The Invited(75)

“?‘A fire of undetermined origin’?” Helen asked.

Riley looked up from the clipping. “I’ve heard that a group of men from town went out and set that fire. They’d been drinking at the pub and got it into their heads that it was up to them to save the town from Hattie Breckenridge.”

“Jesus. She was the one who needed saving, not the other way around.”

Riley nodded.

“Okay, so Hattie’s mother is killed and Hattie’s left homeless. Those are two facts we know for sure.”

“Right. So she builds her little crooked house down by the bog. And let’s not forget the money,” Riley added. “Her parents were very well-off—her dad had owned a stake in the local railroad—and she was their only child. There aren’t any surviving pictures of the family home, but they say it was deluxe. The Breckenridges were probably the richest family in town.”

“So what happened to the money?”

Riley shrugged. “That’s the great mystery. Supposedly, Hattie took it all out of the bank and brought it home with her, buried it out near the bog. Not far from the little house she built herself. People have looked for it over the years but never found a thing.”

Helen smiled. “Olive thinks she’ll be the one to find it.”

“Does she? I thought she’d given up on the treasure.”

    “No. She’s still looking. Going out to the bog with her new metal detector. Working the grid. She’s very methodical.”

Riley nodded. “That she is,” she said.

“What I don’t understand,” Helen said, “is that if Hattie had all that money, why didn’t she leave? Get on the first train out of here and start over someplace where no one knew her name? It doesn’t make sense that she would stay here and build a tiny little cabin on the bog.”

“If I had to guess, I’d say it’s because she was connected to this place: it was a part of her, for better or worse. And maybe there were other reasons. Maybe there was a man.”

“Jane’s father? What do we know about him?”

“Nothing at all. Hattie never married. She lived alone in that little house by the bog. Then, not long after the fire, she was pregnant. Like she wasn’t enough of a pariah before. Imagine being a single mother back then. Holy shit. The woman had guts, that’s for sure. Staying here. Raising that girl on her own.”

“Do we have anything on Jane?” Helen asked.

“Not a lot,” Riley said. She reached into a box on the table, grabbed a photo there and handed it to Helen.

It was another school photo, showing about fifteen children ranging from tiny to almost adult in front of a one-room schoolhouse. Hartsboro School, 1924, said a neatly penned note in the corner. Helen flipped it over, and someone had written the children’s names in now-faint penciled letters. Jane Breckenridge was the third girl from the left in the back row. She looked to be about twelve in the photo and was a near exact replica of Hattie at that age. Same dark hair and eyes, same haunted look. As with Hattie, Helen recognized her immediately—after all, a grown-up ghost version of Jane in a singed dress had visited her about twelve hours before. She could almost still smell the smoke.

“That’s the last photo of the schoolhouse before it burned down,” Riley said.

Burned down. She’d forgotten that’s what happened. First, Hattie’s family home burns, killing her mother. Then a fire at the schoolhouse. Another at the mill years later. A coincidence? Or something more?

“And Hattie was blamed for the fire?” Helen asked.

“She’d predicted it, kept Jane out of school that day. Three children were killed. Let’s see.” She looked through some notes on the table. “Lucy Bishkoff, Lawrence Kline, and Benjamin Fulton.”

    Helen turned the photo over again, searched for the names of the dead children. Benjamin and Lawrence were two little boys in the first row. They sat side by side with mischievous smiles. Lucy Bishkoff stood in the back row, right beside Jane. She had blond hair, pale eyes, and a warm smile.

Helen studied the photo, looked at their smiles, and thought, None of you have any idea what’s coming. She felt like the Grim Reaper now, pointing a finger at the photo, at the little faces.

“Did they determine what caused the fire?” Helen asked.

Riley shook her head. “No, but they say the fire spread very quickly. And apparently the kids and teacher had trouble getting out of the building.”

“Oh?”

“The door was stuck. Not just stuck, but people said someone had wedged it closed with a tree branch. It took some time, and a great deal of force, to get it open.”

Another strange coincidence.

“That’s so terrible,” Helen said, studying the black-and-white photo of those schoolchildren, wishing she could go back in time and warn them, warn them all, like Hattie had tried to warn them. Tell them the danger was real.

That was the cruelest part about history, whether your own or a stranger’s from a hundred years ago—there wasn’t a damn thing you could do to change it.

Helen reached into her bag, pulled out the picture she’d printed from her computer of the workers at the Donovan and Sons Mill, taken just months before the fire.

“Meet Jane Whitcomb,” she said, pointing to the woman in the back row with dark hair and eyes.