Page 28 of The Witch’s Orchard

TWENTY-TWO

A QUICK SEARCH ON MY phone and I find directions to Starling Point.

After a few near misses and slow crawls, I turn onto a little upward-tilted gravel road and follow it up the side of a high hill.

Mountain laurel bushes, still green and dense, whoosh by both sides of the car; their flowers have dropped and a few half-rotten blooms lie on the ground below.

Beyond the bushes, deeper into the forest, all I can see is mist.

I’m relieved when the greenery opens up at the top of a hill and I find a little hatchback parked against a guardrail and two teenagers standing together against the passenger-side door.

I roll up slowly, watching them, and realize these are the older siblings of Jessica and Olivia: Tam Hoyle and Nicole Jacobs.

“Hey,” Nicole says when I get out of the car.

“Shouldn’t you be in school?”

Nicole shrugs and says, “Yearbook staff.” Like that explains everything.

“Cool car,” Tam says. Obviously a guy of impeccable taste.

“Thanks,” I say, giving Honey a little pat. “What’s up?”

They trade a glance and then Nicole says, “We want to help.”

“Okay,” I say. “But… how?”

Nicole bites down on her bottom lip, and Tam nudges her shoulder.

“Come on,” Tam says. He’s tall with broad shoulders, built a lot more like Tommy than Mandy Hoyle. But Tam’s voice is soft and thoughtful, with an undercurrent of kindness that I could never picture coming from his father.

“We can trust you, right?” he says.

“Sure.”

Nicole leans back, dipping her hand into the car’s passenger seat. She comes back out with a little stack of folded-up papers. She hands them to me and I open them.

It’s all drawings, in crayon. Spirals litter page after page after page. Red, yellow, orange, and pink, they run corner to corner.

“What is this?”

Nicole crosses her arms tight in front of her, hunching her shoulders together protectively the same way Kathleen does.

“My sister’s drawings,” Nicole says. “Olivia made those when they brought her back.”

“You mean after she was kidnapped?”

She nods.

“For how long?”

She shrugs and says, “I don’t know. A while. She still does them sometimes, but she hides them or tears them up after. She doesn’t show them to Mom.”

“Okay,” I say, my eyes moving over the spirals. The crayon is thick and heavy, indenting the paper even after all these years. I look back up at the two of them.

“You two are friends?”

They glance at each other, and then Nicole nods and Tam says, “We’ve been on debate team together since freshman year.”

Illuminating.

“And you heard about Molly,” I say.

“We went to school with Max,” Tam says. “I always thought hiring a PI was sort of hopeless. Probably a waste of money. But you show up in town and, two days later, Molly is back. I want you to find Jessica. We have to find her, before it’s too late. I want to help.”

“Well, I don’t know how much you can help,” I say. “But this is good. Thank you for this.”

They don’t say anything and my gaze drifts from them, down to the crayon drawings, and back up to them. I say, “You two were pretty young when your sisters were taken.”

“Yeah,” Tam says.

I say, “Nicole, why do you think Olivia was returned?”

She lets out a breath I hadn’t realized she was holding; maybe she hadn’t either.

She says, “I sort of… God, don’t tell my mom.

Look, I love Olivia. She’s my sister and I love her more than anyone.

Anyone. And I think Olivia is perfect the way she is.

But if you didn’t know her? I know what people think. What they say.”

She bites her lip again and her cheeks go pink as she looks off into the distance, beyond the overlook and across the valley. Tam moves his hand, subtly, just barely touching Nicole’s between them.

Nicole is still looking away when she says, “They think she was returned because she was defective. Because she wasn’t normal. And…” She glances at Tam, whose face is set and hard while Nicole’s eyes fill with tears.

Tam says, “And if you take a little girl and bring her back because she’s not normal then what would you have been using her for?

I mean, why did they bring back Molly Andrews?

Why now ? Is it because you showed up here?

Started asking questions? Or is it because it’s been ten years? Like it’s some kind of… anniversary?”

“You sound like you have a theory,” I say.

Tam glares at me for a few long seconds and then looks at Honey instead.

“Tell me,” I say.

“What if someone took Olivia all those years ago and brought her back because they realized she wasn’t suited for whatever purpose they had.”

Nicole bites her bottom lip, looks from the horizon to Tam to me.

She says, “Everyone always underestimates Olivia. They see that she doesn’t talk and that she’s not like regular people and they assume she’s an idiot. But she’s not. She’s smart and she’s brave and she’s sneaky. People assume that Olivia was brought back intentionally, but I’ve always wondered…”

“You think maybe she escaped?”

She shrugs and looks back across the hills.

“Maybe,” she says, quietly. “Maybe he never meant to let her go.”

I look away, down toward town. Quartz Creek lies in a low valley, and I can follow the line of Main Street from here. I’m on the opposite side of town from Max’s farm, the woods beyond it, Susan’s cabin.

“You two ever been to visit Susan McKinney?”

Tam snorts and Nicole looks down at her shoes.

“So, that’s a ‘yes,’” I say.

Nicole nods.

“What’d she tell you?”

Nicole groans and says, “She told me to be brave.”

“Be brave?” I ask.

She nods.

“Just generally or…?”

“She just said to be brave.”

“Okay. What about you, Tam?”

“Shit,” Tam says, his voice edgier now. “My mom’s wasted enough time up at that witch’s house. I don’t need to clean some old lady’s cabin to know I’ve got to get my ass out of this town.”

“I get that,” I say.

“Oh yeah?” Tam cocks a dubious eyebrow at me.

“Yeah,” I say.

“I looked you up, you know,” Tam says. “You were in the military, right?”

“Yeah, Air Force.”

“You recommend it?”

“Not particularly.”

He laughs, and I say, “But if you’re set on it, let me know. I might be able to get you a leg up with recruiting.”

He looks at me for a good long while and then nods his head once and looks away, toward the horizon. I let out a breath and think about Tam, so much like I was at that age only better-looking and cooler and more grown-up, and I think about the military and what it did for me, to me.

I follow his gaze and see a tall, brown-brick building off in the distance.

“What is that?” I ask, pointing.

“That’s the old factory,” Tam says.

“Yeah,” Nicole says. “DrakeCo. Everyone used to work there when we were little.”

“Okay,” I say. “It’s not being used for anything now?”

Tam frowns, bites his bottom lip. Nicole looks up at him, her eyebrows raised as if prompting him to come clean about something.

“What is it?” I ask.

“My dad,” Tam says.

“What about him?”

“Couple guys at school,” Nicole says when Tam fails to answer. “They saw him over there the other day. Him and Tam’s uncle.”

“Dwight?” I ask. “Dwight Hoyle?”

Tam nods.

“I thought the building was closed.”

“It is,” Tam says. “It’s…”

“Haunted,” Nicole says. “People say it’s haunted. But nobody goes there unless…”

“Unless they’re doing something they shouldn’t be doing. Kids don’t even park there. Not anymore. It’s like only the hard-core tweakers go.”

“And your dad’s going?”

Tam shrugs.

Nicole pulls a buzzing phone out of her back pocket and checks it.

“Hey,” she says. “We need to head back. I can’t be late for calc again.”

“Yeah,” Tam says. “Okay.”

“I hope those help,” Nicole says, looking toward the drawings in my hand. They’re on old paper, faded and fragile, but they feel impossibly heavy in my grasp. I look at these kids and I feel that same heaviness. A mix of fear and worry and a gnawing, sick feeling.

Nicole starts around to the driver side of the car but pauses when I ask, “Whose number did you call me from?”

“Mine,” Tam says. “Nicole’s mom watches her phone like a hawk.”

“Okay. Well, call me again if you think of anything else.”

“Okay,” Tam says, but he almost seems like he’s not listening.

“You two aren’t going to go investigating, right?”

They glance at each other.

“Please don’t,” I say. “Please just call me. Call me, okay? Anything comes up, call me.”

Nicole looks at Tam, who finally says, “Okay.”

They get in the car and drive away. I stay there a while longer, looking down at the papers, the endless spirals all joined together, hundreds of them, filling every page.

“What did you see?” I ask the spirals and the mind that they came from, the young woman who does not speak but whose head might hold the key to all of this. “Where were you taken?”

I lean against Honey and stare at the spirals until I’m dizzy with their spinning color.

I close my eyes, then look again at the waving horizon and the DrakeCo Toy Factory on the distant hilltop.

I wonder whether Tommy and Dwight Hoyle are there now.

What they might be up to in an abandoned factory that even local teenagers shy away from.

“Seems like something worth checking out,” I mutter. I climb back behind the wheel and put Honey in gear.