The Invited(89)

He looked at her, eyes rimmed with red.

“Yes, sir,” she said.

“Know what else?” Daddy said now, the sledge swinging in his hand like a heavy pendulum. He wore his stained leather work gloves, so worn that his index and middle fingers poked through on the right hand. “I think you should stay the hell out of Rosy’s. I don’t want you talking to that Sylvia Carlson anymore.” He spat out the name like it left a bad taste in his mouth. “Stay clear of her. She’s half in the bag most of the time. If there was any clubbing going on, Sylvia probably put your mama up to it. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Sylvia’s the one who introduced your mama to—” He stopped himself here, his face reddening under the pale layer of plaster dust.

Olive finished the sentence in her own head: Him.

Him again. The man Mama ran away with.

She almost asked the question that came into her head then, the question she’d been asking herself again and again since she’d found her mama’s necklace: What if that’s not what happened? What if Mama didn’t run off with some man she’d met in a bar?

But the answers to those questions were almost more difficult, more painful to imagine, than thinking that her mama had been unfaithful, had a boyfriend on the side whom she took off with.

“Let’s get back to work,” Daddy said, turning from Olive, swinging his hammer as hard as he could into the wall, sending the plaster flying, smashing right through the thin wooden strips of lath. He pulled his hammer back, hit the wall again and again, with so much force, so much anger, Olive thought he might bring the whole house down around them.





FLOORS AND TRIM





CHAPTER 29



Helen





SEPTEMBER 9, 2015

“Are you sure about this?” Helen asked as she followed Riley through the door of the old Hartsboro Hotel. Everything about this felt strange and slightly dangerous. There was no way the old Connecticut Helen would have let anyone drag her to a creepy run-down hotel to sit with a bunch of strangers and try to make contact with the spirit world. It seemed like the opening of a bad horror movie.

The sign in the front said that it was an antique shop now. They stopped in the lobby, beside the old front desk, like they were waiting to check in, waiting for someone to pass them one of the old keys that still hung on hooks on the wall.

“Like I said, it can’t hurt, right?” Riley told her, voice low. “Dicky hosts these spirit circles every Wednesday, and they’re open to whoever comes by. Maybe if Hattie or Jane or Ann has a message, they’ll be able to get it to you through the circle.”

Helen was hesitant. She was still struggling to figure out the logic of all of this, because it seemed like if something was going to happen, wouldn’t it happen back at the house? The house and the objects in it were what drew them back. How was coming to some dusty old hotel five miles away from the bog, where you had to pay twenty bucks to sit around in a candlelit circle with strangers, going to help? But still, she was desperate to make contact again. Since she’d seen Ann’s spirit for that brief moment a few weeks ago, there had been nothing.

Riley seemed determined to give this approach a try, and Helen had to admit she was curious about the spirit circle: what it would be like, who might be there. What sort of people were desperate enough to talk to the dead that they’d come to something like this?

Me, she thought. I’m their target audience.

“Have you been before?” Helen asked Riley.

“Once or twice, but it was forever ago,” Riley said. “You just have to promise you won’t tell Olive we did this. She’ll think we’ve both totally lost it, and right now I think you and I are pretty much the only stable things she’s got in her life.”

    “And you have to promise not to ever tell Nate,” Helen said.

“It’s our secret then,” Riley said.

Riley had handled Nate, telling him that she was whisking Helen away for a girls’ night out. “Come on, all work and no play makes Helen a dull girl. I’ll take good care of her,” Riley had said. “I promise.”

The three of them had spent the day installing the hardwood floor in the living room. It was salvaged maple, and Helen was thrilled with it: each scratch and nail hole gave it character—a warm charm that new flooring could never achieve. Even Nate agreed that the extra work to get the old boards fitting together and flush was worth it. And Riley had gotten them a great price on it. Riley had also found them a few hundred square feet of wide pine boards from an old silo that they were going to use for the upstairs floors. Nate was thrilled that they were now under budget on flooring.

Now Helen followed Riley up the hotel stairs (which didn’t feel all too sturdy) and down a carpeted hallway. They passed doors to old hotel rooms, most closed, but the open ones were packed full of junk: broken furniture, racks of moth-eaten clothing, rusting bedsprings.

At the end of the hall was a set of double doors. Above them, an old sign read: BAR AND LOUNGE.

Riley went through, Helen behind her.

The room was dark and smelled of scented candles, musty incense, and maybe marijuana. There was a long wooden bar just in front of them with a mirror behind it and a row of empty stools in front. To their right, a wall of windows that had been covered with heavy curtains. To their left, a group of people sat in a circle, candles burning all around them: on the floor, on the mantel of the fireplace they sat in front of, on tables and empty chairs. They were talking in low voices. Riley led Helen over. The floor was covered with a tattered throw rug. The furniture was beat-up, the upholstery full of holes. There were six people in the circle, and now all twelve eyes were on Riley and Helen.