Page 4 of The Witch’s Orchard

“But the story goes that the girls did get away. That she was too late—she didn’t catch her daughters. The witch cried and screamed for them, but they never returned. The story says the other crows learned to scream from her and they scream every night in her memory.”

“Oh wow.”

“Yeah,” he says, finally meeting my eyes. He gives me a bittersweet smile. “The Witch of Quartz Creek. It’s an old story. My mom used to tell it to me; she got it from her granny, I think.”

“You put the story in the casebook,” I say.

“That’s right.”

“You think they’re connected?”

He shrugs. “When I was little I did. I thought the witch had stolen my sister.”

“And now?”

He stands, sets his half-full water glass down on the coffee table, wipes the condensation from his hands onto his apron.

“Now, I hired you to find out.”

“Fair enough,” I say.

“Let me know if you need anything,” he says.

We say good night and then he’s gone, back up the gravel path that twists through the hedgerow to the white farmhouse. I finish my beer, open my notebook, and sit down with what Max refers to as his casebook but what is, in reality, a little boy’s scrapbook.

Flipping through, I find a few drawings of witches and crows and a few Xeroxes of local newspaper articles from the time of his sister’s disappearance.

There are drawings of applehead dolls and pictures of them printed off the internet along with printed posts from a couple true crime bloggers.

I look up the blogs and find them now defunct and, while I’m scrolling through old news articles on my phone, it buzzes and my aunt Tina’s face appears on the screen.

I answer the video call and say, “Hey, you get my note?”

“Yeah,” Tina says. “North Carolina? That’s a hell of a haul. I’m worried about my girl.”

“I’m fine.”

“I’m talking about Honey,” she says, rolling her eyes.

Tina runs a classic-car garage in Louisville and her primary concern where I’m involved mostly runs along Honey’s well-being, whether I’m treating her right—whether she needs a tune-up, whether I shouldn’t take some time off and give Honey a vacation and spa treatment in her garage.

Now I can see Tina’s dimly lit kitchen behind her and I know she probably only just got home from work.

“Tina, do you remember about ten years ago when three little girls were kidnapped in the mountains in North Carolina and applehead dolls were left in their place?”

“Sure,” Tina says. She’s heating up a bowl of something in the microwave.

Probably leftovers cooked and saved by her much more domestically inclined partner, Mel.

I watch as she puts her big fists on her hips and waits.

Tina’s a thick woman with extra-large forearms, full-sleeve tattoos, and permanently grease-stained fingernails that suggest she could pull and strip an engine block in under twenty minutes. Which wouldn’t be far off.

She looks from the microwave to the phone and says, “There was something weird about it, right? Wasn’t one of them brought back the next day?”

“Two weeks,” I say. “But yes.”

“I always figured it was some religious nutbar,” Tina says. “You know, serial killer doing satanic rituals. Something like that.”

The microwave dings and Tina uses a pot holder to remove the steaming spaghetti and meatballs.

“Tina, you watch too much X-Files .”

“And I maintain that you watch too little. It’s a modern classic. ’Course, if I had the kind of dreams you—God, what is that noise?”

“On my end?”

“Yeah. It sounds like someone’s dragging a sack of cats down a gravel driveway.”

“Crows,” I say.

“Bullshit.”

“It’s true. It’s a… it’s a whole thing here.”

She pulls a fork from a drawer and a beer from the fridge and sits down at her kitchen counter to eat. She moves the noodles and meat around with a squashy sound and then takes a big bite and says, “All jokes aside, those kids are probably long dead.”

“I know.”

“Then what are you doing down there? There must be people here who’ll pay you to snoop around and be a pain in the ass.”

“Yeah,” I say. “There are. But I couldn’t turn the guy down.”

“That hot, huh?”

“That young,” I say. “He’s just a kid. Looking for his sister. He looks… haunted.”

“Ah,” she says. Like she gets it. Like she remembers helping out another sad, determined, haunted kid.

“Anyway, I said I’d look. So, I’m gonna look.”

“Well, I know that tone. No use arguing with you. But you’re a long way from home so just watch your ass, all right?”

“I will.”

“And Honey’s.”

“I will.”

We hang up and I look back down at Max’s casebook, a picture of his sister I’d left it open to.

In this photo, she and Max are playing at a park.

He’s pushing her on a swing and she is slightly blurred, her hair a brown swoosh behind her, her head cocked back in laughter, her mouth wide open.

Beside them another little boy pushes another little girl on another swing.

It is any old summer day. For this other little boy and girl, a hundred or a thousand of such instances probably lie in a heap of nearly forgotten memories.

But, because Molly was taken soon after this picture was snapped, this memory, this moment, becomes important, immortal.

Her laugh, frozen forever in a hazy blur, is where she ends.

Unless I find her.

“Okay,” I say to myself. “That’s enough.”

I close the scrapbook, wander into the bedroom, curl up in the quilts, and fall asleep to the screaming song of the crows.