The Invited
Page 1
Also by Jennifer McMahon
Burntown
The Night Sister
The Winter People
The One I Left Behind
Don’t Breathe a Word
Dismantled
Island of Lost Girls
Promise Not to Tell
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2019 by Jennifer McMahon
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.doubleday.com
DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Cover photograph by Edward Fielding/Arcangel Images; (sky) Alicia Ramirez/Shutterstock
Cover design by Michael Windsor
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: McMahon, Jennifer, [date] author.
Title: The invited : a novel / by Jennifer McMahon.
Description: First Edition. | New York : Doubleday, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018037320 | ISBN 9780385541381 (hardback) | ISBN 9780385541398 (ebook)
Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Suspense. | FICTION / Ghost. | GSAFD: Ghost stories. | Suspense fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3613.C584 I55 2018 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018037320
Ebook ISBN 9780385541398
v5.4
ep
Contents
Cover
Also by Jennifer McMahon
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Hattie Breckenridge
Foundation
Chapter 1: Helen
Chapter 2: Olive
Chapter 3: Helen
Chapter 4: Olive
Chapter 5: Helen
Chapter 6: Olive
Framing
Chapter 7: Helen
Chapter 8: Olive
Chapter 9: Helen
Chapter 10: Olive
Chapter 11: Helen
Closing In
Chapter 12: Olive
Chapter 13: Helen
Chapter 14: Olive
Chapter 15: Helen
Mechanical
Chapter 16: Olive
Chapter 17: Helen
Chapter 18: Olive
Chapter 19: Helen
Chapter 20: Jane
Chapter 21: Olive
Chapter 22: Helen
Chapter 23: Olive
Chapter 24: Helen
Insulation and Drywall
Chapter 25: Olive
Chapter 26: Helen
Chapter 27: Ann Whitcomb Gray
Chapter 28: Olive
Floors and Trim
Chapter 29: Helen
Chapter 30: Olive
Chapter 31: Helen
Chapter 32: Olive
Chapter 33: Helen
Chapter 34: Olive
Chapter 35: Helen
Chapter 36: Olive
Finish Work
Chapter 37: Helen
Chapter 38: Olive
Chapter 39: Helen
Chapter 40: Olive
Chapter 41: Helen
Chapter 42: Olive
Chapter 43: Helen
Chapter 44: Olive
Chapter 45: Lori Kissner
Chapter 46: Helen
Chapter 47: Olive
Chapter 48: Helen
Chapter 49: Olive
Chapter 50: Helen
Chapter 51: Lori
Chapter 52: Helen
Chapter 53: Olive
Acknowledgments
About the Author
For Drea, again and always
Hattie Breckenridge
MAY 19, 1924
It had started when Hattie was a little girl.
She’d had a cloth-bodied doll with a porcelain head called Miss Fentwig. Miss Fentwig told her things—things that Hattie had no way of knowing, things that Hattie didn’t really want to hear. She felt it deep down inside her in the way that she’d felt things all her life.
Her gift.
Her curse.
One day, Miss Fentwig told her that Hattie’s father would be killed, struck by lightning, and that there was nothing Hattie could do. Hattie tried to warn her daddy and her mother. She told them just what Miss Fentwig had said. “Nonsense, child,” they said, and sent her to bed without supper for saying such terrible things.
Two weeks later, her daddy was dead. Struck by lightning while he was putting his horse in the barn.
Everyone started looking at Hattie funny after that. They took Miss Fentwig away from her, but Hattie, she kept hearing voices. The trees talked to her. Rocks and rivers and little shiny green beetles spoke to her. They told her what was to come.
You have a gift, the voices told her.
But Hattie, she didn’t see it that way. Not at first. Not until she learned to control it.
Now, today, the voices cried out a warning.
First, it was the whisper of the reeds and cattails that grew down at the west end of the bog—a sound others would hear only as dry stalks rubbing together in the wind, but to her they formed a chorus of voices, pleading and desperate: They’re coming for you, run!
It wasn’t just the plants who spoke. The crows cawed out an urgent, hoarse warning. The frogs at the edge of the bog bellowed at her: Hurry, hurry, hurry.
Off in the distance, dogs barked, howled: a pack of dogs, moving closer, coming for her.
And then there were footsteps, a single runner coming down the path. Hattie was in front of their house, an ax in her hands, splitting wood for the fire. Hattie loved splitting wood: to feel the force of the blows, hear the crack as the ax head hit the wood, splitting it right at the heart. Now she raised the ax defensively, waiting.
“Jane?” she called out when she saw her daughter come bursting out of the woods, hair and eyes wild. Her blue flowered dress was torn. Hattie had sewn the dress herself, as she’d made all their clothes, on her mother’s old treadle sewing machine with fabric ordered from the Sears, Roebuck catalog. Sometimes Hattie splurged and bought them dresses from the catalog, but they were never as comfortable or durable as the ones she sewed.
Hattie lowered the ax.
“Where have you been, girl?” she asked her daughter.
It was a school day, but Hattie had forbidden her daughter from going to school. And last she knew, Jane was gathering kindling in the woods.
Jane opened her mouth to speak, to say, but could not seem to make the words come.
Instead, she burst into tears.
Hattie set down her ax, went to her, wrapped her arms around Jane’s trembling body.
Then she smelled the smoke on Jane’s dress, in
her tangled hair.
Even the smoke spoke to her, spun an evil tale.
“Jane? What’s happened?”
Jane reached into the pocket of her dress, pulled out a box of matches.
“I’ve done something wicked,” she said.
Hattie pushed her away, held tight to her arms, searched her face. Hattie had spent her life interpreting messages and signs, divining the future. But her own flesh and blood, her daughter—her mind was closed to Hattie. Always had been.
“Tell me,” Hattie said, not wanting to know.
“Mama,” Jane said, crying. “I’m sorry.”
Hattie closed her eyes. The dogs were coming closer. Dogs and men who were shouting, crashing through the woods. It had always been funny to Hattie how men who’d spent their whole lives moving through these woods, hunting in them, could move so clumsily, without grace, without any trace of respect for the living things they trod upon.
“What will we do?” Jane looked pale and young, much younger than her twelve years. Fear does that to a person: shrinks them down, makes them small and weak. Hattie had learned, over the years, to put her own fears in a box at the back of her mind, to stand tall and brave, to be resilient to whatever enemy presented itself.
“You? You’ll go hide in the root cellar back where the old house used to be.”
“But there are spiders down there, Mama! Rats, too!”
“Spiders and rats are the least of our concerns. They’ll bring you no harm.”
Unlike the men who are coming now, Hattie thought. The men who are close. Getting closer still. If she listened, she could hear their voices, their shouts.
“Cut through the woods to the old place. Climb down into the cellar and bar the door. Open it for no one.”
“But, Mama—”
“Go now. Run! I’ll come for you. I’ll lead them away, then I’ll come back. I’ll be back for you, Jane Breckenridge, I swear. Don’t you open that cellar door for anyone but me. And, Jane?”
“Yes, Mama?”
“Don’t you be afraid.”
As if it could be that easy. As if you could banish fear just like that. As if words could have such power.
By the time Jane ran down the path, the dogs were coming from the east, from the road that led into the center of town. Old hound dogs, trained to tree bears and coons, but now it was her scent they were after.
Don’t be afraid, Hattie told herself now. She concentrated on pushing the fear to the back of her mind. She picked up her ax and stood tall.
“Witch!” the men who ran after the dogs cried. “Get the witch!”
“Murderer!” some cried.
“The devil’s bride,” others said.
Ax clenched in her hands, Hattie started off across the bog, knowing the safest path. There were parts that dropped down, went deep; places where springs bubbled up, bringing icy-cold water from deep underground. Healing water. Water that knew things; water that could change you if you’d let it.
The peat was spongy beneath her feet, but she moved quickly, surely, leaping like a yearling deer.
“There she is!” a man shouted from up ahead of her. And this was not good. She hadn’t expected them to come from that direction. In fact, they were coming from all directions. And there were so many more of them than she’d expected. She froze, panicked, as she looked at the circle forming around her, searching for an opening, a way out.
She was surrounded by men from the sawmill, men who stood around the potbelly stove at the general store, men who worked for the railroad, men who farmed. And there were women, too. This she should have expected, should have seen coming, but somehow hadn’t.
When a child’s life is lost, it’s the mother who bears the most grief, the most fury. The women, Hattie knew, might be more dangerous than the men.
These were people she’d known all her life. Many of them had come to her in times of need, had asked for guidance, had asked her to look into the future; paid her to give a reading or to deliver a message from a loved one who had passed. She knew things about the people of this town; she knew their deepest secrets and fears; she knew the questions they were afraid to ask anyone else.
Her eye caught on Candace Bishkoff, who was walking into the bog with her husband’s rifle trained on Hattie.
“Stay right there, Hattie!” Candace ordered. “Drop the ax!” Candace’s wild eyes bulged, the cords of her neck stood out.
Hattie dropped the ax, felt it slip out of her fingers and land softly on the peat below.
Candace and Hattie had played together as children. They were neighbors and friends. They’d made dolls from twigs, bark, and wildflowers: stick-figure bodies and bright daisies for heads. They’d played in this very bog, climbed the trees at the edge of it, had parties with bullfrogs and salamanders, sung songs about their own bright futures.
And Jane had played with Candace’s daughter, Lucy, for a time. Then that had ended, as well it should have. Some things are for the best.
“In God’s name, you better tell me the truth, Hattie Breckenridge,” Candace called to her. “Where is Jane?”
Hattie followed the barrel of the rifle to Candace’s eyes and looked right at her. “Gone,” Hattie said. “I sent her away last night. She’s miles and miles from town now.”
Others were moving in on her, forming a tight circle around the edge of the bog and stepping closer, feet sinking and squishing, good dress shoes being ruined.
“If she were here, I would kill her,” Candace said.
The words twisted into Hattie’s chest, drove out the breath there.
“I would kill her right in front of you,” Candace snarled. “Take your daughter away from you as you took mine from me.”
“I did no such thing,” Hattie said.
“Lucy was in the schoolhouse!” Candace wailed, her body swaying, being pushed down by the weight of the words she spoke. “They just pulled her body out not an hour ago!” Her voice cracked. “Her and Ben and Lawrence. All dead!” She began to sob.
A part of Hattie, the little-girl part who looked over and saw her once-upon-a-time best friend in such pain, longed to go to her, to put her arms around her, to sing a soothing song, weave flowers into her hair, bathe her in the healing waters of the bog.
“Candace, I am truly sorry for this tragedy and for your pain, but it was not my doing. I told you—I told everyone in town—that I foresaw this disaster. That the schoolhouse would burn. That lives would be lost. But no one would listen. I only see glimpses of what will happen. I can’t control it. Can’t stop it.”
She never got used to it—the shock of something she’d seen in a vision actually happening; a tragedy unfolding that she had no way to stop.
“I need you to stop speaking,” Candace said, gripping the gun so tightly her hands turned white. “Stop speaking and put your hands up above your head.”
Gun trained on her, Hattie did as she was told.
Men came from behind, bound her wrists with rope.
“Bring her to the tree,” Candace said.
What should I do? Hattie asked the voices, the trees, the bog itself. How will you help me out of this?
And for once in her life, for the one time she could recall in her thirty-two years here on earth, the voices were silent.
And Hattie was afraid. Deeply, truly afraid.
She knew in that moment that it was over. Her time had come. But Jane, Jane would be all right. They would not find her. She was sure.
Hattie went willingly to the tree, the largest in the woods around the bog. When they were young, she and Candace had called it the “Great Grandmother Tree” and marveled at its thick limbs that stuck out like arms in every direction, some straight, some curved.
Tree of life.
Tree of death.
Tree of my own endin
g, she thought as she saw the hangman’s noose. There was a stool directly under it. A simple, three-legged kitchen stool. She wondered whom it belonged to. If they would take it home later, put it back at the table. If someone would eat dinner sitting on it tonight.
The men shoved her over to the stool; one of them put the noose around her neck, the rough rope draped like a heavy necklace. The rope had been thrown over a branch about fifteen feet up, and beneath it, three men stood holding the other end. She recognized them as the fathers of the dead children: Candace’s husband, Huck Bishkoff; Walter Kline; and James Fulton.
“You should cover her head,” Peter Boysko from the lumber mill suggested. “Blindfold her.”
Peter had visited her for herbs and healing charms when his wife and children were so sick with the flu a few years back. They’d recovered well, and Peter had returned to Hattie with two of his wife’s chicken potpies to thank her.
“No,” said Candace. “I want to see her face as she dies. I want to watch her and know there is justice for Lucy and Ben and Lawrence. Justice for everyone she’s ever harmed.”
“I’ve harmed no one,” Hattie told them. “And if all of you had listened to me, those children might still be alive.”
If it weren’t for my daughter, they would still be alive, she thought.
If only she’d been able to see that part. If only she’d known what was coming, she might have been able to stop it. But if there was one thing she’d learned, it was that you can’t change the future. You can catch a glimpse of it, but it’s not in your power to change it.