The librarian nodded. “George pulled her out, did CPR. He brought her back, but she was never the same. Brain damage.” She shook her head. Clucked her tongue. “Never woke up, poor thing. After a week or so, George had them turn off the machines, let her go peacefully.”
Helen’s mind flashed to the table in the trailer laid out for dinner, of the two empty wine glasses. The dusty bottle of wine that still sat on the top shelf of their kitchen cabinet.
“How horrible,” Helen said.
“An accident, they said, but George, he went around saying that it was no accident.” The librarian waited a beat, looked around, then lowered her voice and whispered, “He said it wasHattie.”
Helen felt a chill start at her neck and creep all the way down to her tailbone.
“I’m sorry, Hattie? Who—”
“Don’t tell me you haven’t heard about Hattie yet,” the woman in the Snoopy sweatshirt said in a sort of chortling way, as if Hattie were some dowdy old woman who walked around town in funny hats.
“No. I don’t know that name.” Helen swallowed hard. Because she did know the name, didn’t she? Somehow.
Be a historian,she told herself.Gather facts. Leave your emotions out of it.“What can you tell me about her?”
“Oh, I guess you’d say Hattie Breckenridge is the most famous resident of Hartsboro. There are all kinds of stories. People said she was a witch. Some said she was the bride of the devil himself. Spoke in tongues. Knew what was going to happen before it did.”
“And she lived by the bog?”
“Oh yes, in a little cabin she built herself after her parents’ house burned down. All that witch mumbo jumbo—I don’t know about that. But she did live in a little house by the bog and that’s a true fact.”
“My husband and I found the remnants for an old foundation out by the bog,” Helen said.
The librarian nodded. “That’d be Hattie’s place. Folks called it the ‘crooked house,’ because Hattie wasn’t much of a carpenter and nothing was straight or level.”
Helen nodded, thinking of the arguments she and Nate still had sometimes when a measurement was off by a fraction of an inch. Would their house turn out crooked, too? She shook the thought away, remembering the beautifully straight and plumb downstairs walls they’d just finished today.
“What time frame are we talking about here?” Helen asked.
“Oh, I don’t know for sure. Back in my grandmother’s time. Early 1900s, I think? Mary Ann at the historical society would know.”
“Do you think there are any photos? Of the cabin or Hattie?”
“Could be,” the librarian said. “You talk to Mary Ann. If there are any, she’ll know.”
“What happened to Hattie?” Helen asked.
The librarian got quiet, looked down at the papers on her desk.
“There are all kinds of stories…,” she said, moving papers around. “Some folks even believe that before she died, she buried treasure on her land—her family’s fortune. Me, I doubt there ever was a fortune. If there was, why didn’t she leave? Or build a nicer house for herself? It’s crazy, the stories some people tell.”
Helen nodded. She knew how folklore worked, how stories were embellished over the years, and a true historian had to do a lot of legwork and research to sift through those stories for the grains of truth inside them.
“One thing in the stories is always the same, though,” the librarian continued, a little gleam in her eye. “People say her spirit haunts that bog. They see her ghost out there, walking around the water, out in the middle of it, too. If you look on some early-summer days, you can see pink flowers have sprung up where she put her feet. Lady’s slippers.”
Helen got another chill, remembered the scatterings of pale pink orchids she and Nate had seen while walking to the bog.
Hattie’s footsteps.
The woman smiled at her, and Helen couldn’t tell if she actually believed any of this (and was perhaps the sort who attended the Hartsboro Spirit Circle) or if she was just passing stories along.
Then the woman said something that answered Helen’s questions. “You stay out there long enough, and who knows, maybe you’ll see her, too. Go to the bog at sunset and wait. When the darkness is settling in, that’s when Hattie comes out.” She smiled vaguely again and winked. “Just, you know. Be careful.”
. . .
“What’s all this?” Nate asked. He’d just walked in from the downpour outside. He’d peeled off his raincoat but was still soaked from head to toe. His bird-watching binoculars were strung around his neck.
