Page 21 of The Witch’s Orchard

SIXTEEN

“O LIVIA’S NOT GOING TO talk to you,” Kathleen says when she opens the door.

She’s packing up her purse, putting on a sweater.

She has a Marley County Hospital name tag clipped to her scrubs and her hair is pulled back into a cute little ponytail with the ends all curled together. “And I have to go to work.”

“Okay,” I say. “That’s okay. I can come back tomorrow.”

“You shouldn’t come back at all.”

“You heard about Molly,” I say. “You must’ve.”

She pushes her way through the door now, shooing me in front of her like a goose. She says in a whisper, “Yes. Yes, of course I did. Yes. I feel awful. Jesus. Jesus Christ, of course, I do. But I’ve already told you everything I can.”

She huffs and then opens the kitchen door again, leans her head in, and shouts, “Bye, girls! Be good, okay?”

I hear, “Bye, Mom!”

“Jessica Hoyle is still out there,” I whisper. “She could be next. She could turn up just like Molly if we don’t find her.”

She shuts the door again, then pauses with her handful of keys halfway to her purse and blinks at me.

“Please,” she says. “I can’t help you.”

“Well, your brother-in-law tried to make that clear, but—”

“Cole? Did he talk to you?”

“I assume you sicced him on me.”

She rolls her eyes and walks toward the driver side of her little worn-out Kia.

“No,” she says. “He must’ve heard me telling Emily—the dispatch over there, and a friend of mine—about you. Cole tends to take things personal. Ever since Arnie left, I think… he’s just trying to protect us.”

“Sure,” I say. “Listen, what if I talked to Nicole?”

“Nicole?” she says. “Why would you want to talk to Nicole?”

I shrug. “Nicole’s Olivia’s sister. Obviously, you would be there when I spoke to her.”

“Nicole was seven when Olivia was taken. She was just a kid.”

“They’re sisters. You think your siblings don’t know stuff about you that nobody else does? Even if you never told them?”

“Miss Gore,” she starts. “I don’t have time for this. Please do not bother my children or I will have Cole speak to you. Good night.”

She gets in the car and hauls ass out of the driveway and down the street and I watch her thinking I wish I’d had a field medic with that kind of get-up-and-go when I really needed one.

For a moment, the wind doesn’t blow cool and damp from the mountains. It’s another wind grazing my face. Another wind. Another time. The scent of my own blood fills my nose. Not the real scent, I remind myself.

The memory of the scent.

The ringing in my ears, the throbbing in my head, the confusion, the shouting, the fire. The hot sticky wetness on my own side. I had put my hand there and been surprised at the oily gush, the grit of debris.

I’d been upside down. Buckled in and watching as the Security Forces airman across from me—also belted in and hanging like me—breathed his last breath, blood dripping from his mouth and running up his cheek and over his forehead, into his hair.

I’d held my hand to my side and unbuckled my belt, dropping to the vehicle’s ceiling with a thud, the wind knocking out of my lungs, the distant whump-whump-whump. Dust-off inbound. The taste of blood is fresh in my mouth.

“RAAWWWW!” a crow screeches.

I turn toward the noise, jolted out of my memory. At the edge of the driveway, a crow bounces on the knotted branch of an apple tree. There is no fruit and the leaves—thin on the branches and thickly piled around the trunk—are a deep, blood red.

“Raww! Rawww!” the crow screeches again.

I turn again and walk back toward Honey, but pause when I realize my hand is pressed tight to my side.