“Damn,” she muttered.
“Everything all right?”
“Sorry, I thought I had my notes with me, but I guess not.”
She must have left the notebook back at home. By the computer there, maybe. Careless. If Nate found it…but he wouldn’t find it, would he?
Mary Ann found her a blank legal pad. Helen started to write down the names and dates of birth of every family member they’d found whom Jason and Gloria might have gone to live with.
“I don’t want to make things more difficult,” Mary Ann said, “but I think it’s important to remember that they might have been taken in by a distant cousin, the sister-in-law of an aunt or uncle—anyone.”
In the end, after she and Mary Ann had been at it for over four hours (and had polished off their sandwiches along with all the raspberry Danish), she had a long list of aunts and uncles, great-aunts and great-uncles, cousins, in-laws. She had four pieces of paper taped together on which she’d sketched a rough outline of Hattie’s family tree—the branches twisted and tangled, heavy with names.
* * *
. . .
Helen flicked on her turn signal when the smiling cartoon pig on the Uncle Fred’s Smokehouse sign came into view. Under the pig sign hung another that said: BACON, SAUSAGES, HAM. There was a low single-story building with a green metal roof and an awning that said simply: MEATS. Behind it, a small shed with a metal chimney that sweet hickory smoke poured out of.
Helen walked through the door of the shop, where there was a large refrigerated case full of smoked meat: sausages, hams, thick slabs of fatty bacon. Helen’s stomach felt a little queasy—it was all too much, the sweet smoky smell, the fatty cuts of pork, rinds red from smoke. The rest of the shop was full of knickknacks tourists might buy—stuffed toy moose with ILOVERMONT T-shirts, maple syrup, local hot sauces, jellies and jams, quilted pot holders, beeswax candles—all of it seemingly covered with a thin layer of greasy dust. An old metal fan sat in a corner, chugging, doing its best to stir the thick air.
“Can I help you?” asked a young woman behind the counter. Helen guessed she was still in high school or maybe college. She didn’t look old enough to drink legally, but she was wearing a Long Trail Ale T-shirt and so much eye shadow and mascara that Helen was amazed the girl could keep her eyes open.
“I’m not sure,” Helen said. “I’m looking for family of Candace Bishkoff.”
“Candace?” the girl asked, looking up at the ceiling, thinking. “I don’t think I know any Candace, and I know pretty much all the Bishkoffs. My boyfriend, Tony, he’s a Bishkoff.” She smiled at Helen, proud to be showing her allegiance to this clan of the smoked meat Bishkoffs; maybe one day she and Tony would get married, and their children would grow up and learn the secrets of brining and sausage making.
“Candace would be dead by now,” Helen explained. “She was around back in the early 1900s.”
“Oh,” the girl said. “You’re talking old-time Bishkoffs. That’s the cool thing about this family—they’ve been around here for-ev-er!”
Helen nodded. “Is anyone from the family around at the moment? Anyone who might know anything about Candace?”
“Sure, hang on a sec; let me get Marty for you. Marty knows everyone.”
“Oh, great! Thanks,” Helen said.
“No prob,” the girl chirped, going through a back door and calling, “Marty! MAR-TY!”
Soon, the girl was back, followed by a gray-haired man who shuffled in in worn overalls. He was thin and gangly and reminded Helen of a scarecrow who had come to life and just climbed down off his post. His face and neck were patchy with stubble, like he’d tried to shave but missed huge spots. His eyes were rheumy.
The girl took her seat behind the counter, stared down at her phone and started typing on it.
“Help you?” the old man grunted.
“I hope so. You’re Marty?”
He nodded.
“Nice to meet you. I’m Helen. I was looking for someone who might know something about a woman named Candace Bishkoff?”
He nodded. “She was my grandmother.”
“Did you…did you know her?” Helen pictured the woman from the photograph, young then, holding the necklace, smiling a victorious smile.
“She died when I was young, but I remember her some, yes. She taught me to play checkers. No one could beat that old lady. I mean no one.”
Helen believed that.
“Lived to be ninety-nine years old,” he said. “Almost a century. Imagine that.”
“That’s wonderful,” Helen said. “This might sound odd, but I’m wondering about a piece of jewelry your grandmother might have owned. A necklace with a circle, triangle, and square.”
He nodded. “I know the one you mean.”
Helen’s heart jumped. She’d been right.
“Do you have it? Is it still in your family? I’d love to have a look at it.”
He shook his head. “We sold it. A little over a year ago. Lady came in here, just like you, asking all sorts of questions about it. She offered cash. Three hundred bucks. A lot of money to pay for an ugly old necklace, if you ask me,” he said.
“Three hundred bucks?” the girl behind the counter asked. “Really?”
The man nodded.
“Well, maybe it was really old and valuable, like a relic or something. Something that belongs in a museum,” the girl suggested. “Maybe it was really worth way more than that and that lady took you for a ride.”
“I don’t think so,” the man said. “And to be honest with you, Louise and I, we were happy to get rid of it. Louise used to say that necklace was cursed.”
“Why would she say that?” the girl asked.
“Because it once belonged to Hattie Breckenridge.”
“No kidding?” the girl said. “The witch? The one that got hung out by the bog?”
Marty nodded, ran a hand over one of the straps of his overalls.
Helen winced as she remembered the photograph: the smiling crowd gathered at the base of the tree while Hattie swung up above them. The witch was dead.
She looked at Marty, thought, Your grandmother did that. She was there. Her smile was the biggest, the most satisfied. Helen felt her own throat tighten, as if there were an invisible noose around her neck.
“Do you know the name of the woman you sold the necklace to?” Helen asked, forcing the words through the knot in her throat.
“Of course I do,” Marty said. “Small town like this, I knew just who she was. It was that Lori Kissner girl. The one who took off and left her husband and daughter.”
“Oh, I know who you mean,” the girl said. “Her daughter’s a real freak. I feel bad for her, what with her mother running around with all different men and the whole town knowing it—but Olive’s a freak.”
“Olive?” Helen echoed, unable to keep the surprise out of her voice.
“Yeah.” The girl shrugged her shoulders. “The kids at school all call her Odd Oliver.”
CHAPTER 38
Olive
SEPTEMBER 13, 2015
She couldn’t get the phrase “deep shit” out of her head, because that’s just what she was in.
Olive was trapped in Dicky’s old hotel.
She’d snuck into the hotel a little before six o’clock. She didn’t know what time the others were coming, but she wanted to make sure she was there in plenty of time. The front door was unlocked and she slipped inside, looking around the old lobby.
She had planned just what she’d say if Dicky caught her. She’d say she’d lost a bracelet, her very favorite one, one her mama who was gone now had given her, and the last time she remembered having it on was the day she visited Dicky. I’ve looked everywhere else and this is the only place it could be, she’d tell him. I’m so sorry for bothering you like this, but that bracelet i
s real important to me.
But, to her relief, she didn’t need to use her excuse. Not right away, anyway. There was no sign of life in or around the lobby. Just a single pillar candle burning in a holder on the front desk. It was a total fire hazard, surrounded by mountains of junk mail and papers.
She heard laughter coming from upstairs.
She knew this was just plain stupid. She shouldn’t be here. She should be home watching TV or putting up drywall. Daddy was out working on the water main break (it was the second day of working on it, and if they didn’t get it fixed, there would be no school tomorrow because that whole area of town had no water).
This is stupid, she told herself. I should turn around and go home before I get caught.
But still, she found herself climbing the stairs, as if the voices up there were a magnet pulling her. If there was any chance at all that she could learn anything about Mama, she needed to try. And Dicky and his friends obviously knew something. She crept slowly up the stairs, repeating the made-up story about the bracelet in her head, preparing herself just in case she was caught. When she was all the way up at the top, listening, trying to figure out where the voices she heard were coming from, the front door downstairs banged open and a man called up, “Dicky?”
Olive froze. There was silence for about ten seconds, and Olive scurried farther down the hall, which proved to be a good choice, because she could hear the new visitor start up the stairs.
“Where’re you at, Dicky?” the man called.
Olive looked at all the closed doors to the old guest rooms. No time to try each knob on the off chance one might be open. She went down the hall and into the lounge, where she’d been on her last visit. Familiar territory.
“Where the hell are you guys?” this new voice called out from the hall. This man’s voice, now that he was closer, sounded familiar to Olive, but she couldn’t place whom it belonged to.
“Third floor,” Dicky called back from up above. “But we’re coming down.”
Olive was standing against the wall beside the door, listening, trying to slow her racing heart. The lounge was dark, the old tattered shades over the arched windows drawn. The room had a stinky, acrid smell, like burned hair. She heard footsteps coming down the curved wooden steps from the third floor, where Dicky lived. It sounded like hoofbeats during a stampede. It was impossible to tell how many people he had with him: Two? Twenty?
Then they were coming her way.
Footsteps and voices, laughter.
Crap. They were coming to the lounge! Of course they were.
She looked around, frantic. There was nowhere to run, no back door or escape hatch. No closet. Only a bunch of broken chairs. Windows with tattered curtains. The fireplace. Could she fit inside it, climb her way up and out the chimney like Santa Claus? Not likely.
She hurried over to the bar, got behind it, and ducked down.
Please don’t let them come behind the bar, she thought. She remembered the tequila and the glasses, prayed no one wanted a drink. She tried to make her body as small as she could, concentrated on disappearing into the wood of the bar, being invisible. She was good at holding still, at not making a sound. She’d honed her skills during years of hunting with Daddy. Only now she felt like the hunted rather than the hunter.
They gathered in the hall, a jumble of voices and footsteps, calling out greetings to each other: “Hullo there,” “Long time no see.” Then they tumbled into the lounge, and it did sound more like tumbling than walking, like a river breaching its banks, spilling over.
Olive listened hard, tried to pick out the distinct voices, to count the number of people.
They made small talk, discussing the weather, work, baseball. Some of them lit cigarettes—Olive could smell the smoke. Every now and then, someone new joined them and the greetings would begin again. They all discussed whether someone named Carol was coming, and some of them seemed very distressed by the possibility that she might not be.
“We all need to be here,” Dicky said, clearly agitated. “It won’t work if we’re not all here. I thought I made that clear.”
The talk moved back to boring things—someone told a story about seeing someone named Bud in the supermarket and how good he looked considering he was now missing half his liver; someone else talked about how to make the lightest angel food cake you’ve ever tasted.
Olive held still and listened. Her legs went to sleep under her, but she didn’t dare move. The light coming in around the cracks in the heavy window drapes got dimmer as the sun set. The talking went on and on, and Olive started to wonder if there had been any point at all in coming here for this. The room filled with cigarette smoke. At last, Carol arrived with a story about car trouble.
“Are we all here, then?” a man with a high-pitched mouse squeak of a voice asked.
“Yes,” a voice Olive recognized as Dicky’s answered.
“And we’ve got the diary?” a woman asked.
“No,” Dicky said. “Not anymore.”
“Well, where is it?” asked the woman.
“Hidden,” Dicky said. “It’s back at Lori’s. In the shed. Don’t worry. Everything’s been taken care of.”
Olive’s mind whirled, thoughts spinning like a pinwheel. What diary? Hidden in the shed at her house?
“It doesn’t sound to me like things have been taken care of at all,” another woman said. “Lori’s girl is poking around. The newcomers are asking questions, digging things up.”
“Well, that’s why we’re here, isn’t it?” Dicky asked. “To ask for guidance. For protection.”
“We need more than guidance!” a man argued. “We need to stop that girl and those people building on Hattie’s land!”
“Plans are in place,” Dicky said. “But now we need help from the other side.”
There was a murmur of agreement.
“Well, then, let’s begin,” a man with a deep, gravelly voice said.
More footsteps, the rustle of fabric. The sound of chairs being pulled back and rearranged. There were a few soft murmurs from the group gathered. Olive could make out Dicky and thought a couple of the other voices might be familiar, but she couldn’t place them.
These are people you’ve probably been seeing in town your whole life, she told herself.
The murmurs built to a hum. A hum that filled the room and sounded, to Olive, almost insect-like, as if she were suddenly in a hive of bees, a nest of some sort of strange winged creatures droning. Above the buzz, a single voice rose: Dicky’s voice, loud and sure, speaking with his fake Texas twang: a rodeo cowboy turned preacher.
“Spirits of the east, of the north, of the west and south; creatures of water, air, earth, and fire, we call upon you. We compel you to open the door.”
Then the hum changed, morphed into a chant:
As above, so below
The door is opened
Let the worlds unite
Let the spirits walk among us
Olive’s skin prickled.
“Hattie Breckenridge, come forward,” called a man.
“We give ourselves to you,” said another.
“We offer ourselves to you,” said a woman.
“We are your faithful servants.”
And then the voices rose up together—“Hattie, Hattie, Hattie, Hattie”—until a single voice called out, Dicky saying, “Come to us, Hattie. We ask you to join us, your faithful servants. Come and guide us. Show us the way.”
The room got brighter, the smoke more intense.
Olive pictured the chalk marks on the floor, imagined them opening up like a magic portal and Hattie Breckenridge crawling through.
This she had to see.
Slowly, as quietly as she could, Olive crawled out from her hiding spot behind the bar, peering around, keeping her body hidden.
&nbs
p; The group was standing in a circle in front of the fireplace, around the chalk circle drawn on the floor. The symbol that matched her necklace.
The door to the spirit world.
Olive counted nine people. There were candles lit all around the room—on the mantel, the floor—and incense burned in little brass bowls (the things she’d taken to be ashtrays the other day), filling the air with thick, sweet smoke.
Above the mantel, the black cloth had been removed to reveal not a mirror at all, but a painting. It was a portrait of a woman with long dark hair and dark eyes. She wore a red dress and had a necklace on—and it wasn’t just any necklace: it was the very same one Olive herself was now wearing.
The necklace seemed to thrum beneath Olive’s shirt, buzzing like a tuning fork.
Even from Olive’s hiding place, the woman’s gaze was mesmerizing, enchanting. Olive felt the woman was looking right at her, seeing inside her, and that she was trying to tell Olive something, something important.
Maybe just Give me my necklace back, or else!
And she knew this was Hattie, though she’d never seen a picture, never heard what Hattie had looked like, never heard people say she’d been beautiful. The way people talked about her, Olive had imagined a cruel, twisted face, fangs, a few warts maybe.
But this, this was the true Hattie: radiant, glowing like cool moonlight.
This was Hattie who’d once lived in a little crooked house at the end of the bog. Hattie who was hanged for witchcraft. Hattie, whose necklace Olive now wore.
Olive shifted her gaze from the painting down to the circle of people standing below it. They had drifted apart, made an opening, and a woman came out of the shadowy back corner to the left of the mantel and made her way into the center of the circle. She was moving slowly, dancing through the thick smoke. She had long dark hair, a white dress. And on her face, a white deer mask. It was strangely realistic, with real fur, a black nose, shiny black eyes.
The white doe.
Olive held her breath.
The Invited Page 33
