“Wait, so is anyone living there? Like are any of the condos done?” Did she dare hope it? That maybe her mom had moved there? That that’s where she and the mystery man were living at this very minute?

“No,” Helen said. “It’s all still under construction and looks like there’s a long way to go. It’s nice that they’re giving it a new purpose—it’s a great old building. The man I talked to up there claimed that it was haunted.”

Maybe that’s what it was. Maybe Mama went up because of her ghost club. Hell, maybe she and Dicky and all the members went up to have a séance or to try to record spirit voices like the ghost hunters on TV did.

“Wow, haunted?” Olive said. “For real?”

Helen nodded. “He said so.”

“You believe in stuff like that?” Olive said. “Ghosts and hauntings?”

Helen concentrated extra hard on her brick. “I do,” she said at last. “I didn’t used to, but I do now.”

A history teacher who believed in ghosts. How cool was that? Olive smiled at Helen.

“I wish I could see a ghost,” Olive admitted. “Any ghost, really, but the ghost I’d most like to see—Hattie Breckenridge.”

Helen scrubbed harder at her brick, opened her mouth like she was going to say something, then stopped, looked down toward the trailer. Nate had just come out the door and was heading toward them.

Nate spent a lot of time looking for the white deer he kept seeing. Olive thought it was strange that she practically lived in these woods, had been hunting in them all her life, and she’d never seen a white deer, and now this guy from Connecticut had seen one a bunch of times. She had heard the stories, of course. Warnings to never shoot the white deer if you saw it. Stories of hunters following a white doe deep into the woods and never coming back again. Like something from a fairy tale.

Nate was coming toward them and he looked pissed.

Olive braced herself, wondering if maybe she’d done something wrong. Nate was still so suspicious of her, and he seemed to go out of his way to find fault with her.

The truth of it was, Olive worried that maybe he was starting to go a little off the deep end himself. This white deer, or ghost deer or whatever it really was, seemed to have consumed him.