She didn’t want to stop searching yet. Not when they were so close to finding her. Perhaps Lucas was right—they could continue looking, and if Brigitte still didn’t want Dietmar to know her location, Quenby would keep her secret. “I’d like to visit the cliffs where Rosalind last saw her,” she said. “And then I want to stop in Rodmell.”
But even as she said the words, her eyes began to grow heavy. Unlike Lucas, she hadn’t rested well on the airplane in either direction, not with everything racing through her mind.
He tucked his phone back into his pocket and held up the keys as they walked toward the car. “You want to drive?”
She shook her head. “Wake me up when you find the cliffs.”
The sunroof open, they began driving north. The road was flat here, but according to sat nav, it curved away from the river a few miles up and climbed between farmland and trees. Then they would have to hike to the cliffs.
Her eyes closed, she thought about Mr. Knight locked away in his fortress. He had the best of care, yet his body wouldn’t hold on forever. He’d been hanging on, it seemed, until she brought him word about Brigitte. Perhaps this final letter was what he needed to let go as well.
“What in the—?” Lucas blurted, and he swerved suddenly to the left, toward the trees.
Quenby’s eyes flashed open, and she saw a gray lorry on the road ahead, barreling toward them, stirring up the dirt into a blinding cloud. At first she thought it was Kyle, trying to flare his feathers again, but the driver, it seemed, had lost control, racing toward a head-on collision. If he didn’t stop, he’d kill her and Lucas both.
“Hold on,” Lucas shouted.
He spun the wheel right, toward the river, and she heard the grating of metal as they plunged over the bank. Then there was an awful ripping sound, the car shuddering.
Her air bag exploded, flinging her back against the seat.
Lucas shouted her name, and then she heard someone else. A woman.
She tried to open her eyes, but they were glued shut. And her toes, they were soaking wet.
Swim, that’s what she needed to do, out of this murky water. Rush away.
Lucas said something else, but the last voice she heard wasn’t his. It was Brigitte’s, whispering her name.
Chapter 52
London, 1961
Theater called to Hannah like a mockingbird, mimicking the cry of her heart. She craved an audience enraptured by her talent, and adoration—the theater’s song of promise—lured her into a nest that turned prison cell in her later years.
It’s impossible to really love someone hidden behind the armor of costumes and makeup and lights, but Hannah didn’t care about love back then. Lily and Bridget had spoiled her with it when she was a child, cushioning her from the pains of hunger, loneliness, and fear. Perhaps they’d spoiled her too much.
For her eighteenth birthday, Hannah had begged to attend a musical in the West End, and they went together to London to see Brigadoon in Her Majesty’s Theatre. Hannah soaked in the grandeur of velvety reds and brilliant golds, the aroma of expensive perfumes, the buzz of a well-dressed audience waiting eagerly for the curtain to rise. And when it rose, Eliza Cain took the stage.
Bridget recognized her immediately, though eighteen years had passed, though she wore a powder-blue Celtic dress and a wig with a hundred blonde curls.
She was magnificent as Fiona. Headstrong and beautiful. Larger than life as she sang about being in love. She captured the hearts of her loyal subjects until she disappeared into the darkness. For a moment even Bridget forgot that Fiona was really Rosalind.
Tears streamed down Bridget’s face as she thought about Rosalind so long ago, vanishing by the cliffs. But unlike Fiona, Rosalind never returned. Her path took her away from the one person who needed her most.
When the curtain dropped, Hannah was holding Bridget’s hand, tears smearing her mascara, streaking her flawless cheeks. And Bridget knew right then that she’d never be able to contain her. Hannah was too much like Rosalind. Bold and rash and afraid of nothing, except perhaps being tied down.
She didn’t love her any less knowing this, but she worried for her.
And she feared that Hannah, too, would one day walk away.
CHAPTER 53
_____
Listen to the wind, Quenby.
And so she had. She’d lain down on the lawn by her mother, the sticky grass poking her arms, tickling her ear. And Quenby had listened.
It’s breathing through the grass, her mother had said. Across the dales.
There were no dales in their apartment complex, at least none that she’d ever seen, but she’d imagined the dales in Yorkshire, where you could hear the soft wind instead of sirens, feel its coolness instead of the summer heat.
But then Henry, the bully from the apartment next door, began throwing rocks at them, and it broke the magic.