“Cover my tracks?”
“You know what’s in this diary? You know what she wrote? She wrote that she wasafraidof you.” Olive swallowed hard, looked at her father. Her father, who taught her to shoot and to follow the rules of a hunter: respect your weapon; never fire on a target you’re not sure of; never let an animal suffer; never, ever aim a gun at a person unless you intend to use it. “Why’s that, Daddy? Why would Mama be afraid of you?”
“Afraid of me?” he said, voice low, raspy, like he was in danger of losing it altogether.
“I read the diary,” she said. Her hands were hot and sweaty on the gun. She kept her finger on the trigger. “Don’t lie to me.”
She looked around the room, saw the torn-open walls, the missing floorboards. The constant state of destruction and demolition she lived inside. Then she understood. She finally figured out her father’s obsession with deconstructing the house. She felt like a cartoon character with a lightbulb going off over her head. “You’ve been looking for her map and the diary, haven’t you?” she said.
“What map?”
“The map to Hattie’s treasure. You thought she must have hid it in the house. Hid it somewhere good, somewhere no one would look. And the diary, that might prove what you did.”
He looked pained, his face proof of the expression “The truth hurts.”
“I—” he stammered, unable to come up with any more words.
“But you never found them, did you?”
He didn’t answer.
“I know you hurt her,” Olive said.
“Hurt her?” He staggered back as if the weight of her words had struck him in the chest. “Where on earth did you get that idea?”
“That’s what Mama wrote in her diary. That you hurt her. And you threatened to make her disappear.”
He was leaning against the counter now.
“She said that?” The words came slowly. “Why would she have said that?”
“You tell me, Dad.”
He shook his head. “I have no idea. I never hurt your mother or threatened her in any way. I would never dream of it.” He seemed to sink deeper into himself, to be taking up less and less space. The incredible shrinking man.
It was hard for Olive to believe that her father was lying—he looked so genuinely confused and hurt. But why would Mama have written those words in her diary?
Her father’s eyes moved from Olive and the gun to the kitchen window. “There’s someone out there,” he said.
“What?” Keeping the gun on him (was it a trick, something he was doing to divert her attention so he could get the gun?), she glanced out the window.
Daddy was right. She saw movement. She thought at first it was Dicky Barnes, that he’d come for her. Dicky and his band of spirit-calling witches were the last thing she needed right now.
But it wasn’t Dicky.
She saw the white dress, the glow of the white deer mask in the cool blue light of the moon.
Daddy stood looking out the window, blinking in disbelief at the deer head with white fur, long snout, glossy black eyes. “What the hell is that?” he asked.
But Olive was already at the kitchen door, throwing it open, watching the figure dart off across the yard toward the tree line.
“Mama?” she cried. The figure stopped, turned back to look at Olive, the white mask seeming to glow. Then she turned away again and ran off into the woods. “Mama! Please! Wait!”
CHAPTER 45
Lori Kissner
JUNE 29, 2014
