“So what can I do for you, Little Miss Kissner? Want a Coke or something?”

“No thanks,” Olive said, reaching into her pockets, which were empty. She hadn’t brought any money. Didn’t have any to bring.

Sylvia poured her a Coke anyway, put a cherry in it. “On the house,” she said, setting it down on a beer coaster in front of Olive.

“You hear anything from your mom yet?” Sylvia asked.

“No,” Olive said, touching the glass, watching the bubbles rise to the surface and pop, disappearing. “Not yet.”

Sylvia made a grim face, polished the glass in her hand extra hard. She held it up so that she was looking at Olive through it.

“I was hoping you could tell me something, though,” Olive said, taking a sip of the sweet, cold Coke. “I heard my mom was in here with a man not long before she took off. A man with dark hair and a leather jacket. My aunt Riley saw them sitting at a table together. I was hoping maybe you might remember that and know who he was. Or really anything else about who she was spending time with before she left.” She watched Sylvia, waiting, trying not to look too hopeful. The last thing she wanted was to get the poor pitiful Olive look from Sylvia.

Sylvia put down the glass she’d been holding, twisted the white polishing rag in her hands. “Olive, your mom, she—”

“I know what people say,” Olive said. “That she saw lots of men. I’ve heard her called a lot of horrible names. Not much you can say would shock me, so it’s okay. Really. I just want to know the truth.”

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?”