Nate scooted his chair a little closer to Helen, put a hand on her knee. “I’d have to look it up, but I doubt more than ten years, probably less,” he said. Helen reached down, took Nate’s hand, gave it a squeeze, then removed it from her knee.
“I’m telling you, it’s Hattie,” Riley said, rolling another joint. “Got to be.”
“Maybe it’s not just one,” Nate said, pushing his chair back again. “Maybe it’s hereditary. Maybe there’s a whole population of them out there. A colony of albino deer! Like the black squirrels in Toronto!”
Riley relit the joint and passed it to Helen. Nate gave her a quick frown. She took a deep hit, let the smoke seep out of her lungs as she smiled at Nate. “A colony of albino deer?” Helen said. “I hate to say it, but a ghost almost seems more likely.”
Riley smiled.
Nate narrowed his eyes, shook his head, and stood up. “I’m gonna go look it up. Do some research.”
“Sounds good,” Helen said. “Enjoy.”
They watched Nate jog back down the hill to the trailer, like walking wasn’t fast enough.
“Nate’s not a big believer in the supernatural, I guess,” Riley said as she lit a second joint, then took a hit.
“He’s very evidence-based. Scientific.”
“Not everything can be explained with science,” Riley said, passing the joint to Helen. Helen looked at the tattoos on Riley’s arms: a crow skull, an Egyptian ankh, a dragon encircling her left upper arm. Or was it a gargoyle?
“I agree completely,” Helen said. She thought of Hattie appearing in her kitchen last night. She was contemplating telling Riley about it, when Riley changed the subject.
“I think it’s great that Olive’s spending so much time with you two,” Riley said.
“She’s a good kid,” Helen said. “And she’s really been a huge help with the house.”
“The truth is I’m kind of worried about her,” Riley admitted.
“How so?”
“My brother, her dad, Dustin, you’ve met him, right?”
Helen shook her head. It was a little strange. You’d think he’d be interested to see where his daughter was spending so much spare time, would want to stop in just to make sure she and Nate weren’t obvious perverts or drug addicts or anything.
“Not yet,” she told Riley. “We told Olive we wanted the two of them to come to dinner, but it sounds like he’s kind of busy lately so we haven’t found a time to make it work.”
Olive had offered one excuse after another: her dad was too tired, he was working overtime, he was busy with house renovations. Helen had started to wonder if there might be something else going on. Maybe he was an alcoholic? Or just antisocial?
“Busy?” Riley quipped, shaking her head. “I doubt it. The truth is Dustin hasn’t really been the same since Lori took off. He’s kind of a mess, actually.”
Helen took the joint again, said, “Oh no. I had no idea. Olive hasn’t told us much about her mother.”
That was an understatement. Olive hadn’t really said word one about her mom at all, except to repeat a couple of stories she’d heard from her about Hattie. Helen knew Olive’s mom wasn’t in the picture but hadn’t yet figured out why.
“Yeah,” Riley said. “I’m not surprised. I mean, it’s one thing to leave your husband, right? But your kid? Poor Olive. My heart freaking breaks for her.”
“Was there another man?” Helen asked, worried she was crossing the line, but the pot loosened her tongue.
Riley nodded, looked away.
“No one’s heard from her?” Helen asked.
Riley shook her head, blue bangs falling into her eyes. “No. It’s fucked up. She and I were like—like best friends. Did everything together. It was like the Lori and Riley Show, you know? That’s what Dustin used to say. Then she just . . . took off.”
She looked away, eyes shining with tears. Then she took a deep breath and went on.
“Anyway, Dustin’s been a wreck. He spends all his free time tearing his house apart and putting it back together again. He says he wants to fix it up to surprise Lori when she gets home. Like she’s coming home. And like having a bigger bedroom and brand-new living room are seriously going to get her to stay, right?” She rubbed at a small hole in her jeans, worrying the fabric, making it bigger.
“That seems so sad,” Helen said, imagining the poor guy constantly fixing things up, thinking that if he just gets it right maybe his wife will come home and will want to stay this time. She wondered if Olive believed this, too, or if she was just going along with all the work to help keep her dad busy, to give him hope.
“Yeah, but the worst part is he’s so caught up in his grief over Lori leaving him that he’s not really paying much attention to Olive. I hear she barely showed up at school the whole final semester. She somehow managed to ace most of her tests and handed in homework from time to time, so she got passing grades, but from what I hear, it’s lucky they’re letting her move on to tenth grade in the fall. I’ve got a friend in the guidance department there.”
“And Dustin doesn’t know this?”
“If he does, he’s not doing anything about it. He’s made it pretty clear that it’s not my place to step in and give my opinion. I’m actually heading over there after this to check in with him, see what Olive’s up to. Make sure they’ve got food and stuff.” She sat up straighter, pocketed the baggie of weed and lighter.
“Wait, they might not have food?” Helen said.
“Last time I went over, Olive was having frozen French fries for dinner because that’s all there was in the house. It’s not a money thing. Dustin works. He just doesn’t have it together enough to shop and cook and be a single dad. Lori, she kept that house together. Dustin and Olive, they’re kind of floundering.”
“Wow, I had no idea,” Helen said. She thought about Olive stealing their stuff, setting the fire in the middle of the night on a school night, obsessed with buried treasure like a much younger kid—of course she didn’t have a good home life. How wrapped up in her own shit was she to have missed it?
They were quiet a minute, staring out at the yard, at the line of trees beyond it, the path that led down to the bog.
“Nate and I will try to do more to help. Ask Olive to stay for supper whenever she’s here. She’s such an amazing kid. So smart and helpful.” Riley nodded at her, looked grateful. “I hate to think of her not doing well in school,” Helen continued. “Maybe there’s something we can do to help with that, too. Nate and I were both middle school teachers, so we’re certainly up to doing some tutoring. We can offer to catch her up if she’s missed a lot of school.”
“That would be so great,” Riley said. “I worry about her a lot, but I don’t know how to help. I’ve offered for her to come and stay with me for a while, but she always says no. Besides, I don’t think Dustin would go for it. Olive’s all he has now. Honestly, I think if she wasn’t there, he’d lose it completely. Back when he was younger, before he married Lori, he was a big drinker. Suffered from bouts of depression. I’m afraid he’s slipping back into his old self. Which makes me so, so worried for Olive. She’s all he has, but he’s all she has, too. Well, her dad and me.” She paused, smiled at Helen, put a hand on her knee and gave it a grateful squeeze. “And now you and Nate!”
Helen nodded. She looked over toward the trailer, thought about telling Nate all of this. Surely he’d want to help Olive, too. He still didn’t trust her, called her “Little Ghost Girl” when she wasn’t around, but once Helen told him what was going on with Olive, he’d want to help. How could he not?
Riley saw her looking toward the trailer. “Nate should be careful,” she said.
“Careful?”
“Yeah, there’s a story I didn’t mention when he was here ’cause I could tell he’d dismiss it as pure bullshit.”
“What is it?”
“Well, there used to be this guy, Frank Barns. He was the town doctor, and he loved to hunt. He lived over by Carver Creek. One day, back in the seventies, I think it was, he caught sight of the white doe out in the woods one day and was totally obsessed. He went out looking for it every weekend. One time, he was with his son, Dicky. Dicky was just a kid then, ten or eleven years old. They were over by the bog hunting quail. And Frank caught sight of the doe and took off after it. Dicky tried to keep up but lost sight of him. Frank Barns never came out of those woods.”
“No way!” Helen practically yelled. “He disappeared?”
Riley nodded, eyes widening, caught up in the story and Helen’s response to it. “Search parties looked for him for weeks. Hound dogs, a helicopter even. Nothing. The man vanished without a trace.”
“What do you think happened?” Helen asked. She was good and stoned now. Her thoughts felt strangely fluid.
“Hattie got him,” Riley said matter-of-factly.
Helen felt cold all over. “You know,” she said, feeling brave, emboldened by the weed. “I saw her, too.”
“The white deer?”
“No, the person. Hattie in human form. If I tell you, will you think I’m totally nuts?”
“Oh my god, not at all,” Riley said, reaching over, giving Helen’s arm a squeeze. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a big believer in this kind of stuff! Please tell me.”
“Well, ever since we got here, I’ve had this feeling, this sense.” She stopped.
Riley watched her. Not like she was crazy, but openly. She was genuinely curious.
“This feeling,” Helen continued, “that someone was watching me. I’ve almost caught sight of her a few times, just a hint of movement out of the corner of my eye, you know?”
Riley nodded excitedly.
“And I think . . . I think maybe she left something for me. A sort of gift.”
“What kind of gift?”
“A cloth bundle with an old rusty nail and an animal tooth sitting in a little nest of straw. Nate thinks the tooth came from a deer or a sheep maybe.”
Riley frowned. “Do you have it still?”
“Yeah, it’s in the trailer.”
“So when you say you saw her, it was just a shadow, a little hint of movement?”
“No. I mean, at first, yes. But then last night—I actually saw her. She looked like a real person. As solid as you look now sitting here beside me.”
“Did you see her out in the bog?”
“No.” Helen shook her head. “Here in the house.”
“No way! Here?” Riley turned and looked back at the house right behind them. “Wait, is this what Nate was talking about before? About the haunted beam?”
Helen nodded. “We installed that beam yesterday and spent the night in the new house last night. I talked Nate into it. I thought it would be fun—like camping out. I got up in the middle of the night and walked into the kitchen and she was there, standing in the corner. A dark-haired woman with dark eyes, a rope around her neck.”
“Shii-it!” Riley said, drawing the word out slowly. “What’d she do?”
“She . . . spoke to me.”
“No.”
“Yes!” Helen said. She looked around to make sure that Nate was still out of earshot.
“No way!” Riley looked both shocked and excited. “She actually spoke? And you heard her?”
“It was kind of a horrible sound. It made me feel cold all over.”
“What’d she say?”
“She said one word: Jane.”
“Jane?” Riley was leaning close now, her face flushed. “That’s her daughter.”
“Her daughter.” Helen repeated.
If Hattie’s daughter’s name was Jane, this was proof that Helen hadn’t imagined the whole thing. No amount of wine or nightmare could have given Helen that piece of information. She had seen Hattie’s ghost, and the ghost had really spoken to her, told her something she had no way of knowing.
Jane.
“Jane was about twelve years old when Hattie was killed,” Riley said. “She disappeared right after.”
“Oh my god. What happened to her?”
“No one knows.” Riley shrugged dramatically. “She was never heard from again. There were rumors—she changed her name and moved south, or went up to Canada. Some say she never left, that she drowned herself in the bog so she could be with her mother.”
“There has got to be a way to find out what happened to her,” Helen said. “What’s the latest on when the historical society might open again? I’d love to get in there and see if we can find any leads. Anything about Jane, about Hattie. I feel like there are so many unanswered questions.”
“I talked to Mary Ann last night. Sounds like the damage was a little worse than she thought. It’s going to take a couple more weeks to get it cleaned up and renovated.”
“Oh no!”
“I guess the old wood floor under the carpet is ruined, and when they started ripping it out, they discovered some structural rot underneath. Mary Ann says we can’t go back in until we get the all clear—insurance regulations. Fucking sucks.”
“Okay, that’s okay. I’ll keep doing what I can online in the meantime.” Helen was nodding, rocking slightly to and fro like she couldn’t contain the energy buzzing through her mind and body. What if Jane had moved away, had kids of her own? What if there were living relatives, direct descendants of Hattie, who might hold important pieces of family history?
“Wow,” Riley said. “I still can’t get my head around this. You actually saw her! What else did she say?”
“Nothing. I called Nate over, wanted him to come see, but she disappeared.”
“She didn’t want him to see her,” Riley said. “Not like that anyway—she appeared to him as the white deer. I can’t believe she came to both of you guys. This feels huge. Most people, they just get a glimpse of her out in the bog. I’ve never heard of anyone saying she spoke to them.”
“Do you think it was the beam?” Helen asked. “I mean, do you think it’s possible that installing it, if it really was a piece of wood from the hanging tree, that maybe it helped her come back somehow?”
Riley thought a minute, then said, “I’ve heard that sometimes objects act as conduits, you know? Like if you hold your grandmother’s wedding ring, you might call her back enough to be able to smell her perfume.”
“I’ve always had this idea that objects hold history,” Helen said.
Riley nodded. “But maybe it’s more than that. Maybe they don’t just hold it—maybe it flows through them, you know? Gives the dead a kind of . . . touchstone; something to pull them back to this world.”
MECHANICAL
S
CHAPTER 16
Olive
S AUGUST 3, 2015
Olive had never been inside the Hartsboro Hotel. It was a big, creepy three-story building with sagging porches and Gothic arched windows with leaded glass. The gray paint was peeling; the black shutters hung crooked. A hand-painted sign hung from a chain on the front porch: used furniture and antiques. Olive and Mike stood on the other side of Main Street from it. The old hotel was a good half mile from the center of town where the general store and post office were. There were some houses scattered here and there along this part of Main Street, and School Street ran off Main and curved back behind the hotel. School Street didn’t have a school on it. Not anymore. It’s where the old one-room schoolhouse they’d torn down used to be.
“I don’t think this is such a good idea,” Mike said, shifting nervously from one foot to the other. There was a broken beer bottle there in the road and he kicked it, scattering the bits of brown glass.
“So don’t come with me then.”
The truth was Olive wasn’t sure it was a good idea, either, but she was going in. She’d p
ut it off for weeks now, trying to convince herself she was waiting for a good plan, but really, she was just being a chicken. She’d even called Dicky once and asked when the next spirit circle meeting was, thinking she could just join in, pretend to be interested in the spirit world and see if anyone would say anything to her about her mom having been a member.
“Who is this?” Dicky asked, sounding angry, like his hissing voice was sending tendrils through the phone to identify her, to stop her.
Olive had hung up without saying anything more.
“It looks creepy as shit,” Mike said now.
To Olive the hotel looked like a neglected old woman—someone who’d been popular and stylish once but was now slumped over and sitting in her own pee. “It looks more derelict than creepy to me,” she said.
The kids at school all said the hotel was haunted, that Dicky lived there with the ghosts he’d called up with his spirit circle. That his dead father lived there with him—his father who went into the woods years ago and disappeared. Now, they ate dinner together every night. Kids said that if you watched the hotel from across the street at midnight, you’d see the place was full of the shadows of people, moving from room to room. Some said they heard music, the clinking of glasses, chortling laughter.
“My mom came here once,” Mike said. “To one of Dicky’s gatherings.”
“No way!” Olive said. “How come you never told me?”
“She made me promise.”
Olive gave him an appreciative nod. She knew Mike took promises seriously. Him telling her this? It was kind of a big deal.
“Anyway, about six months ago, she went to try to talk to her sister, Val, who died back when they were kids. She drowned.”
“Shit, Mike. You had an aunt who drowned? How come you didn’t ever tell me?”
He shrugged. “It’s not like I knew her or anything. She was, like, twelve when she died.”
Olive nodded. She’d been younger than they were now. It was weird to think about.
The Invited (ARC) Page 17
