Page 47 of The Witch’s Orchard

THIRTY-EIGHT

I STAND ASIDE AND LET her in and, once again, I’m stunned by how slight she is. How fragile-seeming and otherworldly. And I’m reminded of the opposite when she turns again to face me. How resilient she is, how strong.

“It was Tommy,” I guess. “He’s the one who broke in.”

She nods. “I found it this morning.”

I take the book from her, open the door, invite her inside. She follows reluctantly, and I go about making coffee. When the pot’s sputtering, I open the book on the countertop.

“The book and this box,” she says, taking my gun case out and putting it on the counter.

I smile at the case, run my fingers over it, over the place where I know Leo’s words are carved on the inside.

“Is it worth a lot?” Mandy asks.

“Yeah,” I say. “More than I’d realized.”

I put out a basket of Shiloh’s cookies. They’re a little stale now but still delicious. She doesn’t take one.

“The truck’s been acting up,” she says. “So Tommy took my car to the factory the other day. The sheriff’s station has taken it for evidence and I needed wheels, so I asked a friend to come take a look at it this morning.

When he did, he found this stuff under the seat.

I’d guess Tommy took the box to sell but just hadn’t found a buyer yet.

With the scrapbook, I don’t know why he took it.

I went to the hospital and asked him today.

He said he was going to give it to me. He said maybe I’d see something in there that would help find Jessica.

Who knows with Tommy. He can be thoughtful sometimes. Kind, even.”

“I know,” I say. No woman stays with a man who is bad every moment of every day. They always stay for the good moments that happen in between. They bask in the shimmer of dappled sunshine that appears between the storms. They weather everything else.

I think of the Happy Paws Veterinary Clinic, the many black eyes my own mom tried to hide over the years, the smell of iodine as I swabbed it onto her swollen lips. I wonder what my mom is doing now, if she’s okay, and dismiss the thought as soon as I have it.

I can’t save someone who refuses to be saved while Mandy Hoyle is sitting here in my kitchen asking for help finding her only daughter.

The coffee finishes dripping, and I pour two cups and slide one across the counter to Mandy, who finally settles on a barstool. She adds plenty of milk and sugar and takes a cookie too.

“Did you see anything?” I ask. “In the casebook?”

“I don’t think so,” she says. “It was hard to look through, at first.”

She sighs and turns the pages, one after another, her slender fairy fingers traveling over the photographs and newspaper clippings and the little-kid version of Max’s handwriting that gradually turns into the grown version.

She shakes her head.

“I want to find Jessica,” she says. “I keep thinking that I should know something. I should have a mother’s intuition or a dream or a gift from the Lord.

Anything. Odette—Tommy’s sister—she used to believe in all that.

Prophetic dreams. Guardian angels and guiding lights.

All that kind of thing. But I never… I’ve always had faith, but, you know, it’s hard sometimes.

Especially when all I can think about is that morning.

The morning Jessica was taken. How tired I was. How guilty I felt and still feel for—”

She sniffs and dabs at her good eye with the pad of her thumb. The tear in the black eye makes its way past the swollen flesh and eventually falls and slaps the countertop. It doesn’t make a sound.

“I was so tired and I needed to go to work but they hated it when I brought my kids. It shouldn’t have been a problem, really, Jessica was so good—”

“Was this at Ellerd’s Diner?”

She shakes her head, says, “No, I couldn’t.

I couldn’t work there when my kids were little because they wouldn’t let me bring them and I couldn’t afford day care.

Jessica was old enough to be in Head Start but the program shut down a couple years before.

So, usually, if I could swing it, I’d take them over to Mommy’s Day Out. ”

“Mommy’s Day Out?”

“Yeah,” she says. “At the churches.” She takes a nibble of the cookie and stops. Her teeth are hurting. I’ve seen it before.

“Like a day care?” I ask.

“Well, sort of. Different churches, on different days, would have a time—usually like ten to twelve—where you could drop your kids off. There was one at Valley Methodist every Tuesday. Another one at First Baptist that was two days a week. And another one at Good Hope. Programs like that are supposed to be for housewives. So they can do shopping or whatever, but…”

“But you used the time to work.”

“Yes. Whatever I could pick up. Cleaning houses mostly. Though Tommy didn’t like that.

He never liked me cleaning, but what else was I supposed to do?

And he was taking building work whenever someone offered.

You’d never think it to look at him, but he can build anything.

He can just picture it and get ahold of some wood and next thing you know…

there it is. When we were in high school, he would build these haunted houses. ”

“Whole houses?”

“Well, no,” she says, a faint blush in her cheeks.

“There’s a lot of old, abandoned homesteads around here.

He would use those as the skeleton, put a maze inside, and fill it up with all kinds of things.

Ghosts and creepy noises and whatever. Every year a different one.

It cost five dollars to get in but it was worth it.

I reckon he made a killing every year. That’s how I really met him.

He was two years ahead of me in school and in a totally different crowd.

I was the same year as his sister, Odette, and I wanted to go one year and asked if she would take me.

She didn’t want to, at first. I think it was sort of embarrassing for her, and she was the sensitive type.

Didn’t like being startled, you know. Actually—”

She opens the casebook and flips through the pages until she gets to a newspaper clipping about Jessica—the anniversary of the day she was taken. Within the clipping is a photo of Jessica, standing in a park in a white dress and, beside her, a beautiful young woman.

“That’s Odette,” Mandy says, putting her fingertip beside the young woman’s face.

The caption under the photo says that the picture was snapped at an Easter-egg hunt hosted by the newspaper the year before Jessica was taken.

I remember that Odette probably died not long after this and my gaze shifts between her and Jessica, a sense of revelation sliding through my nerves.

I’d let myself think that Jessica only looked like Mandy, and the resemblance was uncanny.

But Odette was Tommy’s sister, and now I could see his features in her.

In both of them. That sharp bone structure.

That sly smile. If you’d told me that Jessica was Odette’s daughter or little sister, I’d have believed you.

“But it was amazing,” Mandy says, still on the topic of the haunted house.

“I was terrified! Honestly, I just about peed my pants and tried to run back out and instead I ran straight into Tommy. Dressed up as the grim reaper. I didn’t even recognize him under all those layers of fabric.

I found out later he’d dyed a bunch of old grain sacks black and stapled them together into a cloak.

You’d think it would’ve looked terrible but… ”

She seems to realize she’s been rambling and looks up at me again, an apologetic smile on her mouth.

She says, “I hate how much I love him.”

I don’t know what to say. Don’t know how to explain to her that I watched my own mother wrestle with the very same feeling. But she doesn’t need me to help carry this conversation. It’s one she probably has by herself every day.

She says, “I wish I could go back. Tell myself not to go that night, not to agree to a date with him, not to get in the back of his truck that night. But, honestly, I wouldn’t listen to anyone.

Everyone tried to tell me. Even Odette, his own sister.

But I wouldn’t have any of it. And still…

I can’t even say I fully regret it. I have my boys, don’t I?

And they’re the best boys a mama could ask for, despite his blood in their veins.

And I hope… I hope that my girl will come back to me. I heard the FBI is on their way.”

“Yes,” I say. “They should be here today.”

She nods.

“Hopefully they’ll do better this time,” she says.

“Yes,” I say. “Hopefully so.”

“Oh—” Mandy says with a start, and I follow her gaze to the kitchen clock.

“I have to go! I’ll be late for work. Please tell Max I’m sorry about Tommy taking his book.”

I nod and watch her drain the last of her coffee, get her purse, and march toward the door.

“Thanks for the coffee,” she says. “And, thank you for listening.”

She heads out the door, and I go onto the porch and watch as she climbs into Tommy’s truck and eases it around and back down the driveway.

I think about Tommy Hoyle. His bad attitude and the bruises he left on Mandy.

I think about that photo, hanging in the Hoyle house, of his family before Jessica was taken and I think about the donation money Tommy took to hire a PI that never materialized.

I think about his pitiful pleas for help in the factory and the fact that now he was resting in a hospital bed thanks only to my decent nature.

I think about the way he’d brushed right past me the day I visited his house.

Muttering about me as if I weren’t even there and spitting gravel behind his truck, almost hitting Honey.

“Well,” I say, grabbing my keys and my bag. “He can’t brush me off now.”