Page 45 of The Witch’s Orchard

THIRTY-SEVEN

I T’S JUST SHERIFF JACOBS and me and an EMT back in Crow Caw Cabin on Max’s farm.

This is the same EMT who worked on my leg at the factory.

She’s opening up a kit of medical supplies.

She also found and made coffee and put a blanket around me, wrapped it tight, just as Susan had only a couple of hours before.

I didn’t think that was strictly part of the EMT service, but who was I to argue?

“You couldn’t see anyone?” Sheriff Jacobs asks.

“No,” I say. “I couldn’t see anyone.”

All of his deputies had paused their search for Lucy to look for my shooter, and I feel guilty for having taken up their time, in spite of the fact that someone was out there trying to kill me.

Now, apparently safe, I’m sitting on the cabin’s little couch, staring at the woodblock print over the fireplace, watching the ink black crows as if they might fly away.

Jacobs is talking but it’s a while before I understand what’s going on. I’m still in shock, the EMT has said. My brain is still lagging. Despite Susan’s tea, I still feel sluggish and worn and my thoughts are swirling in a fog. The EMT is taking my temperature, my blood pressure.

“—found these shell casings up on a deer stand.”

Jacobs holds up a baggie of rifle brass and then adds, “Of course, it could be a hunter’s.”

“Prints?” I ask.

“We’ll see. But doesn’t look like it. Brass smells fresh, though. Doubt they’ve been up there long.”

“Hon, you’re running a fever,” the EMT says.

“The scrape on your shin is healing pretty good and I’ve got butterflies on this new one here.

Any deeper and I’d have made you go to the hospital for big-girl stitches.

Lord have mercy, though, that cough of yours is sounding—in my medical opinion—gross.

You sure you don’t want to go in for a chest X-ray? ”

“I’m sure,” I say. “I don’t have time.”

She shakes her head.

“Were you wearing a high-visibility vest?” Jacobs asks.

“It wasn’t some old coot mistaking me for a deer,” I say. “They shot the bank right over my head and then followed me down the gorge. They could see me just fine.”

“I told you, you should’ve left town,” Jacobs says.

“I have a job to do.”

“Well, so do I,” he says. “And I can’t do it if I’m spending my whole morning trying to keep your ass out of the morgue.”

I can tell I’m getting pulled into a staring contest with Jacobs and I feel, suddenly, what years of searching for the answers I’ve been searching for can do to a person.

What they’ve done to him. I think about the picture I saw of him only ten years ago, when he was just a deputy, just an uncle, just a man without the whole weight of Quartz Creek on his shoulders.

I look at his hollow cheeks and dark circles and I realize I saw the very same thing this morning in the mirror.

The EMT rips open my blood pressure cuff with a loud scccrriicchh.

“You sure I can’t give you a ride to the hospital?” the EMT says.

“I’m sure.”

“Well, get some of Susan McKinney’s cough tincture,” she says. “Some elderberry wine wouldn’t hurt either. And lots of rest.”

“Sure,” I say.

“I mean it,” she says.

“Okay,” I say.

She shakes her head again, then snaps up her EMT kit and leaves.

Once she’s gone, Sheriff Jacobs takes a seat in the chair nearest the door. His arms are wiry and taut and covered in freckles. I’d not noticed the freckles before, and I feel strangely amused by them now. I really do need a nap.

“Are the FBI agents coming?” I ask, looking out the window past his head.

“They should be here in a couple hours. Takes a while over the mountain roads.”

I nod.

“You could’ve been killed,” he says.

I nod.

“And you’re just going to keep at it, aren’t you?”

I meet his eyes.

“Yes.”

Jacobs rasps his hands together, sighs, looks at the floor. We sit like this for a while, with me watching him and him watching the floor.

“It’s all happening again,” he says, echoing the words I’ve heard over and over since Lucy was kidnapped. I wait for him to continue, too exhausted to ask questions.

“The year those girls were taken,” he says eventually. “A lot of rumors flew around. You know how many fights I broke up? How many people—lifelong friends—started pointing fingers at each other? It was ugly. An ugly you hate to see.”

He sucks in another big breath like this story is using up all his oxygen and it’s the only way he can keep going.

“When Olivia was taken, the FBI sent a team. Big-city types. They looked around here—looked at us—like we were scum. Like we weren’t nothing to them.

Just a waste of their time. They found out Kathleen worked at the hospital and they started questioning her about methamphetamines, opiates.

Whether she was part of some racket. Whether she and Arnold were in over their heads to some drug runner. Whether they themselves were users.”

Jacobs clicks his tongue against his teeth, shakes his head.

“And I didn’t even know how to tell the FBI to stop.

I’d just taken over—in the middle of everything—because the sheriff before me, Donald Kerridge, had a heart attack and died after Olivia went missing.

I was just doing the best I could, trying to handle everything at once, and the FBI walked all over me.

There was nothing I could do about it. I’d never wanted to be sheriff. I was happy as I was.”

I watch him as he struggles with these admissions, this airing of grief and grievances, and stay silent.

“They went out and took one look at the Hoyles—their home, Tommy’s record, Mandy’s bruises—and decided Tommy must be involved somehow.

They pulled up Dwight’s and Elaine’s rap sheets and decided they were probably in on it.

They were working up some hillbilly mafia tale like you wouldn’t believe.

And the whole time, these little girls are gone who knows where.

The main one. The team leader? Agent Rachel James.

She had her eye on some big bust. Wanted to make a name for herself.

They brought dogs. They walked the church grounds and the picnic area.

They questioned everyone’s families. Dug out any dirt they could find.

And then, one night, Olivia turns up right there on Kathleen and Arnold’s back porch. Safe and sound.”

My shock is starting to wear off, I realize. My palms are sweating. My heart is thudding. I’m beginning to feel alive again.

“God, it was such a relief. Such a relief to have her back. But…”

Jacobs goes on looking at the floorboards and not at me. His voice has been getting thinner, and he clears his throat like the problem is just allergies and not his heart swelling up with feeling.

“Olivia’s barely been home half an hour when Agent James corners her.

Rushes the whole family to the station for evidence collection.

Separates them. Kathleen and Arnold are so relieved that Olivia’s back, so stunned by everything moving so fast, that they don’t even think to question it.

They just obey Agent James. Olivia’s the only person who knows who the kidnapper is.

The only person who can say… But she can’t say. ”

He clears his throat again. Takes another big breath. Keeps going.

“We didn’t know, at the time, exactly what Olivia’s situation was.

We understood that there were developmental delays.

Understood that there were hurdles. But my Aunt Betty had been delayed.

And she ended up living a pretty normal life, just slow to start.

Always quiet. What’s the word they say now?

‘Introverted.’ Different. But she carved out a life for herself.

At the time, I don’t think it occurred to us that Olivia—just turned five years old—would never speak.

Would never communicate like other children. ”

“What happened?”

He shrugs.

“I wasn’t there. I was out on a call across town.

The place still had to be policed. I was breaking up a fight between Tommy Hoyle and another man after the man accused Tommy of taking the girls for a kidnapping ransom scheme, saying Tommy’s donation campaign was all a big hoax.

And if his little girl was really gone, why was he sitting in a bar drinking and not out looking for her every minute of every day?

Tommy was flaming mad. Broke the other guy’s nose, laid him out.

I was putting Tommy in the back of the cruiser when the call came in that Olivia had been returned and she was with Agent James. ”

“So you drove back across town.”

He nods.

“I walked in. James had Olivia in the interview room in the station. There were pictures of all the suspects all over the floor, like they’d been flung off the desk.

Agent James was standing there seething.

Olivia was crouched on the floor, screaming.

Screaming like she was trapped in a nightmare.

Like nothing you’ve ever heard. She was terrified. ”

“Of her kidnapper?”

“I’m sure. But that’s not all. There was a fresh red mark across her face. Apparently, James got so frustrated by Olivia’s noncooperation that she slapped her.”

“Oh.”

“Slapping the dickens out of a little girl? A little girl who’s been through that much? Can you imagine?”

“No,” I say. “It’s inexcusable.”

“Yeah,” he says, finally looking at me. “I’ve never come so close to hitting a woman.

I picked Olivia up. She was fighting me.

Punching me with her fists. Screaming. We took her to the hospital.

They sedated her. Kathleen didn’t leave her side.

She brought Nicole into the room, and they sat there with Olivia night and day.

Every time Olivia came to, she screamed like someone was gonna kill her. It was horrible.”

“I’m sorry,” I say.