Page 14 of The Witch’s Orchard

TEN

B ACK IN TOWN, I stop at a gas station and buy myself a Coke from the back of the fridge before heading to the pump and pushing the button for premium gas. I stand against Honey’s fender, watching the cost tick up while both of us take long, thirsty drinks.

When we’re done, I look at the address Mandy gave me for Dwight and Elaine Hoyle and, realizing it’s not too far, start in that direction.

A few minutes later I arrive at a little blue house on a twisty lane crammed with other houses.

There’s no vehicle in the drive but I get out anyway and try my luck at the door.

I bang a few times but there’s no answer, and when I start trying to peer into the window, I’m interrupted by the sound of throat clearing behind me.

Turning, I find a woman in her sixties with arms as big as a bear’s crossed over her chest.

“You here to buy soap?” she asks.

“What?”

“Elaine’s damn soap business. She said she’s gonna sell at the farmers market, but I’ve yet to see her down there.”

“She’s making soap?” I ask.

“Oh sure,” the woman says with an exaggerated eye roll. “Says she’s making holiday soaps for the Christmas season, but if you ask me the whole place smells like a reindeer fart. If you’re not here to buy soap then who the hell are you?”

I tell her who I am, what I’m doing there.

“Well, it’s pretty clear they ain’t home,” she says, taking my card. “So maybe you can take this ruckus elsewhere.”

“You know when they’ll be back?”

“Not one idea,” she says. “They ain’t hardly ever here since they come back. Except for soap-making time. That’s every Sunday so far, right when I’m trying to get ready for church.”

“Well, if they turn up, would you give them my card? Or call me?”

She gives me a long look, her lips pursed to the side, then clicks her teeth and nods.

“Thanks,” I say. And then she stands there and waits for me to get in my car and leave. I’d forgotten how territorial people are here. How much neighbors look out for one another, even if they don’t care much for them.

We pull away from Dwight and Elaine’s place and back toward the highway.

I’m already exhausted, but, I think, it’s worth it to talk to everyone on my list before word of my activity spreads all the way around town and people start getting their hackles up.

It’s always better to catch people off guard.

“Come on, Honey,” I say as I rev her engine. “One more and then we’ll pack it in.”

Deena Drake, Max’s former piano teacher, lives up a road named Lilac Overlook Lane.

It’s paved and the asphalt runs like a gray ribbon up and up and up under arched branches colored gold and red.

After several minutes of twists and turns, between thick clusters of mountain laurel, I finally break into open land on a cleared mountaintop with a two-story, glass-fronted luxury log cabin at the center of a still-green lawn.

I park beside an older but still solid-looking Range Rover, get out, and wander up the cedar steps to the front door. But just as I’m about to knock, there’s a voice beside me.

“Hello,” a woman says. I turn and the woman’s standing in the grass next to the porch.

In spite of the gardening hat, apron, and gloves, she is—in every way—prim.

Her blond bob, brushed with silver, is sleek and perfectly straight and grazes her sharp chin.

Her dark blue eyes—almost lavender in the half-light—look at me with open curiosity from under the sun hat.

“Deena Drake?” I guess.

“That’s right.”

I tell her who I am.

“Max Andrews hired me,” I say, coming down the steps and around the porch to close the distance. “I’m looking for the girls who disappeared ten years ago.”

She eyes me for a long moment, reading something in my face. I look back at her and try to appear as amiable as possible.

“May I see some identification?” she says.

I take my wallet from my back pocket, pass her the cards. She reads the IDs carefully, one at a time, then hands them back. Again, she gives me a long look, as if deciding whether to talk to me.

“A’right,” she says finally. “You’ll have to come around back, I’m very nearly finished and I want to get these bulbs in before dark.”

I follow her around the house to a sprawling flower garden.

Seasonal blooms of pansies and mums fill the space nearest the house, paths of white gravel running between them.

The space beyond the house is filled with rosebushes, likely numbering more than a hundred.

Most of their blossoms have dropped but I spot several still-vibrant red, orange, yellow, and pink blooms among the rows.

Beyond them, the whole mountaintop is bordered by evergreen mountain laurel bushes, their pale pink and white flowers already dropped but their waxy leaves unmistakable.

“Wow,” I breathe, staring at the garden. “This is beautiful.”

“Thank you,” Deena says.

I’ve always been envious of the green-thumbed. My granny was one of those people who could make anything grow, and clearly this woman has the same talent.

She leads me to one of the nearest beds and kneels beside it, where a bag of bulbs waits next to churned-up black soil.

“So,” she says. “The Andrews boy has hired you?”

“Yes.”

“It’s been a while,” she says. She digs in the soil with a spade and drops a tulip bulb in, covers it over.

“Yes,” I say. “Ten years. I wanted to talk to you because—”

“Because I was there that day. The day Molly was taken.”

“Yes.”

She nods. “Unfortunately, I doubt I’ll remember anything more about it now than I did then. But I’m happy to tell you what I know.”

“Okay. You were Max’s piano teacher. Let’s start there.”

“Yes. Max had just started lessons a few months before. It was his mother’s idea, I believe.”

“Was he good?”

“He wasn’t a prodigy, if that’s what you’re asking. But more patient than the average little boy, I’d say. Less wiggly.”

“And Molly?”

“Goodness, I barely saw her. She was a pretty little girl.”

“Tell me what you remember. About Molly, the family, that day.”

“It was the end of summer,” Deena says. “Unbearably hot. And they had no air-conditioning. They lived in an old farmhouse, you know. Lots of small rooms. It was like a maze. Their piano was in an old dining room at the back of the house, and I believe Molly had been playing in the front of the house, the living room.”

“And their father was at school,” I say.

She digs another hole, plants another bulb.

“As I learned later, yes.”

“And their mother was working in the garden, to the side of the house.”

“Yes.”

“So what happened?” I ask. “When Max came out and found his sister gone.”

“Well, that’s the thing, actually. I’d already left by then,” Deena says.

She takes one gardening glove off and pulls a wisp of silvery blond hair back behind her ear.

Her fingers are long and elegant and her manicured nails are the color of the inside of a conch shell.

“I’d gone out the kitchen door, which was on the side of the house.

My car was parked around the side, in their driveway, so it just made the most sense.

I always came and went that way. As far as I know, everyone did.

Anyway, Max finished his practice and I left. I felt very guilty about it later.”

“Guilty?”

“Yes,” she says. She closes her eyes briefly and puts her bare fingertips to her forehead as if the guilt is a sharp pain above her eyebrows.

When she opens her eyes, she says, “I didn’t check to see that Janice Andrews was still in the house.

She usually was, you see. Or, if she went out, she took the children with her.

I didn’t understand that she’d gone to the garden alone.

I had another appointment almost immediately after, so, when the lesson was complete, I gathered my things, shouted goodbye to Janice—whom I thought was still in the house somewhere—and then went on my way.

I ran into a man on the way out. A plumber, I think. ”

“Do you remember his name?” I ask.

“No,” she says. “But it must be in a file somewhere at the station because of course they questioned me later. Anyway, the plumber had come to the house after me and parked behind me and I remember thinking I’d have to ask him to move, but he was leaving as well.

” She pauses to let out a long sigh and then says, “It wasn’t until the next day that I heard about it. ”

“And what did you hear?”

“That little Molly had been taken, just like the other girls.”

“Jessica and Olivia.”

“Yes.”

“And that an applehead doll was left in her place,” I say.

“Yes. I did hear about that. Ghastly looking things. I’d never heard of them before that summer.”

“Where are you from?” I ask. Deena’s accent lacks the hard twang of her neighbors, and her open, genteel bearing is a lot more Deep South than high holler.

“Georgia, originally,” Deena says. “Savannah.”

“Oh,” I say. “Pretty.”

She nods and puts her glove back on, and I watch her carefully bury another bulb.

“What brought you here?” I ask.

“My husband. He was from here originally and he owned a couple of mills and factories in the region, including one in town.”

“The one that closed the year the girls were kidnapped,” I say.

“Yes. That’s actually… Well, that’s a bit my fault.”

“How so?”

“My husband passed earlier in the year. Harvey had already been having trouble keeping the business afloat, and once he died I simply had no idea what to do with it. I sold it off as soon as I could, and the new owners moved operations out of town.”

“Hmm,” I say. I watch her pull another bulb from the bag, then ask, “Do you attend First Baptist?”

The change in direction doesn’t seem to faze her. She smiles at the bulb as she buries it and says, “Yes. Brother Bob performed Harvey and my wedding ceremony. He and Rebecca were a great comfort when Harvey passed.”

She stands and faces me. She looks like the kind of woman who’s had a nine-step nightly skin-care routine from birth and has never missed a day.

“What did you think of the Andrews family?” I ask.

She sighs and takes off her sun hat for the first time.

“They seemed a very nice couple. The wife was quiet. The husband was intelligent. I was very sad to hear of Janice Andrews’s passing.”

The word “passing,” I think, isn’t right. It’s too quiet. Too soft. Too nice a word to describe the way Janice Andrews left this world.

We turn back toward the house and as we pass it, with the sun setting to the west, I look out from the high vantage of Lilac Overlook.

Quartz Creek and all its lower hills and valleys spread out below.

From here, I can see the little Main Street.

Closer, there are acres and acres of hilly farmland.

It’s a lovely patchwork of autumnal color spread out like a quilt, prepared for the coming winter.

“It’s beautiful up here,” I say.

“Isn’t it?”

“I guess I’d better head down before it gets dark.”

I give her my card. She takes it and slips it into her gardening apron pocket, and I feel fairly certain it’ll go straight in the trash as soon as she gets inside.

“Let me know if you think of anything else. I know it’s been a while, but I’ve promised Max I would look and, you never know, sometimes people remember things a long time after. ”

She squints at the card, biting her lips together for a moment, obviously mulling something over before she finally meets my eyes again and says, “I believe I’ve told you all I know. I went over this many times with the police ten years ago.”

“Yes but—”

“Please don’t come back here,” Deena interrupts.

She takes a sharp inhale of breath, pausing.

Her inborn politeness is fighting what she wants to say, but she carries on anyway, “The year Harvey died was the hardest of my life. And these questions only remind me of that time. Of his absence. I may have been in the Andrewses’ house that morning, but I have no knowledge of where those girls went. Please, I only wish to be left alone.”

“I can’t promise that,” I say. “I may need to talk to you again.”

“And I may need to call the sheriff if you step on my land again.” It sounds less like a threat and more like a calm statement of fact. I nod in response, and she gives me a brief smile as if all this is just a small misunderstanding.

She follows me to Honey, and I turn back before I open the door. I look up at the elegant, A-frame, glass-fronted cabin.

“It’s a beautiful house,” I say.

“Thank you,” she says. “Take care.”

“Sure,” I say. “Have a good night.”

She waves me off and I swing into the driver’s seat and rev the straight six. After a very long day, I’m down the switchback road twice as fast as I climbed it.