She’d spent the day searching around with her metal detector on the northwest side of the bog. The metal detector was on the fritz—sometimes beeping when there was nothing at all beneath it, sometimes just dying altogether. It was crap, but she’d picked it up for thirty bucks at a church rummage sale last fall, so what did she expect? She was saving her money for a much better one, a hundred times more sensitive and powerful. It even came with headphones. Olive was sure that if she had this, she’d find the treasure in no time. She’d been saving her allowance, doing any odd jobs she could find. She’d even skipped eating school lunch and pocketed the four bucks Daddy gave her each day. And Mike had offered to buy the old crappy one from her for the same price she’d paid for it, which seemed unfair, but he insisted, saying he knew it would be good luck for him because it had been hers and look at all the cool stuff she’d found with it.

During today’s search, from time to time, she’d take a break and go up the hill on a little path to check on Helen and Nate (she knew their names now from hearing them talking, from watching them, but more than knowing their names, she felt she knew them). She’d been watching them from behind the moss-covered root system of a tree that had fallen over—it made the perfect cover. They were trying to frame one of the walls, but things hadn’t ended well—they’d started fighting as soon as things got hard. Olive almost felt sorry for them. Then they’d quit early (after getting into a fight when Helen cut a board too short) and gone down to the bog, which meant Olive’s searching was over for the day. It was time to call it quits anyway, because she wanted to get home before Daddy, get dinner started, and make it look like she’d gone to school and was doing her homework like the good girl he thought she was.

But seeing Daddy’s truck in the driveway wrecked all that.

She ditched the metal detector in the toolshed and scrambled to come up with a story to explain why she hadn’t been in school. Saying she’d missed the bus seemed pretty lame. She could tell him she was too upset and freaked-out about the accident, about the dead kids just a little older than her, to get on the bus, go to school. That would work. It would have to. It was the best she had for now.