Page 53 of The Witch's Orchard
I reopen the folder, go back to the pictures, studying the shots from the morgue. I get out my notebook and read over everything I’d written down. AJ waits patiently for my next question, takes another drink of his milk.
“What I need are the files from ten years ago.”
He nods. “I started getting into them today. The system was a complete mess ten years ago, so it’ll take some time to track everything down, but hopefully tomorrow.”
“Okay,” I breathe. “In the meantime, what can you tell me about Jessica’s father? Tommy Hoyle?”
I think about the man I’d seen leaving that run-down house in that run-down holler the day before. The way he’d screamed at his dog, at me, kicked up mud as he sped away.
“Local lowlife,” AJ says. “Beats up on Mandy.”
“I got that far. He was laid off from the toy plant around the time the girls were kidnapped, right?” I ask.
“That’s right. My dad worked the same plant.”
“What’s your dad do now?”
“He went over to the community college after he got canned. He does HVAC repair now.”
“Well,” I say. “Tommy seems to have had no such aspirations. Mandy said he drives a digger or something, over in another town, but it didn’t really ring true.”
“Could be, I guess,” AJ says. “But mostly I just see him hanging around at Yellow Dog.”
“Local bar?”
“Wow, it’s like you’re a professional or something.”
I snicker, and AJ smiles as he watches me.
“He do a lot of day drinking?” I ask.
“Enough we’ve had to pull him out of there a few times. We take him back to the cells, let him sober up so we don’t send him home to Mandy like that.”
“So if he doesn’t work, how does he pay the mortgage?”
“Well, they don’t have a mortgage,” AJ says. “That house belonged to Tommy’s folks and he was the oldest so it’s his now. But everything else? How they put food on the table and keep their kids in clothes and sports uniforms? Mandy waits tables at Ellerd’s, and I’d guess that’s all the money they’ve got.”
“What about Dwight Hoyle and Elaine, the cousins? I heard from Mandy that they just moved back from Charlotte. I went by their house, but they didn’t seem to be home.”
“If they’re back,” he says, “I haven’t seen them. But I can ask around.”
“Mandy told me that Dwight was questioned after Jessica disappeared,” I say. “But that it didn’t come to anything.”
“I’ll have to look back at the files, but I wouldn’t be surprised.”
I nod.
“Do you think he had something to do with all this?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Anyone in town with the guts and the drive to do it—anyone with enough space to keep two little girls, though as we’ve said they don’t take upthatmuch space—could have taken them. I just have to poke around and see what turns up. But this is what being a PI is. It’s just following every road and seeing where it leads. Most of the time, you get to a dead end.”
“What do you do then?” he asks.
“Turn my ass around,” I say. “Go back to the start. Try a new road.”
“And what happens if all the roads are dead ends?”
“Then I go back to where I started—make sure the client hasn’t run out of money, and start over again, looking for new roads.”
