Page 54 of The Witch’s Orchard

FORTY-THREE

“H OW ARE YOU?” SHILOH asks.

I shrug. Shrugging hurts.

We’re sitting in a hospital room. I have spent the night here. I want to leave as soon as possible. I’ve already pulled off all the wires that lead to the beeping machines, the liquid delivery machines, the machines that call the nice people in scrubs.

Shiloh has brought me a clean change of clothes and has promised to take me back to the cabin, where Honey is waiting for me. I slip a fresh pair of underwear and a new-washed pair of jeans on under my thin hospital gown.

“I can’t tell you how grateful I am,” she says as she holds out the T-shirt she brought. It’s black and soft and smells like the detergent in Crow Caw Cabin.

“I’m the one who’s grateful,” I say. “That’s a hell of a piece you were packing.”

She laughs.

“I can’t believe it,” I say. “The whole time. If anyone had just shown you Olivia’s drawings—”

“I still might not have realized it,” she says. “I was so desperate with worry.”

I’d left her sitting on the couch in the cabin, looking at Olivia’s spirals, while I went tearing off to search for Susan.

“My mom taught me to draw roses the same way,” she says. “And I pipe them on cakes just like that.”

That was why she’d come to Deena’s. She knew Deena was the only one in town with roses that could leave an impression like that.

“The last thing I expected, though,” she says, “was to see Jessica Hoyle holding a gun.”

“I know,” I say.

I grimace as I pull the shirt on over my various wounds and sore places. When my head emerges, AJ is there. He’s standing in the doorway in his deputy uniform.

“Hey,” he says. “She wants to talk to you.”

“Me?”

“If you’re up for it.”

“Yeah, but… why?”

“I think she needs to lay it all at someone’s feet and, for whatever reason, yours are the feet she’s picked.”

I sigh. I think about fate and Max Andrews coming into Roxanne’s that morning. About him going to Susan and getting his cards read. About her telling him to find a warrior from another mountain, one who will understand. I think about Mandy and Tommy and that too-familiar muddy holler.

“Okay,” I say.

I pull my hair up and look around for an elastic to hold it.

They’ve taken mine. I grunt. Shiloh pulls one from her wrist, holds it out to me.

I really would marry this woman. If I ever felt so inclined to marry anyone.

If I ever became a whole other person. There are good people in this town, I think.

They deserve so much happiness after so much tragedy.

I take the elastic and finish my ponytail.

“Thanks,” I say.

“I’ll wait for you out front.”

“Okay.”

I follow AJ out of the room and through the hall.

“I’m surprised Jacobs is letting me talk to her,” I say.

“Sheriff Jacobs has put himself on suspension,” AJ says as we walk. “So, I’m kind of in charge at the moment.”

“Couldn’t think of a better man,” I say.

AJ snorts. Then he stops short, turns back toward me.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“About what?”

“I wasn’t there in time. I’m sorry.”

He’d been the first to the scene, after Shiloh.

He’d got my call, but it had been so garbled that he couldn’t understand any of it.

Instead, it was Susan McKinney who’d finally reached him.

She’d called from her satellite phone when she came to the top of the mountain to pick rose hips and saw Bob Ziegler lying motionless just beyond the open doorway in a pool of blood.

She’d turned and run back into the forest to hide and wait for the cops.

“I’m sorry,” he says again.

“Please don’t be,” I say. “You’re not my keeper.”

“I know.”

“And this is just my job.”

“I know.”

“Okay.”

“Can I make it up to you?” he asks.

“I feel like you already know the answer to that.”

I wink at him, or try to. With my injuries and my aching body, I probably just look like I have something in my eye.

Still, he grins and brings a big hand up to squeeze my shoulder. Then, he turns back and leads me to another room and opens the door.

We pass the room where Bob Ziegler rests. I pause just outside it and see Rebecca Ziegler at his bedside, reading her Bible while he sleeps. Rebecca looks up and sees me and raises her hand in a little wave. I wave back.

I’d not believed it when I told him he would make it, but, thankfully, there are better doctors in this town than me.

“Where’s Tommy?” I ask, realizing that this is the room he’d been in the day before when I’d questioned him about his sister.

“They moved him to another wing,” he says. “In light of his history. With Odette. With Jessica. They didn’t want the two of them anywhere near each other.”

“This is a knot that’s going to take a long time to untangle, I think.”

“Yes,” he says. “The FBI have started going through everything. Dwight and Elaine’s property.

Any evidence they can find on Tommy Hoyle’s past crimes.

Everything that links anyone to Deena Drake.

The way she was involved with Jacobs, the way Kerridge helped her ten years ago.

I think there’s going to be a lot of report writing in my future. ”

“So much of crime fighting is what happens after the action,” I say.

“In the end, we spend most of our time just doing paperwork. I suspect that’s the real reason Batman wears a mask.

Filing reports and logging evidence and giving testimony in court is way less sexy than punching a bunch of guys and disappearing into the shadows. But it’s just as heroic.”

“You think so?”

“Well, no,” I say. “If I could, I’d be Batman. But real-life law enforcement officials tend to take a dim view of masked vigilantism.”

He laughs softly, and pauses in the hall and looks at me.

“You did a good job, Annie,” he says. “You found the truth.”

“Yes,” I say. “Not in time for Molly, though.”

“But in time for Lucy. In time for Shiloh. In time for Jessica and Mandy. And Max will heal. It’ll take time. But at least he won’t be stuck in limbo anymore.”

I nod. AJ had already found the letters Molly had written to Max over the years. Already made copies of all of them and given them to him. And already Max had read them, with his father at his side, and then put them into the box he kept in his closet.

“He’ll heal,” AJ says, again. “Thanks to you.”

He gives my shoulder a squeeze and we walk a little farther in relative silence, the hospital noises buzzing around us. He stops at another door and says, “You ready?”

“Yes.”

Inside, Jessica Hoyle is sitting in a hospital bed. She’s wearing a pale blue hospital gown, and the tape from her wound dressing peeks out from above and below the sleeve. She is handcuffed to the bed.

Mandy Hoyle sits beside her. Mandy looks at me when I enter, and her eyes instantly brim with tears.

She stands and comes to me and wraps her arms around me and gives me a hug far stronger and tighter than I’d ever have imagined she could manage.

It was a mistake, I know, to have ever thought of Mandy as frail or weak.

An easy mistake. She has the hands, the arms, the strength, the embrace of a mother.

“You found her,” she says. “You said you would.”

I look over her shoulder to the young woman sitting on the bed, glaring at us. I know this isn’t the reunion Mandy wanted. But it is a reunion. It is something. Her daughter is alive. She’s here.

“Mandy—” I start, as she pulls out of the embrace. But she shakes her head, a soft sad smile on her mouth. There’s not really anything else to say.

“I’m going to go get some coffee while the two of you talk,” she says.

She pats my arm and straightens her purse on her shoulder and leaves.

The door shuts behind us. AJ stands against it. I go and sit in the chair beside Jessica. She stares at me the whole time. I rest my hands in my lap and look at her. She looks at me. Her eyes are rimmed in red. She glances at AJ and then back at me.

“You ruined it,” she says, finally.

“I know,” I say.

“I was a princess,” she says. “I was a princess in a castle and soon I was going to leave and have my own life.”

“I know.”

She sniffs. Her hair is still braided. It coils in a long, white-gold rope over her good shoulder and into her lap.

“I didn’t want to kill Molly. I—” She pauses when her voice cracks, then goes on in a whisper. “I loved her. She was my sister. I… I was going to take us far away. But… as soon as you came, and she heard about Max…”

She bows her head, and tears fall into the braid in her lap.

“If she’d gone to Max, she would’ve told him everything.

And Deena would’ve been arrested and they’d have taken all her beautiful things and her beautiful castle and I’d have had nothing.

Just like before. She ran away before I could stop her.

She got all the way down the mountain. I tried to talk to her.

I tried to take her home. She fought me.

I never… I didn’t know she could fight me. She never had before.”

Jessica looks back at me, and even though her face is red and swollen from crying, she is still beautiful. Her features are cool and sharp like a diamond.

“I loved her,” she says, her voice steady. “I loved Molly.”

I nod.

“I tried…” She stops and falters, her voice strangled with feeling. “I tried to give her a pretty death. She looked just like a doll. A beautiful dead doll.”

“I know,” I say.

We sit for a long moment, Jessica staring at her hands.

“Jessica,” I say. “Tell me why you took Lucy.”

She looks at me again, bites her lips together, and then says, “I… I took Lucy because, well, at first, I took her for Deena. I thought a new little dolly would make her interested again. And, I knew if I took Lucy while Deena was with someone else that no one could say it was her who did it. Everyone would have to stop looking at our house.”

“You took her car?”

“Yes.”

“How did you learn to drive?”

“The internet,” she says. “Deena’s computer. Easy.”

“Okay.”