Page 106 of The Witch’s Orchard

She moans and rocks and smacks her leg, growls at me.

My brain buzzes. I feel like I’m vibrating.

Olivia saw Jessica Hoyle when she was taken away.But I already knew that, right? I just didn’t expect the certainty of it to hit so hard, and I wonder, like everyone has wondered, what else Olivia saw, what else she experienced. How to get the information from her. How to help her and Nicole and Max and Mandy and Shiloh and this whole town get past this darkness and through to the other side. And is that my job now? No longer an investigator but a shepherd?

A knight? A warrior from another mountain?

I get my breath under control and lean as close to Olivia as I dare.

“All right, Olivia, I know this is really hard. But, if you can, could you please… draw something… anything that you saw when you saw this little girl. Can you remember anything?”

She moans and rocks and her body contorts as she comes closer to the paper and presses the highlighter hard against it. I think for a moment that the tip might disappear into the plastic but it doesn’t. Instead, she begins to draw.

Her hand, crabbed around the marker, travels in a circle and then squeezes in and in and in. A spiral. She lifts the marker again, hovers overthe paper a moment, then presses the tip close to the outside of the first spiral. She draws another, same as the first. Another. Another. Another. She turns the page. Starts again.One spiral. Two. Three. Four.

“What is it?” Nicole asks.

“I don’t know,” I say. “More spirals.”

The song changes. A man sings about how he’s sorry about his love, his pain.

Olivia draws another spiral. Another. Another.

“Olivia?” Nicole asks, leaning closer to her sister. “What are they? Can you show me what they are?”

I pull up a picture of snails, a picture of seashells, a picture of water going down a drain. Anything spiral-shaped I can find. I try to show them to Olivia—as I’m sure others have done before me—but she ignores my phone now. Ignores me.

She draws another spiral. Another. Faster. Harder.

“Liv?” Nicole asks again, very soft. “Can you show us? Can you show us what they are? For Lucy?”

Olivia pauses long enough to glare at Nicole, then lowers herself even farther, until her face is just inches above the paper. She takes a deep breath through her nose. And again. And then the moan grows in her chest and travels up her throat.

“Okay,” Nicole says, calming. “It’s okay.”

Olivia taps the paper with the marker.

“Okay,” Nicole says.

Olivia moans again. Longer this time. Louder. She still doesn’t open her mouth. The moan never turns into a scream. It’s a guttural noise like growling, urgent and necessary.

I watch her and listen to the song and look at the paper and the spirals and decide to take a wild stab in the dark.

“Olivia, do you know the story of the Witch of Quartz Creek?”

Olivia turns to me, stares, her dark eyes boring into mine, glassy with fresh tears. And the moan becomes a scream now. She rocks and nods and flaps her hands.

“It’s okay,” Nicole says, moving next to her sister on the sofa, wrapping an arm around Olivia’s shoulders.

I realize that everything I’d seen till now was born of frustration at my inability to communicate with her, but this is different. This is pure terror.

“Are you afraid of the witch?” I ask, my voice calm and quiet.

Another scream, and then Olivia melts into tears.

“I’m sorry,” I say to both of them. “I’m sorry. I had to ask.”

Nicole nods, and Olivia waves her hands wildly.