Fourteen

The reporters are still at the front gate.

I see them when I reach the end of the driveway, milling on the other side of the wrought iron, waiting for me to emerge. Now that I have, they surge forward, shoving their microphone-clutching hands through the gate’s bars like a horde of undead in a zombie movie.

Among them is Brian Prince, his bow tie askew as he elbows others out of the way, angling for prime position.

“Maggie!” he shouts. “Talk to me! What are your plans now for Baneberry Hall?”

Behind him, flashbulbs pop into firecracker brightness. Caught in their glare, I retreat, slowly at first, shuffling backward before turning my back to the crowd. Soon I’m running up the driveway, winding my way up the hillside toward Baneberry Hall.

In order to leave this place, I’m going to need a different escape route. Lucky for me, I know of one. Also lucky: Brian Prince and the other reporters haven’t found it yet.

Veering off the driveway, I plunge into the woods and start to descend the hill again, this time under the cover of the trees. I push through the forest until I reach the stone wall that surrounds the property. A walk alongside the wall leads me to the section that’s crumbled away. I pass through it and, five minutes later, find myself emerging from the woods behind Elsa Ditmer’s cottage.

Because there could also be reporters waiting out front, I stick to the backyard, crossing it quickly before hopping onto the rear porch. The back door swings open before I get a chance to knock. Hannah stands just inside, her jaw clenched.

“What do you want?” she says.

“To say I’m sorry. For your loss.”

“That’s not going to bring my sister back.”

“I know,” I say.

Hannah bites the inside of her cheek and asks, “You’ve got anything else to say?”

“Actually, yes.” I reach into my purse and pull out the notes, all twenty-four of them. “I was wondering if you could explain these.”

She steps out of the way, allowing me entry into the cottage. I follow her to the kitchen. On the way, we pass the living room, where a game show blares from a console television. I get a glimpse of Elsa Ditmer cocooned in a recliner, a knit blanket pulled to her chin.

I wonder if Hannah has told her that Petra’s been found. If so, I wonder if Elsa understands.

In the kitchen, I’m hit with the smell of cigarette smoke and cooking oil. We sit at a kitchen table with one leg that’s shorter than the others. The table tilts when Hannah grabs a cigarette and lights up. It tilts back when I place the notes in front of her.

Hannah doesn’t bother giving them a glance. It’s clear she’s seen them before.

“I started writing them a year after you guys left and Petra vanished,” she says. “That damn book your dad wrote had just come out, and I was mad.”

“That the three of you were in it?”

Hannah gives me an incredulous look. “That he did something to Petra and got away with it. When your dad showed up out of the blue—literally a year to the day after Petra disappeared—well, I couldn’t deal with it anymore.”

She reaches for the notes, sorting through them until she finds the one that led me to her door.

WHERE IS MY SISTER?

“I was so angry when I wrote this,” Hannah says, flattening the note against the tilting table. “I thought it would be therapeutic or something. To finally write down the question I’d been thinking about for an entire year. It didn’t help. It only made me angrier. So angry that I marched up to Baneberry Hall and left it on the front porch. It was gone after your father left the next day. That’s when I knew he had seen it.”

“And then it became an annual tradition,” I say.

Hannah exhales a stream of smoke. “I thought that if I did it enough times, I might finally get an answer. And after a few years, I think your father had come to expect it.”

“Did he ever confront you about it?”

“Nope,” Hannah says. “He never talked to us. I guess he was afraid of what I would say.”

“But he still paid your mother?” I asked.

“Every month.” Hannah taps her cigarette against a ceramic ashtray and takes another long puff. “He paid a little more every year, directly deposited into my mom’s account. Out of guilt, most likely. Not that I cared what his reason was. When you’ve got a sick mother to take care of, it doesn’t matter where the money comes from. Or why.”

“Even if it’s from a man you think killed your sister?”

Hannah leans back in her chair, her eyes narrowed to slits. “Especially then.”

“I was told most people thought Petra had run away. Why did you think my father had anything to do with her disappearance?”

“Because I saw him come back to Baneberry Hall,” Hannah says.

“When?”

“About two weeks after Petra was gone.”

Shocked, I lean on the table, which does another jolting tilt. “Two weeks? Are you sure?”

“Positive. I had a lot of trouble sleeping in those first few weeks Petra was gone. I’d lie awake all night, waiting for her to come back. One morning, I got up at the crack of dawn and went walking in the woods, thinking that I could still find her if I kept looking hard enough.” Hannah lets out a sad, little laugh. “So, there I was, roaming the woods behind our house. When I reached the wall around your property, I followed it to the front gate. I had almost reached the road when I saw a car pull up.”

“My father,” I say.

“Yes. I saw him clear as day. He got out of the car, unlocked the gate, and drove on through.”

“Did he see you?”

“I don’t think so. I was still in the woods. Besides, he seemed pretty focused on getting inside as fast as possible.”

“How long was he there?”

“I don’t know. I had gone home by the time he left.”

“What do you think he was doing?”

Hannah stubs out her cigarette. “At the time, I had no idea. Now, though? I think he was dumping Petra’s body.”

Chief Alcott told me she went to Baneberry Hall the night we left, finding nothing out of the ordinary. If my father had killed Petra and stuffed her body in the floor, that means he either did it well before the chief searched the house or well after.

Maybe two weeks after.

In which case Petra’s body would had to have been kept somewhere else. Something I don’t want to think about.

“Did you tell anyone that you saw him back at the house?” I ask Hannah.

“No, because I didn’t think anyone would listen to me,” she says. “The police weren’t really interested. By then your dad’s story about Baneberry Hall being haunted was spreading. We’d already started to see looky-loos driving up to the front gate, trying to get a look at the place. As for Petra, they were convinced she’d run away and would return when she felt like it. She never did.”

“That’s what your mother thought as well, right?”

“She did,” Hannah says. “Because that’s what I told her had happened.”

She lights another cigarette and inhales. One long, hungry drag during which she decides to tell me everything she knows.

“Petra had a boyfriend. Or something.”

Hannah lets the word hang there, insinuating. It makes me wonder if Brian Prince had shared his theory about my father with her.

“I don’t know who it was or how long it had been going on,” she says. “But she snuck out at night. I know because we shared a bedroom. She’d wait until she thought I was asleep before climbing out the window. When I woke up in the morning, she’d be right back in bed, asleep. I asked her about it once, and she told me I had been dreaming.”

“Why the need to sneak out?”

“Because my mother didn’t allow dating. Or boys. Or anything that would displease God.” Hannah holds up her cigarette as an example and takes another devilish puff. “The thing you need to know about my mother is that she was strict. As was her mother. And her grandmother. The Ditmer women were hardworking, God-fearing people. There’s a reason they all became housekeepers. Cleanliness is next to Godliness.”

A bit of ash drops from Hannah’s cigarette onto the kitchen table. She doesn’t brush it away. A small act of rebellion.

“Growing up, Petra and I weren’t allowed to do anything. No school dances. No going to the movies with friends. It was school and work and prayer. It was only a matter of time before Petra was going to rebel.”

“How long had she been sneaking out?”

“Only a week or two, as far as I could tell. The beginning of July was when I first watched her do it.”

My heart sinks. I’d been hoping it had started weeks before my family moved into Baneberry Hall. But, no, we were there by the beginning of July.

“The night Petra disappeared, did you see her leave?”

Hannah gives a quick shake of her head. “But I assumed she did, because she was gone the next morning.”

“And that’s when you told your mother she had run away?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because Buster was also gone.”

Hannah sees the confusion on my face and elaborates.

“He was Petra’s teddy bear. She got it years before I was born and still slept with it like she was my age. If she spent the night somewhere, Buster went with her. You don’t remember this, but she had him when we went to your house for that sleepover.”

Hannah gets up and leaves the kitchen. She returns a minute later with a photograph, staring at it as she resumes talking.

“She’d never leave home without him. Ever. When we realized Buster was also gone, we assumed she’d run away. Most likely with this boy she’d been seeing.”

That boy could have been my father, a possibility that makes me as wobbly as the kitchen table. The feeling gets worse when Hannah finally shows me the photograph. It’s her and Petra, presumably in their bedroom. Petra sits on a bed. Next to her is a disturbingly familiar teddy bear.

Brown fur.

Button eyes.

A red bow tie circling its neck.

It’s the very same bear Dane and I found in my father’s office. Now it is gone. While I don’t know—and likely will never know—who took it, I can think of only two reasons it was in Baneberry Hall.

“You mentioned that Petra brought Buster that time you spent the night,” I say.

“Yes,” Hannah says. “Even though we never made it the full night.”

I’m well aware of that, thanks to the Book.

“Is there a chance Petra left it behind?” I say, hoping I’m not revealing too much. Hannah doesn’t need to know that, until a few nights ago, Buster was still inside Baneberry Hall. “Maybe it got lost.”

“She brought him home with her,” Hannah says. “I’m certain of it.”

That leaves only the other reason Buster could have been in the house. The one I’d been hoping wasn’t true.

Petra brought the bear with her because she thought she was leaving for good. Probably with my father. The idea sucks all the air from my chest.

Short of breath, there’s nothing left for me to do but stand and leave the cottage in a daze. Hannah follows me past the living room, where the television has changed from a game show to a sitcom. Forced laughter blares from the TV.

It’s not until I’m at the back door that I turn around to ask Hannah one more thing. A question prompted not just by that picture of Petra and her bear but by the memory of yesterday morning. Mister Shadow in the armoire, staring at me, creeping closer.

“You seem to remember a lot about the night you two came to Baneberry Hall for that sleepover.”

“It was pretty hard to forget.” Hannah huffs out a humorless laugh, as if she can’t believe that, with everything else going on, this is what I want to talk about. It makes perfect sense to me. She was there. She remembers. I don’t.

“The things my father wrote about that night,” I say. “That was bullshit, right?”

“I don’t think so,” Hannah says.

I study her, seeking a tell that she’s lying. She levels her gaze at me, indicating she’s dead serious.

“So, what my father wrote about that night—”

“It’s all true,” Hannah says, without a moment’s hesitation. “Every damn word.”