Page 15 of The Witch’s Orchard

ELEVEN

I ’M AT MY LAPTOP—SITTING behind the narrow strip of butcher-block countertop in Max’s cabin taking notes—when I hear whispers and footsteps outside, see shadows pass through the warm, orange light of the porch bulb.

There’s a knock on my door and the sound of a little kid giggling.

I slip my gun back into the holster I never got around to taking off, and answer.

“Hi!” says Shiloh, exactly as cheerful as I’d seen her earlier that day. Max, Shiloh, and Shiloh’s little girl—Lucy—are all there. Shiloh is holding a basket and Lucy a tiny pumpkin with a long, curly stem.

“Sorry to disturb you,” Max says, his cheeks flushed from the night air. In the company of Shiloh and Lucy, he is smiling—a real smile—and I realize it’s the first time I’ve seen it.

“We’re looking for a good carving pumpkin,” Shiloh says. “Lucy liked this one but it’s a bit too small. We thought it might look nice in the cabin and I was bringing this by anyway.”

She hands me the basket, and my belly grumbles at the scent of pumpkin bread and fresh cinnamon rolls.

“You’re amazing,” I say, staring down at the treats. “Marry me.”

“I’ve got enough on my hands as it is,” Shiloh says with a chuckle, “without hitching myself to a woman of action.”

I take the basket and she says, “Oh, I put some savory hand pies in there too. Sausage from my daddy’s farm. I’m told people can’t live on sugar alone.”

I offer my heartfelt thanks, and then Lucy tugs at the hem of Max’s barn coat and says, “Can we look at the creek?”

Max glances at Shiloh, who nods, and then he leads Lucy down the steps and onto the path.

“You take good care of him,” I say, watching Max and Lucy.

“I’ve tried to watch out for him, that’s all.”

“Can’t have been easy. You were just a kid yourself, weren’t you?”

“Sixteen when Molly was taken, yes. But it was the right thing to do,” she says.

“He lost his sister, his father, and his mother all within a couple of years. He was left alone to carry the burden of what had happened. I kept in touch when I went to culinary school. Then, when I came back, he helped me refurbish the building for the bakery. He’s been saving for a PI since he was a kid.

I think he needs to do it. Needs to know he did what he could do.

He could have a big future, I think, but… ”

She looks past my shoulder, and I turn, following her gaze to the woodblock print above the fireplace.

“Did he tell you about that?” she asks.

“No. I was actually going to ask where he got it.”

“He made it,” she says.

“That’s his?” I ask, staring at the print with fresh eyes. The depth of the line, the gradation in value, the balance of the composition. The way the crows seem alive as they melt into the sky. He’d said that he did woodblock prints, but this was way beyond the capability of a teenager.

“Max is such a talented kid,” Shiloh says, reading the look on my face. “He’s completely self-taught. He was offered scholarships to five different schools and even an internship in Japan to study with one of his heroes, which, I confess, I applied to for him because I knew he wouldn’t.”

“Wow.”

“But he won’t go,” she says. “Not until he’s done what he needs to do. And he needed to hire a PI.”

“Even if the PI doesn’t turn up anything new?”

“Do you think that’s what’ll happen?”

“It’s likely, I think. But I understand why he has to try.”

We watch Max and Molly in the distance. He picks something up from the ground and waves his hand like he’s performing a simple magic trick. She laughs and jumps up and down.

I look back at Shiloh and ask, “What can you tell me about First Baptist and Brother Bob?”

“You think they’re connected to the kidnappings?”

“Do you?”

“When I was a teenager, I remember there being questions. Later, when I saw Max’s notes and everything…

Oh, I don’t know. I did wonder. All the girls taken had some kind of connection there.

But as far as personal knowledge about the place?

My family went to that church and so I went to that church but, aside from a couple family funerals, I haven’t been in years.

Brother Bob must be in his, what, late sixties, at least?

And what would he or anyone else from the church have done with a couple of little girls? ”

“What’s Brother Bob like?” I ask. “He wasn’t there today.”

Shiloh’s lips purse to the side for a moment before she says, “He’s sort of like… Santa Claus in a glen plaid suit and loafers. He always struck me as harmless.”

“He never talked to you?”

“In passing, sure. But, he ministered from the pulpit. We had a couple youth ministers over the years, for the teenage crowd, but none of them really stand out.”

“And you don’t go now?”

Shiloh barks out a laugh.

“No. They’re pretty traditional, and I’m a single mom.

I didn’t marry Lucy’s dad because, well, I just plain didn’t want to.

He’s a nice guy but we barely knew each other.

My folks love Lucy, and they take her to some of the church’s more benign functions.

Festivals and picnics and Easter egg hunts.

Stuff like that. Somehow my mom conned me into making a bunch of stuff for this year’s festival. Though I still don’t intend to go.”

“What can you tell me about Deena Drake?”

“She used to teach piano,” Shiloh says. “But my sisters and I didn’t take lessons.

My daddy was much more interested in making sure we were all crack shots.

” She pauses while we watch Max and Lucy stand at the edge of the gorge, looking down at the creek.

“I was shooting clay pigeons out on the farm by the time I was eight.”

She shakes her head at the memory and then sighs and says, “But, aside from Deena being Max’s piano teacher, I know she came to town about twenty years ago and married Harvey Drake, the factory owner. Then he died and she stayed up in the house on the hill.”

“It’s a beautiful house. I was up there today.”

“Oh really?” Shiloh says. “I’ve heard the view is gorgeous. She has Christmas parties up there whenever the weather permits, and my parents usually go, but I’ve never seen it in person.”

We watch as Max and Lucy start back toward the house, Lucy still clutching Max’s fingers.

“You mentioned the church’s ‘more benign functions.’ Are there some that are less benign?”

She half shrugs. “Well, just revivals and that sort of thing. They have guest preachers in sometimes who are more or less fanatical about God’s word and the literalness of it.

They occasionally have big prayer meetings where they get together to pray over someone who’s sick or suffering, sort of low-key faith healing.

It’s fine for my parents but just not really for me. ”

She turns toward Lucy and Max as they step onto the porch. “We’d better get home if we want to carve that pumpkin before bedtime.”

They all take off and I watch them go before I close the door.

Back in the cabin, I make coffee and dig into background checks.

What I expected is pretty much what I get.

Drunk and disorderlies for Tommy Hoyle. I look up his cousins, Dwight and Elaine Hoyle.

They both have records—misdemeanors for possession and DUIs—but nothing in the last year.

I find their last known address and then look at the street view online.

It’s a big apartment complex with a ton of tiny balconies, cheek by jowl, overlooking a parking lot.

I shift my focus to the local constabulary.

There’s a long record of service in the department for Sheriff Cole Jacobs.

And there’s AJ Barnes, former running back for Appalachian State, a deputy for the last two years with an Instagram account showing off food from his mom and dad’s barbecues, sun-dappled shots of him working on a cabin up in the woods, him in a tux at his sister’s wedding.

I find some old pictures from an archived Savannah society magazine of Deena as a fresh-faced debutante. I don’t find much about Brother Bob Ziegler. Just a lot of old newsletters from First Baptist, usually penned by Mrs. Ziegler.

I look up Susan McKinney but, while I find a few other women with her name, I can’t find anything about the woman who’d startled me in the woods during my run. I remind myself that not everyone has an online presence and that for older people in this region that’s probably even more accurate.

I look back and forth between photos of all these people and photos of the applehead dolls from Max’s scrapbook.

I remember my granny sitting on the porch and peeling an apple.

I remember being little, watching the long spiral of skin falling away from the pale flesh, dropping to the floor with a dull plop.

I remember sitting there into the night, my mom working late, my dad off doing God-knows-what.

And my granny telling me to come on in, no use waiting up; they weren’t coming to get me.

I look back at the little shriveled faces of the black-eyed dolls and think of the witch who turned her daughters into a bluebird and a robin so they might sing for her forevermore.

I’m still lost in thought when my phone rings, and I answer.

“How’s the hoedown?” Leo asks. His voice is like velvet, wrapping around me. Instantly, I feel myself relax.

“Just getting started. You know what an applehead doll is?”

“Nope. Why don’t you enlighten me.”

“Don’t you have other things to do? Cleaning guns or counting money or doing rounds through your secret under-a-volcano base?”

Leo laughs, and I smile at the sound.

I update him on the case.

“It’s unlikely they’re still there,” Leo says. “After ten years?”

“I know.” I look again at the photos of the dolls, shake my head. “Most likely, someone took them away and they’re long gone. Or they were murdered, and their bodies are buried somewhere in these hills.”

“That sounds about right. How’s the law down there? They giving you much trouble?”

“You know me.”

“I know you like to stir up shit. Things get thick, I’m always a phone call away.”

“I thought you were wheels up tomorrow. Won’t you be in Singapore or Dubai or somewhere?”

“I’m always a phone call away, Annie.”

“Okay,” I say, smiling in spite of myself.

We hang up and I eat some of what’s in the fridge while I jot down a few more notes, take a shower, watch reruns of Andy Griffith on the little TV in the bedroom.

I fall asleep to the heavy drumbeat of Barney Fife’s theme song and an under-chorus of screaming crows in my ears.

The next morning I’m awake just before dawn.

I sit up, put my shoes on, splash water on my face, slip into my jacket.

I hesitate before I’m all the way out the door, go back inside and tuck my holster and gun against the back of my leggings.

It’s not a great feeling to run with a gun, but it’s not like I didn’t do it for years—with a much heavier gun—before I veered off my old path and onto this one.

I leave the cabin and make sure it’s locked.

I jog the length of the gravel road, head down by the gorge, across the bridge, up the other side.

I’m working up a good sweat as I close in on the ring of boulders.

And then I stop.

There’s more than one crow today. There’s a swarm. It’s a dense, wavering cloud of black feathers and a screaming, echoing chorus of hoarse cries. They’re circling a dead animal. Fighting over it. Laughing and crying and shrieking at each other.

I almost turn and jog away. Seeing a deer being dismantled isn’t my idea of a good morning.

But it’s the color. A redder red than blood and, attached to it, an intricate, snow white froth of lace.

Shivers run up my spine, catch in my throat.

“Oh no,” I breathe. I pull my gun on instinct, hold it at the ready. Check my surroundings. The forest is quiet. There’s nothing here but crows. I reholster as a sick, ugly feeling grows in my stomach.

I take a step closer, pull my jacket off, wave it at the crows. They flap and caw and finally settle on the stones, their talons scrabbling against the rough surface.

There, in the center, is a young woman. Her honey brown hair is wavy and shiny and princess-long, streaming over the fallen leaves. She wears a soft-looking red dress and she is, unquestionably, dead. The scene is like a Waterhouse painting, all bright colors and fair skin and tragedy.

Except for the ring of red around her neck, the speckles of blood in her eyes. This young woman has been strangled and left here, exposed.

Finding a corpse is never a pleasant experience.

But the corpse of a murder victim? It is something else altogether.

It’s a fist closing around your heart. Oxygen burning your lungs.

Blood pounding in your ears. All reminders that you are still alive while the person in front of you is dead.

A sudden certainty that you continue to exist while this person remains only as a body. A memory. A victim.

Years of training have stripped whatever instinct I might once have had to scream, run, cry, vomit, call for help.

I clench my jaw shut. And I force myself to look.

The crows have been at her. Nips have been taken from her cheeks and hands, revealing red flesh within.

Her eyes, though, are mercifully untouched, her delicate lids pale and thin, half shut over hazel irises and whites dotted with burst blood vessels, the evidence of her body’s desperate fight for air.

A ragged ring of red encircles her pale neck. The cause of her death.

I move a little closer, careful where I put my feet.

Her Cupid’s bow mouth is slightly open above a bright white, inch-long scar on her chin. Exactly as Shiloh had described. The little girl. The excitement. The fall. The trip to get stitches.

I swallow the lump in my throat and force myself to stare at that scar.

No longer a child, then. No tiny, unmarked grave full of small, fragile bones.

A girl, very nearly a woman.

“Molly,” I breathe. “I found you.”

And my voice reverberates off the rocks and rises into the air around me.

“I found you… found you… found you…”