The Invited

by Jennifer McMahon

  About an hour into the drive, her phone rang. Nate’s ringtone. She reached over and answered the phone, left hand still on the wheel of the pickup. “Hello?”

  There was only dead crackling air.

  “Nate? Hello?”

  “—elen?” His voice sounded echoey, far off, like he was calling from the bottom of a well.

  “I can barely hear you, Nate. Where are you calling from?”

  “The house,” he said. “I wanted—”

  He was gone again, his voice replaced by a crackle, a sizzling sound, like meat on a grill.

  “Can you—” he said.

  “What?” she asked. “I can’t hear you.”

  “Because of you.”

  “Nate?”

  “Because of you.” It was a woman’s voice that came through loud and sure. A woman’s voice that sounded like glass being ground up in a blender. A jagged, grating sound.

  Helen nearly swerved off the road. Heart pounding, she pulled over, turned on her blinkers.

  “Hello?” she croaked out. “Who is this?”

  She held her breath, afraid of what the voice might answer. The phone felt hot in her hand, like the circuits were overheating, might just burst into flames.

  “Sorry, hon, you’re breaking up,” Nate said. “You there?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m here.”

  Nate. Only Nate. Just a bad connection. She must have misheard.

  “I was just calling to see if you could stop at the farm supply store on the way home and pick up some deer feed. Hello? Can you hear me?”

  Deer feed. Of course that’s what he wanted.

  For his elusive white doe.

  He thinks you’re going crazy, and you think he is, too.

  Stop it, she told herself.

  No money for pizza or decent beer or wine, but plenty of money to feed the wildlife.

  She hated thinking of him like this, feeling bitter and resentful. She took a breath. Remembered how just last night he’d cooked an amazing dinner—coconut curry soup with sweet potato biscuits—then made her close her eyes before he pulled out his surprise dessert, a cute little saltbox house made from graham crackers and frosting that looked nearly identical to theirs. His way of apologizing for freaking out about the bricks, though he didn’t say it out loud.

  “Yeah, Nate, I hear you,” she said now. “I’ll stop.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “See you when—” He cut out again.

  She put the phone down on the passenger seat, pulled back out, and continued on. Half an hour later, the voice on the GPS cheerfully announced, “You have reached your destination.”

  But there was no farmhouse in sight.

  She was in front of a large expanse of lawn with a narrow driveway that led up to an enormous, glass-fronted log home with a wraparound porch and a pond beside it. There was no mailbox, no visible address. She drove on, scanning both sides of the road for a dairy farm and an old farmhouse. She passed fields of low-growing corn and even a pasture with some Holsteins grazing, but there was no sign of a farm or farmhouse. She had to be close to the old Gray place, though. Riley must have gotten the address wrong, or the GPS wasn’t doing well with Vermont directions (it often didn’t). Maybe there was an old County Road and this was the new County Road. She’d have to stop and ask someone. She continued on, hoping she’d come to the center of town. She only passed more fields, some grown over, abandoned.

  Had Ann passed these fields often, walked them, even?

  At last, Helen spotted a large red barn up ahead on the right. HAY BARN ANTIQUES was painted in tall white letters on the side. Perfect. She’d stop in, ask about the Gray place, get proper directions.

  Helen parked, went through the front door and found herself in a room crowded with furniture and knickknacks. Classical music played from a back room. She passed an old schoolhouse desk with an abacus on top, a stuffed fox, an ornate cast-iron coal stove (FOR DECORATIVE USE ONLY, warned a hand-lettered sign), couches, chairs, mirrors, and tables of all sorts. At the end of the room, a mantel leaned precariously against the wall.

  It was a reddish hardwood, polished to a shine with straight sides and carved brackets. There was something beautiful about the simplicity of the design. The price tag said $200, but it had been crossed out, marked down to $100. Helen felt drawn to it, imagined it in the living room of the new house, above the woodstove.

  “It’s a lovely piece,” a voice said.

  Helen turned, saw a gray-haired woman in a turtleneck with little Scottie dogs all over it. A real-life Scottish terrier trotted up behind her, squeaking a rubber hedgehog in its jaws.

  “This is Mulligan,” the woman said. “He’s the real owner of the place. I just work for him. My name’s Aggie.”

  Helen smiled at the woman and the dog, who was now sitting by her feet, torturing the rubber dog toy.

  “The mantel is solid maple. I’d let it go for seventy-five dollars—I’ve got another load from an estate sale coming in at the end of the week and I need to make room.”

  “It’s beautiful,” Helen said. “You’ve got a lot of lovely things.” She walked around a bit, stopping to pick up sad irons, to touch a treadle Singer sewing machine. Then she approached Aggie.

  “Looking for anything in particular?” Aggie asked.

  “I actually stopped in hoping you could help me with directions,” she said.

  “Sure. You on your way to the college? Or out to the bed-and-breakfast?”

  “No, actually, I’m looking for the farmhouse the Gray family used to own. I’ve got an address, 202 County Road, but couldn’t seem to find it. Maybe the address I’ve got is wrong, but—”

  “No, you’ve got the address right. The house isn’t there anymore. Stood empty for a long time, no one wanted to touch it. People said it was haunted. I imagine if any place was going to be haunted, it would be that house. I think houses hold memories, don’t you?”

  Helen nodded, said, “Absolutely.”

  “Anyway, it fell into neglect, then a doctor from out of state bought the place last year, had it all torn down—the house, the barn, everything—so he could build a fancy log house with a whole wall of windows.”

  “Oh yes, I saw that,” Helen said.

  Aggie nodded, stepped over to a table full of knickknacks. “One of those big prefab things trucked in. He put in a pond, stocked it with trout so he can fish whenever he wants. He comes up a few weekends a year. Place sits empty most of the time.” Aggie’s voice dripped disdain. She began to fiddle with a collection of old brass bells on the table, arranging them from largest to smallest.

  Helen nodded sympathetically, said, “That’s too bad. People should be fixing up the old farmhouses, not tearing them down.”

  “It’s a rotten shame, if you ask me,” Aggie continued, still moving the old bells around. “The Gray place, it had history. Some of it a bit dark, mind you, but that house, it had character.” She leaned down, gave Mulligan a pat on the head. The dog leaned into her. “Isn’t that right, Mulligan?” Then she looked up at Helen and asked, “Why were you looking for it, anyway?”

  “I’m doing a history project. A family tree of sorts. I’m trying to trace any living relatives of the woman who used to live on the land my husband I bought in Hartsboro. Apparently, Ann Gray was her granddaughter.”

  Aggie shook her head. “Terrible what happened. It’s kind of local legend around here. The worst crime ever to happen in Elsbury—well, the only crime really, if you don’t count a few breaks-ins and the gas station being robbed.”

  Mulligan squeaked his toy, and Helen leaned down to give his ears a scratch.

  “Do you know any details about what happened?”

  Aggie gave a deep sigh. “Oh, sure. I guess everyone around here knows just about every gruesome detail…Sam was an alc
oholic, for one. And the farm was going under. It was the family farm and it fell to him to keep it going, but he couldn’t manage. He’d sold off most of the cows, even subdivided the back acreage and sold some off, but he still wasn’t able to pay the bills. Not that those are excuses for what he did, but they provide the background.”

  She’d moved over to a desk and was neatening a pile of old photographs now—sepia-toned portraits of people no one could name.

  “It was a murder-suicide, right? Did it happen in the house?”

  Aggie nodded. “He shot his wife, then himself. Right in the living room. She was an odd one, his wife. Some said she was crazy. And of course it didn’t help that she went around calling herself a witch.”

  “A witch?” Helen practically shouted. “Really?”

  Aggie nodded. “She actually made a little business out of it, you know. People would come visit her in her parlor and she’d read their tea leaves, palms, do spells to help them with love or money. She even self-published a little book about the spirit world and divination. If only she’d been able to see her own future, to know what was coming and find a way to stop it.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t work that way,” Helen mused. Maybe it’s like everything else, she thought; it’s hardest to see what’s right in front of us.

  “I guess not. A shame, though. Just terrible. He shot her right in front of their kids.”

  “Do you know what happened to them? The kids?” Helen stepped closer to Aggie. “Are they around here still?”

  “The poor things—neither of them could have been much older than ten when it happened. Jason. That was the son’s name. And the daughter, let’s see, I can’t say I recall her name. They didn’t stick around. Went off to live with relatives.”

  “Do you know where?”

  She shook her head. “Afraid not. Out of state, I think, but I’m not sure.” There was a pause. “You know, it’s a funny coincidence, but that mantel you noticed when you first came in? It came from the Gray farmhouse.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “My husband and I managed to salvage a few things out of it before the contractors tore it down—some shelves, all the doors, and the mantel. We’ve got a set of shelves and a couple of doors left, too.”

  Helen went back to the mantel, touched the wood.

  Right in the living room, Aggie had said.

  Shot right in front of the mantel, Helen imagined.

  “My husband, Phil, always said that whole family was cursed. I’m not sure I believe in curses, but you have to admit the poor Gray family had more than its fair share of horrible things happen.”

  Runs in the family, Helen thought.

  Closing her eyes, Helen could almost see it: the mantel covered in knickknacks and family photos of Samuel, Ann, and their two children smiling into the camera. Then everything splattered in blood. The screaming of the children.

  “I’ll take the mantel,” Helen said, before she could think it through. “It’ll be perfect for my living room.”

  Aggie smiled. “One second,” she said, and went back into the room the classical music was coming from. When she came out, she was carrying a thin paperback book. “I’ll throw this in with it,” she said.

  Helen looked at the title: Communicating with the Spirit World, by Ann Whitcomb Gray.

  “Wait…this is Ann’s book?”

  Aggie nodded.

  It was one of the library books she’d been holding on to all summer. Her head spun at the thought of it—that a book written by a direct descendant of Hattie had been sitting on her kitchen table for weeks, a book she’d turned to to help her understand what was happening between her and Hattie.

  Aggie smiled. “I’ve collected a few copies and I pull them out for the right customer. This copy goes with you.”

  “Thank you so much,” Helen said as she flipped to a chapter toward the end, read:

  Spirits, like living people, can come with an agenda. Some come in peace, just seeking to make contact with the living, especially those they have a connection to. For others, it may be more complicated than that.

  A spirit may come to pass along a message you may not wish to hear or even to warn you of something.

  Sometimes they return to exact revenge.

  INSULATION AND DRYWALL

  CHAPTER 25

  Olive

  AUGUST 18, 2015

  “I still can’t believe you actually went into Dicky’s,” Mike said, shaking his head. Olive hadn’t seen him since then—his mom had been keeping him busy, and between that and Olive still being pretty pissed at him for abandoning her, they hadn’t managed to find time to hang out. As soon as he met up with her, he asked her to tell him the whole story, every detail of what had happened once she went up those old stairs at the hotel. So she’d told it, but in a vague, rough-outline kind of way.

  “And I can’t believe you ditched me. You are such a wimp,” she said. “You could have waited for me. I actually looked around for you when I came out. I thought maybe you’d at least stand guard or something.”

  He said nothing, just looked down at his dirty sneakers.

  They were out in the bog, near Hattie’s old house. Bullfrogs sang in a strange angry-sounding chorus, voices raised, like they were shouting over each other.

  It was quiet up at Helen and Nate’s. Olive had spent the morning helping them fill the walls with rolls of pink fiberglass insulation. Even with gloves, long sleeves, and her jeans tucked into her boots, bits of fiberglass found their way to her skin and made her itchy, just like when she’d helped her dad with insulation. She’d kinda hoped Nate would use hay bales or milkweed fluff or recycled Patagonia fleece to insulate—no such luck. Probably too expensive. She went home, took a shower, and met up with Mike. Helen and Nate were hoping to finish the insulation today and start hanging drywall.

  “What if someone had seen you going in?” Mike asked, reaching down, picking a handful of sedge grass. “What if your dad had found out you went there? He’d be pissed.”

  “Well, he didn’t, right? My dad isn’t exactly paying a whole lot of attention to where I go and what I do these days.”

  Mike scowled, picked apart the grass in his hand, ripping it into tiny pieces. “Maybe he should. I mean, that guy Dicky is a legit weirdo. The dude lives with ghosts and carries a loaded gun everywhere! And don’t tell me you didn’t think that old hotel was creepy as hell.”

  Olive had told Mike only what Dicky had told her: that her mom hadn’t been there. She’d decided to keep the phone call she’d heard to herself. And right now, she was realizing what a smart move that had been. No way was she going to tell Mike that she planned to go back next month, that there was some connection between her mom and Dicky and his ghost club.

  “Did he have his gun when you saw him?”

  “Sure,” Olive said.

  “Oh man, oh man!” He dropped the grass, looked at her in wide-eyed amazement that soon morphed into this stupid, furrowed-brow reprimanding-parent kind of look. “Olive, do you get how dangerous that was?” There was spittle on his lower lip.

  “Like he was going to shoot me for coming to his store in the middle of the day. Quit trying to act like you’re my dad,” Olive said.

  “That’s not what I’m doing,” Mike shot back.

  “Oh, really? ’Cause that’s what it seems like.”

  “I don’t want to be your dad,” he said.

  “Well, what is it you’re trying to be? A boyfriend, maybe? Because I so do not need a boyfriend.”

  His cheeks turned lobster red and he stood up, glaring at her. “I am trying to be your friend, Olive.” He was wheezing a little, giving his words a whistling sound, like a freaking talking prairie dog with big sad eyes. “I’m, like, your only friend. If you’re too dense to get that, then maybe we shouldn’t be friends at all.”<
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  He looked at her, waiting. Blood rushed in her ears. “Maybe not,” she said, glaring at him.

  He turned his back and walked away.

  She sat on the edge of the old stone foundation, her metal detector beside her, eyes on Mike’s back as he made his way along the edge of the bog to the path up through the woods.

  “Scaredy-cat asshole!” she yelled after him when he was almost out of sight. “Think you’re so smart, but you don’t know shit!”

  She got up and started working the grid in a halfhearted, half-assed way.

  She didn’t need Mike. She didn’t need anyone.

  She rubbed away tears with a balled fist, let the metal detector fall to the ground.

  She wasn’t even sure what she was looking for anymore.

  The treasure, sure.

  But more than that, she wanted answers.

  What had her mother been up to? What had she found in Lewisburg? Something about Jane? Something that led Mama to find the treasure? Something that got her in trouble? And what had she been up to with Dicky and his friends at the old hotel? What did the chalked drawing of Mama’s necklace mean?

  She felt like the pieces were all there in front of her like loose beads waiting to be strung in a pattern that made sense. Maybe if she’d told Mike everything, he could have helped her figure it out.