Page 80 of The Witch’s Orchard

“You had a call at the Andrews house on the day Molly was kidnapped.”

“Sort of.”

“What do you mean, sort of?”

“Well, I had a call. But I couldn’t go. There was a backup at the high school—you should’ve seen the turds. Anyway, no, I couldn’t go. They were having a problem with the drain in an old outbuilding, I believe. I figured it probably just needed to be snaked.”

“Pretty good memory,” I say.

He taps a thick first finger to his temple. “It’s like a vault, I tell you. Wanna know the secret?”

“Crosswords?”

“Damn,” he says, and whistles through his teeth. “You really are a big-city PI, huh?”

“That’s right. So you sent Dwight Hoyle,” I say. “Is that correct?”

“Lord, they should put you on TV,” Mack says, standing and putting things in his pockets, closing his toolbox. “Anyhow, that’s right. The very same Dwight Hoyle died in that explosion yesterday. Jesus Christ, you know I could hear it from here? ’Course, I have a top-of-the-line aid.” He taps the huge chunk of plastic in his ear. “Turns up and down, you know. Amazing. I ordered it online.”

He leads me back to the front of the shop and out onto the sidewalk.

“He made a statement with the cops,” I tell him. “But it seems no one can find it. Do you have any idea what he said? Did he ever talk to you about it?”

“Well, not much,” he says. “He said something about a lady being there.”

“A lady—you mean Deena Drake? The piano teacher, the woman who married the factory owner?”

He shakes his head. “I don’t recall. But I don’t think it was her. I thought it was someone else. Someone he saw out in the field. That’s what he told me. Said it nearly scared him half to death.”

“Why?”

“Said he thought she was a scarecrow at first,” he says, his voice low.

“A scarecrow? Why?”

“Don’t know. He was pretty shook up. The cops were on him, and he and Elaine were nervous as all get-out. They left town right after.”

He rattles the handle of the shop door to make sure it’s locked, then turns to face me.

“You want my opinion,” he says. “It wasn’t no ordinary human.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like a haint, weren’t they? How does one person even do what they did? Move like they were never there and leaving a doll behind? I think it was something supernatural, a spirit or a demon or…”

He stares at me, eyes pinched to slits.

“A witch,” I say.

He winks, taps the side of his nose with a gnarled first finger.

“Now you’re thinking right. Some kind of satanic ritual.”

“Satanic ritual?”

“Three little girls go missing except one’s brought back, probably ’cause she’s touched in the head—you can’t go making satanic offerings with damaged goods, can you? So anyway, two little girls go missing and then one’s found—all of ten years later—down in that ditch.”

“Not a ditch.”