The old woman beside her nodded. “It’s the spirits waking you. That’s a powerful number. The number three is the number of communication. Of psychic ability. It’s the number of mediums.”
She looked at Helen, gauging her response. “What happens when you wake up, dear? Do you see any visions? Have any particular feelings?”
“No,” Helen lied. “I just go back to sleep.”
The woman nodded. “Stay up next time. Stay up, keep your eyes open, and listen. If they’re waking you up again and again, there’s a reason.”
More murmured agreement from the group. Helen felt everyone studying her.
“We can begin,” Dicky said. He reached out, took the hands of the two people sitting on either side of him, and then the whole circle joined hands. Helen took Riley’s hand in her right and held the old woman’s hand in her left. The woman’s hand felt light and fragile and fluttered slightly like a small bird in Helen’s hand. Dicky closed his eyes, bowed his head, and the others did the same. Helen tilted her head down but kept her eyes wide open, watching.
“We bring only our best intentions into the circle,” he said.
“We bring only our best intentions into the circle,” the others echoed.
“We open our hearts and minds to those we can feel but cannot see,” Dicky said.
“We open our hearts and minds to those we can feel but cannot see,” the group echoed.
“We ask the spirits to join us here in the room, to come forward.”
This time, there was no repeated refrain. The musty room was still. All Helen could hear was the others breathing.
“Are there any spirits here among us now? Give us a sign,” Dicky called.
There was a loud rap that came from somewhere behind Dicky, near the old fireplace. Helen jerked her head up, searched the shadows.
“Welcome,” Dicky said, smiling, eyes still closed. “Come forward. Do you have a message for us? A message for anyone here?”
There had to be another person in the room. Someone hiding behind the wall, listening. Someone playing ghost. Giving these people what they’d come for.
Disappointment flooded through Helen. It was a sham. These people couldn’t really call the spirits.
The old woman sitting next to Helen squeezed her hand tighter. “I’m getting something,” she said, her voice a dull crackle. “It’s a message for Kay.”
A middle-aged woman in a red sweater leaned forward, said, “For me? Who is it? What do they say?” Her hair was a washed-out blond; her skin looked yellow and sickly in the candlelight. She had on thick blue eye shadow all the way up to her eyebrows.
“It’s your sister, Jessa.”
“Oh!” Kay said, eyes wide open, excited. “What does she say?”
“She wants you to know she loves you. And she says . . . she says she’s sorry.”
“Ohh!” Kay exclaimed, tears filling her heavily made-up eyes, running down her yellow cheeks. “Oh, Jessa! You don’t need to be sorry. I forgive you! Tell her I forgive her!”
She was sobbing now.
The old woman beside Helen smiled. “You’ve made her so happy, Kay. She’s so relieved.”
Jesus, thought Helen. What a complete crock of shit. It seemed cruel, heartbreaking really, taking advantage of people like Kay, people in grief who didn’t know any better, who clearly had unfinished business with the dead. She imagined that if she had stumbled into this group right after the death of her father, when the rawness of her pain left her ripped right open, these people would have had a field day with her. And she probably would have bought it all, too. Because she was so desperate to talk to her father one more time, to say the good-byes she felt she’d been cheated out of.
“There’s another presence here,” Dicky said.
“Oh yes, there is,” said the old woman beside Helen. She turned to Helen. Her face was etched with deep wrinkles. “It’s a message for you, dear.”
“For me?” Helen asked.
The old woman nodded, closing her eyes. She held tight to Helen’s hand, giving it a squeeze. “Oh! She’s a strong spirit, this one.”
This was too much. Too goddamned much. She should never have listened to Riley, should never have tried this. She wanted to stand up and walk out, but politeness kept her there, holding hands, eyes closed, thinking, This will be over soon and then I can get the hell out of here and never come back.
Her head was starting to ache. The incense and candles were too sweet and cloying, the scent filling the back of her throat, making it feel like it was closing, getting tighter and tighter.
“It’s a woman, but she won’t identify herself. She says you know who she is. She says . . . she says there’s someone you’ve got to find. I think it’s someone related to you? No, no, that’s not it. The person is related to her. That’s who you’ve got to find.”
Riley gave Helen’s hand a hard squeeze.
“She says you have to hurry. You’re running out of time,” the old woman said, tightening her face into a grimace.
“Is there more?” Riley asked. “Does she say how to find this person?”
“Wait! She’s got another message,” the old woman said, opening her eyes, giving Helen’s hand another squeeze. “This one’s just for you and you alone. Close your eyes, dear. Close your eyes and listen with your whole self. She’s trying to come through to you.”
Helen closed her eyes, took in a breath, tried to forget where she was, how much her head was throbbing. She felt a breeze, imagined she was outside, near the bog.
She heard one short sentence, one command, spoken clearly in the grinding glass voice she’d come to know: Save her.
Helen nearly opened her eyes but kept them clamped shut, concentrated on breathing in and out.
The room, and everything in it—the smell of the incense, the breathing and shuffling of the people around her—seemed to retreat. Helen was in the bog. She saw a white deer—Nate’s white deer, so elegant and strange—then something shifted, and suddenly she was the white deer. And she was being chased, hunted. She ran through the woods to the bog, and where her hooves struck the ground, pink lady’s slippers sprang up. Dragonflies circled around her, the hum of their wings a song, a terrible warning song that turned into Hattie’s ground-glass voice: Danger. You are in danger.
Then she was in the center of the bog, and there was the sound of a gun going off. And she felt the bullet hit her chest, her white deer chest, and she sank into the bog, going down, down, down.
Helen’s eyes flew open, heart thumping madly, mouth dry and cottony. But she could smell the bog all around her. Hear the buzzing song of the dragonflies. Danger. You are in danger.
Her eyes locked on Dicky’s gun.
“I have to go,” Helen said, standing, letting go of the old woman’s hand, pulling away from Riley, who was giving her a worried look.
“You can’t break the circle,” Dicky warned.
Helen moved away on shaky legs. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“Please,” the old woman called. “You can’t be afraid of what they show you.”
Helen hurried out of the room, bumping into chairs, banging through the door and down the stairs, Riley behind her, calling, “Helen, wait up!”
. . .
The lights in the trailer were off, so they sat in Riley’s car, smoking a joint.
“You gonna tell me what happened in there?” Riley asked, face full of concern. It was eerily similar to the way Nate had been looking at her lately. Helen kept her eyes fixed on the dark windows of the trailer, thought it was a damn good thing Nate hadn’t seen her big freak-out at Dicky’s.
“Nothing,” Helen said. “Just my fucked-up imagination. God, that place gave me the creeps. And those people, it’s like they’re feeding on other people’s needs and misfortune, you know?”
Riley said
nothing, then at last said, “I’m sorry. We shouldn’t have gone. I didn’t know it would be like that.”
“It’s not your fault. But doesn’t that Dicky guy give you the creeps? I mean, why does he carry a gun everywhere? Was he expecting civil unrest during the spirit circle?”
Riley smiled. “You’re right. He’s kind of a yahoo. We’re just used to it, I guess.”
They were quiet as they finished the joint. The windows in the car were down, and Helen could hear frogs calling in the bog, smell the dark rich scent. She looked at the trailer, thought of Nate sleeping obliviously inside, surrounded by his nature guides, his carefully rendered drawings of their dream house. She knew she should go in, crawl into bed beside him, find comfort in his warm familiarity.
But that’s not where she wanted to be.
She turned back to Riley. “I heard Hattie’s voice,” Helen said.
“At Dicky’s?”
“Yeah.”
“What’d she say?”
Danger. You are in danger.
“She said, ‘Save her.’ ”
“Save who?”
“This relative I’m supposed to find, I think. The one the old lady was talking about.”
Riley frowned at her, bit her bottom lip. “Anything else?”
“She said . . . I’m in danger.”
“Helen, maybe you should stop, you know?”
Stop? Helen couldn’t believe that Riley, of all people, might suggest such a thing.
“I can’t. I don’t know how to explain it, but I can’t. Hattie wants me—no, she needs me to do this.”
Riley was silent, staring at Helen. “But did you ever stop to think that maybe she doesn’t have your best intentions at heart? Or maybe she’s just fucking with you.”
“Why? Why would she do that?”
“I don’t know, Helen. Because it’s fun. Amusing. Because she can.”
“No.” Helen shook her head. “She’s not, Riley. I know it—she hasn’t led me astray yet. She needs me, I can feel it.”
Riley studied Helen for a moment.
“All right. Whatever you say. Just be careful, okay? Just remember that things aren’t always what they seem.”
. . .
Helen turned off the computer, rubbed her eyes, and closed her little notebook, the notebook she’d come to think of as the “Mystery of Hattie” notebook. She’d been searching online for nearly two hours, and all she had to show for it was a name for Ann’s daughter. Samuel Gray and Ann Whitcomb Gray had had two children: Jason, born in August 1968, and Gloria, born in April 1971. She found a copy of Gloria’s birth certificate—her middle name was Marie, and she was born at 3:40 p.m.—but nothing beyond that. There were hundreds of hits for both Jason Gray and Gloria Gray, and she didn’t have any other information to narrow things.
Nate was still out cold in the bedroom and hadn’t so much as stirred when Helen had come in and turned on the lights in the trailer.
She looked at the table in the corner where his laptop was set up. It was open and showing the green-tinted images from the three outdoor cameras set up in the yard. Helen went over to look at them. There was nothing out there, no movement at all, only the trees, the trailer she and Nate were tucked safely inside, and the dark unfinished house looming above it.
The windows of the trailer were open and all Helen heard were the usual night sounds: the occasional croak of a frog from down by the bog, a lone barred owl, crickets.
She noticed Nate’s wildlife journal tucked against the laptop and opened it up. There was the first entry: the great blue heron in the bog. And then the porcupine, a male and female cardinal, a red squirrel. Then the sketch Nate did of the deer after his first sighting of her, the day he fell in the bog back in July. His drawing was remarkably lifelike—his art skills seemed to be improving with each sketch. She turned the page and found more drawings of the white deer and copious notes about his observations. She continued to flip through and felt her stomach harden into a knot. Page after page was full of sketches of the white deer and messily scribbled notes that seemed to make less and less sense as she went along. The notes said things like: “Her eyes change color—tapetum lucidum?”; “went out into the middle of the bog and vanished”; “tracks disappeared.”
There were detailed accounts of sighting after sighting all summer long: where she came from, where she went.
One note said: “It’s a game we play. Like a child’s game of tag.”
Helen continued to turn the pages with trembling fingers.
His book was nearly full and over 90 percent of it was sketches of and notes about the deer. Close-ups of its face and eyes. Notes on its approximate height and weight.
“My god,” Helen muttered, sure she was looking at the diary of a man unwound, a man completely obsessed. She felt sick to her stomach.
Then she got to the last page with today’s date at the top: “She was waiting for me today at our usual place. She was clearly annoyed that I was late. She looked at me as if to say, Please don’t keep me waiting again. Then she took off, running so fast that I could not possibly follow.”
CHAPTER 30
Olive
S SEPTEMBER 10, 2015
Olive had been dreaming about Hattie for the past few weeks. Since she put Mama’s necklace on. Dreaming not just about Hattie, but that she was Hattie. She was standing in front of her house by the bog. Then she heard men and dogs coming for her.
The dreams ended the same: with a noose around her neck and her hanging from the big white pine.
She woke up at midnight on the living room couch and was totally disoriented: she thought she was still Hattie, waking up in the little crooked cabin.
“You okay?” her dad said, standing over her. He was in boxers and a T-shirt. His hair was ruffled and his eyes puffy.
“Yeah, bad dream,” she said.
“You screamed in your sleep,” he said. “Scared the hell out of me. Woke me up out of a sound sleep. I came tearing out here thinking something . . . I don’t know what.”
“Sorry.” She rubbed her face, shook her head, trying to rid herself of the dream.
“Then when I got out here, you were talking in your sleep.”
“Yeah? What’d I say?”
“ ‘I’ll always be here,’ ” he said. “That’s what you said.”
Olive got chills.
“You sure you’re feeling okay, Ollie?” Daddy said. He put a hand on her forehead, like she might have a fever. “You don’t look right.”
“I’m fine, Dad,” she said. But she was anything but fine.
“If you’re sick tomorrow, I can call Riley, see if she can come hang out with you.”
“No, Dad, I’m fine, really.”
“Things going okay at school?”
“They’re fine,” she said.
The truth was, even though she was only a few days in, the year was off to a better start. She hadn’t cut so much as a single class. She showed up prepared, did all of her homework.
“Okay, let’s both go back to sleep,” Daddy said. “Don’t go having any more bad dreams.”
“No more bad dreams,” she said. And she meant it. Because no way was she falling back to sleep.
She waited until it was quiet upstairs, then she went into the kitchen and grabbed a flashlight, shoved it into her backpack. She snuck out the back door, crossed the yard, and walked through the woods to the bog, following the path that started at the edge of her yard by the hollow tree. She stopped there, checked the hollow, foolishly hoping that there might be a message inside. Only pine needles and a wood louse.
The night was cool and moonlit. There was a dampness to the air that clung to her.
She got to the bog and found it covered with a fine mist. She thought she saw a figure on the other side, over by where Hattie’s house
once stood. She shone her light across the water, then made her way along the edge toward the stone foundation, but there was nothing. No one.
Still, she felt she wasn’t alone.
She took her necklace off, watched it swing in the moonlight.
She hadn’t attempted to communicate with Hattie like this since that first time. It had freaked her out too much. Made her feel half crazy. And, if she had to admit it, she was a little afraid of whatever answers Hattie might give her.
“Are you here, Hattie?” Olive asked, holding the thin leather cord that the silver I see all pendant dangled from.
It began to swing in a slow and steady clockwise direction.
“Am I going crazy?” she asked.
The pendulum held still.
“What am I even doing out here?” she said, more to herself than Hattie. She was about to put the necklace back on, to give up trying to communicate with Hattie, when the silver circle at the end of the string swung forward, back and forth.
“What does that mean?” she asked. The pendulum just kept swinging out in a forward motion. Weird. She took a step forward.
Yes, the pendulum said, moving clockwise again. Then it went back to moving straight back and forth, only off to a slight left angle. Taking a chance, she took another step in the direction the pendulum was pulling her.
“You want me to follow you?”
Yes.
Olive started to walk, straight at first. Then the necklace swung to the left, and Olive started walking to the left. She was heading out toward the middle of the bog. She’d explored the bog enough to know where the deep places were, but still, it was dark and she felt a little nervous about stepping into a spring.
Then, all at once, the necklace stopped, holding perfectly still.
“Why’d we stop?” Olive asked. “Is there something here?”
The silver circle moved clockwise again.
Olive slipped the necklace back over her head, shone her flashlight down at the ground. She didn’t dare hope, did she? Could it be the treasure? Could Hattie have decided to show her where it was?
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