The Invited

by Jennifer McMahon

  Hattie?

  Had they really conjured the actual spirit of Hattie Breckenridge, who was now moving among them, in the center of their circle?

  As Olive watched this spirit woman move, there was something spookily familiar about the dance she did: step, step, shimmy; step, step, shimmy. Then Olive looked down, peeked through the legs of the people who stood in a circle, chanting, “Hattie, Hattie, Hattie,” and saw the woman’s feet.

  She wore ivory-colored shoes with silver beads embroidered across the toes in a flower shape and straps that fastened with tiny silver buckles.

  Olive clasped her hand over her mouth to keep from making a sound, from crying out, “Mama!”

  CHAPTER 39

  Helen

  SEPTEMBER 13, 2015

  Helen was trying to put the pieces together: Olive’s mother paying $300 for Hattie’s necklace, then running off, never to be heard from again. And what the girl had said about Olive: Odd Oliver. Helen’s heart nearly broke. She needed to talk to Olive, to ask if she knew anything about the necklace her mother had bought, find out if she’d ever mentioned it. It wasn’t too late—she’d call Olive tonight, invite her over for hot cocoa to talk.

  But her plans slipped away when she walked into the trailer.

  Nate was sitting at the kitchen table, looking down at something. At first, she worried it was another warning message: LAST CHANCE.

  But this was far worse.

  Helen froze in the kitchen, wishing she could turn around and run.

  Nate was pale, shaking. He had the ax next to him. And Helen’s notebook—full of all she’d learned; all she’d experienced with Hattie, Jane, and Ann; all the things she had lied to Nate about over and over—was there, open on the table.

  Helen stepped back. “Nate?”

  She thought of Ann being shot dead by her husband in their living room. What did it take to make a person snap, to pick up a gun (or an ax) and come after the one he loved?

  “What did she look like?” he asked. He croaked the words out, like a frog calling from the bottom of the well.

  “Who?”

  “Hattie. When you saw her in the kitchen. And later, in the house. What did she look like?”

  He reached down, rested a hand on the ax handle—the new hickory handle Helen herself had bought for hanging the ax.

  “I—” Helen scrambled, unsure what to say. Perhaps deny it all, tell Nate that he was right, that there was no such thing as ghosts, she knew that now. Tell him she must have imagined it.

  But hadn’t she done enough lying?

  Nate rose, holding the ax. His eyes were glassy, bloodshot. “What did she fucking look like, Helen?” he shouted.

  “Nate,” Helen stammered, taking a stumbling step backward, toward the still-open door, estimating the distance between Nate and herself.

  “Did she have black hair?” Nate asked, wrapping his fingers around the ax handle now. “Dark eyes? A little shorter than you are?” He was looking at Helen but also beyond her, like the figure he was describing might be right behind her, watching.

  Helen nodded, taking another step back, knowing she must be close to the door. She held one hand in front of her, palm out in an it’s okay, let’s calm down gesture. With her other hand, she reached back, feeling for the doorway.

  “I saw her,” Nate said. “Jesus, I must be going crazy, because I swear to you, I actually saw her.”

  He collapsed back down in the kitchen chair, let the ax slip from his hand, slumped forward, put his arms up on the table, and buried his face in them.

  Helen went to him. She put a hand on his arm. “Tell me,” she said. “Tell me exactly what you saw.”

  Tell me what she did to you.

  He lifted his head. “I was out in the woods, tracking the deer. I know you think I’m crazy, but she’s real, Helen. But now I think…oh god, I don’t know what I think.”

  “So you were in the woods. Is that where you saw Hattie?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “I was walking in circles for what felt like hours. She knew I was following her. It’s something she does. A game she plays? Then the circles got wider, and soon, I was following her along the edge of the bog. Only…it was different.”

  “Different how?”

  “Maybe I somehow stumbled onto another bog? Or another part of the bog. An area we haven’t explored yet.”

  Helen nodded but knew there was no other bog. No other part of the bog.

  “What did you see there, Nate?”

  “There was a house. A little cabin. A ramshackle thing. Crooked, leaning to the left.” He looked at her and she nodded again, encouraging him to continue. “There was a chimney with smoke coming out of it. And the door was open. My doe…I mean, the doe, the white doe I’d been following, she walked right in. I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing, but I knew I had her then. She was trapped. I got my camera ready and ran, ran toward the cabin. But when I got there…”

  “What?” Helen asked. “What, Nate? What happened?”

  Nate pushed his chair back, stood up, rubbing his face.

  “There was no deer inside. But there was a woman just inside the front door. A woman with dark hair and eyes. She was wearing a white dress. And the way she looked at me, Helen…” He paused, his eyes locked on Helen’s. In them, she saw pure terror. His voice shook. “It was like she knew me, Helen. Like she’d been waiting for me.”

  CHAPTER 40

  Olive

  SEPTEMBER 13, 2015

  Mama! It was Mama there, dancing in the center of the circle.

  But how? Why?

  Olive’s mind scrambled for explanations and for an idea of what she was supposed to do next.

  If only she had a cell phone, like every other fourteen-year-old kid on the planet, then she could sneak back behind the bar, call or text her dad and Aunt Riley, tell them she’d found her mom, to hurry up and come quick.

  But she didn’t have a phone and she was stuck here, in this old bar and lounge at Dicky’s hotel.

  Think, she told herself.

  Olive thought about tracking a skittish deer when hunting, how you had to keep it in your sights and follow carefully until you had the perfect shot, until just the right moment.

  Her one and only shot with Mama was trying to get her alone, to talk to her one-on-one.

  “She speaks!” one of the men said, as if reading Olive’s mind.

  “Hattie, speak to us!” a woman said. “Tell us your secrets. Tell us what it is we must know. Tell us what it is we must do.”

  These people sounded ridiculous, hokey, but even though it sounded like something from a cartoon, they seemed serious, and it scared the hell out of Olive.

  The group moved closer to the deer-headed woman (Mama!), encircling her, listening.

  But Olive didn’t hear a thing, only the hum of the group, the sound of her mother’s feet shuffling across the floor in the fairy-tale slippers.

  And a whisper. Just the faintest hint of a whisper.

  She had to get closer.

  The possibility of hearing her mother’s voice pulled on her like a superpowered magnet, luring her out of her hiding place.

  Olive spotted a small, tattered red love seat just ahead of her and started to crawl for it, sure that the group was fixated on Mama in the mask. And the room was dark. She could move through the shadows.

  “Guide us, Hattie,” a man said. “Show us the way.”

  Olive scuttled forward on all fours, moving fast—too fast. Her right foot struck a ladder-back chair she hadn’t even seen in the dim space. It tipped backward, balanced for a second, and then crashed to the floor just behind her.

  The humming stopped, the circle opened, everyone turned to look her way.

  And there was Olive.

  Caught on her hands and knees, like
a large and foul bug in the center of the room. And she felt as vulnerable as an insect, something that could easily be squashed and put out of its misery.

  “Who the hell is that?” asked the man with the mouse voice.

  Her mother leaned forward, the eyes on the deer mask gleaming, flickering in the candlelight. The group circled her more tightly, protectively.

  Dicky put his hand on the gun in his holster. Olive didn’t wait to see what might happen next: she sprang to her feet and bolted for the door.

  “Come back here!” Dicky shouted, and there was the sound of footsteps behind her, like hoofbeats, but she didn’t slow, didn’t dare to turn around, just yanked the heavy wooden door open and ran through it, flying down the carpeted hallway, past the closed doors of long-abandoned guest rooms, taking the stairs three at a time, landing in the front hall, speeding by the front desk and out the door into the night.

  She jumped off the porch, the dressed-up mannequins watching like frozen sentries, unable to stop her. The front door banged open again behind her, Dicky shouting, “Stop right there!” There were other voices behind him, shouting, desperate.

  “Don’t let her get away!”

  “Lori’s kid! I can’t believe it!”

  “Stop her!”

  Heart jackhammering inside her chest, she tore off around the corner of the building, searching for the shadows, for darkness, running up the hill, staying off the road, cutting through backyards and toward the woods. They were following her still—she could hear their footsteps, their gasping breaths. But she was faster, younger, nimbler; she moved like a jackrabbit through the night, her eyes on the woods in front of her at the top of the hill.

  Was her mother behind her, part of the group chasing her now? She wanted to look, to turn around and see if she could catch a glimpse of the white deer mask, but didn’t dare.

  She sprinted the last of the way up the hill, pushing herself harder than ever before, leg muscles screaming, lungs gasping. Finally she reached the safety of the trees, smelled the rich, loamy forest scent. She zigzagged expertly through the trees, jumping over rocks and roots, her eyes fully adjusted to the dark.

  She ran on, heard Dicky somewhere behind her, far off now. “Goddamn it, we lost her!”

  A female voice (her mother’s maybe?) said something faint, but Olive was sure she could make out the words: “For the best.”

  CHAPTER 41

  Helen

  SEPTEMBER 13, 2015

  Helen stood in the kitchen, stunned. Nate had seen Hattie. She’d brought him to her house. Helen had a worried, sick feeling in her stomach: What had Hattie done to him there? Was this going to be like those stories in old folktales about a woman so mesmerizing, the poor man couldn’t resist and went to her, kissed her, had some kind of supernatural sex with her?

  “Did she speak?” Helen asked. “Did you? What happened?”

  What did she do to you?

  She held her breath, waiting.

  “I took her picture,” he said.

  “You…photographed her?”

  He nodded. “And as soon as I did, it was all gone—the house, the woman, the deer. I was standing alone at the other end of the bog. It was like I’d imagined the whole thing. But it seemed so goddamned real.”

  “What does the picture look like?” Helen asked, though she knew how he would answer.

  “Like nothing. Like pure light was shining through the lens. Just one overexposed blur.” He looked down at Helen’s notebook again. He had it open to the passage where she talked about seeing Hattie for the first time in the kitchen. “Do you think it was her?” Nate asked.

  “I do.”

  “And these other women you’ve written about, Hattie’s daughter, her granddaughter—you’ve really seen them, too?”

  Helen nodded.

  Nate looked down at Helen’s notebook, touched it. “It’s because of the objects in the house? That’s why they come?”

  “I think that’s part of it. I think the objects help them to come, but I think they come for other reasons.”

  “What reasons?”

  “I think they want to be together again. And…and I think they want something from me. From us, Nate. From our house.”

  “Our house?” He gave her a helpless, perplexed look.

  She nodded, paused. “I think they want these objects in our house so that it can be a gathering place, a safe space for them all to come back to. Somewhere between our world and theirs. An in-between place.”

  “In-between place?” he echoed in the dull monotone of someone in shock, someone who was dealing with more than he could handle. But she had to go on, to tell him the rest.

  “But there’s more than that. I think they want us to help them.”

  “Help them how?” Nate asked.

  “There’s someone they want me to find. A living descendant of Hattie’s.”

  “Who?”

  “I’m not sure, but whoever it is, I think she’s in danger.”

  He stared at her, not knowing how to respond, doing his best to process what she was saying, to take it all in.

  Helen reached out, put her hand on his arm. “We’ve got to help her, Nate. That’s what Hattie wants. What all this has been for.”

  CHAPTER 42

  Olive

  SEPTEMBER 13, 2015

  She ran home, cutting through the woods and people’s backyards, staying off the streets because she didn’t want to risk being seen if Dicky and his friends had gotten in their cars to look for her. The moon was nearly full and she had good light to navigate by. Once she was back in her yard, she went straight into the workshop—an old, leaning eight-by-ten wooden shed that stood on the other side of the driveway from the house. Heart thumping, skin prickling with cold sweat, she grabbed the old twelve-gauge Winchester her daddy used for duck hunting. All of their other guns were locked up in the gun safe in the dining room. But Daddy had been cleaning the twelve-gauge, so it was in the shop, on the workbench.

  She didn’t know if Dicky and his gang of wackos would come after her, but she wanted to be ready if they did.

  She felt around on the workbench until she found the flashlight her dad kept out there and flicked it on. The batteries were low and the light it cast was dim.

  She found her father’s waxed-canvas duck hunting bag and opened it up, grabbing a box of ammo.

  Then she started to search the shed for this diary she’d heard them talk about tonight. Hattie’s diary, maybe?

  She checked the shelves, the toolboxes, the old apple crates full of junk. No diary. She found old batteries, taps and buckets for sugaring, spools of wire, boxes of nails, old tire rims, but nothing resembling a diary. She spotted the giant pink tackle box her mother had used for her brief foray into beading. A few years back, Mama had decided it would be fun to make beaded jewelry and sell it at craft fairs and the farmers’ market. She spent a small fortune on supplies, then made only a few of pieces of jewelry (which she kept herself or gave to Riley—she didn’t sell any) before losing interest. Mama was fickle like that. Things held her interest only so long, then she was chasing after something new.

  Olive reached up and lifted the tackle box down from the shelf, set it on the worktable, and opened it up. The top drawers were full of tiny compartments of beads all sorted by color and size. There were spools of nylon cord for stringing the beads and clasps, closures, and hooks. At the bottom of the main compartment were her tools: a small hammer, tweezers, pliers of all sorts. And underneath these, a leather-bound book.

  Olive pulled it out and flipped through it, recognizing her mother’s tiny, sloped letters, her careful penmanship.

  It was her mother’s diary! Not Hattie’s, but Mama’s.

  Olive had had no idea that Mama had kept a diary. The first entry was dated January 1, 2013.

  Olive flippe
d through the pages. There was something so wonderful and comforting about seeing her mother’s writing, touching the pages her mother had touched, reading her thoughts.

  Many of the early entries were boring everyday stuff: hours she’d worked at the market, how annoyed she was with her boss, a funny story a customer told her.

  Then things took a turn for the interesting. She was writing about Hattie, about the treasure. Mama was clearly searching for it.

  About a month before she disappeared Mama wrote:

  I feel Hattie leading me to it, bringing me closer all the time.

  In another entry, she wrote:

  If I can find the necklace, I’ll find the treasure. The necklace is the key.

  On June 12 of last year, she wrote:

  I hate lying to Ollie about all this, but I’m doing what has to be done. It’s the only way to keep her safe. I see that now. I’ve seen how desperate the others are, the lengths they’ll go to to find the treasure. “There is no treasure,” I tell my girl. “There never was. It’s just a silly story people tell.” I wonder if she believes me. My Ollie Girl, she’s my bright shining star, and something tells me she sees right through my lies.

  On June 14, she wrote:

  I’ve got it! I’ve got the necklace. It took a huge chunk of my savings, but money is no object now. If this works the way I believe it will, we’ll soon be rich beyond our wildest dreams!

  Then another entry, the second to the last, dated June 28 of last summer, the day before she disappeared.

  I have found the treasure! I left it in the ground where it was for safekeeping for the time being. I have made a map and hidden it well so that I won’t forget its exact location. But I no longer believe I am safe. I must move carefully. I must get Olive, dig up the treasure, and go quickly.

  Then, the following day, the final entry of the diary, written in fast, sloppy letters, the ink badly smudged: