then batted her eyes at him.

He took this opportunity to snap her lips closed with a single knuckle under her chin. “Remind me not to put you on my reelection committee.” He flipped open the pizza box to see if any remained—scowled at his offspring when he found it empty. “And I don’t hate my job. It’s not as . . . rewarding as when I worked chiefly with the public, is all. I
liked
chasing down the jaywalkers.”

The young people groaned and made disparaging remarks with teasing laughter in their eyes. And Hannah smiled when she began to appreciate that even in families where tensions ran high from time to time, there were also calm, close, comical moments that outweighed the others a hundred to one.

That night she lay awake in the faint moonlight, straining to make familiar shapes of the objects in the shadows of her room. She didn’t dare close her eyes.

She told herself it was the wind whistling through the hundreds of tiny fissures in the siding, not whispering voices that roused her whenever she started to doze off.

She needed to keep her mind in the here and now.

She started a mental list of things to go over with Joe in the morning, then worked on a plan for her favorite and fairest of the three antique dealers to return for another, hopefully final, viewing of some questionable items they’d uncovered in the last few days. It made her feel diligent.

Of course, her favorite catalog was the one she kept on Anna—who didn’t care for the color pink but preferred greens and then blues instead. She loved milk more than any other drink she’d had so far. Her taste in music was eclectic, her one requirement being lyrics she could sing along to. She would listen to but wasn’t fond of heavy metal . . . to which Biscuit rolled his eyes in a belabored fashion and said, “It ain’t for little girls anyway.” She was a staunch defender of her sex, and her humor was easy and generous.

She spoke with some consideration of becoming a nurse in the future, her stomach for the profession having already been tested, but she had qualms at the prospect of facing death every day for the rest of her life. Her next best choice was teacher of small children, kindergarten or first grade, when their eyes were bright and their teeth went missing. But her deepest, darkest wish—told to her aunt alone in front of a repeat episode of
Law and Order: Criminal Intent
with Vincent D’Onofrio, the only episodes worth watching they’d agreed—was a family, with lots of kids.

“Not the Olympics? The way you love to run?”

“I’ll always love to run. And it’s nice that people around here think I’m something special, but if you look at bigger towns like Richmond or Charlottesville, I’m barely competitive. There are lots of kids as fast or faster than me out there.”

“But you’re a sophomore . . . fifteen years old. And Lucy says you’re going to clean up at the regional races and then again at the state competitions.”

“We’ll see.” She shrugged. “And the big family thing is my long range plan, so don’t worry. Gran made me promise I’d finish college, and I want to travel a little before all that.”

“With the Olympics maybe . . .” The suggestion was made softly, and with hardly any pressure at all.

Anna smiled tolerantly. “We’ll see.”

Though Anna never said a word about it, Hannah hadn’t forgotten her discussion with Biscuit that afternoon at the track. She had a birthday—a big one, her sixteenth—two track meets and a senior prom with an almost guaranteed date with someone she cared for if she were still around to participate. And in Baltimore? She’d be the
new kid
for the last two months of the school year, an outsider. There might be enough time to make a new friend and meet her new track coach but . . . well, wouldn’t it be better to get a fresh new start with everything in the fall?