Page 7 of The Witch’s Orchard

FIVE

I HAVE A LIST OF people to talk to today, and the family of Olivia Jacobs—the second girl taken and the only one returned—is the first on my list since her house, according to the information Max gave me, is closest.

“Good a place as any to start,” I say to Honey as we pull onto the girl’s street.

The short, tidy ranch house belonging to Kathleen Jacobs, Olivia’s mother, is one of many short, tidy ranch houses in a short, tidy subdivision just outside town. There’s a tall oak in the front of this one, and its wet leaves litter the lawn in a pretty way.

I walk up the asphalt driveway, still slick with dew, and listen for a moment before knocking. Inside I hear footsteps and the muffled voices of two women, a stereo in another room.

A school bus drives up the road, stops just past the house, and three kids get on. The doors shut and the bus starts off again.

I knock.

A woman opens the door. Probably in her late forties, she has wisps of gray in her otherwise very black hair and deep, vertical lines over her upper lip when she purses her mouth and tries to remember if she’s ever seen me before.

“Can I help you?” she finally says. Her Western North Carolina mountain twang is a lot stronger than Max’s, and I just barely catch myself before I smile at the familiar pinched-off syllables not dissimilar from the sounds of my youth.

I ask if she’s Kathleen Jacobs. She says yes.

I tell her who I am, why I’m here. I give her my card.

“No,” she says.

“I didn’t ask anything—”

“You want to talk to Olivia, right?”

“Yes.”

“Because that Andrews boy hired you and now you’re going to go around asking questions. And that’s fine with me. Whatever happened ten years ago ought to come out. It’s about goddamned time.”

“Okay.”

“But Olivia won’t talk to you.”

“Can I at least—”

“Olivia won’t talk to anyone. Olivia doesn’t talk. I guess Max failed to mention: Olivia is completely nonverbal.”

She swings the door open and I see two young women at the kitchen table, finishing up their breakfast, one maybe a little younger than Max, with hair as black as the woman’s in front of me, and the other one younger with a cloud of chestnut curls nearly obscuring her face.

I recognize the hair, if nothing else. It’s the same little girl who was once taken and then, inexplicably, brought back. Olivia Jacobs, now fifteen.

“Olivia doesn’t talk to anybody,” Kathleen says.

“You done with your cereal, Liv?” the black-haired girl asks.

Olivia doesn’t say anything. She’s looking off into the distance, clapping her hands together under the table in rhythm to the stereo I’d heard playing before.

There’s a pop song crackling through the speakers and Olivia claps in 4/4 time.

The other girl reaches for Olivia’s cereal bowl, but Olivia stops clapping and puts her hand on top of the bowl, yanks it back.

Milk and bloated rectangles of Cap’n Crunch slosh around and almost spill.

“Fine,” the black-haired girl says, completely calm. “No problem, Liv.”

Once the other girl retreats, Olivia’s hands go back to clapping.

Kathleen looks at her watch. She’s wearing teal scrubs with a chunky sweater and black leather clogs.

“I just got home from my shift,” she says. “Haven’t even taken a shower yet.”

“I apologize,” I say, but I know I don’t sound sorry.

Kathleen sighs, looks back over her shoulder at the two young women finishing their breakfast and says, “Nicole, you about ready for school?”

Nicole, the girl who isn’t Olivia, says, “Yeah. Just need to get my bag.”

“And you have dance tonight,” Kathleen says.

“Oh!” Nicole says. “Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I’ll get my stuff.”

Nicole runs off, and I hear her rummaging in her room while Kathleen shakes her head, exhausted.

“Look,” she says. “Go around and sit on the back porch. You can talk to me once Olivia starts her shows.”

“Okay,” I say, because it’s better than nothing.

She shuts the door and I walk around to the back of the house, where I find a little red-stained deck, a porch swing, and a few dewy deck chairs around a glass-topped table.

Another oak tree stands just past the railing, so the deck is covered with slick yellow leaves.

I notice a cobweb attached to three different points on the porch swing.

It wavers a little but I don’t see the spider. Dewdrops drip onto the wet wood.

I rattle off the moisture from one of the chairs, then give it a final, inadequate drying swipe with a hankie from my bag. A few moments later, a voice says, “Bye!” An engine starts and a car rolls away.

A few more moments and Kathleen slides open the back door and comes outside with a cup of coffee that she hands to me. She wipes down her seat with her sweater sleeve and then sits with a bone-weary sigh.

“Gonna be a wet winter,” she says.

I nod like I understand weather, take a sip of coffee, put it down in front of me. I wait to see if Kathleen is going to start the conversation. When she doesn’t, I say, “Max Andrews hired me because he’s desperate to find his sister.”

Kathleen is still looking out toward the yard, so I continue, “He’s not ready to give up.”

“I wouldn’t be either,” Kathleen says. She reaches into the pocket of her sweater and pulls out a pack of menthols with a pink plastic lighter stuffed in the cellophane. “Mind?”

I shake my head. She lights up.

“When Olivia was taken…” she starts, and then stops, takes a long drag, lets it out.

“When she was taken, I thought my world had ended. We knew that Jessica Hoyle had gone missing nearly a month before. Same exact thing. An applehead doll and everything. We knew she’d not been found. The whole town knew about it but…”

“What?”

“The Hoyles aren’t… They weren’t, um… God, it’s awful to say. But they’re kind of trashy.”

I feel my teeth grit together as the familiar slur “trashy” sears through my mind and dredges up old memories. I force myself to take another sip of the coffee, nod encouragingly.

“The Hoyles were… Look, they seemed like the kind of people whose kid might have a death by misadventure and they cover it up.”

The words are out of her mouth like a train. She’s trying to get past them. Past that guilty feeling of suspicion too easily arrived at, another mother’s grief too easily brushed aside.

“And, I remember some folks saying that it was all just a big scam. That the family was faking the kidnapping for media attention, donations, whatever. The day after Jessica was taken, Tommy—Jessica’s father—started an online donation fund to hire a PI, which, of course, he never did.

Anyway, you read stories about things like that, and the Hoyle clan?

Well, I hate to say it, but they fit the type. ”

“Did anyone prove anything?”

“No,” Kathleen says. “And even if it had been some kind of Hoyle con, they would’ve stuck to just having Jessica go missing.

But it was only a month later that Olivia was taken, and, just like with Jessica, there was an applehead doll.

Of course, once that happened, people started taking Mandy—that’s Jessica’s mother—seriously.

That’s when it became real. For everyone. For me.”

“Tell me about the day. Do you remember it?”

“Of course. We were at a church picnic, down at the park. It used to be a yearly thing. We’d just put the food out.

I was getting a plate and I was trying to juggle both girls.

Nicole was seven at the time and very chatty.

We always had to keep an extra eye on Olivia, you know, even then.

She’s autistic, which we know now, but…

this is a small town and she was still so young, just barely five years old.

You have to understand. It wasn’t until later that we took her to a specialist.”

I nod and take another drink of coffee, hoping she’ll continue.

“Anyway, Nicole was going on and on about what all was on the dessert table and I was listening to her. She asked me a question about the bowl of ambrosia, I remember, and I was answering her and when I turned to look for Olivia, she was gone.”

Tears well up in Kathleen’s eyes. She blinks them away. Takes another long drag of her smoke. Sharp mint and acrid tobacco fill my nose.

“I just let go of her hand for a second. That’s all it took.

She was gone. I screamed her name but… she was never…

she wouldn’t have answered. Some other people asked what was going on.

We all spread out and searched for her. I found my husband, Arnold, over by the music stage.

He’d been going to play his guitar. We looked everywhere.

I took him back to the buffet table where I’d lost her, and there it was. ”

“The applehead doll,” I guess.

“Yes. It was horrible. A little red velvet dress. That awful, shriveled face.”

Kathleen shivers and taps her cigarette against the hard plastic arm of the deck chair. Gray ash falls to the planks and turns to thin sludge.

“We thought… We knew we’d lost her for good.

Search parties went out that night. And the next day.

And the next. Everyone came back empty-handed.

The news came. And then the FBI. There was nothing.

Nothing. I felt so, so hopeless. I remember wishing I could just…

go back. God, it was awful. But then, two weeks later, I came outside one night for a smoke. And there she was.”

Kathleen’s eyes stare across the porch at the empty, weathered swing and farther. Into a decade ago.

“I thought… God, at first I thought she was dead. She was lying there on her side in the swing. Asleep. And when I touched her… she was so cold. It was summer but it had been a chilly week. Cloudy. And… I don’t know how long she’d been out there. Just… asleep like that.”

“You woke her up, took her inside,” I say.

She nods, puts out the butt of her cigarette. Lights another one.

“She was covered in scratches and bruises. All over her arms and legs. We begged her to talk to us. But she… she never would. Never, never could. And then, two weeks later.”

“Max’s sister,” I say. “Molly Andrews was taken.”

She nods. The cigarette shakes. She sniffs and wipes her eyes with the sleeve of her sweater.

“Does Olivia communicate? Does she type or draw or…”

Kathleen shakes her head.

“She draws pictures if she has chubby crayons. And, when she’s inclined, she’ll use her iPad and a program with picture cards to tell us things she wants or needs.

She’s not mute—her voice box works just fine.

Sometimes, in her sleep, she moans. Sometimes she screams at us, wordless.

” Kathleen looks back at me, a hint of a challenge in her eyes now.

“I’m a nurse. I’ve taken her to all kinds of therapy.

When Arnold was still around, he took her everywhere he could.

All the specialists in the state. We’re all just doing the best we can, Ms. Gore. ”

“I know.”

“Arnold left when Olivia was in middle school. He stuck around that long. He tried.”

“Where is he now?”

“He’s a contractor. He went to another town.

Got another job there. Another life. He pays his child support, though.

On time. Every month. When she feels up to it, Olivia goes to school, but usually it’s just too overwhelming for her.

So, at most, it’s a couple half days a week.

She has a homebound tutor who’s very good with her.

Lord, we’re lucky for that. I work nights so I can be here in the day and Nicole stays with her in the evenings. ”

“I’m not DSS, Mrs. Jacobs. I’m not here to check up on you or look into Olivia’s living situation,” I say. “I’m just trying to find out what happened to Molly, what happened to all of them.”

She chews on her bottom lip for a while and then lets out a sigh.

“I know,” she says. “I just… I feel guilty. I feel sick every time I think of that Andrews girl. It makes me want to puke.”

She pauses, swallows hard, takes another drag. Smoke billows out of her mouth as she says, “Because I know that she took my daughter’s place.”

Tiny taps of rain begin to spit around the porch, hit the deck, the table, me. Kathleen stubs the cigarette out and stands up. I stand with her. This meeting is over.

“If I wanted to talk to Olivia—”

“You can’t.”

“But if she could—”

“She won’t. Listen, you think this is the first time someone’s come around, trying to talk to her?

You think the cops didn’t try to talk to her after she was brought back?

The FBI? No, she didn’t talk to them. And she won’t talk to you.

I’ve been more than generous, and that’s because I feel for poor Max.

I really do. He’s a good kid and he deserves a better lot than life handed him.

But I’ve got nothing more to say to you.

I’m tired. I’m going to bed. Please leave or I will call the sheriff. ”

She turns and stomps back inside the house, slides the door shut.

I move off the deck and back toward the road.

Around the front, through the living room window, I see Olivia Jacobs sitting on the sofa, watching a British gardening show.

Two women in neat cardigans prune roses in front of a stone Cotswold cottage.

The blooms fall to the pristine green grass. Music plays. Olivia watches, rapt.

I slide my hands into my damp back pockets and head to the car.