The Invited(114)

Nate typed more, brow furrowed. “Yup. Current address is listed as 389 Westmore Road. That’s Olive’s place. So is Gloria Olive’s mother?”

“No, her name is Lori, I’m sure of it.”

    “Could Lori be short for Gloria?”

“Oh god, I guess you’re right. But…she disappeared last year,” Helen said quietly.

“Disappeared?” Nate asked.

“Rumor has it she ran off with a man, but Riley was telling me that Olive thinks maybe something else happened. Riley seemed a little worried, too. She seemed to think that maybe her leaving had something to do with Dustin. That he’d scared her.”

“What? Like he threatened her in some way?”

“Nate,” she said, “what if he…what if Olive’s dad did something to Gloria? Hurt her. Or worse. And what if Olive found out?”

“Helen, you don’t know—”

“Maybe it’s not Gloria I’m supposed to find and save,” she said. “Maybe it’s Olive.”





CHAPTER 44



Olive





SEPTEMBER 13, 2015

Her father was standing in the kitchen, wearing his town work shirt with his name stitched over the chest pocket. DUSTIN.

Dusty, his friends called him.

But his friends didn’t come around anymore. Not since Mama left. Not since they started their endless renovations. The knocking down of the walls, the piles of dust, the drywall and tape and compound and holes in the ceiling and floors.

“What are you doing with the gun, Olive?”

It was his serious, no-bullshit I’m the dad here voice. He called her Olive only when he was scared or angry or both.

She pulled the diary out of her back pocket, dropped it on the worn kitchen table.

“I found this in the shed,” she said.

He glanced down at it but kept his eyes on her, on the gun that was pointed at him.

When there’s a gun in the room with you, you give it your full attention.

Daddy looked tired. Thin. The dark circles under his eyes made him look like a raccoon man. “Put down the gun and we can talk, Olive,” he said, his voice like the chatter of an anxious coon. Danger. There’s danger here.

“Do you know what this is?” Olive asked, nodding at the book.

“No,” he said. “I’ve never seen it before.”

“Mama’s diary,” she said.

His face twitched slightly. “Lower the weapon, Olive,” he said.

“Did you know she was keeping a diary?”

He shook his head. The little color he had left his face, until he was as pale as the walls.

“I read it, you know. Can you guess what she wrote?”

    He was silent, thinking, his jaw clenching, eyes on the gun. “Is it about the other men?” he asked finally.

She laughed. “You know what? I don’t think there ever were any other men. I think that was entirely your paranoia. Or maybe just you trying to cover your tracks.”

“Cover my tracks?”

“You know what’s in this diary? You know what she wrote? She wrote that she was afraid of you.” Olive swallowed hard, looked at her father. Her father, who taught her to shoot and to follow the rules of a hunter: respect your weapon; never fire on a target you’re not sure of; never let an animal suffer; never, ever aim a gun at a person unless you intend to use it. “Why’s that, Daddy? Why would Mama be afraid of you?”

“Afraid of me?” he said, voice low, raspy, like he was in danger of losing it altogether.

“I read the diary,” she said. Her hands were hot and sweaty on the gun. She kept her finger on the trigger. “Don’t lie to me.”

She looked around the room, saw the torn-open walls, the missing floorboards. The constant state of destruction and demolition she lived inside. Then she understood. She finally figured out her father’s obsession with deconstructing the house. She felt like a cartoon character with a lightbulb going off over her head. “You’ve been looking for her map and the diary, haven’t you?” she said.

“What map?”

“The map to Hattie’s treasure. You thought she must have hid it in the house. Hid it somewhere good, somewhere no one would look. And the diary, that might prove what you did.”

He looked pained, his face proof of the expression “The truth hurts.”

“I—” he stammered, unable to come up with any more words.

“But you never found them, did you?”

He didn’t answer.

“I know you hurt her,” Olive said.

“Hurt her?” He staggered back as if the weight of her words had struck him in the chest. “Where on earth did you get that idea?”

“That’s what Mama wrote in her diary. That you hurt her. And you threatened to make her disappear.”

He was leaning against the counter now.

    “She said that?” The words came slowly. “Why would she have said that?”

“You tell me, Dad.”

He shook his head. “I have no idea. I never hurt your mother or threatened her in any way. I would never dream of it.” He seemed to sink deeper into himself, to be taking up less and less space. The incredible shrinking man.