Page 5 of The Witch’s Orchard

THREE

T HE PHONE BUZZES AGAINST the wood bedside table and I pick it up.

“It’s still fucking dark, Leo.”

He chuckles on the other end and I grumble, rubbing at the crust in my eyes.

“Yeah, but you’re already awake,” he says. And he’s not wrong. I wake up just before dawn pretty much every day, whether I like it or not. (I don’t.)

I grumble and Leo says, “Sleep okay?”

“Sure,” I say. And Leo calls, just about every day, whether I like it or not. (I do.)

Despite the crows, my sleep was dreamless and so deep that I woke slowly to a sluggish predawn chill and lay there, bundled in my covers, waiting for the day and, with it, Leo’s call. Now, I’m sitting up, tugging my pre-tied running shoes onto my bare feet. This is how I begin every morning.

“Listen, I got an opening over here,” he says. “One of my guys up and got the flu. I’m not taking his congested ass anywhere.”

“So, get another guy,” I say. I stand and wobble into the unfamiliar bathroom, search for the light switch, find it, squint at my reflection in the too-bright glare, and flick the switch back off. I turn on the speaker and put the phone down on the vanity while I pee.

“I don’t want another guy,” Leo says. His voice is earthy and rich and smooth, like the rest of him. He’s a top-shelf product I could never afford.

“Well, I have a job,” I say, washing my hands, my face.

“Where are you?”

“North Carolina. The mountains.”

“You drive that ancient car all the way down there? Over those hills?”

“If you’re talking about Honey, my beautiful and pristine classic 260Z, then yes. I did. We had a wonderful trip, thank you.”

He snorts. Leo loves Honey and always dotes on her when he’s in town, but he still never misses an opportunity to needle me about using her as my daily driver, arguing that I should get something more dependable for long rides.

I always think it sounds like a good idea until I go outside and start up Honey and sink into the familiar purr of her engine.

“I could pay you better,” he says. “We got a hell of a contract at the moment.”

I take the phone into the kitchen with me, fill a glass of water from the tap.

“I tried that, remember? Two months was as much as I could do. I don’t want to work private security for some rich dick who only needs private security because he’s constantly screwing people over.”

Leo laughs a little. I hear a light spoon clinking against delicate china. Coffee, two sugars, a splash of heavy whipping cream, I remember, smile to myself. The smell of Leo’s coffee rushes back to me. The smell of Leo isn’t far behind. Faint hints of sandalwood, gunpowder, red wine.

“So you’re working for some redneck instead?”

A hint of his South Texas accent comes through. Like me, he’s mostly lost his regional dialect but, unlike me, it was intentional. Meeting Leo for the first time, you’d never guess his origins. I’d known him for more than a year before I ever even had a clue.

“Annie,” he says. “Just what are you into?”

“Old kidnapping case.”

“Stirring up shit,” he says, like he’s just affirming what he already thought. He’s not wrong.

“The kid’s probably long gone,” I say. “Her big brother hired me. I’m probably getting paid just to go around asking questions that make people feel weird.”

“Probably.” There’s a pause while he takes a sip. “You bring your gun?”

“Yeah.”

“Take it with you. Those rednecks are all packing heat. You might as well be too.”

“It’s an old case, Leo.”

“Annie, take your piece.”

I roll my eyes. On his end, there’s a high bing sound, muffled.

Maybe an elevator down the hallway. I think he’s in a hotel and I picture him somewhere sunny—an open window, a breeze billowing an expensive, sheer curtain.

Leo is all low-key luxury. From his tailored T-shirts and designer leather jackets to his three-hundred-dollar haircut that looks exactly as unkempt as he likes, he is the model of unpretentious pretension and, somehow, I’ve never been able to hate him for it.

“Wheels up tomorrow. Nineteen hundred. You sure you don’t want a ride?”

“Positive.”

There’s another pause where we both just breathe, almost silent. On his side, I hear the bells of a distant church. It’s twelve o’clock, wherever he is. Monaco, maybe. Or Madrid, Naples. Beautiful European cities with grand histories and dramatic architecture. Places like that suit Leo.

I look out the window of the cabin, into the predawn gloom, the still-violet light on the cold, dewy grass. My own car in the drive is the nearest sign of human activity. Beyond that, a gravel road, an old farmhouse, a dying town. Places like this suit me.

“You know you can call me,” Leo says. “You can always call me.”

“I know,” I say.

“Watch your six, Gore.”

“Always,” I say. “You too.”

We hang up. I glance at the phone. It’s not even eight o’clock on Monday morning, the fog not even burned off the ground.

It’s this quiet, solitary, silvery nature of early morning that, despite my chronic lack of sleep, makes this my favorite time of day.

I slide the phone into my pocket, take another drink of water, pull on my light, reflective jacket, and head out the door.

There’s a path behind the cabin and I take it.

I follow it all the way to the edge of a gorge and down to a fast-running creek.

Quartz Creek, I guess. I’m not a fast runner but I’m steady.

My heart rate picks up and then beats out a steady rhythm and, as my feet tread over the wet, fallen leaves, I fantasize about a life where I rented this cabin for the sole purpose of standing in this water, waders up to my chest, casting a line over and over and over, hoping for a plump mountain trout.

It’s a quieter life. Slow and contemplative.

The kind of life I’ve never had. The kind that’s better imagined than lived. At least for me.

I cross the creek at a decrepit bridge and then jog up the gentle slope of the opposite bank.

There, after maybe ten yards on the trail, I spot what must be the circle of stones Max mentioned.

I slow down as I get nearer. My breath and heart rate should be falling but they’re not.

As I reach a circle of gray boulders, the huge stones embedded with shimmering quartz, my heartbeat quickens.

An involuntary shiver races across my shoulder blades.

Still, I step into the center and immediately hear what Max was talking about.

Every sound is weirdly amplified here. I reach down, pick up a dead twig, snap it in half.

SNAP. Snap. snap.

It echoes.

Another shiver.

I snap one of the half twigs in half again.

SNAP. Snap. snap.

And then I pause. It’s not just the nearness of the stones, the eeriness of the echoes that have pricked my subconscious.

I realize, with latent animal instinct, that I am being watched.

My heart is hammering now and I’m surprised I can’t hear it thumping, echoing off the surface of the rocks.

I reach for my gun and remember I didn’t bring it.

No reason to run with a gun in the middle of the woods, I’d thought.

I turn and lock eyes with an old woman standing just outside the stone circle.

Her frizzy, steel gray hair is piled on her head.

She wears canvas pants and a long, black threadbare cardigan over a T-shirt that says, “Virginia Is for Lovers.” She’s carrying two baskets in her red-knuckled hands and her beetle black eyes narrow as she says, “Just who the hell are you?”

“Annie Gore,” I say. My voice echoes and comes back to me tight and thin with a sharp tinge of fear. I step outside the stones before I have to listen to it anymore. “I’m a private investigator.”

“Why you running around in my goddamned forest?”

“This is your forest?”

She gives me a curt nod.

“I thought it was Andrews land,” I say. “I’m working for Max.”

“This about his sister?” she asks.

“Yeah.”

She sniffs and looks down into her basket. The wind catches wild strands of her hair and her oversized sweater billows and flaps like the wings of a crow. I can’t help but think of the Witch of Quartz Creek and her two doomed daughters.

“Damn shame,” she says. She takes a few steps closer, her old hiking boots crunching over the leaves, and looks me up and down. “You ain’t a city girl.”

“No,” I say.

She looks into my eyes, then follows the line of my cheek, my brow, my nose. I imagine she sees the softness of my features—a face that stays round even when the rest of me is skinny—marred by a couple of thin, white scars, a once-straight nose previously broken and never set quite right.

I give her the same studying. She’s a plump lady but not soft. She’s strong-boned with broad shoulders and warm olive skin. Deep lines crease her forehead, the space between her eyebrows. Her eyes are sharp and wary as a fox.

“Military,” she says, a guess.

I don’t reply.

A cold breeze slices the air between us and the sheen of sweat that had accumulated on my body now stings with chill. Goose bumps erupt on my arms and legs.

The woman looks in the direction from which the breeze comes. The wind pushes the hair off her face and she stares into it, her nose reddening, water glistening in her eyes. The wind shimmies around the high stones behind me and whistles as it passes, a high keening.

“Bad things coming,” she says, almost a whisper. She looks back at me as the breeze dies down. “You got here just in time, Miss Gore.”

“Bad things?”

She doesn’t answer, just watches me some more, eyes searching. She frowns.

“I live up the hill a little ways. There’s a trail,” she says.

She points with a gnarled finger to the north, and I see a slender dirt trail, knobbed with exposed tree roots, winding its way farther up the hill. She says, “I’ve got to finish my work this morning. You can come by later on, when you want answers.”

Then she turns with her basket and walks away.

There’s a flap and scrabble behind me and I turn to see a crow landing on the nearest high stone.

“CAAW!” it screams, and the scream bounces around the rocks, echoing madly. I watch the crow for a moment, watch it prune its oil black wings, listen to the scritch-scratch of its feet on the rough texture of the stone. I turn back to look for the old woman and find that she is gone.

I look at the crow again.

“Where’d she go?” I ask.

The crow caws, then flaps its wings and flies away.

I look at my phone. It’s been half an hour, I realize. Time to head back.

I glance into the forest but, again, I don’t see the old woman. I make a mental note to ask Max about her, about the land and who owns it. But I can’t ask about the eeriness of her gaze. How it felt like there were insects under my skin while she looked me up and down. Looked into me.

“The Witch of Quartz Creek,” I breathe. And then I make myself laugh. And it sounds false. I start jogging back toward the cabin, picking up my pace as I do.

By the time I’m keying my way inside, I’ve worked up a good sweat and I’ve got a head full of questions for the townsfolk of Quartz Creek, North Carolina. After another twenty minutes I’m showered and dressed in a black T-shirt, jeans, and a “take me seriously” no-wrinkle charcoal blazer.

I grab my keys from the bedside table, open the drawer. When I’d left the service and got my PI license, I bought a cheap, lightweight .22 revolver at a local gun show.

“What are you trying to do?” Leo said when I told him. He was in a jungle somewhere, a million miles away, and his voice crackled through the line to me. “Gun like that, you shoot someone, you’re just gonna piss ’im off.”

“Best I could afford.”

“Annie, you’re little.”

“Fuck off,” I’d said, though he was right. With a high ponytail and thick-soled boots I barely scrape five-three.

“You get into a mess with anyone big and strong and, like as not, you pull out that twenty-two and they’re gonna do one of two things: blow you away with their bigger gun or laugh in your face and then blow you away.”

“A private eye almost never shoots their gun, Leo.”

He chuckled and said, “Annie, you know as well as I do: if you’re gonna carry a gun, you’d better be ready to use it.”

I received a custom .357 Korth Mongoose two days later.

Two-and-three-quarter-inch barrel, all blacked out, in a custom purpleheart wood box with the words “Annie Get Your Gun” engraved on the inside of the lid.

A four-thousand-dollar gun, as much a piece of art as a deadly weapon.

I never needed to ask where it came from.

Now, I look down at the cool black revolver in its glossy box.

“Annie get your gun,” I read out loud. Though it’s Leo’s voice echoing in my mind.

I pick up the gun, check it, thrust it into the holster that clips into the back of my jeans, and walk out the door.