Page 51 of The Witch's Orchard
“You catch the guy?” he asks.
“No on the first one. I always suspected it was my roommate’s ex, onaccount of how it was mostly her lingerie that went missing. The second one I did get him. It was the guy who’d had the office before me. Left some coke under a floorboard and came back to get it.”
“What an exciting life you do lead.”
“Never a dull moment,” I say, and remember with disgust that all my clothes have been rifled through. I move into the bedroom, grab a big armload of clothes, stuff them into the washer and set it going. Then, finally, I trudge back into the kitchen.
I pour both of us a cup of coffee, then sit before him at the butcher-block countertop, where he has put down a manila folder.
“It’s the autopsy photos,” he says, a warning.
“Okay,” I say, and let out a long breath.
He opens the folder and reveals the pictures. In them, Molly Andrews is lying on a silver table. There are close-ups of her slender throat, encircled by thin, regular bruises and erratic, vertical claw marks. Close-ups of her eyes, spotted red with dots of blood. Close-ups of her fingers, bloody with her own flesh under her nails.
“She probably clawed at whoever was attacking, too,” AJ says. “The doc’s sending off DNA to check. But that’ll take weeks, months. Who knows?”
“Okay,” I say. “So, good for the courtroom but not helpful immediately.”
He shakes his head.
“No sign of sexual assault,” AJ says as we look over the photos. “No sign of bruises elsewhere or physical abuse, but . .,”
“What?”
“Well, Doc Jenkins isn’t sure. He’s putting in a call to another coroner he knows. But it looks like there was damage to her esophagus, her heart, her liver. Evidence of stress. But it’s subtle. He’s not sure what could’ve caused it. The esophagus, he said, looked like a bulimia victim, but very mild.”
“Poison?” I ask. “Some kind of… food torture? What had she been eating?”
“He said her last meal was simple. Biscuits, he said. And tea withhoney. But he’s sending off all kinds of samples. We don’t have the kind of lab here to process this stuff. He sent everything to Raleigh and told them to rush it.”
I look down at the photos of Molly’s face.
“She has a few freckles,” I say.
“What are you thinking?”
“I’m just wondering about the condition in which she was kept. Her hair is long, combed. Her dress is clean aside from the mud along the trim. There are cases of girls kept as young wives, ultimately found, usually with Stockholm syndrome. And there are cases of girls kept in horrifying dark basements…”
“But you think it’s the former.”
“I wish it were neither. But if wishes were horses…”
He drinks the last of his coffee and I take the mug, rinse it out, set it in the sink.
“You want anything else?” I open the fridge and look inside. “Max and Shiloh left some milk, sweet tea, and Cokes in here.”
“I’ll take a glass of milk,” he says.
I grin into the fridge, involuntarily. I’ve long believed there’s nothing like a glass of cold milk at the end of a long day. And today has been the longest day.
I pour two tall glasses, set them on the counter.
AJ thanks me, and I watch him take a drink. The muscle in his forearm is thick and ropy and he drinks noisy gulps, his Adam’s apple bobbing. Something about him, sitting there at that counter, drinking that cold milk, helps distract me—however briefly—from the grief and the guilt I feel about Molly Andrews.
“You doing okay?” he asks when he’s finished half the glass.
“Yeah,” I say. “It’s just… I just got here the night before last. Now, I’m sitting at the kitchen counter looking at autopsy photos of a girl I found only this morning, a girl I never expected to find at all.”
