The Invited

by Jennifer McMahon

  She thought of the ways her father had shaped her, the things he’d taught her and stories he’d told her that she carried still: her house building, the tales he told about his own boyhood, about relatives long gone. What might Hattie have passed on to her descendants? What stories might they still be able to tell?

  “Okay,” Helen said, looking down at her notebook. “Let’s see if we can figure out what happened to Jane’s children, Ann and Mark.”

  “I’ll see what I can dig up,” Riley said, carefully setting the painting down on the table, leaned against the wall. Then she sat at the computer on a desk in the corner, fingers flying over the keyboard.

  “You and Nate get the plumbing done?” Riley asked.

  “Yeah. We started on the wiring today actually. Got a lot of the boxes in place. Drilled holes in the framing and started running cable.”

  “I’m booked up tomorrow, but I can come out and give you guys a hand for a bit the day after,” Riley offered.

  “That would be great,” Helen said.

  Helen turned back toward the painting.

  Hattie was wearing an unusual necklace: a silver circle with a triangle inside it. At the center of the triangle was a square, then another circle with an eye in the middle.

  Third eye, Helen thought.

  “Okay if I get some photos of the painting?” she asked Riley.

  “Sure,” Riley said, still tapping at the keyboard.

  Helen took pictures from different angles. Wherever she went, Hattie’s eyes followed her.

  “Hey, listen to this,” Riley said. “Jane and Silas’s son, Mark Whitcomb, died in 2000. He was married. Can’t tell if there were kids.” More rapid clicking on the keyboard, then, “Oh! This is interesting!”

  “What is it?” Helen asked, moving closer, coming up behind Riley.

  “Looks like I found Jane’s daughter, Ann.”

  Helen moved closer to the computer and glanced down at a photo of a couple. The woman had dark hair pinned back and dark, haunting eyes. Hattie’s eyes. The man was shorter than the woman and had receding hair and a mustache. They stood with their arms around each other in front of a Christmas tree. Above it was the headline: “Murder-Suicide Shakes the Town of Elsbury.”

  Helen squinted down at the article, dated May 24, 1980.

  Police are calling the deaths of Samuel Gray and his wife, Ann Gray, a murder-suicide.

  Vermont State Police colonel Gregory Atkinson gave this statement: “At approximately 5 p.m. on Friday, Samuel Gray shot and killed his wife, Ann, and then himself with a handgun registered in his name. This happened in their home on County Road, where Gray ran a dairy farm. Their two minor children were witnesses to the crime but were not harmed. The children are currently in the care of relatives.”

  It is the worst crime on record in this small town of 754 residents. “It’s just a horrible shock,” said Town Clerk Tara Gonyea. “It’s shaken the community to the core.”

  Friends and neighbors expressed sorrow at the horrific events that transpired at the old Gray farmhouse, but neighbor William Marsh said he was not surprised. “Sam had a temper and he was a drinker,” Marsh explained. “He’s had trouble with the farm, making ends meet. I think his wife and kids bore the brunt of it. I’ve seen bruises and black eyes on ’em. I’ve heard the yelling and screaming.”

  Police declined to comment on whether there was a known history of domestic violence in the home.

  “Ann was just an angel,” neighbor Penny Stromberg said. “Full of life, always smiling. Such a good friend and neighbor. And those poor children. Can you imagine? It’s heartbreaking, what they’ve had to endure.”

  Family members could not be reached for comment.

  Helen stepped back, skin prickling, feeling suddenly cold all over.

  Gone. Ann was gone.

  “It’s so fucking awful,” Riley said out loud. “Terrible things happened to all of those women: Hattie, Jane, Ann. It’s like the women in that family were all cursed. Doomed to have their lives end in violence.”

  Helen nodded, eyes still on the picture in the article—the smiling faces of Ann and Samuel in front of their Christmas tree. “Where’s Elsbury?” she asked.

  “Southeast of here. Probably a little over an hour away.”

  “I think I’ll take a ride down there. Take a look around.”

  Riley looked up at her, squinting a little. “You want to bring something back, don’t you? For the house? For Hattie?”

  Helen nodded. “I feel like it’s the least I can do. A way to pay tribute.”

  And maybe, just maybe, it would be enough to bring Ann back. Helen let herself imagine it—three generations of Breckenridge women in her kitchen.

  Riley looked at her a minute. “It’s like you’re creating a sort of family tree with objects,” she said. “It’s such a beautiful idea. A real way to honor those poor Breckenridge women.”

  Riley turned back to the computer, typed again, scanned the screen, then found what she was looking for. “202 County Road, Elsbury,” she said, writing it down on a scrap of paper. “That’s where the old Gray farmhouse is. Where the murder took place.”

  CHAPTER 23

  Olive

  AUGUST 7, 2015

  “You got these from where, exactly?”

  Olive was kneeling on the ground outside with a hammer and chisel, cleaning the old cement off the bricks. They’d spent the morning inside, working on the wiring. Riley had come by to help for a bit, and they’d finished the entire downstairs. Then Riley left to get to work, and Nate ran down to the trailer.

  Olive scraped at the brick with the chisel. She had her new I see all necklace tucked under her T-shirt.

  Helen and Nate were going to use the bricks to build a hearth in the living room, underneath the woodstove. Helen explained that instead of the traditional fireplace at the heart of the old New England saltbox, they’d have a much more efficient high-tech woodstove. They should be able to heat the whole house much of the time and use the propane heat for backup on really cold days. Olive nodded thoughtfully. She liked the little history lessons Helen incorporated into everyday conversations and had learned a lot about colonial New England and how the first settlers survived. Those were the stories that interested her the most. She didn’t care much about heat sources or how energy efficient a woodstove was. She wanted to hear about chopping wood, killing animals, how there were no refrigerators so people cut ice in blocks out of lakes.

  “I picked them up at an old mill that’s being renovated,” Helen said. She was working on her own brick with a wire brush. “They were just going to throw them away—I got them for free.”

  She smiled proudly. Olive had been around Helen and Nate enough to know that the house budget was an issue. Nate seemed super stressed about it and was always holding up spreadsheets and stuff to show to Helen. Helen was a little more laid-back and had this don’t worry, everything will work itself out attitude.

  It reminded her a little of her own parents—how her dad would sit down at the end of the month with all the bills and a big calculator and get all stressed out, and Mama would bring him a beer and massage his shoulders and promise that things were going to change one day soon.

  “The bricks look old,” Olive said, holding one in her hands. “And some of them are all black and stained like they’re from the inside of a chimney.”

  “There was a fire at the mill. It destroyed part of the building.”

  “Cool. Where was the mill?” Olive asked.

  “Up in Lewisburg.”

  Lewisburg. The name sent off a ping in Olive’s brain. The receipt she’d found for coffee and a candy bar, the little red star on the map, the bottom left corner of the triangle.

  “The mill was once the center of the community up there, until there was a big fire in 1943.” />
  “What happened?” Olive asked.

  Helen gave Olive a protective, worried sort of look that Olive’s own mother might have given her. “It’s a pretty terrible story,” she said.

  “Then I definitely want to hear it,” Olive said. “Come on, it can’t be worse than the stuff Aunt Riley has told us about Hattie and what happened to her, right?”

  “Well, this is terrible in a different way,” Helen said. “The people who ran the factory had barred the doors from the outside so workers couldn’t sneak out on their shifts. They couldn’t escape when the fire started.”

  “Holy shit,” Olive said, then remembered she was with a grown-up, a teacher no less. “Sorry,” she said, embarrassed.

  “It’s okay.” Helen smiled.

  “So what was it like up there in Lewisburg?” Olive asked. “Is it a big place?”

  “No, it’s pretty small—smaller than Hartsboro. Not much to it at all. The mill is the main thing. They’re fixing it up. Turning it into condos, shops, and offices.”

  Olive nodded. But why would her mom have gone up there? It’s not like she was in the market for a new condo or had this great interest in old mills or anything, unless…

  “Wait, so is anyone living there? Like are any of the condos done?” Did she dare hope it? That maybe her mom had moved there? That that’s where she and the mystery man were living at this very minute?

  “No,” Helen said. “It’s all still under construction and looks like there’s a long way to go. It’s nice that they’re giving it a new purpose—it’s a great old building. The man I talked to up there claimed that it was haunted.”

  Maybe that’s what it was. Maybe Mama went up because of her ghost club. Hell, maybe she and Dicky and all the members went up to have a séance or to try to record spirit voices like the ghost hunters on TV did.

  “Wow, haunted?” Olive said. “For real?”

  Helen nodded. “He said so.”

  “You believe in stuff like that?” Olive said. “Ghosts and hauntings?”

  Helen concentrated extra hard on her brick. “I do,” she said at last. “I didn’t used to, but I do now.”

  A history teacher who believed in ghosts. How cool was that? Olive smiled at Helen.

  “I wish I could see a ghost,” Olive admitted. “Any ghost, really, but the ghost I’d most like to see—Hattie Breckenridge.”

  Helen scrubbed harder at her brick, opened her mouth like she was going to say something, then stopped, looked down toward the trailer. Nate had just come out the door and was heading toward them.

  Nate spent a lot of time looking for the white deer he kept seeing. Olive thought it was strange that she practically lived in these woods, had been hunting in them all her life, and she’d never seen a white deer, and now this guy from Connecticut had seen one a bunch of times. She had heard the stories, of course. Warnings to never shoot the white deer if you saw it. Stories of hunters following a white doe deep into the woods and never coming back again. Like something from a fairy tale.

  Nate was coming toward them and he looked pissed.

  Olive braced herself, wondering if maybe she’d done something wrong. Nate was still so suspicious of her, and he seemed to go out of his way to find fault with her.

  The truth of it was, Olive worried that maybe he was starting to go a little off the deep end himself. This white deer, or ghost deer or whatever it really was, seemed to have consumed him.

  Nate had put up wildlife cameras in the yard. He’d started with one he got at the general store, then had gone online and ordered two more crazy-expensive motion-activated night-vision cameras that he’d set up in the trees at the edge of their yard—to “maximize coverage,” he said. It seemed a little weird that he’d blow what must have been over a thousand bucks on this setup when they were supposedly over budget with house stuff, but far be it from Olive to understand what made grown-ups do the things they did. He’d connected the cameras to his laptop wirelessly so he could constantly check the feed. He’d hung salt licks and put out special deer pellets. He was determined to catch the deer on video or get a photo of it. But so far, he hadn’t been successful. He’d gotten some great shots of skunks, a porcupine, even a coyote. But no deer.

  “I know where the bricks came from,” he said as he reached them now. His face was serious, his mouth a tight little line.

  “What?” Helen asked. Olive looked down at the brick she was holding, like she was concentrating extra hard on getting every speck of old mortar off.

  “You left the search engine open on your laptop, Helen. And the pages you’ve been looking at are all right in the history. Donovan and Sons? That’s where the bricks came from, right? The mill where there was a fire that killed all those women?”

  Olive looked at the brick she was holding in her hand, looked at the black sooty stains, wondered if bricks could be haunted.

  “Well, yeah, but—”

  Olive snuck a look at Helen, saw she had this I’ve been caught guilty kind of look on her face that made Olive squirm. Olive shrank down, hunching her shoulders, scrubbing hard at the brick. She wished she could disappear altogether. Get up and run away, but that would be too weird. She hated when grown-ups fought. There were too many times when her mom and dad were arguing and there was Olive, sitting right at the table, sinking lower and lower into her chair, practicing becoming invisible. She’d seen her mom fight with Aunt Riley once, too, which was weird because they were like best friends. Riley came to pick her mom up for something, but her mom said she wasn’t going, that she had other plans. “You have to go,” Riley had said. Mama had refused. “There are some things you don’t bail on and this is one of them,” Riley had hissed, and she was all pissed off, like going out to hear some crappy band play on two-dollar beer night was the most important thing that had ever happened. But Olive understood now it probably wasn’t what they were going to that was important, but the fact that they were doing it together; that her mother was blowing off Riley.

  Mama had refused to go, and Riley had slammed the door on her way out. It was the only time Olive could ever remember seeing her aunt totally lose her cool.

  Nate stood over them now, looking down at Helen, eyes blazing with their own fire. “That’s why you went there, right?” he demanded. “You knew about the fire. And you wanted the bricks because of the fire, because of the people who died.”

  “Nate, just calm down. I think there’s a possibility that—”

  “Jesus, Helen,” he spat, interrupting her. “Why can’t we just use bricks from Home Depot? What’s this sudden obsession you have with filling our house with these things steeped in dark history?”

  Dark history.

  Olive liked that. She touched her T-shirt, feeling for the necklace underneath.

  I see all.

  “Bricks from Home Depot don’t tell a story,” Helen said.

  He let out a long, dramatic sigh. “You know I love that you want to put things in the house that have history, that tell a story. But do the stories have to be such awful ones? Do they have to center around death and tragedy?”

  She didn’t answer.

  Maybe Nate wasn’t the only one going a little crazy. Maybe Helen was, too. The thought hit Olive like a cannonball in the stomach.

  Helen had been keeping secrets.

  Olive’s mother had been keeping secrets, too, and look where they got her.

  Nate didn’t wait for Helen to respond or reprimand him for swearing in front of Olive. He just stalked through the front door of the house, calling back, “I’m going to go start wiring the upstairs.”

  Olive kept scraping at her brick even though all the cement was gone. She wanted to say something—felt like she should say something—but no words came. This was an adult. A teacher, even. Helen was really nice to her, and she guessed they were kind of friends—but to
try to comfort her, to say, I’m sorry your husband just yelled at you like that, it felt all wrong. Finally, when she couldn’t stand the silence any longer, she asked, “So did a bunch of people die in the fire?”

  Helen startled a bit, as if she’d forgotten Olive was there. Then she nodded. “One man and twelve women died. Mill workers. And I think…no, I’m sure—that one of them was Hattie’s daughter, Jane.”

  Olive got a tingle at the back of her neck. And the necklace gave a warm pulse under her T-shirt.

  That’s what her mother was doing there. She must have figured it out, must have known about Jane. Must have thought that learning about Jane might lead her to find a clue about the treasure.

  CHAPTER 24

  Helen

  AUGUST 8, 2015

  Helen left home at eight and headed for Elsbury in search of the farmhouse where Ann had been killed. She’d plugged the address, 202 County Road, into the GPS. She wasn’t sure what she’d do once she found it—knock on the door, greet the current owners, and say she was interested in anything they might have that had once belonged to Ann, anything that had been in the house when she was killed, anything haunted?

  Right. That was a sure way to get the door slammed in her face and the cops called.

  Hattie will show me what to do, she told herself.

  She’d promised Nate that she’d be back by one to help with the upstairs wiring—told him she had a couple of places to check out, places that had used roofing materials. She felt guilty lying, but she couldn’t exactly tell him the truth. Letting him know she was doing anything connected to Hattie would just start another argument. And they’d had enough of those lately. It seemed they fought over everything, from the color of the tile they should put in the bathroom to what to have for dinner. Nate had insisted they stop eating out and getting pizza, start keeping a strict budget for groceries. Yet he frowned at her when she came home from food shopping with cheap store-brand coffee and gave her a lecture about how they should drink only fair trade, organic coffee because everything else was poison and a disaster for the environment and the local people.