“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.