Page 23 of The Witch's Orchard
“I’ve got some bread going in the back. Did you need to talk or were you just coming in for brunch?”
“Both, actually.”
“Okay!” she says. “Just follow me.”
She heads behind the counter and through the double doors and I follow her into the kitchen while she says, “I just took the pumpkin bread out.” She cuts a slice off the orange loaf on the cooling rack and puts it ona little white plate with a pat of butter and a silver spreading knife. She sets both down on the butcher-block work surface, where a wad of pale dough sits, puffy, in a sea of flour. “You want some milk?”
“Sure.”
She pours a glass of whole milk. “Good?”
“Yeah. Thanks.” I smear butter over the warm bread, my mouth watering. I almost forget that I didn’t just come here for lunch. Shiloh was Max and Molly’s babysitter the summer Molly was taken, so she’s the closest thing I can get to being able to speak to a parent in person. And it’s always possible she knows more than she thinks she does.
“How’s it going so far?” she asks before plunging her knuckles into the ball of dough.
I shrug. “About like I expected. Asking questions that have mostly already been answered in Max’s notes or by Max himself or, at least, in old news articles.”
“So why ask them?”
“Well, sometimes asking those same questions stirs people into some kind of action. Sometimes, if someone’s been sitting around… maybe knowing something they should’ve said and didn’t or maybe they didn’t do something when they should have, even remembered something that didn’t seem meaningful at the time but does now… you come back around and ask them again, without a badge on your chest, and they get stirred up. Think maybe they have a second chance.”
“That makes sense.”
“So today I go around asking questions. Tomorrow, I see if anyone wants to do anything about it. I did meet someone I didn’t expect, though.”
“Oh yeah?”
“An old woman in the woods out past the creek.”
“Ohhh,” Shiloh says. She pauses kneading for a moment and sighs. “That would be Susan McKinney. She’s, um, sort of a psychic? Did she offer to read your cards or anything?”
“No, but she did say I could come by later, if I wanted answers.”
Shiloh goes back to kneading. “Well, that’s cryptic.”
“Have you ever been to visit her?” I ask.
Shiloh snorts. “When I was in high school one of my friends—Amy—wanted to go. It was her sixteenth birthday and she’d been fighting with her boyfriend… something about… Gosh, it seemed so important at the time; I can’t believe I can’t remember now. Anyway, me and her and a few of our other friends crammed into Susan’s cabin and she read Amy’s fortune and told her that Bradley was cheating.”
“And?”
“Well, wouldn’t you know it? The very next day Amy found him down at the parking lot with Kacey Bazler. Anyway, Susan McKinney is harmless, as far as I know. A lot of women in town visit her and give her a little cash or whatever they happen to be able to trade for whatever it is she provides. Maybe it’s just peace of mind, you know?”
“Yeah.”
I watch her knead the dough for a while and then ask, “You were the Andrewses’ babysitter, right? It was in the book Max gave me.”
Shiloh nods.
“Yes,” she says. “Just that one summer. Before Molly was taken.”
“Not after?”
She shakes her head. Her hair and eyes are the same shade of deep coffee brown. She sighs, sad and reminiscent, as she pushes her fists into the dough. I take a bite of the pumpkin bread and have to keep myself from groaning at the spicy-sweet warmth of it. The bread is otherworldly. Magical. Or maybe I’m just cold and wet and frustrated. Either way, I’m grateful for the unexpected treat.
“No,” she says. “After Molly was taken, the Andrews family didn’t use a babysitter anymore. Mrs. Andrews didn’t… go out. She never left Max alone after that. She took him to school. She picked him up. If he had band or sports or whatever, she went along and watched.”
“What were they like? Max and Molly?”
