Helen checked the bathroom and the kitchen—both rooms had half-finished walls, exposed wiring and plumbing. The kitchen door was open, and Helen stepped through it, looked around the yard. She was sure she’d heard something, a voice calling. Nate came outside and stood beside her, started to speak. She shushed him.

“Did you hear that?” she asked, and right away, she was the crazy lady again, the woman who heard screams in the woods, saw ghosts.

“No,” Nate said. “I didn’t, but—”

And then a voice cut through the darkness. A man’s voice, angry and not too far off.

“Ollie!” he yelled. “Ollie, get back here!”

CHAPTER 47

Olive

SEPTEMBER 13, 2015

“Ollie!” Daddy called behind her. “Ollie, get back here!”

Olive ran with the shotgun held tight in both hands, kept it firm against her body, barrel pointing up to the left.

Never run with a gun, Daddy always told her, but if there was ever a time for breaking the rules, this was it.

She got to the edge of the yard, passed the old hollowed-out maple she and Mama used to leave gifts for each other in. The place she’d hidden the necklace she now wore.

Mama was ahead of her, just a blur of white moving through the trees like a deer-headed ghost.

And it was like chasing a ghost, so much so that Olive wondered if maybe this wasn’t her mother, if it really was Hattie.

But why would Hattie be wearing her mama’s special fairy-tale shoes? Even in the dark, from a distance, she could make them out—could see the sparkling light from the flower-shaped beading on top.

Her mother was moving surprisingly fast, considering that she was wearing her good shoes and her vision must be encumbered by the mask.

But then again, Mama knew this path by heart. She’d been walking it for years and, like Olive, could probably do it with her eyes closed.

Olive knew where they were going, where the path led.

They looped through the woods, up the hill, then back down, the figure ahead moving easily over the roots and rocks, navigating the path perfectly in the moonlight.

Daddy, on the other hand, was off behind them, struggling to catch his breath, tripping on fallen trees, stumps, roots. Olive heard him cursing each time he went down. And he was calling for her. “Ollie! For God’s sake, wait up!”

But she did not slow. She made her way past ghostly white paper birch trees, white pine, maple, and aspen. She did not want to lose Mama (or was it Hattie? Hattie who’d found a way back and was now wearing Mama’s magic shoes as she ran through the woods toward the bog?).