Page 112 of The Witch’s Orchard

“Yes,” Susan says. “Because a mother’s grief is everlasting. That is the sound the crows scream at night. They learned it from her. It is the witch woman’s cries. Her mistakes made manifest.”

“My question,” I say, drinking the last of the tea and feeling more like myself, “is what happened to the beggar woman who traded her daughters for food?”

Susan smiles. And then there’s a knock at the door.

“Miss Gore? You in there? It’s Sheriff Jacobs.”

Susan opens up and he steps inside, takes his hat off, looks around.

“We’re clearing the hillside now,” he says. His cheeks are red from the cold air and exertion and, probably, the constant low-level aggravation he feels. “When you’re ready, I’ll walk you back to the Andrewses’ place.”

I look up at him and smile blithely.

“My hero.”

He rolls his eyes.

THIRTY-SEVEN

IT’S JUST SHERIFF JACOBSand me and an EMT back in Crow Caw Cabin on Max’s farm. This is the same EMT who worked on my leg at the factory. She’s opening up a kit of medical supplies. She also found and made coffee and put a blanket around me, wrapped it tight, just as Susan had only a couple of hours before. I didn’t think that was strictly part of the EMT service, but who was I to argue?

“You couldn’t see anyone?” Sheriff Jacobs asks.

“No,” I say. “I couldn’t see anyone.”

All of his deputies had paused their search for Lucy to look for my shooter, and I feel guilty for having taken up their time, in spite of the fact that someone was out there trying to kill me.

Now, apparently safe, I’m sitting on the cabin’s little couch, staring at the woodblock print over the fireplace, watching the ink black crows as if they might fly away.

Jacobs is talking but it’s a while before I understand what’s going on. I’m still in shock, the EMT has said. My brain is still lagging. Despite Susan’s tea, I still feel sluggish and worn and my thoughts are swirling in a fog. The EMT is taking my temperature, my blood pressure.

“—found these shell casings up on a deer stand.”

Jacobs holds up a baggie of rifle brass and then adds, “Of course, it could be a hunter’s.”

“Prints?” I ask.

“We’ll see. But doesn’t look like it. Brass smells fresh, though. Doubt they’ve been up there long.”

“Hon, you’re running a fever,” the EMT says. “The scrape on your shin is healing pretty good and I’ve got butterflies on this new one here. Any deeper and I’d have made you go to the hospital for big-girl stitches. Lord have mercy, though, that cough of yours is sounding—in my medical opinion—gross. You sure you don’t want to go in for a chest X-ray?”

“I’m sure,” I say. “I don’t have time.”

She shakes her head.

“Were you wearing a high-visibility vest?” Jacobs asks.

“It wasn’t some old coot mistaking me for a deer,” I say. “They shot the bank right over my head and then followed me down the gorge. They could see me just fine.”

“I told you, you should’ve left town,” Jacobs says.

“I have a job to do.”

“Well, so do I,” he says. “And I can’t do it if I’m spending my whole morning trying to keep your ass out of the morgue.”

I can tell I’m getting pulled into a staring contest with Jacobs and I feel, suddenly, what years of searching for the answers I’ve been searching for can do to a person. What they’ve done to him. I think about the picture I saw of him only ten years ago, when he was just a deputy, just an uncle, just a man without the whole weight of Quartz Creek on his shoulders. I look at his hollow cheeks and dark circles and I realize I saw the very same thing this morning in the mirror.

The EMT rips open my blood pressure cuff with a loudscccrriicchh.