But when she got to the mill, Jane realized she should have listened.
Tom Chancy, the foreman, told the women they were behind—they’d gotten too lazy, too slow, and if it kept up, he was going to dock their pay. “No more midmorning breaks,” he announced when he gathered them all in a circle for a meeting before the first work bell rang. There were murmurs of dissent. “And no one,” Tom said, voice rising above all the mumbled complaints, “I mean no one, is to leave their workstation until the bell rings at noon!”
“What about cigarettes?” Maggie Bianco asked.
“You’ll wait till noon. If any one of you is foolish enough to try to sneak a smoke in here, you’ll be fired instantly.”
The women wouldn’t dare. They all knew how flammable the very air was, full of cotton dust that could ignite, send the whole mill up in a great ball of flames.
“Well, what if we’ve got to use the john?” Mildred Cox wanted to know.
“Then you’ll hold it.”
“And if we can’t?”
“Then you’ll piss down your leg, I imagine,” Tom said.
The bell rang and the women went to work, annoyed, sure—but there was no point in grumbling. They quickly settled at their stations, running the looms. The sound was deafening but comforting to Jane. The whole room vibrated, smelled of hot grease and warm cotton. Their fingers moved quickly, deftly, over the machines. About ten o’clock, Tom came by Jane’s loom, stood behind her, said he needed to speak with her a moment. In the office. He took her into his office, a tiny box of a room with shelves and a desk covered with piles of paper. Tom shut the door and Jane’s heart grew cold.
“I’ve been watching you,” he said.
“Oh?”
“The other girls look up to you,” he said.
She nodded. It was true. She was older than most of them, had been here longer. That counted for something. She’d learned to get by. To keep walking when Tom gave her bottom a pinch or when he stood so close behind her that she could feel his privates pressed against her. She recalled her first day on the job over ten years ago now, how Tom had seemed so kind, had said he knew her husband’s family and was happy to hire her despite the terrible state of the economy. “We’re in a depression, you know,” he reminded her. She told him she understood and would work hard, that he wouldn’t be sorry he’d hired her. And she had kept up her end. She didn’t smoke or gossip. She did good work and showed the new girls how to do good work, too. She didn’t reckon she’d been late to work one day in ten years.
“I’m going to be making cuts,” he said this morning, “letting some of the girls go.”
Jane stiffened.
“Do you want to keep your job, Mrs. Whitcomb?”
“Yes, of course.”
She needed the job. Silas was not bringing in much pay. He’d lost his job at the bank and was logging now—work that didn’t suit him and didn’t pay nearly as much. Everyone in town knew this, Tom included.
Tom came toward Jane, put his big, dirty hand on her hip, pulled her to him.
Jane pushed away.
“I thought you wanted to keep your job?” he asked, coming closer. He smelled like sausages and tobacco. His teeth were brown.
He put one hand at her waist and began tugging at her dress with the other, and just like that, she was back down on the ground of the schoolyard in Hartsboro, a circle of children around her, taunting, tugging at her clothes, exposing her, looking for the devil’s mark.
What they didn’t know, what she herself didn’t fully understand until that day, was that mark was not out on her skin but somewhere deep inside her.
She felt it surface once more as she gathered all her strength, planted her hands on Tom’s chest, and shoved. He stumbled a step backward, his rump hitting his desk. Jane lunged for the door but stopped when he spoke.
“You’ll finish up your day today,” he snarled, eyes furious. “And then you’re fired.”
“You can’t do that!” she said.
He smiled a sickening smile. “Are you sure about that, Mrs. Whitcomb?”
“I’ll tell my husband,” she said.
He laughed. “Tell him that you made improper advances toward me in a pathetic attempt to keep your job after I told you cuts would have to be made? Do you really want to go stirring up that kind of trouble, letting the whole town hear about the sort of woman you really are?”
Tears blurred her vision. She hurried back to her looms, blood pounding in her ears. She began to work, walking around the looms, checking the warps, watching the thread unspool, feeling the quality of the cloth as she always did. But a rage boiled inside. She pictured Tom Chancy’s face, his filthy hands, and imagined terrible things. She imagined him suffering. Screaming.
Jane remembered her daughter’s words: Something bad is going to happen. You’re going to make something bad happen.
And she felt for the matches in her pocket. They were always there, waiting, making her feel safe, powerful. A talisman.
Punish him, the voice inside told her. Make him pay.
She went over to the corner, to one of the bins of cotton just outside the door of Tom’s office. She glanced around—none of the other workers were watching, all focused on their looms, perhaps hoping to avoid getting involved in whatever trouble Jane Whitcomb might be in. They certainly wouldn’t hear the quiet scritch of the match striking over the din. She lit the match, held it to the cotton, watched it catch. Just like that, she was a little girl again, hearing her mother’s voice: The spirits will protect us.
She saw a little curl of smoke drift up from the bin and walked calmly back to her loom, doing her best not to smile.
“Fire!” someone yelled not three minutes later. And in an instant, the place was alive with panic, all the women scrambling, surging toward the doors. Jane wasn’t worried. The foreman’s office was on the far end of the cavernous space—they all had plenty of time to make it to the doors and out before the whole wretched place went up in flames. Still, she shrieked and ran as the others did, grabbed Maggie Bianco’s hand as she passed when she saw Maggie standing frozen, looking around in confusion, and urged her on—“Let’s go, Mags! You’ll be all right, but we’ve got to go!”
But something was wrong.
Instead of following the other workers out of the mill into the fresh air, she and Maggie ran smack into a throng of women pushing, shoving forward, crying out, “For God’s sake, move!”
The doors wouldn’t open.
“They’ve bolted them from the outside!” someone yelled.
The women, they pounded and screamed and wept. Jane lost hold of Maggie. She felt the press of bodies behind her, crushing her.
There was another scream, too. A different one.
Tom Chancy was screaming. Jane could turn her head just enough to see the walls of his office fully engulfed.
At least there was that.
CHAPTER 21
Olive
AUGUST 5, 2015
As soon as Olive saw Daddy’s truck leave the driveway, headed to work, she was out the door, making a beeline for the old maple at the edge of the yard.
He’d taken yesterday off so they could make some progress on the house together, and honestly, she couldn’t wait for him to leave and go back to work. She wanted some alone time. Time to go over everything she’d seen and heard at Dicky’s and time to do some serious detective work.
She got to the maple at the edge of the yard and looked around, making sure no one was watching—silly, really, because there wasn’t anyone out in those woods, ever, except for Mike sometimes. He hadn’t shown his face or called since he’d ditched her at the hotel the other day.
There was a hollow spot about four feet up in the old tree, a place where a branch used to grow. Now there was the perfect little cavity tucked into the trunk, about four i
nches high and two inches across. She and Mama used to leave each other secret messages and gifts there: chocolate coins, acorns, pennies flattened out on railroad tracks. When Olive was very little, Mama told her the gifts were from the fairies.
Olive reached in now, feeling for the treasure she’d stashed there: Mama’s silver necklace with the broken chain. She pulled it out and took it into the house. She brought it to her room, where she took the silver amulet off the broken chain and polished it with toothpaste (she’d seen Mama polish silver this way). She didn’t have a new chain for it, but she had a thin leather cord left over from a leather craft kit Mama had given her. She put the silver pendant onto the cord, tied a knot at the ends, and slipped it around her neck, tucking it under her shirt.
After seeing the symbol on the floor at Dicky’s hotel the day before last, she felt that the necklace, the symbol itself, was important. She couldn’t stop thinking about it. And Olive had this idea then that wearing it might help act as a magnet, might pull Mama closer to her or at least bring Olive closer to finding out where Mama had gone.
Mama had called it her I see all necklace; maybe, just maybe, it would help Olive see things, too.
Aunt Riley would understand. She believed in things like having visions and magical necklaces. But no way could Olive tell Riley about finding her mom’s necklace. Not yet anyway. She’d keep it a secret for just a little while.
Necklace tucked safely under her shirt, guiding her in some new strange way, she went down the hall to Daddy’s room. Like it or not, she now thought of it as his room, not their room any longer. It was partly because her mother had been gone so long and partly because it was a completely different room now. It had bigger closets, a door to the bathroom right from the bedroom. A new, much larger window.
“Your mama always loved the view of the mountains from here,” Daddy had said when he planned it. And Olive remembered her mother looking out at the mountains, saying they looked like a sleeping giant.
“Don’t you think, Ollie?” she’d asked. “Look, there are his feet, his legs, his round belly. And there are his shoulders, his chin and nose.”
And Olive saw the shape of the man in the mountains but was frightened, because she was little and the idea of a giant right outside their door scared her. “How long has he been sleeping?”
“Oh, a long, long time, I think,” Mama said. “Maybe since back before there were people here, even.”
“What if he wakes up, Mama? What if he wakes up and finds out that everything’s different? What if he’s angry?”
Her mother had smiled. “I don’t think that’s anything we have to worry about, Ollie.”
Her father had placed their bed against the north wall so they could look out the new picture window. As with all the other renovations, the bedroom was not finished. The floor was still bare plywood because Daddy didn’t know what Mama would like best: carpeting or hardwood, or painted wide pine planks maybe. And the inside of his own closet had no drywall, no ceiling, just exposed framing and wires, a light fixture screwed right to the open junction box. He had only a few things hanging up in there: a couple of flannel shirts, one good white dress shirt, a blazer and a pair of nice pants he wore to funerals.
She stood in the bedroom now, saw the unmade bed with the new comforter her daddy had bought—it was covered in ducks and hunters in red flannel with guns. She looked around and realized that with the exception of the clothes that had been placed in her new closet, all traces of her mother were gone. The room no longer smelled like her perfume. The top of the dresser had been cleared of Mama’s makeup and stack of magazines. Olive wondered, not for the first time, what Mama would really think when (if) she came home. Wouldn’t it be unsettling to find that everything had changed, that nothing was the way she remembered? Daddy believed it would be this big, wonderful surprise, but Olive couldn’t help but imagine how shocked Mama would be. How the changes might actually make her angry, make her think they’d moved on to new things without her, tried to erase all traces of the way their lives had been before. It would be like the sleeping giant waking up to find everything changed.
Feeling like a trespasser, Olive started with her mother’s closet. What she was looking for exactly, she couldn’t say. A clue. Something unusual. Something to give her some insight into what had been going on with Mama in those last weeks. She went through the pockets of pants, shirts, and jackets, found nothing but breath mints, a Rosy’s Tavern matchbook, receipts from the grocery store and gas station. Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing that told Olive anything new.
She continued to look, listening carefully for the sounds of a car or truck coming up the driveway. Daddy should be at work until six tonight, but he sometimes came back because he forgot something—his lunch or Thermos usually. Riley would occasionally pop in unexpectedly, just walk right in and take a look around just to check up on them, to make sure Olive was doing okay. She’d say she just dropped by to say hello, but Olive caught her opening the fridge and cabinets, as if she was making sure there was food. She’d caught her poking around in the rest of the house, too—opening drawers, going through closets. Maybe she was looking for clues, too; something to tell her where Mama might have gone.
Riley and Olive’s dad had argued the other night when Riley came by, but Olive had caught only the end of it.
“I’m not talking about forever, Dusty,” Riley said. She was in the kitchen putting away a load of dishes she’d just washed. “I’d just move in for a little while. I could help with the renovations. Do the shopping and cooking. Be there for Olive.”
“Olive’s fine,” he said sharply. “We’re both doing fine. We don’t need a goddamn babysitter.”
Olive had walked in then, and they’d changed the subject, starting talking about what color Daddy and Olive should paint the kitchen.
Now Olive dug farther back in her mother’s closet and found two clean green aprons that Mama wore when she cashiered part-time at Quality Market. One of them still had her name tag attached: LORI, with a little stick-on flower with a smile in the middle. A happy have a nice day daisy.
Her mother’s old purses were on the top shelf and Olive went through those next, found change, old lipstick, an unlabeled key that could have gone to anything. They never locked the doors on their house, and this was not a car key. Olive looked at it, ran her finger over its teeth, then slipped it into the pocket of her jeans. She kept looking, sure there had to be something that would help.
Tucked up in the back corner of the top shelf was the mauve-and-tan box that held Mama’s best shoes. They were her special shoes; her “fairy-tale slippers” is what she called them. They were ivory-colored leather with silver beads embroidered across the toes in a flower pattern. They had a low heel and a delicate strap that fastened with a tiny silver buckle. Olive remembered one night, not long before her mother went away, how she’d awoken late at night, unable to sleep. She’d gone downstairs for a glass of milk and caught Mama sneaking in. It was nearly two in the morning. Mama was all dressed up and had her fancy ivory shoes on and much more makeup than she normally wore. “Shh,” she’d said, putting a finger over her lips. “Don’t tell your father.” Then she’d slipped the shoes off and carried them upstairs, creeping up the steps in her stockings.
Olive reached for the box now and could tell before opening it that there was nothing inside. She pulled off the lid, found only a crumpled piece of tissue paper and a single silver bead that must have fallen off. She took the bead out, tucked that into her pocket beside the key.
Olive looked through the rest of the closet, through the jumble of other shoes at the bottom, but the ivory shoes weren’t there, either.
Her mother must have brought them with her or been wearing them the night she left. Olive looked and didn’t notice that anything else was missing. All her mother’s other shoes seemed to be there: her cowboy boots, black heels,
flip-flops, sneakers.
Olive searched the closet for other missing things but didn’t notice anything special. Mama seemed to have left all of her favorites: her old Levi’s jacket that she’d had since high school and still wore, her suede boots, the purple silk top she wore to job interviews and meetings at Olive’s school, her favorite black jeans. If Mama had been planning a trip, why hadn’t she packed any of her favorite things?
A hard knot formed in Olive’s stomach.
Maybe she found the money and just took off. Why pack clothes when you can buy a whole new wardrobe, a whole new life? It made sense in a terrible way: If you wanted to start over, wouldn’t you rather leave every trace of your old life behind? Or maybe there were things she’d taken, clothing that Olive just didn’t notice was missing.
Olive continued her search, moving faster now, just wanting the whole thing to be done and over with. It was too much, being in the closet, surrounded by all of Mama’s things.
She found more receipts stuffed in jacket pockets, all for regular things: milk and eggs, a haircut and color at House of Style, a cup of coffee and a candy bar at a gas station up in Lewisburg.
Lewisburg.
That was weird. It was a tiny town in the middle of nowhere as far as Olive knew.
She looked at the date on the receipt. It was from May 10 of last year. Just a couple weeks before Mama left. The knot in Olive’s stomach tightened.
Went missing, a little voice told her. She didn’t leave. She went missing.
Receipt in hand, Olive jogged down the steps and into the living room, searched the bookshelf, and pulled out the worn Vermont road atlas they had. She flipped to a page toward the front that showed the whole state. Using the index, she found Lewisburg, J-10 on the grid.
Someone had drawn a tiny star next to it in red ink.
She put her finger on the town and couldn’t imagine what would bring her mother there. It was totally off the beaten path, wasn’t on the way to anywhere. Then she noticed other red stars. One in Elsbury. Then another, here in Hartsboro.
The Invited Page 22