The Invited(108)

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 whom 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.”