Page 31 of The Witch’s Orchard

TWENTY-FIVE

L ATER, TWO MOSTLY EMPTY boxes of pizza lie conquered on the coffee table in front of us. AJ sips a beer while he consolidates the leftovers into a single box.

“What do you think of this?” I ask, holding up one of the papers Nicole gave me.

He considers the picture in my hand. I’ve just found them, folded up in my bag, not having looked at them since I left Starling Point.

He shuts the empty boxes and licks some orange grease from his thumb.

“Where’d that come from?” he asks.

“An interested party. Tell me what you see.”

“Is this like an inkblot test?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Just like that.”

“Spirals. Hmm. They’re like… seashells.”

“Huh,” I say.

“Seashells, or maybe snail shells. That’s what it makes me think of.”

AJ’s out of uniform now, wearing a pair of sweatpants and a plain beige T-shirt of mine.

Most of my loungewear is men’s and oversized, but I get the feeling AJ wouldn’t be bothered by a pair of cute terry cloth shorts either, long as he gets out of his brown polyester.

His big body is solid but not stiff as he leans forward on his knees and studies the picture.

“Where’d it really come from?”

“Olivia Jacobs. She drew them after she was brought back and, according to her sister, she’s been drawing them ever since.”

“All crayon.”

“Yeah. And she hides them from her mom.”

“Interesting.”

“I mean, she was questioned when she was brought back, right?”

“As far as anyone could question her, yeah. But they didn’t get anything from her.”

“She was still so little,” I say. “How much of what happened would she have even understood, let alone been able to convey to a bunch of people in uniforms?”

He shrugs and stands and takes the pizza stuff into the kitchen.

Folds the empty boxes in half and slides them into the trash, puts the box of leftovers in the fridge.

He comes back and opens a worn backpack that he probably carried around at college and pulls out a laptop.

From a little pocket, he takes out a USB drive and plugs it in.

“The files?” I ask, as he opens the folder on the drive and reveals tons of scanned documents and photos.

“Yeah,” he says. “Witness statements, newspaper articles, photos, police reports. And the stuff I could find from the FBI, too. Reports they wrote up, photographs they took. Some forensics.”

“Did you have time to look at any of it?”

“Well, no, not really. I scanned some of the initial reports and glanced at a few pictures. It’s mostly just the applehead dolls, though.

Besides that, there wasn’t much of anything to take a picture of.

Just empty places where those girls had been.

The park and church were too heavily trafficked to get clean prints of any kind and no other evidence was found on the scene.

There were no prints besides the Andrewses’ and a few other family members and guests at the Andrews place. ”

He pulls the photos up and we look through them. The empty swing set. The empty park grounds. The empty living room.

We look through the police reports.

The sun is long gone now, and the crows are beginning to scream.

“This is a weird place,” I say with a dark, breathy laugh.

AJ shrugs.

“Did you think about going anywhere else after college?” I ask.

“Nah,” he says. “I like it here. I came back every weekend even when I was in school.”

“You like being a cop?”

He nods. We sit together for a little while and think about our sameness, our differentness, as we listen to the crows.

Eventually I say, “I need to refresh my brain on all of this. It’s getting too twisted up in my head. So… let me lay it out for you. Pretend you’ve never heard any of this before.”

“Sure,” he says. “Tabula rasa.”

I go to the fridge and pour two glasses of milk, bring them back, get situated.

I take a long drink, then put the milk on the table, lean my head back against the couch, and close my eyes.

“Jessica Hoyle,” I say. “Taken in May. Olivia Jacobs, taken in July, brought back two weeks later. Molly Andrews, taken just after, early August. The kidnapper must’ve been local, right?”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because the kidnappings took place over three months, with awareness and paranoia ramping up all the time. If there’d been a suspicious stranger in town, anywhere near where the girls were taken, people would’ve noticed.”

“Okay.”

“Also, the applehead dolls. Only mountain people know about those dolls. People from Appalachia, so most likely here. A local. But where did he take them?”

AJ shakes his head. No idea.

“What about the clothes?” I ask. “That dress Molly was wearing? Where did it come from?”

AJ clicks around on his laptop, looking at the case file, I assume.

“Hmm. No brand. Looks like it was all custom-tailored, I guess. Special-ordered?”

“Or homemade,” I say. “Like the doll clothes my granny used to make for me when I was little.”

“Hard to imagine you playing with dolls,” AJ says with a smile.

“Only child,” I say. As if that explains it all. As if that tells the story of how I didn’t mother my dolls but befriended them, treated them like siblings. I think about Honey in the driveway and decide to push the topic elsewhere.

“Molly was a replacement,” I say. “She was replacing Olivia. Nicole—Olivia’s big sister—said that everyone believes Olivia was brought back because she was ‘defective,’ but it’s not impossible that Olivia could’ve got away on her own and that afterward she was too difficult to snatch again. Easier to pick a new target.”

“But to take a kid from her own home?” AJ says, his hand on his chin while he rubs his lower lip in thought.

“Are we sure she was taken from her home, though?” I say.

“Yeah,” AJ says. “Of course she was. Max—”

“Was in another room, sitting next to his teacher, banging away on a piano. His mom was out back in the garden. Max said he went outside to play after his piano lesson, so Molly was alone in the house for who knows how long.”

I picture the house on that day. The back dining room where the piano sat.

The little front room where Molly was watching Snow White .

The maze of hallways between them. I can almost hear the clunky playing of Moonlight Sonata drifting through the house.

Picture the front door swinging open, picture the shadow of the person standing there, blocking the sunshine.

“Who might’ve been in the neighborhood that day?” I ask. “You said you live down the lane, right?”

“You caught me,” AJ says with a broad grin. “It was me all along.”

I nudge him with my shoulder, and he laughs.

“Impressive work for a fifteen-year-old,” I say. “What was your alibi?”

“Pretty sure I was running wind sprints until I puked just about every day that summer. I was determined to get a football scholarship and Coach told me I should start early.”

“Okay, I’ll mark you down as improbable.”

He rolls his eyes dramatically and I ask, “How many other houses are down the lane?”

“Six down around me, but more farther on.” He rubs a hand over his stubble, thinking, his gaze traveling up to the ceiling. “The road forks, with one side going up the mountain and another going down into a woodsy holler.”

“Anyone of note?”

“Now that you mention it…” he says.

“Who?”

“The Zieglers. Pastor Bob and Rebecca. They live out a piece in a split-level they built when they moved here.”

“Is it a big house?”

“Big enough for what you’re thinking, yeah,” he says, his eyes scanning the report from the day Molly was taken as he talks. “It’s not a palace or anything, but maybe three thousand square feet? I think Rebecca inherited a bunch of land and money from her father or someone and—oh—”

He stops mid-sentence, and I watch him, hopeful for some big break.

“What is it?” I ask.

“The Zieglers were there that day,” he says, looking up at me.

“Does it say why?”

“No, and I can’t find their statement. I’ll have to look again tomorrow. God, I can’t believe what a mess these files are. All I have is a list of those interviewed concerning Molly’s disappearance. Bob and Rebecca are on the list.”

“Jessica was taken from the church parking lot,” I say. “Olivia was taken from a church picnic.”

“But not Molly,” he says.

“No, but the Andrews family went to First Baptist. And it doesn’t say why they were visiting that day?”

He shakes his head.

“I’ll have to talk to them,” I mutter. I go back to my own thoughts, letting my mind wander, hoping some connection will suddenly spring up, but the only one I can find is fairly weak.

“You know who else goes to First Baptist?” I say.

“About half the town?”

“Deena Drake. She plays piano there. She said she gave a statement on the day of Molly’s disappearance, and she was at the picnic and the church the day Jessica was taken. Is there anything from her on that day?”

He flicks through until he finds an old scan of a handwritten list.

“It’s not a lot to go on. A list of people in attendance when Jessica went missing, and all the cars they went through—make and model—with the names crossed off once they were searched. Deena’s car is on here, that old Range Rover she drives. It’s the only one in town, pretty distinctive.”

“Who checked it?” I ask.

“Donald Kerridge,” he says. “The sheriff. That’s his initials by the car’s check. At the bottom is a note about how they called in Fish and Wildlife to help look in the woods.”

“Did you know him?”

“Who?”

“Sheriff Kerridge.”

“No, not really. I remember him because I was a teenager at the time and teenage boys tend to harbor a healthy fear of law enforcement, but my memory is that everyone respected him. Loved him, even.”

“That’s what Susan McKinney said,” I tell him. “Apparently they were pretty close.”

We sit in silence for a while as he goes back to the file.

“There was a plumber here that day too,” he says eventually. “The day Molly was taken. There’s a note scanned in here from the FBI with the business card stapled to it obstructing the name on the paperwork.”

I remember what Deena had said about talking to a plumber on her way out.

“Dwight Hoyle,” I say. And I relay what Mandy had told me. That he’d been sent there to fix a pipe and that he had to give a statement about what he saw that day.

I put my hands to my face and recall what I’d seen only hours before. Dwight Hoyle’s half-melted face. His wife screaming. The flames and black smoke engulfing me.

“Annie—”

I shake my head, my hands still mashed into my cheeks.

“I tried to talk to them. I went to their house the first day I was here. I’d hoped to get him to tell me anything he hadn’t mentioned to the police, but now we don’t even have his damn statement. God… I was at their house. ”

“I know. I’m sorry—”

“It’s not your fault. It’s just this whole case is like one big knot. Normally, I don’t mind taking my time to untangle things, but with Jessica still missing and Molly dead, I’m… I’m at a loss. I’m out of my depth, AJ.”

I rub my eyes. They’re gritty with lack of sleep, and I wince at the sensation of sand rolling over my eyeballs.

“Annie—” AJ says softly, squeezing my shoulder. “You’re doing everything you can.”

I let out a long breath, and some of the tension drops away.

His hand runs up to the back of my neck and I sigh as the side of his thumb caresses the base of my scalp. “You can’t solve this case in one night.”

I grumble.

“Not even with help from an expert sheriff’s deputy like myself.”

I grumble some more but I’m smiling now.

I turn toward him and lean into him like a cat, rest my head against his warm palm.

“Time for bed,” AJ says.

“Would you like to come?” I ask him.

“Oh yes.”