“Let’s get back to work,” Daddy said, turning from Olive, swinging his hammer as hard as he could into the wall, sending the plaster flying, smashing right through the thin wooden strips of lath. He pulled his hammer back, hit the wall again and again, with so much force, so much anger, Olive thought he might bring the whole house down around them.

FLOORS AND TRIM

CHAPTER 29

Helen

SEPTEMBER 9, 2015

“Are you sure about this?” Helen asked as she followed Riley through the door of the old Hartsboro Hotel. Everything about this felt strange and slightly dangerous. There was no way the old Connecticut Helen would have let anyone drag her to a creepy run-down hotel to sit with a bunch of strangers and try to make contact with the spirit world. It seemed like the opening of a bad horror movie.

The sign in the front said that it was an antique shop now. They stopped in the lobby, beside the old front desk, like they were waiting to check in, waiting for someone to pass them one of the old keys that still hung on hooks on the wall.

“Like I said, it can’t hurt, right?” Riley told her, voice low. “Dicky hosts these spirit circles every Wednesday, and they’re open to whoever comes by. Maybe if Hattie or Jane or Ann has a message, they’ll be able to get it to you through the circle.”

Helen was hesitant. She was still struggling to figure out the logic of all of this, because it seemed like if something was going to happen, wouldn’t it happen back at the house? The house and the objects in it were what drew them back. How was coming to some dusty old hotel five miles away from the bog, where you had to pay twenty bucks to sit around in a candlelit circle with strangers, going to help? But still, she was desperate to make contact again. Since she’d seen Ann’s spirit for that brief moment a few weeks ago, there had been nothing.

Riley seemed determined to give this approach a try, and Helen had to admit she was curious about the spirit circle: what it would be like, who might be there. What sort of people were desperate enough to talk to the dead that they’d come to something like this?

Me, she thought. I’m their target audience.

“Have you been before?” Helen asked Riley.

“Once or twice, but it was forever ago,” Riley said. “You just have to promise you won’t tell Olive we did this. She’ll think we’ve both totally lost it, and right now I think you and I are pretty much the only stable things she’s got in her life.”

“And you have to promise not to ever tell Nate,” Helen said.

“It’s our secret then,” Riley said.