Page 23 of The Witch’s Orchard

EIGHTEEN

“Y OU’RE GONNA WANT TO see these,” AJ says as I get out of the car. He’s holding up a manila envelope and looking very serious.

“Have you seen Max?” I ask.

“Not since this morning; I’ve been at work all day. Shiloh’s been over there, though, and I think that’s all the company he wants right now. She texted me earlier, said Greg Andrews is on his way home.”

“Max’s dad?”

“Yeah.”

I let us both inside and, making my way toward the kitchen, I pause to shove my still-scattered belongings into piles.

“I don’t suppose you’ve ever been burgled?” I muse, scooping up my errant pens and notebooks and tossing them back into my rucksack. I double-check as I go to see whether anything else is missing, but as far as I can tell it’s only the casebook that’s gone.

“Can’t say that I have. This your first time?”

“No,” I say. “It happened once when I was in college, after the Air Force and before I was a PI. And it happened again when I first moved into the office I have now.”

I pause in the kitchen, flicking the coffee maker on.

“You catch the guy?” he asks.

“No on the first one. I always suspected it was my roommate’s ex, on account of how it was mostly her lingerie that went missing. The second one I did get him. It was the guy who’d had the office before me. Left some coke under a floorboard and came back to get it.”

“What an exciting life you do lead.”

“Never a dull moment,” I say, and remember with disgust that all my clothes have been rifled through. I move into the bedroom, grab a big armload of clothes, stuff them into the washer and set it going. Then, finally, I trudge back into the kitchen.

I pour both of us a cup of coffee, then sit before him at the butcher-block countertop, where he has put down a manila folder.

“It’s the autopsy photos,” he says, a warning.

“Okay,” I say, and let out a long breath.

He opens the folder and reveals the pictures.

In them, Molly Andrews is lying on a silver table.

There are close-ups of her slender throat, encircled by thin, regular bruises and erratic, vertical claw marks.

Close-ups of her eyes, spotted red with dots of blood.

Close-ups of her fingers, bloody with her own flesh under her nails.

“She probably clawed at whoever was attacking, too,” AJ says. “The doc’s sending off DNA to check. But that’ll take weeks, months. Who knows?”

“Okay,” I say. “So, good for the courtroom but not helpful immediately.”

He shakes his head.

“No sign of sexual assault,” AJ says as we look over the photos. “No sign of bruises elsewhere or physical abuse, but . .,”

“What?”

“Well, Doc Jenkins isn’t sure. He’s putting in a call to another coroner he knows.

But it looks like there was damage to her esophagus, her heart, her liver.

Evidence of stress. But it’s subtle. He’s not sure what could’ve caused it.

The esophagus, he said, looked like a bulimia victim, but very mild. ”

“Poison?” I ask. “Some kind of… food torture? What had she been eating?”

“He said her last meal was simple. Biscuits, he said. And tea with honey. But he’s sending off all kinds of samples. We don’t have the kind of lab here to process this stuff. He sent everything to Raleigh and told them to rush it.”

I look down at the photos of Molly’s face.

“She has a few freckles,” I say.

“What are you thinking?”

“I’m just wondering about the condition in which she was kept.

Her hair is long, combed. Her dress is clean aside from the mud along the trim.

There are cases of girls kept as young wives, ultimately found, usually with Stockholm syndrome.

And there are cases of girls kept in horrifying dark basements… ”

“But you think it’s the former.”

“I wish it were neither. But if wishes were horses…”

He drinks the last of his coffee and I take the mug, rinse it out, set it in the sink.

“You want anything else?” I open the fridge and look inside. “Max and Shiloh left some milk, sweet tea, and Cokes in here.”

“I’ll take a glass of milk,” he says.

I grin into the fridge, involuntarily. I’ve long believed there’s nothing like a glass of cold milk at the end of a long day. And today has been the longest day.

I pour two tall glasses, set them on the counter.

AJ thanks me, and I watch him take a drink.

The muscle in his forearm is thick and ropy and he drinks noisy gulps, his Adam’s apple bobbing.

Something about him, sitting there at that counter, drinking that cold milk, helps distract me—however briefly—from the grief and the guilt I feel about Molly Andrews.

“You doing okay?” he asks when he’s finished half the glass.

“Yeah,” I say. “It’s just… I just got here the night before last. Now, I’m sitting at the kitchen counter looking at autopsy photos of a girl I found only this morning, a girl I never expected to find at all.”

“Okay,” he says, closing the file. “Look, let’s take a break. Talk about something else.”

I snort, “Like what?”

“Tell me about yourself.”

“Not a lot to tell.”

He gives me a sly smile.

“Now we both know that’s not true.”

“Not sure where to start.”

I take a drink, set the glass down, look into the pure white opacity of the milk’s surface.

“What are your folks like?” he asks after a moment.

“They were… my folks. I guess. They’ve never got along.”

“Like oil and water?”

“More like a lit match and kerosene.”

His eyebrows raise in a mix of humor and pity I’ve seen before. It’s a look I hate, so I just start explaining my way through it. It’s an old story. Common enough.

“My dad could never hold down a job and he drank too much,” I say.

“My mom worked third shift cleaning a nursing home. Neither of them were doing what they wanted to do in life and their favorite hobby was fighting over whose fault it was. An activity that usually turned violent, almost always ending with my mom on the losing end, in the hospital if they could afford it, which they never could.”

I pause, then add, “But they stayed together, so I mostly stayed with relatives. Usually my granny. Sometimes my great-uncle, Jovial.”

“How’d you end up in law enforcement?”

I laugh. “My granny said I should pick up an extracurricular activity so I wasn’t underfoot all the time. My uncle had been a SEAL in Vietnam—”

I put a hand, unconsciously, to my wrist and then remember that the watch Jovial had given me—the Rolex Submariner he bought on the cheap during his service—was sitting in a pawnshop back in Louisville.

I’d gotten behind on my bills and the watch was the only thing of value that wasn’t an absolute necessity in my day-to-day life.

I remember that it was one more reason I took this case.

Spend a week on a lost cause, turn up nothing, get paid, get my watch back.

But now I look at my naked wrist and think I never should have come.

That my being here has only made things worse.

“A Navy SEAL?” AJ asks, snapping me back. “Wow.”

“Yeah,” I say. “But you’d never know it.

He hates talking about it. You’d think I’d have learned some kind of lesson from that, but no.

I joined JROTC, tested high on the ASVAB—then went straight into the Air Force.

I was in the service for six years. When I got out, I spent three years in college getting art history and English degrees, just for fun.

Before I graduated, I got my PI license and started my business. ”

“Why a private eye?”

“I just sort of knew how to do this. Look for things, find stuff out. I did enough in the Air Force to know I liked it.”

I don’t tell AJ that I was a special investigator.

That I was recruited by Leo. That, even when I was in the Air Force, I couldn’t talk about my position or my rank or any of the cases that I worked.

That I spent a lot of time being hated by my fellow airmen and that having virtually no social life was all right with me because I just wanted more time to read books.

“Why not a cop?” AJ asks.

I shrug. “I’ve had more than my fill of the command structure,” I say. “Now, I report to myself. That’s enough for me.”

“And the car?” he asks, grinning.

“What about the car?”

“It’s a weird car,” AJ says, pointing toward the front of the house where Honey is parked, oblivious to his rudeness. “I mean, it’s cool, but it’s weird. I had to google what the hell it was.”

“Honey was my aunt Tina’s,” I say. “Well, she’s not really my aunt.

She was on her way out of the Air Force when I was going in.

We were from the same general part of Kentucky, and she sort of took me under her wing.

When she left, we stayed in touch, and she was always there for me.

She understood, better than most, how hard being away from home can be.

And how necessary. When I left the Air Force, I moved to Louisville, where she’d opened her own garage.

She was fixing up Honey at the time, as a side project, and I helped her out.

It was good for me. Pouring a lot of my frustration into an engine block.

When we were done, she gave Honey to me. ”

I finish my milk, rinse out the glass, put it in the sink, realize I’d rather talk about a murdered girl than my own past.

I reopen the folder, go back to the pictures, studying the shots from the morgue. I get out my notebook and read over everything I’d written down. AJ waits patiently for my next question, takes another drink of his milk.

“What I need are the files from ten years ago.”

He nods. “I started getting into them today. The system was a complete mess ten years ago, so it’ll take some time to track everything down, but hopefully tomorrow.”

“Okay,” I breathe. “In the meantime, what can you tell me about Jessica’s father? Tommy Hoyle?”

I think about the man I’d seen leaving that run-down house in that run-down holler the day before. The way he’d screamed at his dog, at me, kicked up mud as he sped away.

“Local lowlife,” AJ says. “Beats up on Mandy.”

“I got that far. He was laid off from the toy plant around the time the girls were kidnapped, right?” I ask.

“That’s right. My dad worked the same plant.”

“What’s your dad do now?”

“He went over to the community college after he got canned. He does HVAC repair now.”

“Well,” I say. “Tommy seems to have had no such aspirations. Mandy said he drives a digger or something, over in another town, but it didn’t really ring true.”

“Could be, I guess,” AJ says. “But mostly I just see him hanging around at Yellow Dog.”

“Local bar?”

“Wow, it’s like you’re a professional or something.”

I snicker, and AJ smiles as he watches me.

“He do a lot of day drinking?” I ask.

“Enough we’ve had to pull him out of there a few times. We take him back to the cells, let him sober up so we don’t send him home to Mandy like that.”

“So if he doesn’t work, how does he pay the mortgage?”

“Well, they don’t have a mortgage,” AJ says.

“That house belonged to Tommy’s folks and he was the oldest so it’s his now.

But everything else? How they put food on the table and keep their kids in clothes and sports uniforms?

Mandy waits tables at Ellerd’s, and I’d guess that’s all the money they’ve got. ”

“What about Dwight Hoyle and Elaine, the cousins? I heard from Mandy that they just moved back from Charlotte. I went by their house, but they didn’t seem to be home.”

“If they’re back,” he says, “I haven’t seen them. But I can ask around.”

“Mandy told me that Dwight was questioned after Jessica disappeared,” I say. “But that it didn’t come to anything.”

“I’ll have to look back at the files, but I wouldn’t be surprised.”

I nod.

“Do you think he had something to do with all this?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Anyone in town with the guts and the drive to do it—anyone with enough space to keep two little girls, though as we’ve said they don’t take up that much space—could have taken them.

I just have to poke around and see what turns up.

But this is what being a PI is. It’s just following every road and seeing where it leads.

Most of the time, you get to a dead end. ”

“What do you do then?” he asks.

“Turn my ass around,” I say. “Go back to the start. Try a new road.”

“And what happens if all the roads are dead ends?”

“Then I go back to where I started—make sure the client hasn’t run out of money, and start over again, looking for new roads.”

“Sounds like police work,” he says.

“It’s more hyper-focused,” I say. “I spend all my time on one thing. Don’t have to pause what I’m doing to direct traffic or respond to a 911 call. And I set my own hours.”

“Speaking of which…” AJ says, glancing at his watch. “I’d better head out. Early start tomorrow.”

“Okay,” I say. “Thank you, AJ.”

We both grow quiet, pondering, I guess, everything we’ve put together so far—which is, admittedly, not very much. Some mild evidence of abuse, a regional history of poverty and desperation, a possible connection to a local church.

“It’s possible that Jessica’s still out there,” I mutter, closing my eyes.

“I realize that Molly was the last girl taken and that maybe Jessica was dead before Olivia was ever nabbed at the church picnic but… I can’t stop now.

I need to find out what happened. If Molly was alive this whole time, then maybe Jessica’s still out there and… ”

“Yeah,” AJ says, his voice soft and deep. “We’ll find her.”

I feel his warm palm against the back of my free hand.

The air in the room feels too hot, suddenly. AJ is exactly the kind of man I could seek comfort with. More than comfort. But not tonight. Tonight, I need to lie awake while the crows scream outside and remind me that, until sometime early this morning, Molly Andrews was still alive.

And that now she is lying on a slab in the morgue, her beautiful hair wound into a coil beside her.

“I need some sleep,” I say, finally.

He nods, squeezes my hand, lets go.

“I’ll round up the old case files,” he says. “Bring ’em by tomorrow. Soon as I can.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Thanks, AJ. Thanks, again.”

“Just doing the right thing,” he says. “Night, Annie.”

“Good night.”

I watch as he goes out the door. As the headlights on his cruiser shine through the curtains. As he pulls away.