Now Olive wondered if being able to talk to ghosts was something you were born with. Like people who had a photographic memory or were supertasters. Which brought Olive back to thinking about natural selection again. About Darwin sailing around on his boat, the Beagle, and writing notes, drawing pictures of birds.

Everyone’s looking for something, she thought. Ghosts. Scientific explanations of the world around us. A new and different life somewhere else.

Buried treasure.

She started sweeping the metal detector over the ground in front of her, through brush, tall grass, and sedge. Nothing. She startled a moth, which came fluttering up from the grass. A damselfly darted down in front of her. A junco chattered from a nearby cedar. She continued slogging forward, sweeping carefully, making her way through the thick brush at the edge of the bog. Then the high-pitched beep of a signal. A strong one. Her heart banged in her chest.

The gauge on the detector said it wasn’t far down.

“Mike, I got something!” she called out.

“Are you messing with me?” he asked.

“No,” she said, and Mike trotted over.

She got down on her knees, pants soaking through because the ground was so wet here, the carpet of moss deep and spongy. She pushed back the tall grass, cotton sedge, and old dead leaves. She had a trowel and a small folding camp shovel in her backpack.

But she didn’t need them.

There, right on the mossy surface, silver glinted up at her.

Maybe it really was the treasure and that one piece had worked its way up from underground, a marker meant for her and her alone to find.

X marks the spot.

She reached for it, brushed away the leaves.

It was a silver chain. She picked it up, pulling it up slowly and carefully from its camouflaged place in the dead leaves.

But this wasn’t treasure.

No, this was a necklace that she recognized immediately.

“What is it?” Mike asked, leaning closer. “A necklace?”

Olive’s skin got all prickly, charged up, feeling like lightning had struck somewhere close-by. Like danger was near.

The silver chain was broken, but the clasp was fastened. Near the clasp hung a delicate silver circle with a triangle inside it, a square inside that, and inside the square another circle with an eye at the center.

“It’s my mother’s,” she managed to say even though her throat felt like it was closing up. “Her favorite. She never took it off.”

Olive held the necklace, now tarnished, caked with mud. The eye looked back at her.

I see you.

I know things.

“Weird,” Mike said, biting his top lip, lower jaw sticking out like a bulldog’s. He stepped back, like the necklace scared him the way Hattie’s cursed treasure might scare him. “So…what’s your mom’s favorite necklace that she never took off doing out here in the bog?”

CHAPTER 11

Helen

JUNE 15, 2015