“Anyway, about six months ago, she went to try to talk to her sister, Val, who died back when they were kids. She drowned.”

“Shit, Mike. You had an aunt who drowned? How come you didn’t ever tell me?”

He shrugged. “It’s not like I knew her or anything. She was, like, twelve when she died.”

Olive nodded. She’d been younger than they were now. It was weird to think about.

“So what happened at Dicky’s? Did your mom talk to her sister?”

“Yeah. She says she did.” He rolled his eyes. “That Val told her she was all right, that she was watching over us, that she was never far.” He said this last bit in a warbling imitation medium voice. He shook his head, disgusted. “My mom told me all this after a couple glasses of wine—you know how she gets. But she seemed so, like, happy about it. Happy that this pack of quacks gave her this fake message from her dead kid sister.”

“How do you know the message was fake?” Olive asked.

He bit his lip, looked over at the old hotel across the street. “My dad says that Dicky and his friends, they offer this great service. They tell people exactly what they want to hear, then they pass a hat and ask for a few bucks to help keep the circle going. It’s a racket. He was real pissed off at my mom for going.”

“But maybe it’s possible, right? Maybe there are some people who can actually talk to ghosts, call them back.”

Mike blew out a breath. “Maybe. My mom sure believes it. And she told me half the people in this town have gone slinking into that old hotel at one point or another, trying to make contact with some dead friend or relative. But then, out in public, they all make fun of Dicky and his weirdo friends. No one ever admits to having gone. It’s a funny thing.”

“Well, maybe we’ll get lucky in there and see a ghost.”

“No way! Don’t wish for that!”

“Come on, chicken,” she said, tugging on his sleeve, leading him across the street. Main Street didn’t have a whole lot of traffic—locals passing through, dairy trucks loaded with milk or manure from nearby farms. If you looked up to the left, you could see where Main Street intersected with Route 4—up where the bus accident had been months ago. Olive could make out the white cross someone had nailed up, the piles of stuffed animals and flowers and cards people had been leaving there since the accident.