As her eyes adjusted, she could make out shapes in the darkness: the sharp angles of the two pop-up canopies they stored their tools and wood under. And there, beyond them, the strange skeletal walls of what would one day be their home. There was something inside it, within the cage of walls, moving across the floor. A pale figure, writhing, dancing. This wasn’t Nate with his sure gait, his broad shoulders.
This was a woman.
A woman in a white dress.
This, Helen knew at once, was Hattie Breckenridge.
And there was a reason Helen could see her figure so well—there was a flickering orange glow behind her.
“Shit, shit, shit, shit,” Helen gasped.
A ghost! An actual for real ghost. And she was dancing around flames.
Their house was burning.
This was not some imagined horror born from panic or a bout of paranoid thinking.
This was actually happening.
Helen wanted to drop down on her knees, to hide and stay hidden. But Nate was out there, maybe in danger. And their house, the house of their dreams that they’d only just begun, was burning.
She felt Hattie beckoning her, saying, Come closer, please. Saying, I dare you.
Helen held her breath, turned the knob, pushed the front door open as quietly as she could, not wanting to draw attention to herself. The cool air hit her, her skin turning to gooseflesh.
Then, once she reached the steps, she ran.
Her bare feet pounded across the grass, past the truck, up the newly graded driveway.
She ran toward the acrid, stinking smoke. Toward the figure in white, twisting and contorting, giving off a low, droning moan.
Helen thought about history, about how places held memories, and maybe ghosts were just a magnification of that force. Maybe ghosts were like an echo.
“Hattie?” she called as she came upon the building.
“Like hell,” a voice roared, and a blindingly bright light hit her face, illuminated the floor of the house, the girl who was trapped there, her foot encircled with rope. She hadn’t been dancing. She’d been trying to get away.
And this was no ghost, Helen understood now, but an actual flesh-and-blood girl. A girl with white makeup caked on her face, wearing camouflage pants and a matching shirt with a lacy white nightgown on top of them.
Helen guessed the girl was only about thirteen or fourteen years old, all elbows and knees with a thin, pointed elfish face, dark, tangled hair that looked like it hadn’t seen a brush in a while.
“Nate?” Helen called, shading her eyes, trying to look past the girl and the beam of light at her husband. “What’s going on?”
“This is our ghost,” Nate said. He stood at the other end of the house, aiming the spotlight at them. He was holding the other end of the heavy rope that was looped around the girl’s foot. The ground was strewn with tools, more rope, and the nylon netting they used to cover loads in the back of the truck.
“What’s all this rope and netting?” Helen asked.
“I knew someone was coming and messing with our stuff,” Nate explained, “and that it sure as hell wasn’t any ghost. So I set a trap. I laid some snares out. And the netting. Put a pile of tools right in the center of the floor. Then I hid and waited. This girl shows up, all dressed in white, and starts a freaking fire in the middle of our house. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing!”
Helen leaned down and untied her. The girl was shaking like a frightened animal.
Nate came forward, standing next to the pile of smoldering rags that lay in a metal pot on the floor. “She was trying to burn our house down!”
“I wasn’t,” the girl said, her chin shaking as she struggled not to cry. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m calling the cops,” Nate said, voice crackling as he tried to contain his fury. “Arson is a crime.” He turned to Helen, “Do you have your phone on you?”
“No,” Helen said. “I didn’t . . . I thought . . .” She gestured lamely at the scene before her.
“Go get it,” Nate said. “Get it and call the state police. Tell them we caught a kid vandalizing our new house. I’ll keep her here.”
“Wait,” the girl said. “Please, you don’t understand. Let me explain.” She looked so young, so genuinely scared.
“You have about twenty seconds and then my wife goes down to call 911,” Nate barked.
Helen stepped between them. “Let’s all just slow down,” she said. “Nate, let’s hear what she has to say.”
“I just wanted to scare you,” the girl said. “See, I built the fire in a pot so it wouldn’t burn anything else. I thought if you saw the flames, if you saw me dressed like this, you’d think I was Hattie. And you’d be freaked out and . . . leave.”
Helen saw the girl was right. The fire, nearly out now, had been burning in a cast-iron Dutch oven, like a mini-cauldron. The fire wasn’t actually very big at all, just bright in the dark night.
“Are you the one who’s been taking our things?” Helen said, understanding slowly dawning.
“Of course she is,” Nate answered.
At first, the girl said nothing.
“Yes,” the girl admitted. “Okay, you’re right. It was me. It was all me.”
“Our tools? Our money?” Helen said.
“My cell phone?” Nate asked.
“Yes,” the girl said, looking down at the ground. “All of it. But I’ll give it back!”
“You went in and took things from the trailer?” Nate asked. “Jesus. That’s breaking and entering!”
“I didn’t break in or anything—the door was always unlocked.”
“You opened the door, entered our home without our knowledge, and took shit,” Nate said. “I’m pretty sure that still counts. People go to jail for what you did.”
“Please!” the girl said. She was crying now.
“What is it? Drugs?” Nate asked. “You took our stuff to sell and get cash for what . . . OxyContin, fentanyl, some meth? What is it you guys up here are all into?”
“No!” The girl was shaking her head. “I don’t do drugs. It’s nothing like that. I have all your stuff still. I didn’t sell it. I just wanted to scare you. I swear that was all. I wanted you to think it was her.”
“Her?” Nate asked. “The ghost? Who’s going to believe in a ghost that steals money and cell phones?” He laughed harshly.
Helen winced. She didn’t think Nate saw, but she thought the girl might have.
Helen had wanted to believe in Hattie, to believe it was possible for someone from the past to somehow open a door and reach into the present and make contact—one misunderstood outsider to the other.
“I’ll give it all back,” the girl said. “I promise. I’ll make it up to you, just please don’t call the police. My father, he . . . he’s been through so much. This would kill him.”
“Guess you should have thought of that before pulling these stunts,” Nate said.
Helen put a hand on the girl’s arm. “Okay, you’re not a ghost. We’ve got that straight. So, who are you?”
“My name’s Olive. Olive Kissner. I live about half a mile down the road with my dad. We’re in the old blue house at the top of the hill.”
Helen nodded. She’d walked by the house. Waved to a man in blue work clothes who drove a banged-up half-ton pickup.
“How old are you, Olive?” Helen asked.
“Fourteen.”
“So what, are you a freshman?” Helen asked.
Olive nodded. “Yeah. I go to Hartsboro High.”
“And it’s just you and your father?”
The girl nodded. “Just us now.” Helen almost asked more, but the pained look on Olive’s face stopped her.
Nate spotted a camouflage backpack, set down his spotlight on the floor, and grabbed the bag. He unzipped it and
peeked inside. He pulled out a can of lighter fluid, some matches, then his hammer, a measuring tape. “These are our tools,” he said. He reached in again. “My phone!” He tried turning it on, but the battery was dead.
Olive nodded. “I’ve got the rest of them at home. I’ll bring them all back. I promise.”
Nate slipped his dead phone into his pocket and reached back into the bag, pulling out a graph-paper notebook this time and flipping through it, holding it in the spotlight beam. There were maps on the pages, maps of the bog with all the trees and large rocks marked. The maps were outlined in red grids with Xs over some of them.
“What’s this?” Nate asked.
“A map,” the girl said.
“Oh, really? You are so not in a position to be sarcastic, okay?” Nate said.
“I know! It’s just . . . it’s hard to explain,” the girl said.
Nate was studying the notebook, frowning hard at the map with the tiny Xs. Helen could see the drawing was a good one, the bog accurately rendered, right down to the path leading to her and Nate’s house.
“You said you were trying to scare us?” Helen asked. “Why? Why did you want us to leave?”
Olive chewed her lip, looked down at the plywood floor.
Nate set the notebook aside. “Better start talking, Little Ghost Girl, or I’m calling the police and driving down the road to knock on your father’s door.”
“Okay, okay,” the girl said, sounding frantic. “See, this land, it all used to belong to Hattie Breckenridge.”
Helen nodded. “We know. She lived in a house on the other side of the bog. But the house isn’t there anymore. Only the old stone foundation.”
“Right,” Olive said.
“So, you’re what—protecting Hattie’s land? Trying to keep it safe from outsiders?” Nate asked. He’d picked up the spotlight again and kept shining it right at Olive, blinding her, making her close her eyes. “Why? Because her ghost told you to?”
“No,” Helen said, understanding. She suddenly got it. The marked-up map in Olive’s notebook, the little bits of red string she’d found, Olive’s desire for them to leave the land. “You’re looking for the treasure, right?”
Olive looked away, bit her lip.
“What treasure?” Nate asked.
“It’s a story I heard in town,” Helen said. “Hattie Breckenridge supposedly buried treasure somewhere around the bog.”
“Treasure?” Nate scoffed. He rocked back on his heels, held out his arms in an I can’t believe this gesture. “First, we’ve got a witch ghost, now there’s a buried treasure? Is this Scooby fucking Doo?”
Helen put a gentle hand on Nate’s arm and squeezed. She got how absurd it all sounded. “The librarian said it was just a story people told, town legend.”
“It’s not a story,” Olive said. “The treasure is real.”
“And you’ve been looking for it? Around the bog? Here on our land?” Helen asked.
Olive nodded. “It’s real and I’m gonna find it. I need to find it.”
“So much that you had to break the law? To spy on us, steal from us?” Nate said.
“You don’t understand,” Olive said.
“Help us understand, Olive,” Helen said.
The girl drew in a deep breath. “See, my mom and I, we used to hunt for the treasure. She always said it was real. And she said she knew we’d be the ones to find it. But then last year, my mom, she . . .” Olive faltered. “She took off, okay?”
“Took off?” Nate repeated.
Olive nodded. “She left us. Me and my dad. We haven’t heard from her since. And I think—no, I know, that if I find the treasure, my mom will hear about it, ’cause it’ll be on the news and stuff, right? And if she hears, she’ll come back. If not, I can hire someone to find her. A private detective.”
Helen flashed Nate a this poor kid look. Helen had lost her own mother when she was just eleven. She knew firsthand how hard it was to be motherless. How back when she was Olive’s age, she would have done anything, anything at all, to get her mother back again. She looked back at Olive, dressed up as a ghost in the old nightgown—her mother’s probably—and her heart just about broke.
“I wish you’d just asked if it was okay to go poking around on our land,” Nate said, voice softer, calmer now. He’d lowered the light so the beam was pointing down at the floor. “You didn’t need to try to drive us off with this whole crazy ghost girl thing. And you certainly didn’t need to steal.”
“I know,” Olive said. “I know and it was really stupid . . . and I’m really sorry.”
“Nate’s right,” Helen agreed. “If you’d just asked if you could search our land, we would have been fine with that.”
Olive looked down at the plywood floor, eyes on the charred remains in the cast-iron pot. She began to pick at the frayed edge of the left sleeve of her nightgown.
“So what are we going to do here?” Nate asked, looking from Helen to Olive.
Olive looked up, twisting the sleeve of her nightgown now. “Like I said, I can give all your stuff back. Well, not the pie. My dad and I ate that.”
“I knew it!” Helen said, looking over at Nate. “I told you I’d brought that pie home and put it in the fridge! You made me think I was nuts, telling me I must have left it back at the store or that maybe I didn’t buy it at all.”
“Sorry,” Olive said, looking small and sheepish. She toed the floor with a ratty sneaker. “And I can’t exactly give back the money, either. I . . . I kind of spent it.”
“Of course,” Nate said, his voice taking on an edge again. “Are you sure drugs aren’t involved in this in any way?”
“I swear! I used the money to help buy a new metal detector. A really nice one. So I could look for the treasure. I guess I can sell the metal detector and use the money to pay you back.”
“How much money of ours did you take?” Helen asked.
The girl looked up, thinking, then counted with her fingers. “About eighty dollars, I think. Actually, maybe closer to a hundred? I’m not sure ’cause I didn’t do it all at once. It was a twenty here, five or ten there, you know?”
“Jesus,” Nate said again, shaking his head, rubbing his eyes.
Helen was amazed that she’d taken so much. They’d been careless with their cash—she and Nate sharing money, passing it back and forth, sticking it in pockets, and both running off to the general or hardware store several times a day for little things they needed.
“Wow,” Helen said. “Well, the stolen money is definitely a problem. We’re going to need you to pay us back somehow.”
“At the very least!” Nate added.
They were silent a minute, both of them watching Olive, who continued to twist at her nightgown worriedly.
“What if I work it off?” Olive suggested.
“What?” Nate scowled at her.
“I’m a really hard worker, honest! And I know a lot about building stuff. My dad and I, we’ve been renovating our house for a long time. I’m really good with tools and I’m a lot stronger than I look. I can frame walls and hang Sheetrock. I can even do some electricity and plumbing.”
“I don’t know,” Nate said. “I don’t think—”
“We could definitely use some help,” Helen said, turning to him. “We’re behind schedule, right? And if Olive’s got building experience, the work will go faster if there’s three of us.”
Olive nodded, looked hopefully at Helen. “I can come after school tomorrow. A trial. To prove that I’m not messing with you—I’m actually really good at building. And if it works out, if you want me to keep helping you, school’s out for the summer next Wednesday, then I can come all day. Until you feel like I’ve done enough to pay you back. I’ll work all summer if I have to, just to make it up to you. And if it doesn’t work out, I’ll sell my metal detector and get
you the cash.”
“What do you say, Nate?” Helen asked.
“I don’t know,” Nate said. “The kid just tried to burn our house down.”
“Let’s not exaggerate,” Helen said. “She wasn’t trying to burn the house down.”
“Look,” Olive said, looking right at Nate, “I know what I did, it was really wrong and downright shi—I mean downright crappy. I thought . . . well, who cares what I thought? I’m so, so sorry. Please, let me make it up to you.”
Helen looked at Nate. “What do you think?”
“We don’t know anything about her,” Nate said.
“She’s our neighbor,” Helen said. “She’s a kid, she made some bad choices, but she’s trying to do the right thing. Right, Olive?”
The girl nodded enthusiastically.
Nate sighed. “No more stealing?” he asked. “No more tricks, no more sneaking around?”
“I promise! Everything aboveboard from now on,” Olive said. “And hey, I saw all your field guides inside. I know everything about the animals in these woods. I can show you a bear’s den, a beaver dam, and where the bald eagles nest. I even know where a bobcat’s been hanging out lately.”
Nate couldn’t quite hide his interest. “A bobcat? Really?”
“Totally. I can tell you all about the land. I’ve been hunting around here since I was a little kid.”
“And about Hattie?” Helen asked.
“I’ll tell you everything I know,” the girl promised. “And if you want, I can take you to meet my aunt Riley. She knows a lot more. She’s kind of an expert on local history. And she loves all that ghost and ghost story stuff, too.”
“What do you think, Nate?” Helen asked again.
He was quiet, still shining the light on Olive’s face, trying to make up his mind.
“Nate?” Helen said in way that she hoped he’d hear as You’d better go along with this.
“Sure,” he said, still looking skeptical. “You come back tomorrow after school and we’ll see what kind of a worker you are. But if you don’t keep up your end of the bargain, or if you pull any more tricks, I go right to your father and the police.”
“You won’t be disappointed,” Olive said. “I promise.”
The Invited (ARC) Page 12
