Page 50 of The Witch’s Orchard

FORTY-ONE

I PULL TO THE TOP of the hill and stop. There are two cars in the driveway. The one farther back, a newer-model gray Buick, I recognize as the Zieglers’ car. It sits empty. I press my hand to the hood and find it still warm.

“What are the Zieglers doing here?” I mutter.

Deena’s Range Rover is parked in front of it. I approach, my hand around the back of my jeans on the grip of my gun. There’s no one behind the wheel, no one in the passenger seat. I look in the backseat and find a couple of decent-sized travel bags ready to go.

The mountaintop is nearly silent. Not even a breeze.

I leave Honey and walk toward the front of the house. My footsteps on the gravel path crunch in a way that feels too loud.

The front door is ajar, and I remember how Deena had left it unlocked the day I visited.

I nudge it open, and my teeth bang together as I suppress a gasp at the sight of Bob Ziegler, lying on the floor in a pool of blood.

He wheezes and stares at the ceiling, clasping one of his big palms to his side.

“Shit,” I whisper, getting to my knees at his side.

“Bob? Bob? Can you hear me?”

He turns his head toward me, eyes wide, and stares.

“G-Gore? Am I hit?”

“Yes,” I breathe. “Yes. You’re hit.”

I move his hand just enough to inspect the wound, but as soon as I take off the pressure, blood gushes out.

“She got me,” he gurgles. “She got me. I didn’t even see… all these years.”

The pink in his cheeks is gone, replaced by a sweaty buttermilk color.

“You’re gonna make it,” I say to him. “But you have to keep holding it. Can you keep holding it?”

“Yes sir,” he whispers, but he’s drifting off.

“Goddamnit,” I breathe. I yank at his belt buckle and thank heaven for slick wool and well-oiled leather as I jostle his belt out of his suit pants and back around his middle. I whip off my sweatshirt and wad it up tight, then secure it over the wound with the belt.

“Help is coming,” I tell him as his eyelids flutter. “Hold on, Bob. Help is coming.”

I pull my phone out. No service. I try 911, just in case, and get nothing. I type a text to AJ and send it anyway. I stand and look around for a landline. Try to remember if there was one in the kitchen.

“She’s a devil,” he says. “She’s a devil.”

“Bob, listen, I—”

But there’s a scream. Long and high and shrill as only little girls make.

Lucy.

I wipe Bob’s blood on my jeans and pull my gun.

Rushing up the stairs, trying to find some balance between speed and silence and achieving neither, I sweep the second-story rooms, glad I’ve already been in here once and know the general layout.

Guest bedroom. Empty. Second guest bedroom. Empty. Bathroom. Empty.

Which leaves only Deena’s room.

I pause outside it. Take a breath. Listen.

A woman’s voice is talking, but low enough that I can’t make out the words. A little girl cries. Not screaming this time but weeping. The other voice snaps, and the weeping gets louder. Louder.

“I want my mommy…” the little girl wails.

I spin around the doorway and find… nothing. An empty room. An empty bed. The door to the closet hanging open. The door to the bathroom also open. Empty. There is no one here.

I wait. Listen.

“Just sit still,” Deena’s voice says. “Sit still and it’ll be okay.”

My breath catches in my throat. The sound is coming from behind the tapestry to the left of the bed. I pause. Look at the window and remember how I’d felt so sure that there was something off. Something that didn’t fit.

Now I understood. Deena’s room was longer in reality than it appeared from within. Standing down in the yard, looking up at the house, the window had been in the middle of the wall, but here, from within, the window was nearly at the edge.

A second room. A panic room. Hidden.

“It’ll be okay,” Deena says again. “If you just listen and mind. Sit still now.”

And I realize I had been wrong. Deena had hidden those girls in this house the whole time.

Right under the nose of everyone who visited, everyone who attended her Christmas parties and sang beside her piano, everyone who admired her roses and complimented her décor.

Right under the nose of everyone. Including me.

I breathe in a long, silent breath and feel a tickle in my chest that I can’t afford. I can’t afford the noise, the distraction. I swallow, desperately, in an effort to shut the cough down, and, finally, get it under control.

Again, I ready my gun and nudge the tapestry aside with my foot. Behind it is a thick steel door, the front of it dressed to look exactly like the wattle and daub in the rest of the room. It is hanging open.

I tiptoe inside. This is a panic room, as I thought.

But it’s been kitted out like a nursery.

Two twin beds against the wall, each under a skylight, each adorned with its own handwoven wool blanket.

One red, one blue. There are two desks and two chests and two baskets of antique wooden toys and a tray with a carafe of water and a plastic cup and, on the farthest side of the long room, Deena Drake, sitting, with Lucy Evers at her feet.

Deena is sitting very awkwardly. And then the penny drops.

Deena Drake is tied to a chair.

I move toward her.

“Deena,” I say. “What—”

And then there is pain. Nothing but pain. It spreads through my skull, a sickening heat. I spin around but I’m already falling.

My gun goes off, but I feel sure I hit nothing. I see a glint of silver. A candlestick. Plaster from the ceiling falls like snow into the pale blond hair of a young woman. Her delicate feylike features and ice blue eyes are unmistakable.

“Jessica?” I say.

She smiles at me.

It’s the last thing I see.