Page 32 of The Witch’s Orchard
TWENTY-SIX
T HE NEXT MORNING, I’M already in the kitchen, drinking a glass of water, when Leo calls a little before dawn. I pick up the phone before it has much time to buzz.
“Hey, Leo,” I say softly.
“What’s with the whisper—you got someone over?” he asks, chuckling in that deep, velvety way he has. “You manage to find the one person in that hick town worth a good lay?”
I snort.
“I’m glad you have such a high opinion of my standards.”
“Oh, I know you have high standards,” he says. I hear a train station speaker in the background rattling off information in Japanese. “Listen, I’m about to have to go. Everything okay?”
“Yeah,” I say. “You?”
“Always. I got that information for you. Who says Army intelligence is an oxymoron?”
“All right, spill.” I get a pen and my notebook ready.
“There’s no record of a Bob Ziegler matching your man, but there is a Brian Robert Ziegler the third.”
“The third, huh?”
“Yeah, but don’t be getting ideas about him having airs.
He’s a nobody. That was part of his problem, actually.
He hooked up with some chick he met at a hippie party back in ’69.
He was eighteen. She was fourteen. They were stoned.
Bottom line, they got caught. And her daddy—some bigwig councilman—had him arrested.
Ol’ Bob got railroaded. The judge said he could go on to jail and serve down at the state pen or… ”
“Or join up with Uncle Sam and wage war on Charlie?”
“Bingo.”
“So he joined the Army to avoid a stat rape charge,” I say, writing down what I can. “Then, while he was in there, he found Jesus or whatever and became a preacher?”
“Sounds like.”
The light, bright female voice chimes out more information over the speakers. It’s followed by a jazzy jingle and then I hear the clicka-whoosh of a train pulling into the station.
“That’s me.”
“Okay,” I say. “Thanks.”
“I’ll be back stateside soon,” he says.
“Okay.”
“When you get done, I’ll take you out for a drink.”
“I think I’m gonna need one.”
“Thought you might.”
We hang up. I finish my water, stretch out, inspect the gauze on my shin.
“You run every morning?”
I look up and see AJ standing in the doorway, his eyes sleepy and a soft smile on his mouth. It’s almost enough to make a woman want to go back to bed.
“Pretty much,” I say. “When I’m away from home. It’s more practical.”
“More practical than what?”
“Hauling around a heavy bag. I live about two doors away from my aunt Tina’s garage and she lets me keep my gym stuff there, including the bag I work.”
“Boxing?”
“Muay Thai. I picked it up.”
He scratches his bare chest as he yawns, looks at the clock above the stove. I tell him the news about Bob Ziegler’s history and AJ lets out a whistle, shakes his head.
“Not what you want to find out about the shepherd of your faith.”
“No,” I say. “But it was a long time ago.”
“You gonna talk to him about it?”
“Yeah, I’m going to go by first thing this morning.”
“I’d better start getting ready for work,” he says.
I’m still watching him scratch his chest when he smiles at me again and says, “Something on your mind?”
“Just thinking there are other ways to get a workout in besides running.”
He chuckles, his big shoulders bouncing, says, “Don’t even have to leave the house.”
“That’s right,” I say. I kick off my shoes.
An hour later I’m in the shower and AJ’s gone.
I give my hair a quick blow-dry and then slide it up into a ponytail, still damp.
I find a clean pair of jeans and look them over with vague distaste, mourning the pair I lost yesterday.
I eat some of Shiloh’s leftover pastries and some bacon that AJ left for me and drink two cups of coffee.
Then I lace up my boots and head out the door.
I drive to First Baptist but only Rebecca is there. I interrupt as she and a flock of ladies who look like her fill grab bags for the coming festivities.
“Bob is visiting a parishioner of ours,” she says, pulling me aside. “In the hospital.”
“I’ll come back later,” I tell her. “I need to talk to him about something.”
She nods and goes back to bag stuffing.
Back in the parking lot, I run Honey’s heater and look through the files AJ brought on my phone. I find the report from the day of Molly’s disappearance and, while the witness statements are missing, there is a record of Dwight Hoyle’s being there, along with the name of his employer.
“Mack’s Pipe and Plumbing…” I mutter. “Maybe Dwight told this guy something.” And I find the address and put Honey in gear.
Mack’s Pipe and Plumbing is housed in an old brick building on the backside of Main Street. When I go in, there’s an old man sitting behind a desk doing a crossword puzzle in a book. He wears Coke bottle glasses and his black hair has gone mostly white and mostly away.
I tell him who I am, what I’m doing there. He tells me that he is, in fact, the eponymous Mack.
“Heard about you,” he says.
“What’d you hear?”
“That you’re looking into those missing little girls.”
“That’s right.”
“And that you found Molly Andrews dead in a ditch after all these years.”
“Not a ditch.”
He shrugs.
“I’d like to ask you a few questions,” I say.
“That’s fine, but I’ve got to get to a call at ten.”
I look at my phone.
“It’s ten after ten.”
He shrugs.
“You had a call at the Andrews house on the day Molly was kidnapped.”
“Sort of.”
“What do you mean, sort of?”
“Well, I had a call. But I couldn’t go. There was a backup at the high school—you should’ve seen the turds. Anyway, no, I couldn’t go. They were having a problem with the drain in an old outbuilding, I believe. I figured it probably just needed to be snaked.”
“Pretty good memory,” I say.
He taps a thick first finger to his temple. “It’s like a vault, I tell you. Wanna know the secret?”
“Crosswords?”
“Damn,” he says, and whistles through his teeth. “You really are a big-city PI, huh?”
“That’s right. So you sent Dwight Hoyle,” I say. “Is that correct?”
“Lord, they should put you on TV,” Mack says, standing and putting things in his pockets, closing his toolbox.
“Anyhow, that’s right. The very same Dwight Hoyle died in that explosion yesterday.
Jesus Christ, you know I could hear it from here?
’Course, I have a top-of-the-line aid.” He taps the huge chunk of plastic in his ear.
“Turns up and down, you know. Amazing. I ordered it online.”
He leads me back to the front of the shop and out onto the sidewalk.
“He made a statement with the cops,” I tell him. “But it seems no one can find it. Do you have any idea what he said? Did he ever talk to you about it?”
“Well, not much,” he says. “He said something about a lady being there.”
“A lady—you mean Deena Drake? The piano teacher, the woman who married the factory owner?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t recall. But I don’t think it was her. I thought it was someone else. Someone he saw out in the field. That’s what he told me. Said it nearly scared him half to death.”
“Why?”
“Said he thought she was a scarecrow at first,” he says, his voice low.
“A scarecrow? Why?”
“Don’t know. He was pretty shook up. The cops were on him, and he and Elaine were nervous as all get-out. They left town right after.”
He rattles the handle of the shop door to make sure it’s locked, then turns to face me.
“You want my opinion,” he says. “It wasn’t no ordinary human.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like a haint, weren’t they? How does one person even do what they did? Move like they were never there and leaving a doll behind? I think it was something supernatural, a spirit or a demon or…”
He stares at me, eyes pinched to slits.
“A witch,” I say.
He winks, taps the side of his nose with a gnarled first finger.
“Now you’re thinking right. Some kind of satanic ritual.”
“Satanic ritual?”
“Three little girls go missing except one’s brought back, probably ’cause she’s touched in the head—you can’t go making satanic offerings with damaged goods, can you? So anyway, two little girls go missing and then one’s found—all of ten years later—down in that ditch.”
“Not a ditch.”
“Well, it’s a ravine, ain’t it? And what’s a ravine but a big ditch carved out by water? Anyway, that stone circle down there’s probably cursed. That’s what the stories say.”
“You mean about the witch and the crows?”
“That’s right. She killed her very own daughters.”
“What?”
“Yeah. The old witch. She killed her own daughters because they could sing prettier than her. She turned them into songbirds and then she ate them and took their voices and their youth.”
“What?”
“You know, I could tell you where I got this hearing aid.”
I narrow my eyes at him, and he laughs. It’s a rolling cackle, wet and self-satisfied.
When he’s done, I ask, “So what happened? This isn’t the version of the story that I heard.”
He gives me a look like he’s about to take pity on me since I’m the village idiot and then graciously proceeds with the story.
“The witch had two daughters who were prettier than her and could sing better than her. She climbed up on this powerful big horse she had and rode to the stone circle and asked the Devil for power over them and every year he gave it to her. But, eventually, he turned his eyes on the daughters. Gave them power instead.”
He looks down at the open palms of his hands, rough and ragged, and continues.
“Oh, powerful jealous she got. So jealous she couldn’t hardly stand it.
So, one night, she killed and ate them up and in so doing took all their gifts.
Now she had their youth and their beauty and their singing voices.
She married a woodcutter who was deep in love with her, but one night, when he raised the candle up to look at his beautiful wife, he saw her for what she was. ”
“Okay.”