“And the hanging tree? What happened to that?” Olive asked, trying to think of which tree it could be. There weren’t any big pines along the edge of the bog.

“They cut it down soon after,” Riley said. “Milled it into lumber. They actually used the beams to rebuild the schoolhouse.”

“The one they tore down last year?” Olive said.

“Yeah. Actually, I think I’ve still got a couple of the beams from it right here for sale.” She turned back toward the wood stacked on heavy steel racks.

“No way!” Olive said. “Like, from the actual hanging tree?”

“That’s what people say,” Riley told them as she started looking at the tags stapled to the beams. “This one,” she said, pointing.

Helen came up, reached out to touch the beam, hesitated a second, then placed her hand on it, gave it a soft caress.

“This came from a tree from our land? From Hattie’s time?” she asked.

“I can’t prove it or give you a certificate of authenticity or anything, but I’m reasonably sure it did, yes. Then it helped frame the old one-room Hartsboro schoolhouse.”

The beam looked like all the others to Olive—old, a rich brown color, full of ax marks.

“It’s perfect,” Helen said. “It’s just what we need to be the header between the living room and kitchen.”

“No way!” Olive said. “You’re going to put the hanging tree beam in your house? What if it’s, like, haunted or something?”

Helen laughed. “There’s no such thing as ghosts,” she said. “But this beam…remember what I was telling you about, how they used to make lumber with just an ax? That’s what all these marks are from.” She ran her fingers over the face of the beam. “You can practically feel the history in it, can’t you?”

Olive put her hand on the beam, too, trying hard to imagine the tree it had once come from, standing at the edge of the bog; trying to imagine Hattie with a noose around her neck, how that tree was one of the last things she ever saw. And that tree had seen Hattie, too. Had held her weight, felt her last movements. Olive imagined there was some piece of Hattie in that tree, like a stain somewhere deep down inside it.

CHAPTER 13

Helen

JULY 12, 2015

“It’s perfect,” Helen said.

She and Nate had just installed the beam as the header framing the opening between the living room and the kitchen.

It was a rough-hewn beam about four by eight inches, and it spanned the top of the six-foot opening between the two rooms perfectly. It tied the rooms together and added a wonderful old-wood warmth.