Page 6 of The Witch’s Orchard

FOUR

I T’S NOT EVEN A two-minute drive from Crow Caw Cabin, back down the gravel lane, to Max’s family farmhouse. I pull Honey around and into Max’s driveway, which winds around the house, and park behind Max’s truck. Honey’s engine is barely warm and she settles with a grunt.

“Let’s get started,” I say to myself.

I follow the stone path to the porch and then look around as I climb the steps.

The porch is clean and an old porch swing hangs on one end.

There are no pots of autumnal mums, no decorations, no water bowl for a dog or cat, no welcome mat.

There’s also no peeling, no splinters in the wood, no evidence of the quiet, silent damage of time.

So, well-maintained but not exactly cheery.

I’m about to knock when I see the door is ajar.

I give it a little push and holler, “Max! You home?”

It’s a pointless question. I’d seen his truck in the driveway.

I step over the threshold, my hand on the knob, and try again. “Max? It’s Annie. I’ve got some questions before I get started in town.”

The house is eerily quiet. I wait. Listen.

Somewhere, farther inside, a clock ticks.

And then I hear water whooshing through the pipes.

I assume he’s in the shower and relax a little.

The front door had opened into a living room.

An old couch squats against one wall, a flat-screen TV on the other.

There’s a recliner in the corner, a bookshelf next to it.

Beside the door is a table with a bowl for keys and pocket lint and, beside that, a stack of mail.

“Max?” I holler one more time. Wait. Nothing.

I pick up the envelopes and give them a flip-through. The first qualification of a good PI is a lifelong habit of unmitigated snooping. Anyone who tells you different is lying through their teeth. And probably going through your stuff.

“Hmm,” I mutter, reading the envelopes. Among the regular bills and junk mail are two letters from prestigious liberal arts colleges. One of them has already been opened and I slide my thumb along the flap, reopening it just enough to peek inside at the header and solicitation.

Dear Mr. Andrews,

It is with great pleasure that I inform you of your…

The water shuts off.

“Max?” I shout again, closing the envelope and putting everything back the way it was. “You home? It’s Annie. I need to ask you a few—”

“Miss Gore?” Max says, appearing in the doorway to the side. “Sorry, I didn’t hear you come in, I was working on something.”

He’s wearing an ink-stained apron over an old sweatshirt and jeans with a pair of chunky headphones around his neck.

“I’d like to see the house,” I tell him.

“Oh,” he says, like the idea that I’d want to see the crime scene had not occurred to him. “Umm… I didn’t think you’d—I mean, there’s nothing here, after all this time.”

“Max,” I say. “Remember when I said I’d be going around poking at things that “might”? make people uncomfortable?”

He nods. He’s holding an old towel, twisting it in his hands.

“This is the first thing,” I say.

He twists the towel a little more.

“Max, your sister was taken from this house. I need to see it. This is why I’m here. This is why you brought me here. ”

He lets out a huge breath and his shoulders, which had just about risen to his earlobes when I’d asked to see inside the house, relax.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, okay. I can show you around. Sorry.”

“It’s okay. I know this is tough.”

He nods and steps into the living room ahead of me, waves his arm around like a real estate agent showing the place to a potential buyer.

I look around again, this time with him in the picture for context. The house is probably more than a century old, and the architecture feels exactly right. High ceilings, a maze of narrow rooms, hardwood floors.

“Was this the living room ten years ago?” I ask. It’s the sideways method of asking if this was the room Molly was kidnapped from, the room where he last saw her, watching Snow White on the TV.

“Yes,” he says. He points to the sofa. “Everything—all the furniture, I mean—has changed since then. But, yes. This is how it was laid out.”

I look at the TV, the sofa, the recliner. They’re all only steps to the windows, the front door, the path that leads to the lane.

“Hmm,” I say, and gesture for him to continue with the tour.

He leads me through the house, through a middle room that’s being used for wall-to-wall built-in bookshelves and into a dining room at the back of the house. There’s a matching set of table and chairs that look barely used.

“The piano used to be in here,” he says. “There was a table in that corner over there and Molly used to play there sometimes. She had a doll’s house set up on it.”

He leads me through another hall-room, this one empty.

There are still barely visible holes in the white paint where nails once stuck through.

From the hall, we come into the kitchen.

It’s a big, farmhouse kitchen with butcher-block countertops and a white apron sink, tons of cabinets, and a wide island.

A kitchen table sits against a window, and I guess that, when Max finds the inclination to eat, he sits right there, alone, a book in one hand and a forgotten fork in the other.

We go out of the kitchen, through another hall, and up a set of stairs. We pause at a bedroom with a full-sized bed covered with quilts, very neatly made up, a pair of tennis shoes at the foot.

“This is my room,” he says. There are still two model airplanes hanging from the ceiling near the window.

A telescope sits on a tripod under them, pointed at the sky.

But there are also bills on Max’s desk, a battered laptop, a pad of Post-its, a mostly empty cup of coffee.

This is the room of a kid who has raised himself.

“Thanks,” I say.

He nods noncommittally and leads me across the hall to a closed door.

“This was her room,” he says.

He opens the door.

I’m not sure what I expected. A little girl’s room, left just the way it was when she was taken? Stuffed teddy bears and dolls and pink blankets littering the bed? A dresser full of cute little farm girl clothes?

The room is empty.

The walls are white, the floor is bare, there is no furniture. It is an empty room, that’s all.

“Where—” I start.

“My dad,” Max says with a sigh. “After my mom… Well, we sort of cleaned house. My dad donated all of Molly’s things along with my mom’s. I think it was just too much for him. He called my aunts and they came down and helped him go through everything. It all happened in a weekend.”

I look from one side of the room to another.

The emptiness itself tells me something. The room was never filled with anything else. It never became an office or a hobby room or a storage closet or a guest room. It is still Molly’s room, just without Molly’s things, without Molly.

I scan from the floor, up the wall and over the window, onto the ceiling. There are little plastic stars there, sucking up sunlight. I suppose they do it every day. Just like real stars, they go on shining whether we’re here to see them or not.

I thank Max again and he closes the door.

“There’s nothing left?” I ask.

“There’s a box,” he says. He goes back into his room, and I follow him and watch him open a closet and crouch down in the back, pull out a cardboard file box. He puts it on the bed and opens the lid with a heavy sigh.

“It’s not much,” he says.

He stands there, near the bed but not too near, while I go through the things.

There’s a little vintage book of fairy tales with the name “Janice Andrews” written neatly inside.

“My mom’s,” Max says quietly. His hands are shoved into the barn coat he’s still wearing.

There’s a white-and-lavender crocheted blanket, sized for a child, and a pair of crocheted angels meant to be hung up as Christmas ornaments. There’s a tattered hardback of Where the Wild Things Are . I run my fingers over the familiar old drawings, the little boy in the wolf suit.

“Max,” I say. It’s the name of the boy in the book.

Max nods. “It was mine first, but Molly loved it. I think it sort of tickled her to imagine me in a book. But my mom always teased me that I was never like Max.”

“Never wild?”

He shakes his head, looks at the floor.

“Guess I’d rather read books than be in them,” he says.

I smile at this kid who still so much—in spite of everything he’s been through—resembles the quiet, tender little boy he must have been.

Would he have weathered the storm of his childhood more easily if he’d been rowdy, rough, and tough like Max in the book?

Or would he have put his frustration, fear, and anger into something more destructive than a scrapbook and an ongoing fund to hire another PI?

All of us must do something with the formative pain of our early years.

And even the Max in the book—at the end of the night—returned to the loving order of his mother’s home, something the real-life Max lost years ago.

I glance at him and realize this is something we have in common.

I put the book down and go back to the box.

I pull out an old mug with pansies dancing around it and a glittery, plastic fairy wand with strips of gauze streaming from its tip.

The last thing is a doll with lavender eyes and long shiny blond hair, a lavender dress.

I run my fingers over the cheap satin, the rough lace, look into the doll’s eyes.

“It’s a Lovely Lady Lavender doll,” Max says, watching me. “They were made at the factory in town. All the girls in town had one.”

“There’s a factory in town?”

“Not anymore,” he says. “It closed down a long time ago.”

I look again at the doll, sweep her backward, let the eyes close automatically before putting it back in the box.

“You collected all this stuff?” I ask. “Your mom’s and sister’s things?”

He nods. “When my dad and my aunts started going through the house with boxes and trash bags and I realized what they were doing… I picked up the things I could find, the things that had been left in my room or the kitchen or wherever, and I put them into a box, just in case. They didn’t amount to much in the end.

And, honestly, once it was over, I didn’t open the box more than once or twice. ”

“It must’ve been hard, though,” I say. “To lose everything like that, all at once.”

“It was. But I guess I understand why my dad did it. After Molly was taken, my mother was the only one who ever went into her room. It became almost like a shrine. She would sit on Molly’s bed, take the clothes out of the closet, take the dresses off the hangers, wash them, rehang them.

I think that’s the biggest reason my dad got rid of everything.

I think he thought that obsessing over Molly’s memory is what drove my mom to do what she did.

Like, the fact that she could come in here every day and pretend her daughter had never been taken kept her from being able to let go?

I don’t know. Once she was gone, I think he was afraid that having my mom’s stuff around…

Well, I think he didn’t really know how to cope. ”

“I’m sorry,” I say.

Max nods.

I step out of the room and back into the hallway.

Max continues the tour past a bathroom and a storage closet full of old blankets and puzzles and board games and to the last room, once his parents’, now just his dad’s.

This one is the biggest and a queen-sized bed sits against the far wall.

There’s a shoe rack, a chair beside it. There’s a dresser and a TV on top of it.

A closet where a few men’s jackets and clothes hang.

“He doesn’t sleep here anymore,” Max says without any prompting. “When he’s home, he sleeps downstairs on the couch.”

I nod my understanding and say thanks as we make our way back downstairs.

“Anything you need,” Max says. “Just let me know. There’s a laundry room to the side of the house; that’s usually where I am if I’m not in the main house.”

“Laundry?”

“Yeah,” he says. And then, as if understanding that most people don’t do laundry all day every day and that’s why I’m confused, he says, “If I’m not working, I’m usually, um. Well, it’s a hobby, I guess. I do printing.”

“Like screen printing?”

He shakes his head.

“Woodblocks,” he says. “Sometimes linocuts but mostly woodblocks the last couple years. It’s just… something to do. I like it.”

“Okay,” I say. And I think about the letter from the liberal arts college sitting open and forgotten next to the door.

“Is that it?” he asks, clearly ready to be done with this invasion of his space.

“Sure.”

We walk back through the living room and onto the porch. I go back down the stepping-stone path toward the lane. Max waves goodbye to me as I slide behind Honey’s wheel and I watch as he disappears into the house.

“You know what, Honey?” I say as I rev up her engine. “That house was missing something. Besides the obvious, I mean. I couldn’t put my finger on it till I got back out here.”

I slip the gearshift into reverse, start pulling away, watch the path and the porch and the house recede from my view.

“Not a single family photo. Not one.”