Now Sylvia just looked sad. Much older all of a sudden. Olive noticed the wrinkles around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth.
“I think a lot of people misunderstood your mother…I mean, sure, she came in here and would sit and have a drink with whoever was buying.” Sylvia leaned down, polished at the counter with her rag, rubbing one spot in hard, tight circles, like there was a mark that just wouldn’t come out. “She liked meeting new people, especially if they were just passing through. Tourists and hunters and long-distance truckers—people with stories about other places. Men and women. You know how people around here are about outsiders—distrustful.”
Olive nodded, thought about Helen and Nate. How she’d heard the buzz around town about the new flatlanders who’d bought the land by the bog; how they were blamed for all the trouble in town, for stirring up Hattie; how some even said Helen was a witch herself.
“So the rumors would fly,” Sylvia continued. “But your mother—as far as I know—wasn’t hooking up with strangers all the time the way people go around saying she did.”
“But she had a…like, a boyfriend, right?”
“I don’t know, Olive. If she did, she didn’t tell me. And I never saw her with anyone here who seemed like a boyfriend.”
“But she met men here, right?”
Sylvia stared at Olive a minute, looking like she couldn’t quite believe what Olive had just asked. “Like I said, she had drinks with lots of people in here. Including the weirdos in that ghost club she was in.”
“Ghost club?”
“Yeah. The ‘spirit circle,’ or whatever they call it.”
Olive drew in a breath.No way! Her mom was off trying to talk to spirits?
“Don’t look so freaked, kiddo. It’s basically a bunch of folks drinking bad wine and having séances and stuff at Dicky Barns’s old hotel. Then they go into trances and charge old ladies money to talk to dead people.”
“Wait. You’re saying my mom actually went there? To Dicky’s place?”
Sylvia nodded. “She went more than a few times. For a while, I think she was something of a regular.”
Dicky Barns was a fifty-something man who had once been a rodeo star in Texas. That’s the way he told it anyway. He walked around like he was Hartsboro’s biggest celebrity, a huge silver rodeo belt buckle glimmering on the waistband of his Wranglers and a leather holster with an old Colt revolver. He’d corner anyone he was able to and yammer on to them about the old rodeo circuit: horses he’d ridden, steer he’d roped. His favorite stories, the ones he liked to tell the kids, were about the horrible injuries he’d seen: men gored by bulls, cowboys with skulls crushed, missing fingers. Mike said Dicky had dropped off some fancy Western shirts to be dry-cleaned at his mom’s shop earlier this summer. “Do you have any idea how many bones I’ve broken, son?” he asked.
Mike admitted that no, he did not know.
“I got more metal plates and screws than Iron Man in those superhero movies.”
Dicky had grown up in Hartsboro but left home at sixteen to head for Texas to learn to be a cowboy. His dad had been the town doctor, but he got lost while hunting with Dicky way back in the ’70s, when Dicky was just a kid. Some people said it was Hattie who got poor Dr. Barns, which Olive didn’t take too seriously. Besides, her daddy said that Dr. Barns had been a heavy drinker and it was no wonder he’d wandered into the woods and couldn’t find his way back out.
After a few too many broken bones and concussions, Dicky quit the rodeo life and came back home to Hartsboro in his thirties and bought the old Hartsboro Hotel, turned it into a used furniture and antiques shop. Olive had heard about the séances. People said he was trying to make contact with his father, which seemed just plain sad to Olive. Kids at school said Dicky was mental, that he’d landed on his head one too many times after being thrown off horses. Olive had seen the signs around town, heard stories about the ghost parties at the old hotel. Some kids, they said they’d seen it for themselves: Dicky moving from room to room in there, surrounded by the shadows of ghosts. But for the most part, people made fun of Dicky, including Olive’s parents, who liked to tell the story of how Dicky was kicked out of a town meeting in the elementary school gymnasium a couple years ago for showing up with a loaded six-shooter.
“The guy never takes his gun off. He thinks he’s an actual cowboy,” her mama said when they got home from the town meeting.
“A cowboy who talks to dead people,” her dad chortled. “He’s got a permit and it’s registered, but you can’t bring a gun into a school like that.”
“No exceptions, not even for John Wayne—I mean Dicky Barns!” Mama said back then, laughing, shaking her head.
Now Sylvia leaned against the bar so that she was real close to Olive. She smelled like roses, only it was off somehow, more chemical. Like a kid’s rose-scented perfume. “Lori went to those meetings hoping to make contact with Hattie.” She kept her voice low, nearly a whisper. “She wanted to know about the treasure.”
“Did she? Did she make contact? Did she find out anything?” The words tumbled out fast.
Sylvia smiled at her. “You don’t just look like her, you get all wound up like her, too!” She shook her head and considered for a moment, then went on. “I don’t know if any ghosts turned up, but I do know this: Lori showed up late here at the tavern one night. After everyone else had gone home. She was all shaken up and she asked if she could spend the night at my place, said she couldn’t go home, that Dustin—your dad—was real mad at her for something. I asked her what for, and she said it didn’t matter, that none of it mattered anymore.” Sylvia looked over at the men watching baseball stats flashing on the TV. Then she leaned in closer, lowered her voice and whispered, “Your mom, she had a few drinks here with me that night and, to be honest, she got a little tipsy. She told me that she had a secret, and I had to swear not to tell a living soul. Of course I promised. And she told me she’d found it. Hattie’s treasure. She knew just where it was, but she hadn’t dug it up yet.”
“What?” Olive nearly tipped over her Coke. “When was this? Did she say where it was? Did she dig it up?”
Sylvia smiled again. She was enjoying herself now, enjoying the reaction her story got.
“It wasn’t long before she went away. And no, she didn’t tell me where it was. I don’t know if she dug it up. Hell, I don’t even know if she really found it. You know how your mama is. Always telling stories. Especially with a few drinks in her. She likes to pull your leg, you know? See what she can make you believe.”
Olive nodded. Mama did like to fool people, to tell tall tales. She was always testing people, to see how gullible they were, what crazy story they might believe.
“Did she stay with you that night?” Olive asked.
