Helen went back to the mantel, touched the wood.
Right in the living room,Aggie had said.
Shot right in front of the mantel, Helen imagined.
“My husband, Phil, always said that whole family was cursed. I’m not sure I believe in curses, but you have to admit the poor Gray family had more than its fair share of horrible things happen.”
Runs in the family,Helen thought.
Closing her eyes, Helen could almost see it: the mantel covered in knickknacks and family photos of Samuel, Ann, and their two children smiling into the camera. Then everything splattered in blood. The screaming of the children.
“I’ll take the mantel,” Helen said, before she could think it through. “It’ll be perfect for my living room.”
Aggie smiled. “One second,” she said, and went back into the room the classical music was coming from. When she came out, she was carrying a thin paperback book. “I’ll throw this in with it,” she said.
Helen looked at the title:Communicating with the Spirit World,by Ann Whitcomb Gray.
“Wait…this is Ann’s book?”
Aggie nodded.
It was one of the library books she’d been holding on to all summer. Her head spun at the thought of it—that a book written by a direct descendant of Hattie had been sitting on her kitchen table for weeks, a book she’d turned to to help her understand what was happening between her and Hattie.
Aggie smiled. “I’ve collected a few copies and I pull them out for the right customer. This copy goes with you.”
“Thank you so much,” Helen said as she flipped to a chapter toward the end, read:
Spirits, like living people, can come with an agenda. Some come in peace, just seeking to make contact with the living, especially those they have a connection to. For others, it may be more complicated than that.
A spirit may come to pass along a message you may not wish to hear or even to warn you of something.
Sometimes they return to exact revenge.
INSULATION AND DRYWALL
CHAPTER 25
Olive
AUGUST 18, 2015
“I still can’t believe you actually went into Dicky’s,” Mike said, shaking his head. Olive hadn’t seen him since then—his mom had been keeping him busy, and between that and Olive still being pretty pissed at him for abandoning her, they hadn’t managed to find time to hang out. As soon as he met up with her, he asked her to tell him the whole story, every detail of what had happened once she went up those old stairs at the hotel. So she’d told it, but in a vague, rough-outline kind of way.
“And I can’t believe you ditched me. You aresucha wimp,” she said. “You could have waited for me. I actually looked around for you when I came out. I thought maybe you’d at least stand guard or something.”
He said nothing, just looked down at his dirty sneakers.
They were out in the bog, near Hattie’s old house. Bullfrogs sang in a strange angry-sounding chorus, voices raised, like they were shouting over each other.
It was quiet up at Helen and Nate’s. Olive had spent the morning helping them fill the walls with rolls of pink fiberglass insulation. Even with gloves, long sleeves, and her jeans tucked into her boots, bits of fiberglass found their way to her skin and made her itchy, just like when she’d helped her dad with insulation. She’d kinda hoped Nate would use hay bales or milkweed fluff or recycled Patagonia fleece to insulate—no such luck. Probably too expensive. She went home, took a shower, and met up with Mike. Helen and Nate were hoping to finish the insulation today and start hanging drywall.
“What if someone had seen you going in?” Mike asked, reaching down, picking a handful of sedge grass. “What if your dad had found out you went there? He’d be pissed.”
“Well, he didn’t, right? My dad isn’t exactly paying a whole lot of attention to where I go and what I do these days.”
Mike scowled, picked apart the grass in his hand, ripping it into tiny pieces. “Maybe he should. I mean, that guy Dicky is a legit weirdo. The dude lives with ghosts and carries a loaded gun everywhere! And don’t tell me you didn’t think that old hotel was creepy as hell.”
Olive had told Mike only what Dicky had told her: that her mom hadn’t been there. She’d decided to keep the phone call she’d heard to herself. And right now, she was realizing what a smart move that had been. No way was she going to tell Mike that she planned to go back next month, that there was some connection between her mom and Dicky and his ghost club.
