Page 51 of The Witch’s Orchard

FORTY-TWO

I ’M SITTING ON THE porch. I cannot see the driveway or the forest or the holler. I can only see fog. A silver mist as thick as stew. It swirls only feet from my vision.

My granny is sitting behind me, and I can hear the creak of her rocker.

I remember the way her ankles were so thick.

The way her hands were so warm. The way she chuckled deep in her chest, her bosom bouncing, when she laughed.

I don’t see any of it now. I only hear her rocker.

I can’t turn my head. I am stuck, trapped in a body I cannot control.

“Did you find her?” she asks. “The little girl?”

“Yes,” I say. “But, by the time I did, she had turned into a monster.”

My granny goes on rocking, and now I can hear the knife in her hand. She is peeling an apple. I hear the gritty rip of skin from flesh. The undoing of a thing.

“Every apple has a little poison inside it,” she says.

“I know,” I say.

I wish I could turn to her. I wish I could move.

I can’t.

Pain blooms in my skull and wraps around my face like icy fingers. It wraps around my eyes and tugs at my mouth. My teeth are exploding and my tongue is burning.

I want to bury my face in my hands but I can’t. I want to shut my eyes against the pain but I can’t.

The fog swirls and swirls again and there is a little girl standing in the road. She’s wearing dirty jeans and a T-shirt. She is me.

She is holding a gun. She raises it. Aims.

BANG!

“Miss Gore—” a voice says.

I open my eyes. I’m coughing.

“Miss Gore?”

The voice is Deena Drake. I blink, focus. Lucy is sitting beside me. She has a cup in her hands. My face and hair are wet. My head is throbbing. I sit up and roll over and vomit onto the thick pile carpet. The room spins. I feel for my gun. It’s gone.

“She took it,” Deena says.

“Jessica,” I breathe.

“Yes,” Deena says. She sighs. Her hands are still tied to the chair. They are tied with a blue velvet sash. Her ankles are tied with a thin cord. It looks like a curtain cord, small, braided silk. I reach into my back pocket, feel for my phone. It, too, is gone.

“She took that as well,” Deena says. There’s a pause and then she says, “You have blood all over your shirt.”

I look down.

“It’s Bob’s,” I say. “He was downstairs. What was he doing here?”

She shakes her head.

“He was coming to collect some cookies I’d made for the search party. Jessica killed him?”

“Probably.”

I lean against the chest of drawers and look up at her.

“You,” I say, my voice gravel and acid. “You took the girls.”

“Jessica, Olivia, Molly,” she says. “Yes.”

Then she asks, “Do you think you could untie me? Lucy tried but…”

“No offense,” I say. “But—well, some offense, actually—you’re a kidnapper who’s been holding two children in captivity for the last ten years. I don’t trust you.”

I get to my feet and stumble around the room. There are no windows here. Only the skylights. The door is shut and locked. It’s made of heavy steel. I run my fingers over the seams, uselessly.

I look back at Lucy. She’s huddled on the blue bed, her knees tucked under her chin, watching me with big brown eyes.

“But you didn’t take Lucy?” I ask Deena.

She shakes her head.

“That was Jessica,” she says.

“Why… Jesus Christ, Deena, what the hell did you do?”

She lets out a breath so heavy-sounding it seems like she’s been holding it the better part of a decade.

“I wanted children,” she says.

“Lots of people want children,” I say.

But it’s as if she doesn’t hear me. Or doesn’t want to. As if she’s been waiting all these years to unburden herself, she simply starts talking.

“I wanted them desperately. And the whole time that Hoyle woman was bringing her children in this house.”

“Mandy?” I say, feeling my way around the edges of the room for anyplace that might have some give. The place where the door had been feels like a solid wall. Completely sealed.

“What was Mandy doing here?” I ask, probing for cracks and finding nothing.

“She cleaned for me,” Deena says. “She used to come twice a week, and she’d bring Jessica and that little toddler boy with her.

Then I saw she had another one on the way.

Why? Why does God give babies to people who don’t even want them ?

And she certainly couldn’t take care of them.

You should’ve seen the state of Jessica.

Half the time, her hair was a tangled mess. Rats nest.”

I sigh and rub my palms over my face, then realize they are still sticky with Bob’s blood.

“Finally, I got pregnant,” she says. “Finally. After so many years of trying. So many tears and so many tests in the trash. I was in my twelfth week when Harvey died. I hadn’t even really started to show.

The night he died, I cried so hard I thought it would kill me.

I thought my heart would shatter from the pain. And then… it got so much worse.”

I stop my searching and turn to look at her. Her eyes are glazed over, a million miles away.

“I delivered twins that night. On the bathroom floor. They were so tiny. Like two little perfect plums. Purple and shiny.”

Her breath catches, and I watch her struggle. On the bed, Lucy is staring at me.

“Deena—” I say.

“I buried them in the rose garden. And, three days later, I buried Harvey. And every day after that for two weeks, I would go into the library and sit in his chair and take out his gun and look at it.”

She stops herself, shakes her head.

“But I couldn’t… I wasn’t strong enough.

Brave enough. Instead, one morning, I went for a walk in the forest and found myself standing on the porch of Susan McKinney’s cabin.

I’d heard about her from Mandy. I thought, perhaps, she could help me somehow.

Give me something that would let me sleep for good. ”

I could picture the scene as Deena spoke. The beautiful grieving widow standing, hopeless, on the doorstep of a witch. No better than a beggar woman in the worst winter of her life. Willing to do anything, give anything, to make the pain stop.

“She gave me tea. Told me it would take time. That’s what she said. The same stupid, worthless platitudes as everyone else. She gave me a book. Told me that perhaps something in it would help me find peace in the thing I could not have.”

She frowns. The memory looks so bitter that, for a moment, I think Deena Drake might spit on the floor. Instead, she sniffs and keeps going.

“Did it?” I ask. “Did it help?”

“It was a book of folklore,” Deena says. “Old superstitions. But it told of an old ritual. Making poppets to represent the ones you have lost, carrying them with you until the loss is less painful.”

“And the poppets—”

“Were applehead dolls, yes. And so I made two of them. One for each of my baby girls.”

I go back to searching the room. There’s a small closet full of blue and red dresses, some velvet, some cotton, some silk, some fine linen, all trimmed in lace. They hang above a rack of little satin slippers. Doll clothes, but woman-sized. I shiver and close the door.

I am exhausted. My whole body hurts. And now I am trapped in a room with one psychopath while another waits outside the door getting ready to do who knows what. I breathe through my nose, look around.

There is a little bathroom through a doorway. It features a toilet and pedestal sink and small shower. I wash my hands, then wash my mouth out, splash water on my face, come back into the main room.

To the left of the door, there’s an oil painting of a white rabbit. I try to take it off the wall and find that it is attached by hinges and that it hides a prize. There’s a keypad set into the wall.

“She’s changed it,” Deena says, still distant but less dreamy. “I already got Lucy to try.”

“Let’s try again,” I say.

Deena tells me the numbers. I punch them in. Nothing happens.

“Christ,” I breathe. And when I breathe, I cough. And when I cough my head throbs. I put my fingers to my skull and feel a gooey wetness. I decide to focus on literally anything else. “So you… what? You’ve got the poppets and… now what?”

“I had them with me one day when I went to the church. I finished my practice and stood and looked out the window. There was Jessica. She was sitting on the swing set, swinging. All by herself. Her mother was asleep in the car. Honestly. It was disgraceful.”

She laughs a little at the memory, and then tears come to her eyes.

“I felt a presence in me,” she says. “It told me that the girl should be mine. Was meant to be mine, all along. I walked outside and I asked her if she would like to come with me. She said yes.”

I think I might vomit again but I fight the urge and work my way around the room, looking for some other way out, some other weapon, anything I can use.

I open the chests and look around. There are wooden tops and the disembodied head of a Lovely Lady Lavender doll.

Her eyes shine, bright and violet, at me.

Deena goes on. “She said yes. And so I took her and I left the doll behind. I had made a trade. The magic had worked.”

“What about Sheriff Kerridge?” I ask. “Didn’t he search your car?”

She nods, gives a little smile at the memory.

“I was so sure he would take her away from me. Instead, he looked straight at her and shut the door. That’s when I knew the magic had truly worked.

That’s when I knew. Later, he came to the house.

He told me that Tommy Hoyle had abused his sister and that he’d seen Tommy out with Jessica and the way he’d had his hands on her…

he knew. He knew he had to protect her. He knew that I should be her rightful mother.

He told me that I should wait a few months, then take Jessica and leave town and never come back. ”

“And you agreed?”

“Yes.”

“But that wasn’t enough, was it? You made two dolls to replace your twins.”

“Yes.”

“So, you took Olivia.”

“Yes. She was so beautiful but… she was defective, wasn’t she? All wrong. I’d had no idea. Not until I brought her back here and discovered that she was broken.”