The Invited(51)

Sylvia made a grim face, polished the glass in her hand extra hard. She held it up so that she was looking at Olive through it.

“I was hoping you could tell me something, though,” Olive said, taking a sip of the sweet, cold Coke. “I heard my mom was in here with a man not long before she took off. A man with dark hair and a leather jacket. My aunt Riley saw them sitting at a table together. I was hoping maybe you might remember that and know who he was. Or really anything else about who she was spending time with before she left.” She watched Sylvia, waiting, trying not to look too hopeful. The last thing she wanted was to get the poor pitiful Olive look from Sylvia.

Sylvia put down the glass she’d been holding, twisted the white polishing rag in her hands. “Olive, your mom, she—”

“I know what people say,” Olive said. “That she saw lots of men. I’ve heard her called a lot of horrible names. Not much you can say would shock me, so it’s okay. Really. I just want to know the truth.”

Now Sylvia just looked sad. Much older all of a sudden. Olive noticed the wrinkles around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth.

“I think a lot of people misunderstood your mother…I mean, sure, she came in here and would sit and have a drink with whoever was buying.” Sylvia leaned down, polished at the counter with her rag, rubbing one spot in hard, tight circles, like there was a mark that just wouldn’t come out. “She liked meeting new people, especially if they were just passing through. Tourists and hunters and long-distance truckers—people with stories about other places. Men and women. You know how people around here are about outsiders—distrustful.”

    Olive nodded, thought about Helen and Nate. How she’d heard the buzz around town about the new flatlanders who’d bought the land by the bog; how they were blamed for all the trouble in town, for stirring up Hattie; how some even said Helen was a witch herself.

“So the rumors would fly,” Sylvia continued. “But your mother—as far as I know—wasn’t hooking up with strangers all the time the way people go around saying she did.”

“But she had a…like, a boyfriend, right?”

“I don’t know, Olive. If she did, she didn’t tell me. And I never saw her with anyone here who seemed like a boyfriend.”

“But she met men here, right?”

Sylvia stared at Olive a minute, looking like she couldn’t quite believe what Olive had just asked. “Like I said, she had drinks with lots of people in here. Including the weirdos in that ghost club she was in.”

“Ghost club?”

“Yeah. The ‘spirit circle,’ or whatever they call it.”

Olive drew in a breath. No way! Her mom was off trying to talk to spirits?

“Don’t look so freaked, kiddo. It’s basically a bunch of folks drinking bad wine and having séances and stuff at Dicky Barns’s old hotel. Then they go into trances and charge old ladies money to talk to dead people.”

“Wait. You’re saying my mom actually went there? To Dicky’s place?”

Sylvia nodded. “She went more than a few times. For a while, I think she was something of a regular.”

Dicky Barns was a fifty-something man who had once been a rodeo star in Texas. That’s the way he told it anyway. He walked around like he was Hartsboro’s biggest celebrity, a huge silver rodeo belt buckle glimmering on the waistband of his Wranglers and a leather holster with an old Colt revolver. He’d corner anyone he was able to and yammer on to them about the old rodeo circuit: horses he’d ridden, steer he’d roped. His favorite stories, the ones he liked to tell the kids, were about the horrible injuries he’d seen: men gored by bulls, cowboys with skulls crushed, missing fingers. Mike said Dicky had dropped off some fancy Western shirts to be dry-cleaned at his mom’s shop earlier this summer. “Do you have any idea how many bones I’ve broken, son?” he asked.

    Mike admitted that no, he did not know.

“I got more metal plates and screws than Iron Man in those superhero movies.”

Dicky had grown up in Hartsboro but left home at sixteen to head for Texas to learn to be a cowboy. His dad had been the town doctor, but he got lost while hunting with Dicky way back in the ’70s, when Dicky was just a kid. Some people said it was Hattie who got poor Dr. Barns, which Olive didn’t take too seriously. Besides, her daddy said that Dr. Barns had been a heavy drinker and it was no wonder he’d wandered into the woods and couldn’t find his way back out.

After a few too many broken bones and concussions, Dicky quit the rodeo life and came back home to Hartsboro in his thirties and bought the old Hartsboro Hotel, turned it into a used furniture and antiques shop. Olive had heard about the séances. People said he was trying to make contact with his father, which seemed just plain sad to Olive. Kids at school said Dicky was mental, that he’d landed on his head one too many times after being thrown off horses. Olive had seen the signs around town, heard stories about the ghost parties at the old hotel. Some kids, they said they’d seen it for themselves: Dicky moving from room to room in there, surrounded by the shadows of ghosts. But for the most part, people made fun of Dicky, including Olive’s parents, who liked to tell the story of how Dicky was kicked out of a town meeting in the elementary school gymnasium a couple years ago for showing up with a loaded six-shooter.