Page 8 of The Witch’s Orchard

SIX

N EXT ON THE LIST is Jessica Hoyle’s residence, and between the now-driving rain and the remoteness of the address, it’s not exactly a quick jaunt.

Rain hammers Honey’s roof as I pull off the side of the switchback road and find the pink stuffed pig in the passenger seat floorboard.

It was left over from a case I’d worked when I first got my PI license, almost five years ago.

A mom and little boy trying to get away from a bad situation.

The boy had left the pig in the car when I drove them to the airport and they’d never called to get it back.

I suppose I could’ve donated it or given it to a neighborhood kid, but the pig had made itself an instant reminder of what success in this job can mean for the people who hire me.

I look down at the pig. The Fog Hog, Leo had called it when we sat together in my car the last time, using the back of the soft pig to mop the windshield on a cold, misty night.

I mop up the windshield now, smack the dash where the vents are. Seems like sometimes that helps. Seems like sometimes maybe I just need to smack something.

Nothing happens. I smack the dash again, right in the middle.

Lo and behold, the vents sputter to life and warm air breezes onto the windshield and the fog begins to clear.

“Presto!” I say. The Fog Hog makes no reply. The rain falls in heavy drops.

“You just need to wake up, Honey?” I ask the car. She rumbles. The heat vents blow.

I look back at my phone and check that I’m on the right track. This old mountain road is nothing but trees and deadly drop-offs and I’m lucky I found this shoulder at all. I pull back onto the road, go three more miles, then turn down Garbler Lane.

Honey sloshes in and out of the underfilled divots in the road. This place hasn’t been re-graveled in years, I think, and it’s been washed out by rains like this one over and over. Scraggly apple trees grow, higgledy-piggledy, along the lane, their twisted gray branches bare of fruit.

“Jesus,” I spit as we skid across a particularly bad dip.

I pass two run-down houses and a couple old single-wides before I come to the last house on the lane.

It’s like a shabby, ugly older brother of Max’s family farmhouse, and the old adage “Too proud to whitewash, too poor to paint” comes to mind.

The siding is dirty and gray, or stained green on the side nearest some huge old conifers.

The roof slumps a little toward the chimney.

The columns that support the porch are crumbling.

A chain-link fence surrounds the house and, just inside, there’s a muddy patch where a dog sleeps with his nose poking outside a red doghouse.

It’s a black nose on a white muzzle. Just like Snoopy.

I pull up and park beside a relatively new Chevy pickup and an old, battered Civic—mostly red but with a blue trunk lid. I reach into the backseat for my leather jacket, maneuver it on over the blazer, get out of the car.

The dog hears the car door and jolts out of his little house like it’s on fire. He’s an unneutered pit, and he lurches against the length of his chain, scrabbling his powerful paws into the wet mud and snapping his maw at me, snarling and barking and growling.

If anyone’s in there, they’ll hear Snoopy and come check things out.

I stand at the fence and wait.

Sure enough, there’s a waver in the curtains and then the door opens. A man steps outside. He’s tall and lanky and he’s wearing a tight T-shirt under an open flannel along with about three days of rust-colored scruff. This, I think, must be Tommy Hoyle, father of the first girl taken, Jessica.

“Who the hell are you?”

I tell him who I am, who hired me, what I’m doing there.

He shakes his head.

“Go away,” he hollers. Then, “Shut the fuck up!” at Snoopy.

He turns and goes back in the house. The dog settles down for a minute and looks at me. I look back at him. We both wait for something else to happen.

After a few more moments, it does. The door opens again and the guy comes back out, walks down the steps and across the old concrete stepping stones and through the gate.

“Mister Hoyle?” I ask. But he doesn’t pay any attention. Just keeps going. Once he’s past me, he says to the air in front of him, “She wants to talk to some fucking detective, who the fuck am I to say no?” He smells like mouthwash and grilled cheese.

He steps up into his pickup and starts it and backs up, just barely missing Honey (practically a shooting offense, in my book) before he wheels it around and kicks up mud and gravel as he revs away.

I’m still glaring after him when the door opens again, and a woman comes outside in an old green rain jacket.

She points her finger at Snoopy, snaps, says, “Dozer. Shut it. Go sit down.” The dog obeys. She tosses him what looks like a chunk of Velveeta and the dog catches it and disappears into his house.

She comes to the gate, opens it, lets me in.

“I’m Mandy Hoyle. Come on in.”

Jessica’s mother. Immediately, I see the resemblance. The pale blue eyes, light blond hair, and milk-white skin. Something else, too. Some quality I can’t quite put my finger on.

“Okay,” I say, and follow her.

Inside, the house is old and worn and chilly.

It’s cluttered with knickknacks and shoes of all sizes and hoodies cast over the backs of chairs, but there are no dust balls on the floor or empty cans and unopened mail sitting around.

The house is cluttered but clean. I follow Mandy into the kitchen, where she takes off the rain jacket and slips it over the back of a white kitchen chair before picking up a plastic scrub brush.

She’s been doing the breakfast dishes, I see.

The sink is full of sudsy water and Corning plates from thirty or forty years ago.

Yellow flowers and butterflies adorn the rim of the cream-colored plates.

“I’ll rinse,” I say.

“Sure,” Mandy says.

As she scrubs, I tell her that I was hired by Max Andrews to look for his sister.

“We tried to hire a PI once,” she says. “Well, I wanted to. We couldn’t afford it. Tommy was out of work at the time. He’d been up at the toy factory but it closed down right before… right before she was taken. It was bought out. They sent the plant to Mexico.”

“Was that Tommy who just left?”

She nods, hands me a plate. There’s a green bruise, almost healed, ringing her right wrist. I take the plate.

I rinse it carefully and slide it into the plastic strainer.

The kitchen’s been cleaned with vinegar and the smell still lingers.

Everything in here is old or dollar store and I smile at a little pink flower in a jelly jar on the windowsill.

A weed, I think, pretty and cheerful, its petals open and hoping for sun.

“What do you want to know?” Mandy says.

I ask her to tell me about the day Jessica was taken. She takes a long, shuddering breath, then nods, more at the soapy sink than me.

“I was at this playground; I needed to get out of the house for a while. There’s a Baptist church up on Laurel and they have a sweet little playground.

Just some swings and a slide but it’s the real nice kind with the wood and dark green plastic?

I’d taken Jessica up there to play for a while.

She was swinging on the swings and… then she wasn’t. ”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I was watching her. I looked away for a second. And then she was gone.”

She pulls her hands out of the suds, wipes them on a threadbare kitchen towel, and says, “Let me show you something.”

She walks out of the kitchen and I follow her into a living room, where there’s a bricked-up fireplace and a space heater that’s not been turned on.

There’s a red velour sofa and a gorgeous old rocking chair and a TV sitting on a plain pine table with a stack of DVDs next to it.

But none of that is what Mandy wants to show me.

She walks over to the wall behind the couch and points at the pictures hanging in a straight line the length of the wall.

There are a few children here, one girl and three boys.

The oldest boy, with curly auburn hair, has pictures all the way through high school.

His senior picture hangs last in the line.

He’s got Mandy’s soft expression but everything else about him is like a copy-paste of Tommy.

Same chiseled bones, same wavy auburn hair.

The other two boys’ photos stop at football pictures somewhere in late elementary or early middle school.

And then there’s the girl with the fine, straight, corn-silk blond hair. The only girl.

“Jessica,” I say.

“That’s right,” Mandy says. The kitchen towel is still in her hand, and she uses it to wipe some invisible dust from the top edge of the picture frame.

Jessica’s huge eyes stare through the lens of the camera. Ice blue, I think. There’s a pink bow in her hair and she wears a black-and-pink dress and her hands are placed delicately on her lap as no child sits in real life and all children sit in professional photographs.

“That’s just about the last one we got,” Mandy says. “Before.”

I nod my understanding.

She sighs and points at the oldest boy and says, “This is Tam. Tommy Junior is his real name but we’ve always called him Tam and that’s what he prefers. He graduates this year. Not even a year older than Jessica. Irish twins, they say. Then Jeffrey and James.”

“Mrs. Hoyle, when you saw that Jessica was missing, you found a doll. Is that right?”

She nods, closing her eyes tight. She’s still got on heavy black eyeliner and mascara from last night, and it doesn’t budge when she scrapes tears from one eye with the side of her thumb.

“An applehead doll,” she says. “An applehead doll in a sky blue dress.”

“And you showed it to the police?”

She nods again.