CHAPTER 23
Olive
S 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 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 h
ated 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 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
S 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.
About an hour into the drive, her phone rang. Nate’s ringtone. She reached over and picked up 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 in 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 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 far
mhouse. 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 Invited (ARC) Page 24