“Bad weather out there,” Helen said as she set her bread down to pay. There was a coffee can on the counter with a label on the front showing the photocopied faces of the three teens who had been killed in the bus accident a few weeks ago. The collection was for their families.
The kid nodded but didn’t look at her. “It’s been crazy. Three lightning strikes reported in town so far. One of ’em hit the old Hamilton place out on East County Road. Fire department’s up there now and it must be bad, because they’ve called in two other towns to come help.”
“Terrible,” Helen said. She paid for the bread, slipped five dollars from her change into the coffee can. The boy looked at her then, but instead of looking grateful or pleased by her donation, he scowled, said, “I know who you are.”
“Excuse me?”
“You bought the place out by the bog,” he said.
“Yes,” she said, smiling. “I’m Helen. My husband, Nate, and I bought the land. We’re building a house up there. We just love Hartsboro.”
The kid stared, silent.
“Well,” she said at last, “nice meeting you.” And she turned to go, clutching her bread in its paper bag to her chest, feeling his eyes on her back as she left the store.
* * *
. . .
The squat brick Hartsboro post office was right next to Ferguson’s. Helen stopped in there to check the PO box she and Nate had rented. The only thing in it was a flyer for an exterminator. No house to be infested with critters just yet. A little farther down Main Street stood her true destinations: the tiny stone library and the white clapboard building that housed the town clerk’s office. She tried the town clerk first, but the door was locked and had a CLOSED sign. There were no hours posted, no signs of life inside.
The rain pounded down around her, blew in sheets, as she held up her umbrella to try to keep the worst of it away. She hurried next door to the library. The smell of old books comforted her as soon as she stepped through the door.
She stopped in front of the bulletin board in the entryway and closed up her umbrella. There were signs advertising firewood for sale, a day care, rototilling services, and a poster for the high school drama club’s performance of Into the Woods—she noticed the date was three weeks ago. There was an old poster for the vigil for the kids who were killed in the bus accident. Tucked into the left corner was a small square of white paper with an eye looking out of a cloud: HARTSBORO SPIRIT CIRCLE. LET US HELP YOU MAKE CONTACT WITH A FRIEND OR LOVED ONE WHO HAS PASSED. Then a phone number.
Helen stared, amazed. She’d moved onto land that supposedly had its own ghost and into a town with its own “spirit circle.” She definitely wasn’t in suburban Connecticut anymore.
Helen walked in, expecting an antiquated library with an old-fashioned paper card catalog. But there were three computers on the left with instructions above for searching the online catalog. There was also a poster explaining that e-books and audiobooks were available electronically. She said hello to the woman behind the desk and did a quick walk through the library: periodicals, audiobooks, reference, nonfiction, and then fiction.
There was a mom with a toddler playing at the train table set up in the brightly painted children’s area, but they were the only other patrons. Helen went back to the computers and searched the online catalog for books about Hartsboro. The only titles she found that focused on Hartsboro itself were the VFW Ladies Auxiliary cookbook (which involved lots of maple and bacon) and a book about the flood of 1927.
She walked up to the desk. “Excuse me. I’m looking for books on Hartsboro history.”
The librarian, a middle-aged woman in a Snoopy sweatshirt, told her she should check out the Hartsboro Historical Society.
“Where’s that?” Helen asked, thrilled to hear such a place existed.
“A couple of doors down on the left, in the basement of the old Elks Lodge. But they’re open funny hours—like every second Saturday or something. You’ll want to call Mary Ann Marsden. She runs the place and she’ll open it up by appointment. I’m sure I’ve got her number here somewhere.” She tapped at her boxy computer. “Here it is!” she chirped, sounding thrilled with herself. She copied the number down on a piece of scrap paper.
“You looking for anything in particular?” the woman asked. “I’ve lived here my whole life and know a thing or two about the town.”
“My husband and I just moved to town and I was hoping to learn a little local history. I’m a—I mean, I was a history teacher. In my old life.” Helen laughed, but she thought, Yes—this is my life now. “Anyway, we’ve bought land out by the Breckenridge Bog and I’d love to find out whatever I can about the area.”
“The Breckenridge place?” The woman smiled, showing small pearly-white teeth. “You bought it from George Decrow, isn’t that right?”
“Yes.” Helen nodded.
“Poor George, such a sweet man. How is he?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know. We never actually met him. Apparently, he’s not in great health and lives out of state.”
“Don’t blame him for not coming back. Not after what happened.”
Helen gave her a blank look. “What happened?”
“The accident, I mean.”
“I didn’t hear anything about it,” Helen admitted.
“Well,” the librarian went on, “his wife, Edie, she nearly drowned in the bog.”
“Oh no,” Helen said, thinking of what Nate had said—it was spring fed, could go down very deep.
The librarian nodded. “George pulled her out, did CPR. He brought her back, but she was never the same. Brain damage.” She shook her head. Clucked her tongue. “Never woke up, poor thing. After a week or so, George had them turn off the machines, let her go peacefully.”
Helen’s mind flashed to the table in the trailer laid out for dinner, of the two empty wine glasses. The dusty bottle of wine that still sat on the top shelf of their kitchen cabinet.
“How horrible,” Helen said.
“An accident, they said, but George, he went around saying that it was no accident.” The librarian waited a beat, looked around, then lowered her voice and whispered, “He said it was Hattie.”
Helen felt a chill start at her neck and creep all the way down to her tailbone.
“I’m sorry, Hattie? Who—”
“Don’t tell me you haven’t heard about Hattie yet,” the woman in the Snoopy sweatshirt said in a sort of chortling way, as if Hattie were some dowdy old woman who walked around town in funny hats.
“No. I don’t know that name.” Helen swallowed hard. Because she did know the name, didn’t she? Somehow.
Be a historian, she told herself. Gather facts. Leave your emotions out of it. “What can you tell me about her?”
“Oh, I guess you’d say Hattie Breckenridge is the most famous resident of Hartsboro. There are all kinds of stories. People said she was a witch. Some said she was the bride of the devil himself. Spoke in tongues. Knew what was going to happen before it did.”
“And she lived by the bog?”
“Oh yes, in a little cabin she built herself after her parents’ house burned down. All that witch mumbo jumbo—I don’t know about that. But she did live in a little house by the bog and that’s a true fact.”
“My husband and I found the remnants for an old foundation out by the bog,” Helen said.
The librarian nodded. “That’d be Hattie’s place. Folks called it the ‘crooked house,’ because Hattie wasn’t much of a carpenter and nothing was straight or level.”
Helen nodded, thinking of the arguments she and Nate still had sometimes when a measurement was off by a fraction of an inch. Would their house turn out crooked, too? She shook the thought away, remembering the beautifully straight and plumb downstairs walls they’d just finished today.
“What time frame are we
talking about here?” Helen asked.
“Oh, I don’t know for sure. Back in my grandmother’s time. Early 1900s, I think? Mary Ann at the historical society would know.”
“Do you think there are any photos? Of the cabin or Hattie?”
“Could be,” the librarian said. “You talk to Mary Ann. If there are any, she’ll know.”
“What happened to Hattie?” Helen asked.
The librarian got quiet, looked down at the papers on her desk.
“There are all kinds of stories…,” she said, moving papers around. “Some folks even believe that before she died, she buried treasure on her land—her family’s fortune. Me, I doubt there ever was a fortune. If there was, why didn’t she leave? Or build a nicer house for herself? It’s crazy, the stories some people tell.”
Helen nodded. She knew how folklore worked, how stories were embellished over the years, and a true historian had to do a lot of legwork and research to sift through those stories for the grains of truth inside them.
“One thing in the stories is always the same, though,” the librarian continued, a little gleam in her eye. “People say her spirit haunts that bog. They see her ghost out there, walking around the water, out in the middle of it, too. If you look on some early-summer days, you can see pink flowers have sprung up where she put her feet. Lady’s slippers.”
Helen got another chill, remembered the scatterings of pale pink orchids she and Nate had seen while walking to the bog.
Hattie’s footsteps.
The woman smiled at her, and Helen couldn’t tell if she actually believed any of this (and was perhaps the sort who attended the Hartsboro Spirit Circle) or if she was just passing stories along.
Then the woman said something that answered Helen’s questions. “You stay out there long enough, and who knows, maybe you’ll see her, too. Go to the bog at sunset and wait. When the darkness is settling in, that’s when Hattie comes out.” She smiled vaguely again and winked. “Just, you know. Be careful.”
* * *
. . .
“What’s all this?” Nate asked. He’d just walked in from the downpour outside. He’d peeled off his raincoat but was still soaked from head to toe. His bird-watching binoculars were strung around his neck.
“I’ve been to the library,” Helen said.
“So I see.” He came closer, leaving soggy footprints on the old linoleum floor.
“It’s small but has a lot more than I imagined it would. I signed us both up for cards,” Helen said. “But they don’t actually give cards. They just keep the patrons’ names in a card catalog–looking thing. Very cute.”
“I guess.” He picked up one of the books piled on the kitchen table and read the title out loud. “Witchcraft in New England?” He glanced at the other titles, all books on witchcraft, ghosts, and the occult. “You’re not planning to cast a spell on me or anything, are you?”
She smiled. “Only if you tease me about my research. Then I just might turn you into a toad.”
“I’d prefer some sort of bird,” Nate said. He picked up another book and glanced at the title: Communicating with the Spirit World. He frowned in disapproval but said nothing.
Mr. Science had never approved of anything otherworldly or unexplained.
She frowned back at him. “Those who are the victim of spells don’t get to decide. And watch out, Nature Boy, you’re getting my library books all wet.”
Nate put the book down, took a step back. “And what, exactly, is the goal of this research?”
“Remember what the realtor told us? About the bog being haunted? And remember the little foundation we found?”
Nate nodded. “Did you find out anything at the town clerk’s office?”
“Uh-uh. They were closed. But I asked at the library and it turns out this woman, Hattie Breckenridge, lived in a little house at the edge of the bog back in the early 1900s. That foundation we found is all that’s left. And get this—people said she was a witch!”
“A witch?” Nate raised his eyebrows. “Like Glinda? Or like the Wicked Witch of the West?”
She rolled her eyes. “Hearing about Hattie got me curious. I didn’t realize witchcraft was a thing in New England in the 1900s. The Salem trials were back 1692. As I understand it, the witch craze was all over with by 1700.”
“Your point is…”
“I don’t have a point. I’m just curious. It’s an area I don’t know much about.”
He nodded. This he understood. The need to learn whatever you could about the things you didn’t know, to fill in the gaps, to be constantly supplying your brain with new information and facts.
“And this is our new home,” she added. “Her land, it’s ours now. Don’t you think we should learn Hattie’s story?”
Nate smiled. “Of course.” Then he laughed.
“What?”
“I was just thinking about Jenny—wait until we tell her our land comes with its very own witch ghost!”
“We’ll tell her no such thing!” She waggled her finger at him warningly, laughing herself. “Not until I’ve done my research and found out who Hattie really was, what her true story is. She was probably just an eccentric woman, you know? Think about it—a woman on her own building a little house out by the bog all by herself, in that time. Of course she was shunned, called a witch.”
Nate smiled, leaned in and kissed her forehead, dripping on her books. “Isn’t that kind of what we are? The eccentric outsiders building a house by the bog? What will the people in town call us?”
Helen laughed, but it was an uneasy laugh. She remembered the way the kid at the store had looked at her, with suspicion, then outright loathing. I know who you are.
“There’s something else I learned,” she said, hesitating, unsure how much she should share with him.
“Oh?”
She told him about Edie Decrow.
“My god, that’s awful! No wonder he let the place go for so cheap. Remember what I told you about the spring—who knows how deep it is out there in the middle of the bog. Don’t go too close, okay? If you’re down there on your own, stay by the edge.”
She thought of telling him the rest, that the librarian said Mr. Decrow was convinced it wasn’t the bog that had nearly drowned his wife, it was Hattie. But that would only annoy him, possibly lead to a lecture about how the human mind looks for explanations and patterns when terrible things happen, how it makes us prey to fairy tales and nonsense…
She only nodded. “I’ll be careful,” she said.
“I’m going to go take a nice lukewarm spit shower and put on some dry clothes,” he said, giving her another quick kiss.
“Sounds good.” She went back to the book she was reading, to a chapter on hexes and curses. She skimmed the pages, reading about knot magic, candle burning, anointing your enemy’s door with a special oil. She found a reference to a spell that used a donkey’s tooth to banish an enemy. If a donkey’s tooth would work, couldn’t you use a deer’s or sheep’s tooth?
She closed the book. A witch ghost putting curses on them from the Great Beyond? This was silly. Ridiculous even.
Helen had tucked the historical society woman’s phone number into one of the books: Spirits and Hauntings. Now, at the kitchen table, she opened up the book and pulled out the slip of paper. She grabbed her cell phone and punched in the number.
“You’ve reached the home of Marvin and Mary Ann Marsden. We’re not in right now, but leave us a message and we’ll call you when we get back.”
Helen left a short message along with her cell number.
She drummed her fingers, thought of George Decrow pulling his wife out of the bog. She dug around in her purse until she found the card of their real estate agent. She dialed and he answered on the second ring.
“Hi. This is Helen Wetherell. My husband, Nate, and
I bought the land by the bog?”
“Yes, of course. How’s the building going?”
“It’s going well, thanks. Listen, the reason I’m calling is that we found something belonging to the previous owner in the trailer and I’d love to be able to mail it to him down in Florida. I was hoping you could give me his number?”
“I’m sure he really didn’t want anything from in there,” he said.
“But this looks important. It’s a bunch of personal papers, letters. I’d love to call him just to ask if he’d like them. I can’t bring myself to throw them away.”
“Well, I’m not technically supposed to share information like that, but…” She heard papers rustling. He sounded distracted. “Okay, I’m willing to make an exception in this case. I’m sure I’ve got the number here somewhere. Hold on a sec.”
He came back on the line and gave her the number, promised to stop by and see how the house was coming along the next time he was in the area.
The shower turned off and she heard Nate’s footsteps thumping down the hall to their tiny shoebox of a bedroom. She tucked the little notebook she’d written George Decrow’s number in into her purse.
“Babe?” Nate called half a minute later.
“Yeah?”
“Have you seen my phone?”
“No.” She looked around, scanning the table and kitchen counters. “I don’t see it out here.”
There was the sound of rummaging, of Nate muttering something under his breath.
“Find it?” Helen called.
Nate came out into the kitchen in his boxers and a T-shirt. “No. It’s crazy. I’m sure I left it on the shelf in the bedroom—the one I always put my wallet and phone on. I left it there when I went out bird-watching because the battery was nearly dead and I didn’t want it to get wet in the rain.”
The Invited Page 9
