“I’ve always had this idea that objects hold history,” Helen said.

Riley nodded. “But maybe it’s more than that. Maybe they don’t just hold it—maybe it flows through them, you know? Gives the dead a kind of…touchstone; something to pull them back to this world.”

MECHANICAL

CHAPTER 16

Olive

AUGUST 3, 2015

Olive had never been inside the Hartsboro Hotel. It was a big, creepy three-story building with sagging porches and Gothic arched windows with leaded glass. The gray paint was peeling; the black shutters hung crooked. A hand-painted sign hung from a chain on the front porch: USED FURNITURE AND ANTIQUES. Olive and Mike stood on the other side of Main Street from it. The old hotel was a good half mile from the center of town, where the general store and post office were. There were some houses scattered here and there along this part of Main Street, and School Street ran off Main and curved back behind the hotel. School Street didn’t have a school on it. Not anymore. It’s where the old one-room schoolhouse they’d torn down used to be.

“I don’t think this is such a good idea,” Mike said, shifting nervously from one foot to the other. There was a broken beer bottle there in the road and he kicked it, scattering the bits of brown glass.

“So don’t come with me then.”

The truth was Olive wasn’t sure it was a good idea, either, but she was going in. She’d put it off for weeks now, trying to convince herself she was waiting for a good plan, but really, she was just being a chicken. She’d even called Dicky once and asked when the next spirit circle meeting was, thinking she could just join in, pretend to be interested in the spirit world and see if anyone would say anything to her about her mom having been a member.

“Who is this?” Dicky had asked, sounding angry, like his hissing voice was sending tendrils through the phone to identify her, to stop her.

Olive had hung up without saying anything more.

“It looks creepy as shit,” Mike said now.

To Olive the hotel looked like a neglected old woman—someone who’d been popular and stylish once but was now slumped over and sitting in her own pee. “It looks more derelict than creepy to me,” she said.

    The kids at school all said the hotel was haunted, that Dicky lived there with the ghosts he’d called up with his spirit circle. That his dead father lived there with him—his father who’d gone into the woods years ago and disappeared. Now they ate dinner together every night. Kids said that if you watched the hotel from across the street at midnight, you’d see the place was full of the shadows of people, moving from room to room. Some said they heard music, the clinking of glasses, chortling laughter.

“My mom came here once,” Mike said. “To one of Dicky’s gatherings.”

“No way!” Olive said. “How come you never told me?”

“She made me promise.”

Olive gave him an appreciative nod. She knew Mike took promises seriously. Him telling her this? It was kind of a big deal.

“Anyway, about six months ago, she went to try to talk to her sister, Val, who died back when they were kids. She drowned.”

“Shit, Mike. You had an aunt who drowned? How come you didn’t ever tell me?”

He shrugged. “It’s not like I knew her or anything. She was, like, twelve when she died.”

Olive nodded. She’d been younger than they were now. It was weird to think about.

“So what happened at Dicky’s? Did your mom talk to her sister?”

“Yeah. She says she did.” He rolled his eyes. “That Val told her she was all right, that she was watching over us, that she was never far.” He said this last bit in a warbling imitation medium voice. He shook his head, disgusted. “My mom told me all this after a couple glasses of wine—you know how she gets. But she seemed so, like, happy about it. Happy that this pack of quacks gave her this fake message from her dead kid sister.”

“How do you know the message was fake?” Olive asked.

He bit his lip, looked over at the old hotel across the street. “My dad says that Dicky and his friends, they offer this great service. They tell people exactly what they want to hear, then they pass a hat and ask for a few bucks to help keep the circle going. It’s a racket. He was real pissed off at my mom for going.”

“But maybe it’s possible, right? Maybe there are some people who can actually talk to ghosts, call them back.”

Mike blew out a breath. “Maybe. My mom sure believes it. And she told me half the people in this town have gone slinking into that old hotel at one point or another, trying to make contact with some dead friend or relative. But then, out in public, they all make fun of Dicky and his weirdo friends. No one ever admits to having gone. It’s a funny thing.”

    “Well, maybe we’ll get lucky in there and see a ghost.”

“No way! Don’t wish for that!”

“Come on, chicken,” she said, tugging on his sleeve, leading him across the street. Main Street didn’t have a whole lot of traffic—locals passing through, dairy trucks loaded with milk or manure from nearby farms. If you looked up to the left, you could see where Main Street intersected with Route 4—up where the bus accident had been months ago. Olive could make out the white cross someone had nailed up, the piles of stuffed animals and flowers and cards people had been leaving there since the accident.