Page 43 of The Witch’s Orchard

THIRTY-FIVE

I ’M SITTING ON MY granny’s porch. It is autumn and the air smells like sweet rot.

“Did you see her?” my granny’s voice asks.

I am dreaming.

“Who?” I ask. I’m still looking straight ahead. Sitting on the porch, I’m waiting. For my father? My mother? Someone. My face is propped on the heels of my hands and my elbows dig into my thighs. I am small. Bony. Everyone has always thought I am younger than I am. Little.

“The woman,” my granny says. “The witch.”

“I saw a witch,” I tell her.

There is a flapping sound and a crow lands in the dirt in front of my feet. I hold out my hand to it. It drops an apple core into my palm. The flesh is wet and brown. What’s left of the skin is a green so bright it hurts my eyes.

“Those seeds are toxic,” my granny says.

I pull the apple closer to my face, close enough now that I can smell the way rot is taking it, the way it takes us all. Inside the core, there are two black seeds.

“Every apple—” my granny says. And her voice is a crow’s voice. It rustles through the air behind me, and I shiver to hear it.

“Every apple has a little poison in it.”

I wake up.

Groggy, I glance at the window. Dawn is breaking.

I scrunch the sheets in my fists, anxious to feel something tactile and real. Something to tell me that, finally, I am awake. Alive. Present.

I breathe, and my breathing comes in grating rasps, and I try, briefly, to deny to myself that I’m sick, but I feel feverish. Chilled and hot. Shaky.

I sit up and the file full of papers slides off my chest and tumbles onto the floor. I’d fallen asleep reading ten-year-old witness statements, and now I blink at what seems impossibly small text.

“God,” I mutter. “What day is it?”

I look at the phone on the nightstand, find myself wishing it would buzz. Wishing to hear Leo’s familiar deep voice while he laughs and drinks and exists—so easily—in the world in which I struggle.

When the phone does vibrate, my heart lurches. But it isn’t Leo. Tina’s picture and number show up on the screen instead.

I answer with a question: “What are you doing up, Tina?”

“Figure the ass crack of dawn is just about the only time to catch you.”

“Mmhmm,” I mumble. My voice rustles in my chest. I suppress a cough.

“I mean, rest of the time you’re running all over hell and half of Georgia blowing up meth labs, finding dead girls. Good night, Annie, you know that town you’re in is all over the news?”

“I’m not surprised,” I say.

“And another little girl is missing?”

“Yes,” I say.

I put her on speaker, sit up, and cough as I tug my shoes on.

“You sound like hell. I’m telling you that country air isn’t good for you. You need to bring Honey back home. It’s safer here.”

I snort, and the snort turns into a cough.

“Seriously,” Tina says when the coughing dies down. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Just working. I don’t even know if I’ll be able to stick around. The FBI is rolling in.”

“Well, it’s probably for the best,” she says. “But until they boot you out of there, will you be careful?”

“Of course,” I say. “I’m always careful.”

“Annie, sweetheart, you’ve got a lot of excellent qualities, but ‘careful’ cannot be named among them. Watch your ass.”

“Okay,” I say.

“And Honey’s.”

“Okay.”

“Bring her back safe.”

I finally manage to get off the phone and stumble into the bathroom.

I try to remember what day it is, and it takes longer than it should to figure out that this is Saturday.

I’ve been here since Sunday night. Almost a week, which is all I promised Max.

And yet, in spite of how awful I feel, and the fact that the FBI are on their way, and that all I’ve managed to do so far is probably make things worse, I know I can’t and won’t stop looking until someone makes me.

Washing my hands, I hazard a glance at my reflection, and grimace at the sight.

I look like nine miles of bad road, but I force myself back into the bedroom, where I pull on leggings and a T-shirt and a threadbare Cincinnati Reds sweatshirt.

I clip on my holster and my gun and stutter-step out the door.

There is an almost imperceptible rain. It is almost only fog. Almost only water suspended in the air. And yet, when I run, it splatters against my cheeks and slides down, over my jaw, onto my neck, and into my clothes.

I ignore the rain, or try to ignore the rain, and think.

Ten years ago, someone took Jessica Hoyle from a church playground while her mother slept in the car not fifteen feet away.

Weeks later, someone took Olivia Jacobs from a picnic in the park while her mother was distracted by Olivia’s big sister.

Days later, they brought her back.

Weeks later, someone took Molly Andrews from her house in broad daylight.

Five days ago, after I arrived in Quartz Creek and began asking ques tions, someone brought Molly back. She had been strangled with a length of soft fabric and left for the crows wearing a handmade red velvet dress, her insides damaged by some unknown catalyst.

Two days ago, someone took Lucy Evers from a Fall Festival at her grandparents’ church while her mother ran a cakewalk booth.

In every instance, an applehead doll was left behind.

I think of my granny’s words in my dream.

Every apple has a little poison in it.

I listen to the sound of my feet pitter-patter over the trail and grass and mud.

Pit-pat. Pit-pat. Pit-pat.

So much of investigating is just walking around in the dark, shaking trees, hoping you don’t get plonked in the head by whatever falls out. I wonder, as I run and my breath comes out in rasping gasps, whether I’ve shaken enough trees. Whether I’ve shaken the right ones.

Pit-pat. Pit-pat.

And I wonder whether I got Molly killed. And I think I must have. And I hope I’m not just out here spinning my wheels and—

BANG!

“Shit!” I hiss, as a shot whizzes past me. There’s a sudden, scalding heat in my side.

It didn’t just go by me. I’m hit.

I’m on the edge of the gorge and I drop to my butt and go skidding down the bank, in the mud.

BANG! BANG!

The shots zip over my head. One chunks into the bank and sends mud and hard-packed dirt flying.

It’s a high-caliber hunting rifle being shot from some distance.

Even if I could stand still long enough to spot the shooter, my two-and-three-quarter-inch barrel isn’t going to do a thing against it.

I scramble to my feet and sprint farther into the gorge, following the line of the creek.

I scan the mountainside as I run but see no sign of the shooter within the fall trees.

It’s all just brown and red and gold sheathed in silver fog.

BANG!

This one’s far over my head, and I think the shooter’s lost me. Still, I bound over the creek and up the opposite bank and into the circle of stones, holding my side with my hand as I go.

BANG!

The noise rattles around me in a weird, distorted way. Crows fly up from the forest and flap, calling and crying and screaming into the sky.

I cough, and my cough echoes and I know I have to move. The stones might provide some level of cover, but the echoing amplification of the circle will only give away my position.

I dart out of the circle and, quiet as I can, I run up the mountainside, following the trail to Susan McKinney’s cabin. If she’s the one behind everything, I guess I’m screwed, but out in the open, I’m as good as dead.