The Invited(92)

Helen hurried out of the room, bumping into chairs, banging through the door and down the stairs, Riley behind her, calling, “Helen, wait up!”



* * *



. . .

The lights in the trailer were off, so they sat in Riley’s car, smoking a joint.

“You gonna tell me what happened in there?” Riley asked, face full of concern. It was eerily similar to the way Nate had been looking at her lately. Helen kept her eyes fixed on the dark windows of the trailer, thought it was a damn good thing Nate hadn’t seen her big freak-out at Dicky’s.

    “Nothing,” Helen said. “Just my fucked-up imagination. God, that place gave me the creeps. And those people, it’s like they’re feeding on other people’s needs and misfortune, you know?”

Riley said nothing, then at last said, “I’m sorry. We shouldn’t have gone. I didn’t know it would be like that.”

“It’s not your fault. But doesn’t that Dicky guy give you the creeps? I mean, why does he carry a gun everywhere? Was he expecting civil unrest during the spirit circle?”

Riley smiled. “You’re right. He’s kind of a yahoo. We’re just used to it, I guess.”

They were quiet as they finished the joint. The windows in the car were down, and Helen could hear frogs calling in the bog, smell the dark rich scent. She looked at the trailer, thought of Nate sleeping obliviously inside, surrounded by his nature guides, his carefully rendered drawings of their dream house. She knew she should go in, crawl into bed beside him, find comfort in his warm familiarity.

But that’s not where she wanted to be.

She turned back to Riley. “I heard Hattie’s voice,” Helen said.

“At Dicky’s?”

“Yeah.”

“What’d she say?”

Danger. You are in danger.

“She said, ‘Save her.’?”

“Save who?”

“This relative I’m supposed to find, I think. The one the old lady was talking about.”

Riley frowned at her, bit her bottom lip. “Anything else?”

“She said…I’m in danger.”

“Helen, maybe you should stop, you know?”

Stop? Helen couldn’t believe that Riley, of all people, might suggest such a thing.

“I can’t. I don’t know how to explain it, but I can’t. Hattie wants me—no, she needs me to do this.”

Riley was silent, staring at Helen. “But did you ever stop to think that maybe she doesn’t have your best intentions at heart? Or maybe she’s just fucking with you.”

“Why? Why would she do that?”

“I don’t know, Helen. Because it’s fun. Amusing. Because she can.”

    “No.” Helen shook her head. “She’s not, Riley. I know it—she hasn’t led me astray yet. She needs me, I can feel it.”

Riley studied Helen for a moment.

“All right. Whatever you say. Just be careful, okay? Just remember that things aren’t always what they seem.”



* * *



. . .

Helen turned off the computer, rubbed her eyes, and closed her little notebook, the notebook she’d come to think of as the “Mystery of Hattie” notebook. She’d been searching online for nearly two hours, and all she had to show for it was a name for Ann’s daughter. Samuel Gray and Ann Whitcomb Gray had had two children: Jason, born in August 1968, and Gloria, born in April 1971. She found a copy of Gloria’s birth certificate—her middle name was Marie, and she was born at 3:40 p.m.—but nothing beyond that. There were hundreds of hits for both Jason Gray and Gloria Gray, and she didn’t have any other information to narrow things.

Nate was still out cold in the bedroom and hadn’t so much as stirred when Helen had come in and turned on the lights in the trailer.

She looked at the table in the corner where his laptop was set up. It was open and showing the green-tinted images from the three outdoor cameras set up in the yard. Helen went over to look at them. There was nothing out there, no movement at all, only the trees, the trailer she and Nate were tucked safely inside, and the dark unfinished house looming above it.

The windows of the trailer were open and all Helen heard were the usual night sounds: the occasional croak of a frog from down by the bog, a lone barred owl, crickets.

She noticed Nate’s wildlife journal tucked against the laptop and opened it up. There was the first entry: the great blue heron in the bog. And then the porcupine, a male and female cardinal, a red squirrel. Then the sketch Nate did of the deer after his first sighting of her, the day he fell in the bog back in July. His drawing was remarkably lifelike—his art skills seemed to be improving with each sketch. She turned the page and found more drawings of the white deer and copious notes about his observations. She continued to flip through and felt her stomach harden into a knot. Page after page was full of sketches of the white deer and messily scribbled notes that seemed to make less and less sense as she went along. The notes said things like “Her eyes change color—tapetum lucidum?”; “went out into the middle of the bog and vanished”; “tracks disappeared.”

    There were detailed accounts of sighting after sighting all summer long: where she came from, where she went.