Page 47 of The Witch's Orchard
She rolls her eyes and walks toward the driver side of her little worn-out Kia.
“No,” she says. “He must’ve heard me telling Emily—the dispatch over there, and a friend of mine—about you. Cole tends to take things personal. Ever since Arnie left, I think… he’s just trying to protect us.”
“Sure,” I say. “Listen, what if I talked to Nicole?”
“Nicole?” she says. “Why would you want to talk to Nicole?”
I shrug. “Nicole’s Olivia’s sister. Obviously, you would be there when I spoke to her.”
“Nicole wassevenwhen Olivia was taken. She was just a kid.”
“They’re sisters. You think your siblings don’t know stuff about you that nobody else does? Even if you never told them?”
“Miss Gore,” she starts. “I don’t have time for this. Please do not bother my children or Iwillhave Cole speak to you. Good night.”
She gets in the car and hauls ass out of the driveway and down the street and I watch her thinking I wish I’d had a field medic with that kind of get-up-and-go when I really needed one.
For a moment, the wind doesn’t blow cool and damp from the mountains. It’s another wind grazing my face. Another wind. Another time. The scent of my own blood fills my nose. Not the real scent, I remind myself.
The memory of the scent.
The ringing in my ears, the throbbing in my head, the confusion, the shouting, the fire. The hot sticky wetness on my own side. I had put my hand there and been surprised at the oily gush, the grit of debris.
I’d been upside down. Buckled in and watching as the Security Forces airman across from me—also belted in and hanging like me—breathed his last breath, blood dripping from his mouth and running up his cheek and over his forehead, into his hair.
I’d held my hand to my side and unbuckled my belt, dropping to the vehicle’s ceiling with a thud, the wind knocking out of my lungs, thedistantwhump-whump-whump.Dust-off inbound. The taste of blood is fresh in my mouth.
“RAAWWWW!” a crow screeches.
I turn toward the noise, jolted out of my memory. At the edge of the driveway, a crow bounces on the knotted branch of an apple tree. There is no fruit and the leaves—thin on the branches and thickly piled around the trunk—are a deep, blood red.
“Raww! Rawww!” the crow screeches again.
I turn again and walk back toward Honey, but pause when I realize my hand is pressed tight to my side.
SEVENTEEN
ON THE WAY BACKfrom the Jacobses’ neighborhood I pass a strip mall boasting a Taco Bell, a Laundromat, a boarded-up ice cream shop, and a little local diner with an unlit sign above the place that says “Ellerd’s” in old-fashioned spaghetti Western–style letters. I tell myself I should just go back to the cabin and make a peanut butter sandwich to save money, but then I spot a familiar, beat-up, mostly red Civic on the far side of the lot.
“Perfect,” I say. I pull in and park. It’s nearly seven o’clock and I figure this is as good a place as any to get some chow.
Inside, Ellerd’s looks like it’s had a few iterations over the years, with remnants of each preceding generation’s remodel left behind. There’s the fifties black and white tile floor and the seventies Formica tables along with the Western-themed wood bar and nineties mauve seat cushions. The whole place is an exercise in transitory properties, like low-rent, small-town eateries.
I sit down at the bar and pick up a laminated menu and am trying to decide between the chicken fried chicken and the chicken fried steak when Mandy Hoyle emerges from the double kitchen doors. She almost drops a plate of pork chops when she sees me but recovers and keeps going toward a table with a couple of farmer types in battered boots and Carhartts.
A young woman who’s probably fresh out of high school steps up onthe other side of the bar and asks if I’m ready to order. I tell her I’d like the chicken fried chicken with tater tots, extra gravy, a side of fried apples, and a large coffee. She nods and leaves.
And then Mandy Hoyle is there. She puts a red plastic cup of ice water down in front of me and then looks from side to side, her huge blue eyes watery and scared.
“I heard what happened,” she whispers. “About… about Molly.”
“Yeah,” I say.
“Are you leaving?”
I shake my head.
“You’re going to keep looking?”
