Even though Nate had seen his deer several more times, there had been no more ghost sightings. Helen went up to the house almost every night to sit below the beam, looking at the corner where Hattie had once appeared. But nothing ever happened. When she’d expressed her frustration to Riley that afternoon, Riley had suggested the Ouija board. Riley had come over to help them with plumbing. All the windows and doors were in, the house wrap was on the exterior walls, and the tar paper was on the roof. Last week, Riley had talked them into outsourcing the installation of the propane furnace and hot water heater and they’d called in a friend of hers—Duane, who owned Ridge View Plumbing and Heating. He’d not only installed the new units for a fair price, but he’d helped them get started with roughing in the plumbing. Between Duane, Riley, and Olive, they were done with the basic work in the kitchen and upstairs bathroom, the copper and PVC pipes all in place, ending in stubs where they would eventually connect to a sink or a toilet or a bathtub. Only the downstairs bathroom was left to finish. Then they’d move on to the electrical work. Once all that was in place, they’d be ready to drywall. It seemed so close and yet so far.

    “Riley thinks that maybe if we call to Hattie, she’ll show herself again,” Helen explained to Nate now.

“Yeah, and maybe Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny will show up, too,” Nate scoffed. “Bigfoot, too. Hell, maybe Elvis.” He shook his head, looked at Helen the way she’d seen him look at his students when they’d disappointed him in some way. “I think all that weed you’ve been smoking with Riley is messing with your common sense, Helen.” He took a breath, reached for her hand. “Don’t you get how totally fucking nuts this is?”

“I think—” she started, wanting to finish her true thought: that you’re being an asshole, but instead, she took a breath and said, “—that we need to be open to the possibility that there’s more to this world than meets the eye. I know you think I imagined it, but I know what I saw, Nate. I trust the evidence of my senses. It was Hattie. And if she showed herself once, she might do it again.”

He looked at her. “I’m getting a little worried here, Helen. I don’t want you to lose your shit completely out here in the woods and turn into this total I see dead people and read auras, and let me tell you about my past lives kind of person.”

Helen took a deep breath. “No losing my shit completely,” she said. “Just keeping an open mind. I promise.”

“I know this hasn’t been a cakewalk,” he said, voice softening. “The move here, the house-building, living in this crappy trailer—it’s been way harder than we’d both imagined.”

Harder than you’d imagined, she thought. I fucking tried to tell you, but you knew better.

“Few things in life ever go the way you imagine they will, Nate,” she said, then left him to go up to the house to wait for Riley.

* * *

. . .

Riley pulled into the driveway twenty minutes later with the Ouija board and more pot. Nate was down in the trailer, thinking about his white deer, no doubt. It occurred to Helen that she had never questioned the existence of the deer, even though she’d never seen it, and Nate had failed to get a photo of it. She filed that away for their next argument about whether she’d really seen Hattie in the kitchen. Helen led Riley into the new house and showed her the strange bundle with the tooth and nail. She’d been meaning to show it to her for days but wanted to wait until Nate wasn’t around. “What do you make of it? Is it a curse or something? A binding spell, maybe?”

    Riley raised her eyebrows.

“I checked some books on witchcraft out of the library,” Helen explained. “Remember? I thought everyone knew about my reading habits…”

Riley picked up the bundle. “I don’t think it’s a binding spell. It looks more like an amulet of protection. Both the tooth and the nail, they’re used in spells to protect and ward off evil. Where did you say it came from?”

“It was left for us on our front steps our first night here. I don’t know what to think.”

Riley looked at Helen like Helen herself was a puzzle Riley was trying to solve.

They sat on the floor across from each other, directly underneath the old beam. Their legs were crossed, the Ouija board resting on their knees, fingers of all four hands resting lightly on the plastic planchette. The candles they’d lit in a circle around them flickered.

Helen hadn’t used a Ouija board since she was a young girl at slumber parties asking about crushes, whom she would marry, when she was going to die. But back then, the spirits were vague, just giving teasing answers, never really telling her just what she wanted to know.

“We call to the spirit of Hattie Breckenridge,” Riley said. “Are you here with us, Hattie? We wish to speak with you.”

Helen closed her eyes and listened to the wind blow out across the bog and up the hill, push in through the windows at the front of the house that they’d left open. All she could think of was Hattie Breckenridge and how much she wanted her to appear.

She wanted Riley to see her, too, to have some other human being know she wasn’t nuts, she wasn’t losing her shit completely, as Nate had said.

She just didn’t want to hear her voice. No, she didn’t ever want to hear that sound again.