The Invited (ARC)

by Jennifer McMahon

  “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

  S 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 at 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 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 is 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 who 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 bu
ilt 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.

  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—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.

  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

  S 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 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 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 does 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 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

  S 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.