“Wait! She’s got another message,” the old woman said, opening her eyes, giving Helen’s hand another squeeze. “This one’s just for you and you alone. Close your eyes, dear. Close your eyes and listen with your whole self. She’s trying to come through to you.”

Helen closed her eyes, took in a breath, tried to forget where she was, how much her head was throbbing. She felt a breeze, imagined she was outside, near the bog.

She heard one short sentence, one command, spoken clearly in the grinding glass voice she’d come to know: Save her.

Helen nearly opened her eyes but kept them clamped shut, concentrated on breathing in and out.

The room, and everything in it—the smell of the incense, the breathing and shuffling of the people around her—seemed to retreat. Helen was in the bog. She saw a white deer—Nate’s white deer, so elegant and strange—then something shifted, and suddenly she was the white deer. And she was being chased, hunted. She ran through the woods to the bog, and where her hooves struck the ground, pink lady’s slippers sprang up. Dragonflies circled around her, the hum of their wings a song, a terrible warning song that turned into Hattie’s ground-glass voice: Danger. You are in danger.

Then she was in the center of the bog, and there was the sound of a gun going off. And she felt the bullet hit her chest, her white deer chest, and she sank into the bog, going down, down, down.

Helen’s eyes flew open, heart thumping madly, mouth dry and cottony. But she could smell the bog all around her. Hear the buzzing song of the dragonflies. Danger. You are in danger.

Her eyes locked on Dicky’s gun.

“I have to go,” Helen said, standing, letting go of the old woman’s hand, pulling away from Riley, who was giving her a worried look.

“You can’t break the circle,” Dicky warned.

Helen moved away on shaky legs. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Please,” the old woman called. “You can’t be afraid of what they show you.”

Helen hurried out of the room, bumping into chairs, banging through the door and down the stairs, Riley behind her, calling, “Helen, wait up!”

. . .

The lights in the trailer were off, so they sat in Riley’s car, smoking a joint.

“You gonna tell me what happened in there?” Riley asked, face full of concern. It was eerily similar to the way Nate had been looking at her lately. Helen kept her eyes fixed on the dark windows of the trailer, thought it was a damn good thing Nate hadn’t seen her big freak-out at Dicky’s.

“Nothing,” Helen said. “Just my fucked-up imagination. God, that place gave me the creeps. And those people, it’s like they’re feeding on other people’s needs and misfortune, you know?”