Page 46 of The Witch’s Orchard

“You know, I spanked both my sons,” Jacobs says.

“Till their butts were bright red, sometimes. Little hellions they were. But they were regular little boys. Getting into trouble half the time just to get a rise out of me. But Olivia? How could she understand something like that? Being taken, who knows where, by… who? And then she’s brought back and she doesn’t get half an hour in her mama’s arms before she’s pulled away and questioned like she’s a suspect ? ”

He bites his lips together until the skin around his mouth goes white.

And then he says, “In the hospital, they found bruises all over her. Scrapes, too. She’d been hurt by whoever it was that took her.

A social worker came that night. Too late to keep Agent James off of her, but she did a good job afterward.

Helped Olivia transition back to regular life.

After that, I never managed to question her.

I tried, Kathleen tried. Every time, she fell into screaming. Or she would draw these spirals.”

“I’ve seen them.”

He gives me a look of surprise, like he wants to ask me how I saw the drawings, then decides he doesn’t want to know, shakes his head.

I say, “This is why you didn’t want me around, why you didn’t want me talking to Olivia.”

He nods.

“What happened after that? With Agent James?”

“I called the FBI field office, reported her. She was gone the next day. Replaced by someone else. Agent Sanchez. Seemed keen but young. Very young. For a couple weeks, it seemed like everything was just frozen. Jessica Hoyle was still missing but there were no new leads. No new evidence.”

“And then Molly was taken,” I say.

“Yes.”

I sigh. My chest rasps. My side aches. My leg throbs. I look down at my hands. My palms are still shiny with sweat.

“Olivia came here,” I tell him. “Just last night.”

I watch as surprise and anger mix on his face.

“Nicole brought her. I didn’t ask her to. But she wanted to help. They both did.”

His mouth drops open.

“It’s because of Lucy,” I say. “Olivia was willing to try to work with me because Lucy’s been taken, and I think enough time has passed that she felt like she could handle it.”

“Could she?”

“For a little while. Sheriff, do you know the story of the Quartz Creek Witch?”

“Of course.”

“Well, so does Olivia. And when I asked her about it, she absolutely lost it. She was terrified.”

“It’s just an old story,” he says.

“Maybe not,” I say. “Maybe not to Olivia.”

“What do you mean?”

“Olivia believes it. She’s terrified of it. So who, in this town—because it must be someone in this town—could be the witch she’s remembering?”

He shakes his head.

“Susan McKinney,” I say, pushing into deep waters, “was taken in for questioning at the time. Someone must have thought there was something behind the witch story.”

“It was the applehead dolls.”

“So? My own granny made applehead dolls,” I say. “It must have been the same around here? So, what else was it? She told me there’d been an anonymous tip.”

He looks away from me and then back and says, “There was. It was from a burner phone so we never knew who the call came from. It happened right after Molly was taken. They said Susan was doing some kind of old-timey ritual with the girls. Taking them and sacrificing them in the woods. They said Sheriff Kerridge had been covering up for her.”

“Why would you believe that?”

“Well, I’m not saying I did. But I had to look into it. At that point? We couldn’t ignore anything. We couldn’t afford to. And Susan and Donald Kerridge had always been close. They grew up together. Their mamas were best friends, and the two of them were thick as thieves. Everyone knew it.”

“But you don’t know who made the call?”

“No,” he says. “It came into the dispatch. It sounded like a man’s voice, but it was raspy. We couldn’t be sure.”

“But you investigated Susan.”

“Yes.”

“And found nothing?”

He nods.

“What about Rebecca Ziegler? Deena Drake?”

“I have a hard time picturing Rebecca stealing little girls.”

“She was present at every single kidnapping,” I say.

“True but—”

“I think you’re blind to this community, Sheriff. Blind to what’s happening under your nose.”

Red blotches form on his cheeks, but he doesn’t deny it.

“What about Deena Drake?” I ask. “She was there too. Every single time. The church, the picnic, the Andrewses’ house.”

But even as I say it, I struggle to believe it. I’d been in her house. Gone through her things. I’d found nothing.

“Sheriff Kerridge checked her car the day Jessica was taken,” Jacobs says. “Same as he checked everyone else. And she had an alibi for the day Molly was taken. Dwight Hoyle—”

“Died in a meth lab fire three days ago,” I say.

“And whose fault is that?” he throws back.

“But with Lucy gone. If Deena—”

He grimaces and says, “It couldn’t be her.”

“Why not?”

“Because the night of the Fall Festival, the night Lucy was taken? She was with me.”

“Where were you?”

“At my house.”

“Your—”

“My house. My wife and I are separated. It’s not public knowledge but… she’s gone to stay with her mom in Florida for a few weeks and—”

I realize I’m staring at him, and I force myself to blink.

An affair? With Deena Drake? I try to picture them together and realize it’s not so improbable after all.

Deena is the kind of woman who makes loneliness look elegant without being needy.

Tragic without seeming desperate. And him?

I guess I can see the rugged sadness that would have attracted her to him.

“You and Deena are seeing each other,” I say out loud. Just to confirm it.

He nods.

“And you were together that night. The whole night?”

“Until I got the call about Lucy being taken. So, you have to understand, it wasn’t her. It couldn’t be.”

“Great.”

I put my now-empty coffee mug on the table in front of me and massage my temples.

I realize I’ve developed the same tunnel vision as everyone else in this town.

Hyper-focusing on a story about a witch and, consequently, the women most likely to play the part.

My frustration is almost equivalent to my pain, and I find myself wishing the FBI would hurry up and get here. Not that they did much good before.

“You feel like you’re chasing your own tail,” Jacobs says with a softness I’ve not heard from him before, and I can understand even better what Deena must see in him.

I groan and make myself stand. He gets to his feet too, obviously receiving the message that I want to be alone.

“Whoever took those girls is almost certainly still in town,” I say. “They’re almost certainly the person who shot me this morning. And, yes, I may have gotten myself too involved in this thing and I may be mostly chasing my own tail. But I have promises to keep.”

“And miles to go before you sleep,” he says, so softly I almost don’t hear him.

I notice again the dark circles under his eyes, the hollowness of his cheeks.

And I remember that I share them. What had begun as a way for me to make enough money to get my watch out of hock, a way for me to put a nice mountain kid’s mind to rest with the knowledge that he’d done the best he could, a way for me to visit Appalachia without actually going home, had turned into something more. Something deeper.

“Stay out of trouble,” he says, and leaves.

I take my mug to the sink and rinse it out before heading to the bathroom and standing in the shower, breathing the steam until the water starts to go cold.

I get out and wrap a towel around my head, then slap some gauze on my side and my shin.

I dress and slide my gun into the holster and pour myself a tall glass of tepid water and drink it all down.

I find the bottle of whiskey that Greg Andrews brought over and I drink some of that too.

I dress and then go back to bathroom and use the tiny hair dryer Max has provided to take the rest of the damp out of my hair.

I check my gun one more time, pull on my jacket and my bag with a wince, and open my door to find Mandy Hoyle standing on the porch.

She’s sporting a newish black eye, and the purple makes the ice blue of her iris almost glow.

It’s a hard reminder that even though it seems like eons have passed since the last time I saw her, it’s only been a couple of days.

Plenty of time for Tommy to give her a new shiner before borrowing her car on the day the factory exploded.

“Mandy…”

She sniffs and says, “I wanted to give this back to you…”

She opens a big tote bag that’s hanging at her hip, wrestles something out of it, and holds it toward me. It’s Max’s casebook.