Page 52 of The Witch’s Orchard

I dig through the chest. I find nothing that could be used as a weapon. Why didn’t people give girls wooden swords? Baseball bats? Golf clubs?

“I had a vision,” Deena continues. “Of sitting at my piano and playing while my little girls sang along.” She laughs. “It’s all I wanted.”

“And Olivia doesn’t sing along,” I say.

“No,” she says. “I thought, perhaps, she was merely highly strung. I learned from the book how to make tea that drops your inhibition. Lets you see and feel things that you normally cannot see or feel.”

“The mountain laurel plant,” I say.

“Yes. But it didn’t do any good. Olivia only cried and screamed. She never spoke or sang. No matter what we tried. Jessica was… especially violent.”

I think about the bruises they’d found on Olivia’s arms and legs when she was returned.

I feel sick again, but I get to my feet and continue working through the room.

I find gauzy nightgowns and frilly dresses and silky underthings in the drawers; nothing else.

There’s a silver tray holding a wooden hairbrush with boar bristles and scented oils of various kinds, all in useless plastic bottles. There’s not even a nail file.

“Sheriff Kerridge came to see me. He knew, of course, that I’d taken her.

He said he’d made a terrible mistake. That we both had.

That we’d have to tell the truth and face the consequences.

I couldn’t have that. Even if Olivia was broken, I would simply have to replace her.

And I couldn’t do that if Kerridge told everyone the truth. ”

I think about Susan McKinney’s relationship with Kerridge. How she found him dead on his kitchen floor, apparently from a heart attack.

“I went to his house,” Deena says. “I brought cake and said that we should talk about it. I knew he had heart problems. It didn’t take much. He ate. I didn’t. I watched him die and then I left and took the cake with me.”

“And Olivia?”

“I took her back,” Deena says, defensively. As if that made up for everything. “I didn’t think she would ever be able to tell anyone what had happened to her, but… just in case.”

“You drugged her.”

“Yes. And I told her that if she ever said who took her that the Witch of Quartz Creek would come to her house and kill every single person inside it.”

“She was only five years old,” I say.

She shrugs, lets out a tired breath. She’s coming to the end of her story, and she seems tired in the telling. Ready to go wherever it is that she is going next.

“And Molly?” I say, moving into the bathroom.

“Molly was so beautiful,” Deena says. “Such a good little girl, so eager to please.”

I listen as I unscrew the shower head from its pipe.

I lay the shower head down on the toilet tank, then start unscrewing the shower head’s riser pipe from the wall.

The pipe makes a grating sound as I turn it and, unsure of what Jessica may be able to hear from wherever she is, I go slowly. Very slowly.

“I brought a cookie for Molly the day I took her,” Deena says. “And she went right to sleep. I put her in the car and then I started back toward the house to tell Janice goodbye and I saw that man.”

“Dwight Hoyle,” I say.

“Yes. The plumber. We exchanged pleasantries and he said he was moving his truck and I left, feeling relieved that he hadn’t looked in the backseat of my car. But, later that night, he called me. He said he knew what I’d done. He wanted money.”

I think about all the stuff in the Hoyle household. The new TV, laptop. The new truck. The fact that they’d not worked real jobs the last ten years and lived, better than they should have been able to, on Dwight’s disability.

“I agreed, of course. On the condition that he make a phone call for me.”

“Susan McKinney,” I say.

“Yes,” she says. “He made the anonymous phone call. The police spent time investigating Susan instead of me. And then I started paying him. What choice did I have? At first, it was five hundred a month. Then a thousand. It was all I could afford. I tried to explain to him that most of the money was gone. That my family cut me off when I married Harvey instead of the man they’d picked for me.

That Harvey’s factory had been dying and that he’d put everything he had into it.

Harvey’s pension left me with a thousand a month.

I went through what was left of the savings, sold my jewelry, my furs.

I tried to sell the house, but it was tied up in a land trust. Harvey had been such a conservationist. He’d wanted the home and land to be preserved as hunting grounds, turned into a park of some kind once both of us were gone. ”

Her voice is wistful, with a tinge of annoyance.

I think about the house, the car, the furniture, and the appliances.

None of it less than ten years old. I’d seen this kind of thing before in old-money houses where no new money is coming in.

The walls crumbling around them as they await the inevitable.

“What about the scarecrow?” I ask Deena.

“The what?”

“The scarecrow that you saw, on the day you took Molly. Why did you make that up?”

“I didn’t,” Deena says. “That was true. I really was startled by a figure in the distance. A scarecrow in a black cloak.”

“Ooof,” I say as the pipe finally comes free in my hand.

Lucy wanders into the bathroom and sits on the toilet seat and watches me.

“You’re Max’s friend,” she says.

“That’s right,” I say. “I’m here to help you.”

She nods.

“When the blond lady comes back,” I whisper to Lucy, “I want you to go into that linen closet right there, understand? Squeeze really small and hide. Can you do that?”

I point to the tiny cupboard that holds perfect white towels and washcloths on cedar shelves. Lucy nods.

“I’m hungry,” she says.

“I know,” I say. “We’ll get you something good to eat soon. I saw your mama today.”

Lucy’s eyes light up at the mention of her mother. It breaks my heart. I have to get us out of this.

“She said she made you a cake,” I say. “Lemon raspberry.”

Lucy grins and claps her hands.

“Remember,” I say. “The closet.”

She nods again.

In the main room, Deena continues, “He tried to get more out of me but, eventually, I managed to convince him that I was already paying as much as I could. That he would either have to keep taking the thousand a month or turn me in and get nothing. Thankfully, he accepted. He and his wife moved out of town, and each month I withdrew one thousand dollars from the bank and sent it to a post office box in Charlotte.”

“But then they moved back,” I say, opening the linen closet door so it’s ready for Lucy.

“Yes,” she says. “And I had the feeling that the longer that man was around his cousin again, the more he might decide to tell the truth. I couldn’t have that.

I was trying to figure out how I could get close enough to them to…

Well, I didn’t have to, in the end. You took care of that.

I had no idea they’d turned the old factory into a drug lab. ”

There’s a little laugh, and I breathe out a long sigh.

I’ve just about had it with Deena’s trip down memory lane.

I’ve been on high alert for too long. I’m exhausted, my adrenaline running thin.

My head throbs. My vision is hazy. The room spins.

I close my eyes, and when I open them, I realize Deena is talking again.

“… happy, but I worried the girls would become homesick. What could I do? Someday they would be big enough to question their life with me. Maybe even overpower me, run away. So, I gave them the tea and I told them they were sick. That if they went home, they would make their families sick, and that I was the only one who could take care of them. They belonged with me. I simply had to make them see that. And, of course, it worked. They were only four. I knew that, eventually, they would forget all about the family they had before.”

I think about Jessica Hoyle. Think about the fact that she wasn’t four. Like me, she was undersized, underestimated. She was weeks away from her sixth birthday when she was taken, about to begin school, already reading.

I test the weight of the pipe in my hand. It’s awkward and S-shaped, not optimal for whacking. Still, I bang it against my palm a few times. At least the Drakes didn’t skimp on fixtures. The pipe is heavy. It’ll do.

“But I didn’t take Lucy,” she says. “She was a gift.”

“From Jessica,” I say.

“Yes,” Deena says. “I think she missed her sister, Molly.”

“What happened to Molly?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” she says. “One day she was here and then… you came. And she was gone. Like a bird, she flew away.”

Her voice still has that airy, dreamy quality, and I think Deena Drake probably broke in half the day her twins came silent into the world.

With her husband already dead, all alone in this house, no one to talk to, she buried one half of herself with her family and lived on like a ghost. Half a person, no sense of right or wrong.

I hear clicking in the room and gesture for Lucy to get into the linen closet. She goes, squatting down deep against the inside corner.

“It’s gonna be okay,” I whisper. She looks up at me and nods, but there are tears in her eyes. I take a deep breath and close the closet door.

I give my palm another whack with the pipe, then shove it down the back of my jeans, go into the main room, stand behind Deena.

The door opens. Jessica comes back inside. She has my gun.

She is pointing it at Deena and me, erratic, unfocused. She is wearing one of Deena’s dresses now instead of the long velvet doll dress with the lace frills. Her hair is pulled away from her face and braided into a plait that hangs most of the way down her back. She looks beautiful. And terrifying.

“Okay,” she says. She looks at me. “I wasn’t expecting you. I thought for sure once I’d shot you, you’d go to the hospital, leave, die… At least you’d stop this foolishness. But, no. You told Deena. You said you wouldn’t stop searching. I heard you. And I knew it was true.”