Page 132 of The Witch’s Orchard

BANG!

I feel the warmth of Jessica’s blood splatter my face. Jessica falls to her knees. A bloom of red spreads from her right shoulder. It saturates the pale pink of her borrowed grown-up dress and her white-blond braid.

Angry, eyes wide, grimacing, Jessica switches my gun to her other hand, aims toward Shiloh.

“Mommy!” Lucy cries, running from the bathroom.

Jessica swings the gun around toward Lucy.

I smack Jessica with the pipe, right across the cheek. She goes down, hits the floor with a thud.

I look at Shiloh. Shiloh looks at me.

I pick my gun up from the floor.

Shiloh slides her Colt into the back of her jeans, picks up her daughter, hugs her close to her chest.

“You found her,” Shiloh says.

She cries into her little girl’s hair.

FORTY-THREE

“HOW ARE YOU?” SHILOHasks.

I shrug. Shrugging hurts.

We’re sitting in a hospital room. I have spent the night here. I want to leave as soon as possible. I’ve already pulled off all the wires that lead to the beeping machines, the liquid delivery machines, the machines that call the nice people in scrubs.

Shiloh has brought me a clean change of clothes and has promised to take me back to the cabin, where Honey is waiting for me. I slip a fresh pair of underwear and a new-washed pair of jeans on under my thin hospital gown.

“I can’t tell you how grateful I am,” she says as she holds out the T-shirt she brought. It’s black and soft and smells like the detergent in Crow Caw Cabin.

“I’m the one who’s grateful,” I say. “That’s a hell of a piece you were packing.”

She laughs.

“I can’t believe it,” I say. “The whole time. If anyone had just shown you Olivia’s drawings—”

“I still might not have realized it,” she says. “I was so desperate with worry.”

I’d left her sitting on the couch in the cabin, looking at Olivia’s spirals, while I went tearing off to search for Susan.

“My mom taught me to draw roses the same way,” she says. “And I pipe them on cakes just like that.”

That was why she’d come to Deena’s. She knew Deena was the only one in town with roses that could leave an impression like that.

“The last thing I expected, though,” she says, “was to see Jessica Hoyle holding a gun.”

“I know,” I say.

I grimace as I pull the shirt on over my various wounds and sore places. When my head emerges, AJ is there. He’s standing in the doorway in his deputy uniform.

“Hey,” he says. “She wants to talk to you.”

“Me?”

“If you’re up for it.”