Olive had never been inside the Hartsboro Hotel. It was a big, creepy three-story building with sagging porches and Gothic arched windows with leaded glass. The gray paint was peeling; the black shutters hung crooked. A hand-painted sign hung from a chain on the front porch: USED FURNITURE AND ANTIQUES. Olive and Mike stood on the other side of Main Street from it. The old hotel was a good half mile from the center of town, where the general store and post office were. There were some houses scattered here and there along this part of Main Street, and School Street ran off Main and curved back behind the hotel. School Street didn’t have a school on it. Not anymore. It’s where the old one-room schoolhouse they’d torn down used to be.

“I don’t think this is such a good idea,” Mike said, shifting nervously from one foot to the other. There was a broken beer bottle there in the road and he kicked it, scattering the bits of brown glass.

“So don’t come with me then.”

The truth was Olive wasn’t sure it was a good idea, either, but she was going in. She’d put it off for weeks now, trying to convince herself she was waiting for a good plan, but really, she was just being a chicken. She’d even called Dicky once and asked when the next spirit circle meeting was, thinking she could just join in, pretend to be interested in the spirit world and see if anyone would say anything to her about her mom having been a member.

“Who is this?” Dicky had asked, sounding angry, like his hissing voice was sending tendrils through the phone to identify her, to stop her.

Olive had hung up without saying anything more.

“It looks creepy as shit,” Mike said now.

To Olive the hotel looked like a neglected old woman—someone who’d been popular and stylish once but was now slumped over and sitting in her own pee. “It looks more derelict than creepy to me,” she said.

The kids at school all said the hotel was haunted, that Dicky lived there with the ghosts he’d called up with his spirit circle. That his dead father lived there with him—his father who’d gone into the woods years ago and disappeared. Now they ate dinner together every night. Kids said that if you watched the hotel from across the street at midnight, you’d see the place was full of the shadows of people, moving from room to room. Some said they heard music, the clinking of glasses, chortling laughter.

“My mom came here once,” Mike said. “To one of Dicky’s gatherings.”

“No way!” Olive said. “How come you never told me?”

“She made me promise.”

Olive gave him an appreciative nod. She knew Mike took promises seriously. Him telling her this? It was kind of a big deal.