The Invited(78)

“Well, this is terrible in a different way,” Helen said. “The people who ran the factory had barred the doors from the outside so workers couldn’t sneak out on their shifts. They couldn’t escape when the fire started.”

“Holy shit,” Olive said, then remembered she was with a grown-up, a teacher no less. “Sorry,” she said, embarrassed.

“It’s okay.” Helen smiled.

“So what was it like up there in Lewisburg?” Olive asked. “Is it a big place?”

“No, it’s pretty small—smaller than Hartsboro. Not much to it at all. The mill is the main thing. They’re fixing it up. Turning it into condos, shops, and offices.”

Olive nodded. But why would her mom have gone up there? It’s not like she was in the market for a new condo or had this great interest in old mills or anything, unless…

“Wait, so is anyone living there? Like are any of the condos done?” Did she dare hope it? That maybe her mom had moved there? That that’s where she and the mystery man were living at this very minute?

    “No,” Helen said. “It’s all still under construction and looks like there’s a long way to go. It’s nice that they’re giving it a new purpose—it’s a great old building. The man I talked to up there claimed that it was haunted.”

Maybe that’s what it was. Maybe Mama went up because of her ghost club. Hell, maybe she and Dicky and all the members went up to have a séance or to try to record spirit voices like the ghost hunters on TV did.

“Wow, haunted?” Olive said. “For real?”

Helen nodded. “He said so.”

“You believe in stuff like that?” Olive said. “Ghosts and hauntings?”

Helen concentrated extra hard on her brick. “I do,” she said at last. “I didn’t used to, but I do now.”

A history teacher who believed in ghosts. How cool was that? Olive smiled at Helen.

“I wish I could see a ghost,” Olive admitted. “Any ghost, really, but the ghost I’d most like to see—Hattie Breckenridge.”

Helen scrubbed harder at her brick, opened her mouth like she was going to say something, then stopped, looked down toward the trailer. Nate had just come out the door and was heading toward them.

Nate spent a lot of time looking for the white deer he kept seeing. Olive thought it was strange that she practically lived in these woods, had been hunting in them all her life, and she’d never seen a white deer, and now this guy from Connecticut had seen one a bunch of times. She had heard the stories, of course. Warnings to never shoot the white deer if you saw it. Stories of hunters following a white doe deep into the woods and never coming back again. Like something from a fairy tale.

Nate was coming toward them and he looked pissed.

Olive braced herself, wondering if maybe she’d done something wrong. Nate was still so suspicious of her, and he seemed to go out of his way to find fault with her.

The truth of it was, Olive worried that maybe he was starting to go a little off the deep end himself. This white deer, or ghost deer or whatever it really was, seemed to have consumed him.

Nate had put up wildlife cameras in the yard. He’d started with one he got at the general store, then had gone online and ordered two more crazy-expensive motion-activated night-vision cameras that he’d set up in the trees at the edge of their yard—to “maximize coverage,” he said. It seemed a little weird that he’d blow what must have been over a thousand bucks on this setup when they were supposedly over budget with house stuff, but far be it from Olive to understand what made grown-ups do the things they did. He’d connected the cameras to his laptop wirelessly so he could constantly check the feed. He’d hung salt licks and put out special deer pellets. He was determined to catch the deer on video or get a photo of it. But so far, he hadn’t been successful. He’d gotten some great shots of skunks, a porcupine, even a coyote. But no deer.

    “I know where the bricks came from,” he said as he reached them now. His face was serious, his mouth a tight little line.

“What?” Helen asked. Olive looked down at the brick she was holding, like she was concentrating extra hard on getting every speck of old mortar off.

“You left the search engine open on your laptop, Helen. And the pages you’ve been looking at are all right in the history. Donovan and Sons? That’s where the bricks came from, right? The mill where there was a fire that killed all those women?”

Olive looked at the brick she was holding in her hand, looked at the black sooty stains, wondered if bricks could be haunted.

“Well, yeah, but—”

Olive snuck a look at Helen, saw she had this I’ve been caught guilty kind of look on her face that made Olive squirm. Olive shrank down, hunching her shoulders, scrubbing hard at the brick. She wished she could disappear altogether. Get up and run away, but that would be too weird. She hated when grown-ups fought. There were too many times when her mom and dad were arguing and there was Olive, sitting right at the table, sinking lower and lower into her chair, practicing becoming invisible. She’d seen her mom fight with Aunt Riley once, too, which was weird because they were like best friends. Riley came to pick her mom up for something, but her mom said she wasn’t going, that she had other plans. “You have to go,” Riley had said. Mama had refused. “There are some things you don’t bail on and this is one of them,” Riley had hissed, and she was all pissed off, like going out to hear some crappy band play on two-dollar beer night was the most important thing that had ever happened. But Olive understood now it probably wasn’t what they were going to that was important, but the fact that they were doing it together; that her mother was blowing off Riley.