Page 57 of The Witch’s Orchard

She has a thin bandage on her wrist, gauze under a linen wrapping.

“What happened to your arm?” I ask.

She pauses, looks down at the bandage as if she’d forgotten it was there. She pulls her sleeve down over it and says, “Rooster. Damn things get ornery sometimes.”

I’ve just opened my mouth to ask another question when she mutters, “He keeps acting up, I’ll have to put him down.”

Then she turns to me and says, “We’re going to get some decent food in you.”

I watch as she adds butter to a cast-iron skillet, already hot on the woodstove, whips up three eggs and then goes back to chopping. I’m mesmerized by her actions in the dim light of an overhead incandescent, and I watch as an omelet comes together before me. Susan adds a handful of the topped greens and some homemade red sauce from a little bottle on an overhead shelf, and then folds the omelet in half. She cuts it with her wood spatula and slides the halves onto two heavy ceramic plates. She puts one in front of me.

“What you been eating?” she asks.

I shrug, take the fork she hands me. She sits down across from me and slices into her own omelet half, takes a big bite. I watch her chew and swallow and decide I’m hungrier than I am afraid of her. I cut off a bite.

“I had dinner at Ellerd’s last night,” I say around a mouthful of egg. The omelet is soft and buttery and the greens sharp.

She laughs, wet and croaky. When she settles down again, she sniffs and looks into my eyes, searching like she did before.

“You feeling bad about Molly,” she says. She takes a few bites while I shrug and stare at my eggs. “But you’re not the type to blame yourself. Not usually.”

I shrug again.

“But, in this case, you think you stirred someone into action.”

“Yeah,” I finally say. I look up at her and find that she is watching me. Her dark eyes shine like jet in the low light.

“You likely did,” she says after a few long seconds. It’s a statement of fact more than an accusation, and it feels like a gift. It takes something off me. A weight and a dread and an ugliness. The acknowledgment that, yes, I came here and poked around and now Molly Andrews is dead when she was not dead before.

“What do you know that you aren’t saying?” I ask. I put down my fork. Both our plates are clean, and the scent of cooking and herbs and woodsmoke hangs between us. “I heard in town that you call yourself a psychic.”

She places her hands on the table and looks at them, and I follow her gaze to the gnarled fingers, swollen red knuckles, short choppy fingernails.

“I don’t call myself nothing. What other folks wanna call me is their business,” she says. “But, I do have dreams. And, sometimes, I read some cards.”

I look back to her eyes and hold her gaze.

“I heard you were brought in for questioning after Olivia Jacobs went missing, that you were held.”

Her eyes narrow, and she shifts.

“Of course you heard that. They say I’m a witch, don’t they? And they say a witch took those girls. So how long do you really think it was before everybody and their dog was pointing at me?” She rolls her eyes and then lets out a tired-sounding breath and says, mockingly, “Ol’ Susan McKinney lives up on the mountain, probably up to no good. Probably running around taking little girls and replacing them with poppets.”

“They must have had more than a suspicion. If they brought you in after Molly was taken and not at the very beginning with Jessica?”

She smirks at me.

“Quick one, you are.” She looks down at her hands, but I keep my eyes on her face and see pain there. When she speaks again, a lot of the bite is gone from her voice. “It was because of Sheriff Kerridge.”

“Kerridge?” I ask, confused. “Not Jacobs?”

“No,” she says. “Nobody told you?”

“Told me what?”

“Jacobs was just a deputy then. Donald Kerridge was the sheriff when Jessica was taken, but we were close. Nothing romantic—get your head out of the gutter. We’d always been good friends, you understand? Since we were kids. And he knew I had nothing to do with any of it. Of course, he came around and talked to me after Jessica was takenand againafter Olivia went missing. But… look at this place. Look around and tell me where I could keep two little girls, first of all.”

I admit to myself that the cabin is tiny. Still, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that she could have a root cellar somewhere.