She closed her eyes, willed herself to sleep.
But she couldn’t get the chewing noises from her head.
She imagined an old woman with pointed teeth chewing her way up through their floor.
My, what big teeth you have.
She woke to sunlight streaming in through their small, narrow, prisonlike rectangular bedroom window. God help them if there were ever a fire in another part of the trailer—they’d never get out.
Nate was not beside her. She looked at her watch. Nearly nine o’clock. How had she managed to sleep so late? And how had she not noticed Nate getting out of bed?
She crawled down to the bottom of the bed, slid off, and grabbed her robe from the door. There was a pot of coffee waiting in the kitchen. She poured a cup, pulled on her sneakers, and went outside to find Nate. The sun hadn’t come up from behind the hill yet and the air felt cool. But the black flies were out: tiny, godforsaken creatures that swarmed, found every patch of exposed skin and left bites that itched like crazy. They’d already gone through three bottles of eco-friendly DEET-free bug repellent (which Helen was convinced the little bastards actually liked the scent of) and Nate was finally at the point of agreeing to try something a little more hard-core. As they swarmed her face, Helen vowed to go buy a can of OFF! today. And maybe a hat with an attached veil made of fine mesh netting—she’d seen one at Ferguson’s in the hunting section. She’d look like an idiot, but she was sick to death of being eaten alive.
Nate was standing inside the skeletal frame of the house, right inthe center of what would be their living room.
“Hey, you,” she called, walking over to join him, entering through the opening that would be their front door, imagining how wonderful it would be to have an actual door there to shut out the black flies.
He didn’t answer.
He was staring down at the floor, frowning.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, coming up behind him, coffee mug still clenched in her hand.
Had the porcupine made his way up here in the night, started chewing up their house?
“Nate?” she asked.
There, on the plywood subfloor they’d nailed down, was one of their chunky carpenter’s pencils. It had been used to write a message in big, sloppy capital letters:
BEWEAR OF HATTIE
“Hattie?” Nate said.
Helen thought back to the image that had kept her up last night: the old woman with the sharp teeth, gnawing and gnawing, coming for them.
“She’s the woman I told you about, remember?”
The one who pulled poor Edie Decrow into the water.
Helen swallowed hard, then continued. “Hattie Breckenridge—the one who lived at the edge of the bog.”
Nate shook his head, frowning. “I think our witch ghost needs some spelling lessons,” he said.
“Nate, you don’t think…” She couldn’t even finish saying it—that it might really be a ghost who’d left the message.
“I think some locals are messing with us. Probably kids, probably drunk or high. Scare the flatlanders, ha-ha.”
Nate turned and went back to the area where they’d been keeping their tools.
“Have you seen my hammer with the blue handle? I can’t find it anywhere.”
“No,” she said.
“Jesus. It’s like there’s some mysterious vortex. My cell phone, the level, my hammer. Maybe the kids are taking our shit, too.”
“If we were being robbed, wouldn’t they take more than a couple of random tools?” Helen asked.
“Not if they were just doing it to mess with us,” Nate said grimly.
