Page 15 of The Witch's Orchard
IHAVE A LIST OFpeople 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 Carolinamountain 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. Oliviadoesn’ttalk. 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.”
