The Invited(71)

But something was wrong.

Instead of following the other workers out of the mill into the fresh air, she and Maggie ran smack into a throng of women pushing, shoving forward, crying out, “For God’s sake, move!”

The doors wouldn’t open.

“They’ve bolted them from the outside!” someone yelled.

The women, they pounded and screamed and wept. Jane lost hold of Maggie. She felt the press of bodies behind her, crushing her.

There was another scream, too. A different one.

Tom Chancy was screaming. Jane could turn her head just enough to see the walls of his office fully engulfed.

At least there was that.





CHAPTER 21



Olive





AUGUST 5, 2015

As soon as Olive saw Daddy’s truck leave the driveway, headed to work, she was out the door, making a beeline for the old maple at the edge of the yard.

He’d taken yesterday off so they could make some progress on the house together, and honestly, she couldn’t wait for him to leave and go back to work. She wanted some alone time. Time to go over everything she’d seen and heard at Dicky’s and time to do some serious detective work.

She got to the maple at the edge of the yard and looked around, making sure no one was watching—silly, really, because there wasn’t anyone out in those woods, ever, except for Mike sometimes. He hadn’t shown his face or called since he’d ditched her at the hotel the other day.

There was a hollow spot about four feet up in the old tree, a place where a branch used to grow. Now there was the perfect little cavity tucked into the trunk, about four inches high and two inches across. She and Mama used to leave each other secret messages and gifts there: chocolate coins, acorns, pennies flattened out on railroad tracks. When Olive was very little, Mama told her the gifts were from the fairies.

Olive reached in now, feeling for the treasure she’d stashed there: Mama’s silver necklace with the broken chain. She pulled it out and took it into the house. She brought it to her room, where she took the silver amulet off the broken chain and polished it with toothpaste (she’d seen Mama polish silver this way). She didn’t have a new chain for it, but she had a thin leather cord left over from a leather craft kit Mama had given her. She put the silver pendant onto the cord, tied a knot at the ends, and slipped it around her neck, tucking it under her shirt.

    After seeing the symbol on the floor at Dicky’s hotel the day before last, she felt that the necklace, the symbol itself, was important. She couldn’t stop thinking about it. And Olive had this idea then that wearing it might help act as a magnet, might pull Mama closer to her or at least bring Olive closer to finding out where Mama had gone.

Mama had called it her I see all necklace; maybe, just maybe, it would help Olive see things, too.

Aunt Riley would understand. She believed in things like having visions and magical necklaces. But no way could Olive tell Riley about finding her mom’s necklace. Not yet anyway. She’d keep it a secret for just a little while.

Necklace tucked safely under her shirt, guiding her in some new strange way, she went down the hall to Daddy’s room. Like it or not, she now thought of it as his room, not their room any longer. It was partly because her mother had been gone so long and partly because it was a completely different room now. It had bigger closets, a door to the bathroom right from the bedroom. A new, much larger window.

“Your mama always loved the view of the mountains from here,” Daddy had said when he planned it. And Olive remembered her mother looking out at the mountains, saying they looked like a sleeping giant.

“Don’t you think, Ollie?” she’d asked. “Look, there are his feet, his legs, his round belly. And there are his shoulders, his chin and nose.”

And Olive saw the shape of the man in the mountains but was frightened, because she was little and the idea of a giant right outside their door scared her. “How long has he been sleeping?”

“Oh, a long, long time, I think,” Mama said. “Maybe since back before there were people here, even.”

“What if he wakes up, Mama? What if he wakes up and finds out that everything’s different? What if he’s angry?”

Her mother had smiled. “I don’t think that’s anything we have to worry about, Ollie.”

Her father had placed their bed against the north wall so they could look out the new picture window. As with all the other renovations, the bedroom was not finished. The floor was still bare plywood because Daddy didn’t know what Mama would like best: carpeting or hardwood, or painted wide pine planks maybe. And the inside of his own closet had no drywall, no ceiling, just exposed framing and wires, a light fixture screwed right to the open junction box. He had only a few things hanging up in there: a couple of flannel shirts, one good white dress shirt, a blazer and a pair of nice pants he wore to funerals.

    She stood in the bedroom now, saw the unmade bed with the new comforter her daddy had bought—it was covered in ducks and hunters in red flannel with guns. She looked around and realized that with the exception of the clothes that had been placed in her new closet, all traces of her mother were gone. The room no longer smelled like her perfume. The top of the dresser had been cleared of Mama’s makeup and stack of magazines. Olive wondered, not for the first time, what Mama would really think when (if) she came home. Wouldn’t it be unsettling to find that everything had changed, that nothing was the way she remembered? Daddy believed it would be this big, wonderful surprise, but Olive couldn’t help but imagine how shocked Mama would be. How the changes might actually make her angry, make her think they’d moved on to new things without her, tried to erase all traces of the way their lives had been before. It would be like the sleeping giant waking up to find everything changed.