“Let’s go back,” Nate said. “Call the police. Report the empty house with doors open, the yelling in the woods.”
Helen began patting her pockets for her phone but knew it was no good. It was still in her purse in the cab of the truck.
“Do you have your phone?” she asked.
“Dammit. No. We flew out of there in such a hurry that I left it on the kitchen table.”
If they wanted help—professionals with flashlights and dogs and guns—to find Olive, they had to go back.
“Okay,” she said. “So which way is back?”
“This way, I think,” Nate said, starting to walk.
“But didn’t we come from the other direction? Didn’t we pass that huge leaning tree on the way here?”
“No, it’s this way,” he told her.
So Helen followed, knowing that they were getting more and more lost with each step.
They walked in silence for a few minutes, Helen following Nate, her eyes on his back, his pale T-shirt leading the way.
But she was letting the wrong person guide her. She understood this. She dropped back a bit from Nate.
“Hattie,” she whispered. “Help me. Help us. Help us find Olive.”
She took in a deep breath, tried to clear her mind, to listen for a voice, a signal.
Come on, Hattie, don’t fail me now.
But the only voice that came was Nate’s from up ahead.
“Helen,” Nate said, voice low. “Look!”
He pointed out ahead of them into a stand of trees growing close together, looking darker than the rest of the woods.
And there, standing just in front of it, watching them, looking almost as if she’d been waiting, was Nate’s white doe.
She was full-sized and her fur was bright white, her eyes dark and glittering as she watched them, her ears perked, listening. She held perfectly still and seemed to give a silvery shimmer in the moonlight. She was like a creature from a dream.
“Oh, Nate,” Helen said in a trembling whisper. “She’s beautiful.” She said it as if the deer were something Nate himself had created: a work of art he was sharing with her.
“Come on,” he said, taking her hand. “She wants us to follow her.”
CHAPTER 49
Olive
SEPTEMBER 13, 2015
“Mama?” Olive said, lowering her gun, taking a step toward the woman in the mask and her crumpled, motionless father.
“Oh,Olive,” the woman in the deer mask cried, pulling the mask away from her face, letting it fall to the ground.
“Riley?” Olive said, blinking at her aunt in disbelief.
“You’re okay now, Ollie,” Riley said, coming forward, gently taking the gun from Olive’s hands, laying it on the ground beside the white deer mask before encircling her in a tight, almost crushing hug. “Thank God you’re all right!”
Olive pressed her face against her aunt’s shoulder, her nose mashed against the stiff fabric of her white dress. She smelled like the incense that had been burning at Dicky’s hotel.
