The Invited(34)

Nate was standing inside the skeletal frame of the house, right in the center of what would be their living room.

“Hey, you,” she called, walking over to join him, entering through the opening that would be their front door, imagining how wonderful it would be to have an actual door there to shut out the black flies.

He didn’t answer.

He was staring down at the floor, frowning.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, coming up behind him, coffee mug still clenched in her hand.

    Had the porcupine made his way up here in the night, started chewing up their house?

“Nate?” she asked.

There, on the plywood subfloor they’d nailed down, was one of their chunky carpenter’s pencils. It had been used to write a message in big, sloppy capital letters:

BEWEAR OF HATTIE



“Hattie?” Nate said.

Helen thought back to the image that had kept her up last night: the old woman with the sharp teeth, gnawing and gnawing, coming for them.

“She’s the woman I told you about, remember?”

The one who pulled poor Edie Decrow into the water.

Helen swallowed hard, then continued. “Hattie Breckenridge—the one who lived at the edge of the bog.”

Nate shook his head, frowning. “I think our witch ghost needs some spelling lessons,” he said.

“Nate, you don’t think…” She couldn’t even finish saying it—that it might really be a ghost who’d left the message.

“I think some locals are messing with us. Probably kids, probably drunk or high. Scare the flatlanders, ha-ha.”

Nate turned and went back to the area where they’d been keeping their tools.

“Have you seen my hammer with the blue handle? I can’t find it anywhere.”

“No,” she said.

“Jesus. It’s like there’s some mysterious vortex. My cell phone, the level, my hammer. Maybe the kids are taking our shit, too.”

“If we were being robbed, wouldn’t they take more than a couple of random tools?” Helen asked.

“Not if they were just doing it to mess with us,” Nate said grimly.

“I’m sure the tools are around here somewhere,” Helen said now. It was the logical, adult thing to say. She didn’t tell him that when he’d said “vortex,” she’d immediately thought of the deep center of the bog and all that could be hidden there.





CHAPTER 10



Olive





JUNE 10, 2015

“I can’t believe how much better this one works,” Mike said. Olive was letting him try out the brand-new metal detector, and he was waving it over the ground at the edge of the bog.

Mike was right: the new metal detector was amazing. It was so much more sensitive than her old one and could find things much farther down. So far, she and Mike had found two metal buttons, some coins, an old hinge, and bullet casings. And that was from working on only one square of her grid.

“I think I should go back and redo all the areas I already searched,” she told him. “The treasure might be too far down for my old machine to pick up on. But this one will get it.”

Mike nodded but kept his eyes on the ground. He didn’t believe in the treasure. He’d never come right out and said that, but it was obvious to Olive.

He was wrong, though. Hattie’s treasure was real. She felt it in her bones, especially when she was out here in the bog; she knew she was close. And Mama had been right: they were going to be the ones to find it. Now, without Mama, it was all up to her.

The treasure called to her, whispered, pulled on her, told her not to give up. That this could be the day.

Keep looking, it seemed to say.

You’re so close.

Some people, they were afraid of the bog. They said Hattie’s spirit was out there, and she was angry, looking for revenge. They said that if you went after dark, you’d see her walking across the bog, that the pink lady’s slippers that bloomed in the woodlands around the edges sprung up in the places where she’d stepped.

Olive had seen plenty of lady’s slippers but never a ghost. She’d come at night, setting her alarm for one a.m. and keeping the clock under her pillow so her dad wouldn’t hear it. He was a heavy sleeper and was always sound asleep by midnight. She’d come on full moons and sat by the edge of the bog, begging Hattie to show herself, begging her to leave a clue about where the treasure might be. But the only figures who ever materialized there in the bog were very much alive: hunters and hikers sometimes; but at night, it was older kids who’d come out on dares to get high, fool around, drink beer, and piss on the old foundation of Hattie’s house, daring her to come forward.

    “Come on and show yourself, witch!” a boy hollered once while Olive watched from her hiding spot behind a big tree. Olive held her breath, wished Hattie would come forward, scare the crap out of the kid and teach him a lesson. No such luck.

“Careful, she’ll put a curse on you,” the girl who was with him squealed.

The boy laughed, cracked open another can of beer. “Let her try. She ain’t nothing but a pile of bones sunk down at the bottom of the bog.”

Olive picked up a rock then and threw it deep into the center of the bog, where it landed with a huge splash.