Page 10 of The Witch's Orchard
“You know you can call me,” Leo says. “You can always call me.”
“I know,” I say.
“Watch your six, Gore.”
“Always,” I say. “You too.”
We hang up. I glance at the phone. It’s not even eight o’clock on Monday morning, the fog not even burned off the ground. It’s this quiet, solitary, silvery nature of early morning that, despite my chronic lack of sleep, makes this my favorite time of day. I slide the phone into my pocket, take another drink of water, pull on my light, reflective jacket, and head out the door.
There’s a path behind the cabin and I take it. I follow it all the way to the edge of a gorge and down to a fast-running creek. Quartz Creek, I guess. I’m not a fast runner but I’m steady. My heart rate picks up and then beats out a steady rhythm and, as my feet tread over the wet, fallen leaves, I fantasize about a life where I rented this cabin for the sole purpose of standing in this water, waders up to my chest, casting a line over and over and over, hoping for a plump mountain trout. It’s a quieter life. Slow and contemplative. The kind of life I’ve never had. The kind that’s better imagined than lived. At least for me.
I cross the creek at a decrepit bridge and then jog up the gentle slope of the opposite bank. There, after maybe ten yards on the trail, I spot what must be the circle of stones Max mentioned. I slow down as I get nearer. My breath and heart rate should be falling but they’re not. As I reach a circle of gray boulders, the huge stones embedded with shimmering quartz, my heartbeat quickens. An involuntary shiver races across my shoulder blades. Still, I step into the center and immediately hear what Max was talking about. Every sound is weirdly amplified here. I reach down, pick up a dead twig, snap it in half.
SNAP. Snap. snap.
It echoes.
Another shiver.
I snap one of the half twigs in half again.
SNAP. Snap. snap.
And then I pause. It’s not just the nearness of the stones, the eeriness of the echoes that have pricked my subconscious. I realize, with latentanimal instinct, that I am being watched. My heart is hammering now and I’m surprised I can’t hear it thumping, echoing off the surface of the rocks. I reach for my gun and remember I didn’t bring it. No reason to run with a gun in the middle of the woods, I’d thought.
I turn and lock eyes with an old woman standing just outside the stone circle. Her frizzy, steel gray hair is piled on her head. She wears canvas pants and a long, black threadbare cardigan over a T-shirt that says, “Virginia Is for Lovers.” She’s carrying two baskets in her red-knuckled hands and her beetle black eyes narrow as she says, “Just who the hell are you?”
“Annie Gore,” I say. My voice echoes and comes back to me tight and thin with a sharp tinge of fear. I step outside the stones before I have to listen to it anymore. “I’m a private investigator.”
“Why you running around in my goddamned forest?”
“This isyourforest?”
She gives me a curt nod.
“I thought it was Andrews land,” I say. “I’m working for Max.”
“This about his sister?” she asks.
“Yeah.”
She sniffs and looks down into her basket. The wind catches wild strands of her hair and her oversized sweater billows and flaps like the wings of a crow. I can’t help but think of the Witch of Quartz Creek and her two doomed daughters.
“Damn shame,” she says. She takes a few steps closer, her old hiking boots crunching over the leaves, and looks me up and down. “You ain’t a city girl.”
“No,” I say.
She looks into my eyes, then follows the line of my cheek, my brow, my nose. I imagine she sees the softness of my features—a face that stays round even when the rest of me is skinny—marred by a couple of thin, white scars, a once-straight nose previously broken and never set quite right.
I give her the same studying. She’s a plump lady but not soft. She’sstrong-boned with broad shoulders and warm olive skin. Deep lines crease her forehead, the space between her eyebrows. Her eyes are sharp and wary as a fox.
“Military,” she says, a guess.
I don’t reply.
A cold breeze slices the air between us and the sheen of sweat that had accumulated on my body now stings with chill. Goose bumps erupt on my arms and legs.
The woman looks in the direction from which the breeze comes. The wind pushes the hair off her face and she stares into it, her nose reddening, water glistening in her eyes. The wind shimmies around the high stones behind me and whistles as it passes, a high keening.
