The Invited(36)

“Quit it, Kissner,” Mike barked.

It always amused Olive, how easy poor Mike was to scare.

“Are you here with us, Hattie?” she called out. “Give us a sign.”

“Shut up,” Mike said.

“Okay, Hattie,” she said now as she stood with her metal detector. “If you are here, help me out, okay? Show me where the treasure is!”

Mike gritted his teeth. “You shouldn’t be talking to her like that,” he warned.

    She held the metal detector out in front of her like some heavy dowsing rod, pretending to be pulled right, then left. Mike’s eyes got bigger, more frantic.

Odd Oliver, she thought. Being cruel to her one and only true friend. Talking to ghosts.

She wondered if there were people who really could talk to ghosts. Aunt Riley said there totally were. That mediums were real and had a special kind of gift.

“Can you talk to ghosts?” Olive had asked her once.

“I know people who can. I haven’t been able to myself, not yet, but I keep trying.”

Now Olive wondered if being able to talk to ghosts was something you were born with. Like people who had a photographic memory or were supertasters. Which brought Olive back to thinking about natural selection again. About Darwin sailing around on his boat, the Beagle, and writing notes, drawing pictures of birds.

Everyone’s looking for something, she thought. Ghosts. Scientific explanations of the world around us. A new and different life somewhere else.

Buried treasure.

She started sweeping the metal detector over the ground in front of her, through brush, tall grass, and sedge. Nothing. She startled a moth, which came fluttering up from the grass. A damselfly darted down in front of her. A junco chattered from a nearby cedar. She continued slogging forward, sweeping carefully, making her way through the thick brush at the edge of the bog. Then the high-pitched beep of a signal. A strong one. Her heart banged in her chest.

The gauge on the detector said it wasn’t far down.

“Mike, I got something!” she called out.

“Are you messing with me?” he asked.

“No,” she said, and Mike trotted over.

She got down on her knees, pants soaking through because the ground was so wet here, the carpet of moss deep and spongy. She pushed back the tall grass, cotton sedge, and old dead leaves. She had a trowel and a small folding camp shovel in her backpack.

But she didn’t need them.

There, right on the mossy surface, silver glinted up at her.

Maybe it really was the treasure and that one piece had worked its way up from underground, a marker meant for her and her alone to find.

    X marks the spot.

She reached for it, brushed away the leaves.

It was a silver chain. She picked it up, pulling it up slowly and carefully from its camouflaged place in the dead leaves.

But this wasn’t treasure.

No, this was a necklace that she recognized immediately.

“What is it?” Mike asked, leaning closer. “A necklace?”

Olive’s skin got all prickly, charged up, feeling like lightning had struck somewhere close-by. Like danger was near.

The silver chain was broken, but the clasp was fastened. Near the clasp hung a delicate silver circle with a triangle inside it, a square inside that, and inside the square another circle with an eye at the center.

“It’s my mother’s,” she managed to say even though her throat felt like it was closing up. “Her favorite. She never took it off.”

Olive held the necklace, now tarnished, caked with mud. The eye looked back at her.

I see you.

I know things.

“Weird,” Mike said, biting his top lip, lower jaw sticking out like a bulldog’s. He stepped back, like the necklace scared him the way Hattie’s cursed treasure might scare him. “So…what’s your mom’s favorite necklace that she never took off doing out here in the bog?”





CHAPTER 11



Helen





JUNE 15, 2015

It was 3:33 a.m. That’s what Helen’s light-up digital watch showed when she pushed the button.

Nate was not beside her in bed.

“Nate?” she called sleepily. The trailer was dark and quiet. “Nate?” she tried again, listening.

All she heard was the dull thud of her own quickening heartbeat.

Her worrying, anxiety, and paranoia were getting the better of her. Whenever she went into town to pick up a box of screws or a new hammer to replace one they’d lost, she was sure everyone was watching, whispering. She told this to Nate, and he laughed it off, said she was imagining things. But she hadn’t imagined it when she heard a woman at the post office say to another, “It’s her. The one from the Breckenridge place.” And the other woman had shaken her head in disgust, very clearly said, “Should never have come, disturbed Hattie like they did,” then scuttled out of the post office like she was frightened of Helen.

“I’m telling you,” she’d said to Nate. “I don’t think they want us here. They think we…stirred up Hattie’s ghost or something.”

“I think you’re taking your own worries, your own dis-ease, and putting it on other people,” he said, setting down his new hammer. They were nailing down the upstairs plywood subfloor. “Sure, folks in Hartsboro may be a little leery of outsiders, but saying they don’t want us here is a bit of a stretch. And don’t even get me started on the ghost stuff.”