But she didn’t need them.
There, right on the mossy surface, silver glinted up at her.
Maybe it really was the treasure and that one piece had worked its way up from underground, a marker meant for her and her alone to find.
X marks the spot.
She reached for it, brushed away the leaves.
It was a silver chain. She picked it up, pulling it up slowly and carefully from its camouflaged place in the dead leaves.
But this wasn’t treasure.
No, this was a necklace that she recognized immediately.
“What is it?” Mike asked, leaning closer. “A necklace?”
Olive’s skin got all prickly, charged up, feeling like lightning had struck somewhere close-by. Like danger was near.
The silver chain was broken, but the clasp was fastened. Near the clasp hung a delicate silver circle with a triangle inside it, a square inside that, and inside the square another circle with an eye at the center.
“It’s my mother’s,” she managed to say even though her throat felt like it was closing up. “Her favorite. She never took it off.”
Olive held the necklace, now tarnished, caked with mud. The eye looked back at her.
I see you.
I know things.
“Weird,” Mike said, biting his top lip, lower jaw sticking out like a bulldog’s. He stepped back, like the necklace scared him the way Hattie’s cursed treasure might scare him. “So…what’s your mom’s favorite necklace that she never took off doing out here in the bog?”
CHAPTER 11
Helen
JUNE 15, 2015
It was 3:33a.m. That’s what Helen’s light-up digital watch showed when she pushed the button.
Nate was not beside her in bed.
“Nate?” she called sleepily. The trailer was dark and quiet. “Nate?” she tried again, listening.
All she heard was the dull thud of her own quickening heartbeat.
Her worrying, anxiety, and paranoia were getting the better of her. Whenever she went into town to pick up a box of screws or a new hammer to replace one they’d lost, she was sure everyone was watching, whispering. She told this to Nate, and he laughed it off, said she was imagining things. But she hadn’t imagined it when she heard a woman at the post office say to another, “It’s her. The one from the Breckenridge place.” And the other woman had shaken her head in disgust, very clearly said, “Should never have come, disturbed Hattie like they did,” then scuttled out of the post office like she was frightened of Helen.
“I’m telling you,” she’d said to Nate. “I don’t think they want us here. They think we…stirred up Hattie’s ghost or something.”
“I think you’re taking your own worries, your own dis-ease, and putting it on other people,” he said, setting down his new hammer. They were nailing down the upstairs plywood subfloor. “Sure, folks in Hartsboro may be a little leery of outsiders, but saying they don’t want us here is a bit of a stretch. And don’t even get me started on the ghost stuff.”
Now she reached up on the shelf for the flashlight, fingers groping, spider-crawling along the dusty wood.
It wasn’t there. She swept back and forth with her hand but found nothing. Nate’s glasses were missing, too.
Helen slid her way off the bottom of the bed, her feet hitting the cold linoleum of the floor. It was spongy in places, giving just a little under her bare feet.
Like walking on the bog,she thought.And at any moment, I’ll fall through, down into a deep dark spring, into the place Hattie came from.
