“Could Lori be short for Gloria?”
“Oh god, I guess you’re right. But…she disappeared last year,” Helen said quietly.
“Disappeared?” Nate asked.
“Rumor has it she ran off with a man, but Riley was telling me that Olive thinks maybe something else happened. Riley seemed a little worried, too. She seemed to think that maybe her leaving had something to do with Dustin. That he’d scared her.”
“What? Like he threatened her in some way?”
“Nate,” she said, “what if he…what if Olive’s dad did something to Gloria? Hurt her. Or worse. And what if Olive found out?”
“Helen, you don’t know—”
“Maybe it’s not Gloria I’m supposed to find and save,” she said. “Maybe it’s Olive.”
CHAPTER 44
Olive
SEPTEMBER 13, 2015
Her father was standing in the kitchen, wearing his town work shirt with his name stitched over the chest pocket.DUSTIN.
Dusty, his friends called him.
But his friends didn’t come around anymore. Not since Mama left. Not since they started their endless renovations. The knocking down of the walls, the piles of dust, the drywall and tape and compound and holes in the ceiling and floors.
“What are you doing with the gun, Olive?”
It was his serious, no-bullshitI’m the dad herevoice. He called her Olive only when he was scared or angry or both.
She pulled the diary out of her back pocket, dropped it on the worn kitchen table.
“I found this in the shed,” she said.
He glanced down at it but kept his eyes on her, on the gun that was pointed at him.
When there’s a gun in the room with you, you give it your full attention.
Daddy looked tired. Thin. The dark circles under his eyes made him look like a raccoon man. “Put down the gun and we can talk, Olive,” he said, his voice like the chatter of an anxious coon.Danger. There’s danger here.
“Do you know what this is?” Olive asked, nodding at the book.
“No,” he said. “I’ve never seen it before.”
“Mama’s diary,” she said.
His face twitched slightly. “Lower the weapon, Olive,” he said.
“Did you know she was keeping a diary?”
He shook his head. The little color he had left his face, until he was as pale as the walls.
“I read it, you know. Can you guess what she wrote?”
He was silent, thinking, his jaw clenching, eyes on the gun. “Is it about the other men?” he asked finally.
She laughed. “You know what? I don’t think there ever were any other men. I think that was entirely your paranoia. Or maybe just you trying to cover your tracks.”
