“Right. So she builds her little crooked house down by the bog. And let’s not forget the money,” Riley added. “Her parents were very well-off—her dad had owned a stake in the local railroad—and she was their only child. There aren’t any surviving pictures of the family home, but they say it was deluxe. The Breckenridges were probably the richest family in town.”

“So what happened to the money?”

Riley shrugged. “That’s the great mystery. Supposedly, Hattie took it all out of the bank and brought it home with her, buried it out near the bog. Not far from the little house she built herself. People have looked for it over the years but never found a thing.”

Helen smiled. “Olive thinks she’ll be the one to find it.”

“Does she? I thought she’d given up on the treasure.”

“No. She’s still looking. Going out to the bog with her new metal detector. Working the grid. She’s very methodical.”

Riley nodded. “That she is,” she said.

“What I don’t understand,” Helen said, “is that if Hattie had all that money, why didn’t she leave? Get on the first train out of here and start over someplace where no one knew her name? It doesn’t make sense that she would stay here and build a tiny little cabin on the bog.”

“If I had to guess, I’d say it’s because she was connected to this place: it was a part of her, for better or worse. And maybe there were other reasons. Maybe there was a man.”

“Jane’s father? What do we know about him?”

“Nothing at all. Hattie never married. She lived alone in that little house by the bog. Then, not long after the fire, she was pregnant. Like she wasn’t enough of a pariah before. Imagine being a single mother back then. Holy shit. The woman had guts, that’s for sure. Staying here. Raising that girl on her own.”

“Do we have anything on Jane?” Helen asked.

“Not a lot,” Riley said. She reached into a box on the table, grabbed a photo there and handed it to Helen.

It was another school photo, showing about fifteen children ranging from tiny to almost adult in front of a one-room schoolhouse. Hartsboro School, 1924, said a neatly penned note in the corner. Helen flipped it over, and someone had written the children’s names in now-faint penciled letters. Jane Breckenridge was the third girl from the left in the back row. She looked to be about twelve in the photo and was a near exact replica of Hattie at that age. Same dark hair and eyes, same haunted look. As with Hattie, Helen recognized her immediately—after all, a grown-up ghost version of Jane in a singed dress had visited her about twelve hours before. She could almost still smell the smoke.