7. Hannah
HANNAH
The pencil snaps against the page, and the line I meant to trace goes ragged.
I've spread the journals across the quilt, and not one of them will make sense.
My grandmother's hand is small, looping through dates and the symbols.
A triangle and a circle together, and a circle with horizontal lines.
A mark like a key. A column of initials that match no one I know.
Under one she's written, moved it to the second safe place.
The first is no longer ours. As if she handed me a map and kept the explanations. Evie. What was your secret?
The silence is driving me crazy, and I can't think straight. Lily's downtown with a couple of girls she met at the diner, gone till dark. I slide the smallest notebook into my bag and go find Clara.
Her bookstore is all dust, warm paper, and a cinnamon stick she keeps smoldering by the register. She brightens at the bell, then sees my face and sets down her tea.
"Hannah. You look like you've been arguing with a ghost."
"My grandmother." I lay the journal on the counter and open it. "I can't understand half of what she wrote. I thought—well, I thought you may be able to help because you knew her for a long time."
Clara pulls her glasses down and goes quiet. Her finger hovers over the triangle and circle.
"Now that," she says slowly, "I've seen. Not in a book." She lifts a yellowed map of Briar Glen from the wall and spreads it between us. "Evie used to walk. Everywhere, all weather, marking her routes. Give me a minute."
She matches the journal to the map. The key-shape, she decides, is the old chapel past the orchard; the triangle-circle one, the creek crossing below it. She taps, frowns, corrects herself twice.
"This one." Her nail rests on the horizontal lined circle.
"That's the north woods, the tree line. And this, beside it—" She hesitates.
"There's a hut up there. Trapper's place, ancient.
Your grandmother went up more than made sense especially at her age.
I asked her once. She said she liked the walk.
" Clara's smile wavers. "She didn't, particularly. She hated the cold."
"What was she doing up there?"
"I never knew." Clara closes the journal gently. "She kept her own counsel, your Evie. I told myself it was grief, after your grandfather. Now I'm less sure." She pats my hand. "Don't go up alone, dear."
I drive home with the chapel, creek, and hut turning over behind my eyes. I'm in my own world as I pull my key to unlock the front door to find it open. Not wide, but eased back, the frame splintered.
"Lily." Her name is out of me, and then I'm through the door shouting it. "Lily!"
The lounge answers with disorder. Not wrecked—searched.
The boxes I stacked by the stairs are pulled down and tipped, my grandmother's papers fanned across the floor.
The writing desk stands with every drawer dragged out, including the false bottom I only found last week.
Journals lie spine-up where they were dropped, pages bent back hard. One is torn.
Then it lands—the diner, the girls, till dark. She isn't here. She was never here. The relief drops through me so fast my knees loosen, and I catch the banister and breathe. Footsteps sound behind me, I turn with a journal raised like it will protect me, but I see Alaric and lower it.
"You were shouting," he says.
"How did you—" I don't finish. My pulse is everywhere at once.
"The splintered wood. I was walking past." His gaze moves to the spilled boxes; whatever he's thinking, he doesn't mention it. "Are you hurt?"
"No. I was in town. Lily's in town. Someone was in my house."
"May I?" He waits for my nod before he enters. He moves through the room without touching anything, crouches by the desk, studies the false bottom without asking what it is. "They knew where to look."
"You can tell that?"
"Something like that is hard to find, left hanging open." He glances up. "Nobody finds that if it's jewelry they're after."
I should feel unnerved. Instead something eases, because he's saying what I didn't want to say first. "It isn't the first strange thing. But it's the first one that feels aimed."
"Then it's aimed." No softening, no telling me I'm overwrought. "You're right to take it seriously."
The door won't latch. He tests it, then glances at me instead of fixing it himself. "Do you have a drill?" I fetch my grandfather's old kit. He sets a new lock and I hold it level while he marks the holes. Then he turns the drill around and holds it out to me, handle first.
"You renovate houses," he says. "You'll do it straighter than I will."
I take it and sink the screws myself, his palm braced flat against the wood to keep it true. Twenty minutes of honest noise, and by the end my breathing's level, the room less like a wound.
"What did they take?" he asks.
"I'm not sure yet. Papers, probably." I think of the small journal still in my bag—the chapel, the hut, the things Clara couldn't quite read—and I keep all of it back.
Not because I think he'd hurt me. Because it's the last of her that's mine.
"Whoever it was wanted my grandmother's things. Hers, not mine."
"Did anyone know you'd be out today?"
The question stops me. "No. I didn't plan it."
I'm grateful he doesn't make a lecture out of security or fixing things. Tires sound on the gravel.
"I'll keep an ear out."
I'm standing there with my hand on the bolt, listening to his steps fade off. Wishing he would stay a little longer. He stops, looks back, and smiles. That immediately sends goosebumps down my spine, the good kind. I suddenly realize I'm finding it harder by the day to not want to get to know him.