Page 30 of The Witch's Orchard
“That’s all right,” I say. “I’ll take any list I can get. I understand that Olivia Jacobs was taken from a church picnic. Would that have been a First Baptist event?”
“Yes,” Rebecca says. “It was awful.”
“What do you remember about it?”
She breathes out heavily through her nose and then says, “I was at another table, helping some of the women organize the drinks. I heard a scream. It was Kathleen. She was searching for Olivia. I remember thinking, at first, that Olivia must have just wandered off. She was always an obstinate girl. But then there was the doll.”
“Where was it found?”
“Lying against a tree,” she says, bringing her fingertips up to touch the small gold cross at the hollow of her neck. “Near the tables where Olivia went missing. The whole congregation split up to search for her but…”
“You found nothing.”
“No,” she says. “Nothing.”
“Did the police question you at the time?”
“Of course,” she says, her voice going shaky. “They questioned everyone. Anyone who’d been around either of the kidnappings. But we didn’t know anything. All we could do to help those girls was pray to the Lord for their safe return. Which we still do.”
“Okay,” I say. “Well, I appreciate your help. And if you can get me that list, I’d really appreciate it.”
“Yes,” she says. “All right.”
“Thank you,” I say. And because sometimes you catch more flies with honey, “I really appreciate it, ma’am.”
I leave and walk back down the steps and across the empty parking lot. I slide behind Honey’s wheel and rev the engine, but I don’t move. Instead, I sit there for a minute, thinking. Jessica was taken from this church. Olivia was taken from a picnic hosted by this church. But what about Molly? Shiloh said Max and Molly’s parents attended this church, but was that the only connection?
Instead of backing out and leaving, I pull to the rear of the parking lot, to a little playground sitting under the edge of a tree line. Just like Mandy said, there’s a dark wood swing set and slide with one of those square towers at one end. A little sun-bleached now, but still plenty usable. The chains on the swings have been oiled or replaced over the years since Jessica was taken from one of them.
I sit in the driver’s seat in the cool, damp air and watch the swing. “She must’ve been exhausted,” I say to Honey.
Honey purrs.
I think about Mandy. Tired and hungry and probably feeling hopeless and sad. A baby in her belly, another one in the backseat, another one on the swing.
Jessica had been there, I think, picturing the little blond fairy of a girl. She had been there pumping her legs. And then what?
I rest my hands in my lap instead of on the wheel and watch the swing and think about those dolls with their little bright dresses and their empty black eyes and think about the witch who turned herself into a crow and taught the other crows to cry and I think about Susan McKinney seeming to look at me and right through me at the same time. The heater runs, blowing hot air over my feet and hands. The top blower isn’t working. The windshield fogs.
Watch the swing,I think.
Watch the swing. Watch the swing. Watch the swing.
It’s almost hypnotic. A little girl, swinging. Mandy so tired. A toddler snoozing in the backseat, the rhythmic sound of his breath lulling and calm.
My eyelids begin to droop.
A crow caws. Startles me awake. The crow is standing on the top of the swing set’s tower, looking down at me, his feathers a wet, glossy black, his eyes like polished glass. He caws again.
I hear Leo’s voice from so many years ago, the first time I met him.
“You always gotta go after shit. That’s what they tell me,” he’d said, slapping a file down on the table in front of me. “Can’t leave nothing alone.”
I’d shrugged. I’d been looking into a suspicious money trail on my own time. I was still in Security Forces then, but the unofficial case had fallen well outside of my purview. Still, I’d refused to let it drop, and my searching had led to the discovery of a first lieutenant’s paying off a local girl to keep quiet about some of his boys getting rough with the strippersat the club in town, part of a larger, disturbing pattern I couldn’t keep quiet about.
I’d thought I was going to catch hell from Leo, the way I was digging around. I figured the moment I stepped foot in his office, I’d be booted out of the Air Force for all my meddling. Instead, he recruited me to his unit within the Office of Special Investigations. I’d be operating both within and apart from the Air Force. Much of the time, I’d be investigating our own airmen.
“Now you can find shit out for a job,” Leo had said. “Seems like you got the stones for it, and maybe, working for me, you won’t get yourself killed.”
