Page 1 of The Witch’s Orchard

ONE

R OXANNE’S HAS A SMELL that is somewhere between bacon grease, burnt coffee, and sticky-sweet pecan pie.

The linoleum on the floor hasn’t been replaced since the fifties but the proprietor changes about every season.

A lot of people have tried to keep Roxanne’s going, only to realize what bad shape the building’s in and how being here all the time means that you also have a smell somewhere between bacon grease, burnt coffee, and sticky-sweet pecan pie.

That smell is part of the reason I’m meeting Max Andrews downstairs in Roxanne’s instead of up in my diner-scented office.

The other part is that I’m hungry and my client, driving all the way up from North Carolina to meet me, seemed like the kind of client who’d be buying.

The kind of client I need now, since I pawned my watch (not for the first time) to pay my bills only a couple days ago.

I’m hoping that Max will offer the kind of payday that’ll get me out of my current hole.

But, when I see him, that hope evaporates into the greasy air.

“Thanks again for meeting me,” he says, reaching out to shake my hand.

He’s lanky and fine-boned under the layer of baby fat still clinging to his cheeks, and I realize the kid can’t be more than twenty. His face is completely smooth, and his skin has the honey-brown remnants of a summer spent outdoors.

“No problem,” I say, as he sits down across from me.

His mouth turns up into a soft smile and there’s something quiet around the eyes, sad and sensitive. I think he’s probably the kind of guy who always reads while he’s eating.

The kind of guy I’ve always been friends with.

As if proving my point, we’ve barely ordered and sat down before Max pulls out a tattered old book.

He’s about to open it when Tonya approaches, carrying his biscuits and fresh fruit.

Reluctantly, Max pushes the book aside to make way for the food, and Tonya gives me a half side-eye before sliding the heavy platter of sausage, biscuits and gravy, fried apples, and two over-easy eggs in front of me.

“You came a long way,” I say, once Tonya’s gone. “What’s the drive from down there?”

“Not bad. About six hours.”

There’s a pause before he says, “I wanted to meet you in person.”

I take a big bite of sausage and gravy and watch as the poor kid looks back and forth between the book and his breakfast. He spears an apple slice on his fork and bites half of it off, gives me a weak smile, folds his hands together under the table like he’s a little boy waiting to be dismissed from dinner.

He stares at me for a few seconds while I guzzle coffee.

“Not what you pictured?” I ask him.

There is no photograph on my website, and I’ve noticed that I—a short, skinny, freckled woman in her early thirties with no makeup and dishwater blond hair pulled into a ponytail so often it retains the shape when let down—am not what they’ve expected when they’ve seen the résumé.

The Air Force service, the degrees, the brief stint in private security, the amateur Muay Thai fights.

He gives me an apologetic shrug that I feel pretty sure means, “I thought you’d look older and wiser and not have mustard stains on your shirt . ” Or, perhaps, “I thought you’d be a man. A big one with a mean scowl and a gun . ”

The website just says, “ A. Gore: Private Investigator. ”

Though, to my credit, I do have a mean scowl. And a gun.

“Okay,” I say, wiping some gravy from my mouth. “Tell me why you’re here.”

He looks relieved, pushes the plate toward the corner of the table, slides the book in front of him, turns it around so it’s oriented for my reading pleasure, and swings it open to a marked page.

This isn’t a regular book. It’s a scrapbook.

The heavy paper is plastered with an 8-by-10 picture of a little girl.

This isn’t really what I expected. Guys like Max usually want me to find an ex-girlfriend or maybe find out what an ex-girlfriend did with their savings.

Guys like Max don’t usually pull out Sears portraits of sweet-looking little girls, and I know, glancing down at the kid and then back up to Max’s intense gaze, that this is not a regular job.

This is a sad job. Nobody shows a PI a picture of a kid because everything is going just great.

I sigh and study the photo. The girl looks like a little princess with her delicate, Cupid’s bow mouth, glossy waves of honey-brown hair, and big hazel eyes.

She’s wearing a pink dress with a white Peter Pan collar, and though she’s smiling straight at the camera, it’s a soft, timid smile.

Eager to please. The resemblance is clear.

“My sister,” Max says. “Molly Andrews.”

He turns the page. Now there’s another picture and my heart plummets, inexplicably, at the sight.

“An applehead doll,” I say.

He lets out a silent laugh and there’s a hint of surprise in his eyes. “You know what they are?”

“I’m not from Louisville,” I say. “I grew up in a dinky holler in Southern Kentucky. My granny used to make those things.”

“A lot of grannies used to,” Max says.

We both look down at the photo of the doll, its shriveled apple head resembling an old lady, its black eyes—mere cavities in the apple flesh—seeming deep and endless.

It wears a bright red dress with white lace at the neck and a white petticoat underneath.

These old-timey dolls are cute or nightmarish depending on who you ask, but considering the context, I’m guessing Max is in the latter category.

Max turns the page again and there’s a newspaper article from The Quartz Creek Herald that reads, “Third Girl Taken.” He points at the spread of black-and-white photos on the front page.

“When I was eight years old, three little girls in my town were kidnapped. The first was Jessica Hoyle.” He turns the page to show me a girl who looks about four or five, with pale blond hair and expressive blue eyes.

“And the second was Olivia Jacobs.” He points at a picture of a girl with porcelain skin, her gaze directed off camera, her chestnut hair curly and free.

“Both times,” Max says, “an applehead doll was left in their place.”

“Oh…” I say. And what I want to say is “Jesus Christ. That’s horrible.” Which isn’t new or helpful information for the brother of one of the girls who was taken and who has clearly been keeping a scrapbook with all the details of the crime ever since.

“After Olivia Jacobs was taken, it was pretty clear something was going on,” Max says. “Parents started guarding their kids, not letting them leave the house, no playing in the park without an adult around. But then… about two weeks after she was kidnapped, Olivia was brought back.”

“Brought back ?” I lean forward, look closer at Olivia, at the page opposite to Jessica.

“Yeah,” Max says. “And then four days after she was returned, my sister was taken. And an applehead doll was left in her place.”

My heart picks up speed, looking at these kids, these little girls all part of something strange and horrific. I look away from the book and back at Max, and his haunted, intense, birdlike quality makes a lot more sense now.

“I was at home,” he volunteers. “I had a piano lesson that day. My mom was out in the garden, weeding. The last time I saw Molly, she was sitting on the couch watching Snow White . My mom checked on her before she went out and Molly was asleep. I went outside to play after my lesson and, when I came back inside, she was just…”

“Gone,” I say, making myself look at the two other girls. “And they never found Jessica?”

“No,” he says, shaking his head. “Only Olivia was ever returned.”

He flips back to the first photograph, the one of Molly, and says, “Molly was four years old in this picture. It was taken about a week before she was kidnapped. It’s the last picture of her we ever got.”

“But there must have been an investigation,” I say.

“The cops looked. We don’t have much in Quartz Creek. Just the county sheriff’s station, which consists of the sheriff and five deputies. Fish and wildlife. The FBI came down after Molly disappeared. The search went on for about a year, but…”

“Nothing.”

I look back at the newspaper article, check the date.

The article is ten years old. I think back to my own life, a decade in the past. I grew up only a few hours from Max and his family but I was in the Air Force when the kidnappings occurred.

I was half a world away, trying hard to forget all the reasons I’d joined to begin with.

“It’s like they vanished,” he says breathily. He spreads his hands in front of me like he’s offering something. Or begging for something. “I started this… casebook, as I thought of it, a couple years later. I was about ten. I just… I felt like I needed to do something. I still do.”

“Max…” I start.

“I know,” he says. “I know. I started working when I was fourteen, trying to save up. I did lawn work and I waited tables until the steak house closed down. There’s not a lot of work in Quartz Creek.

So, I fixed up an old cabin on our property.

I’ve been renting it out as an Airbnb—mostly to fishermen—it’s not fancy or anything but I’ve got money. And I can offer you room and board so—”

“Max…” I try, but there’s no stopping him at this point. He’d probably practiced this spiel all the way from Western North Carolina.

“My folks hired a PI about a year after my sister disappeared, but they could only get the best one they could afford and that wasn’t much. He poked around for a while, never turned up anything.”

The gravy on my plate is cold now, congealed and gray. I push the plate aside and pick up my coffee, take a long drink.

“I want to hire you, Miss Gore. I need to do this.”

After a moment I say, “Max, after this long, the odds—”

“I know. But that’s why I came here. In person. I wanted to meet you. I read about you. I know you’re the one who solved the Lehman case.”

I let out a sigh.

“The Lehman case was—”

“It was cold for nine years,” he says.