Page 7 of The Witch's Orchard
He takes a deep breath. The door is still cracked and the crows are still screaming and a cool fall wind blows in and rattles a framed print above the TV. I hadn’t noticed it before. A monochrome field of corn sways in the breeze and, above it, a swirling spiral of crows fades into the stormy sky. It’s masterfully done, and I think briefly that I should know the artist but no name comes to mind.
“There was an ancient witch who lived on the mountain,” Max says,pulling my attention back to the moment. “That’s what the stories say. An old woman who lived here—in a house in the middle of an enchanted apple grove—when the town was first formed. She had two beautiful daughters and men from the town started coming around, offering to marry the girls.”
“And the witch did not approve.”
“No. She wanted to protect them. She turned her first daughter into a bluebird and her second into a robin and she put them in a golden cage. Every day she sang to them, and they kept her company just like always. And the witch was happy. But one day, when she opened the door to feed them, they flew away. She turned herself into a crow so that she could catch up with them, fly with them, and keep them. Forever.”
Max looks straight ahead, seeming to have forgotten that I’m even there. As if he’s just talking to himself, he keeps going.
“But the story goes that the girlsdidget away. That she was too late—she didn’t catch her daughters. The witch cried and screamed for them, but they never returned. The story says the other crows learned to scream from her and they scream every night in her memory.”
“Oh wow.”
“Yeah,” he says, finally meeting my eyes. He gives me a bittersweet smile. “The Witch of Quartz Creek. It’s an old story. My mom used to tell it to me; she got it from her granny, I think.”
“You put the story in the casebook,” I say.
“That’s right.”
“You think they’re connected?”
He shrugs. “When I was little I did. I thought the witch had stolen my sister.”
“And now?”
He stands, sets his half-full water glass down on the coffee table, wipes the condensation from his hands onto his apron.
“Now, I hired you to find out.”
“Fair enough,” I say.
“Let me know if you need anything,” he says.
We say good night and then he’s gone, back up the gravel path that twists through the hedgerow to the white farmhouse. I finish my beer, open my notebook, and sit down with what Max refers to as his casebook but what is, in reality, a little boy’s scrapbook.
Flipping through, I find a few drawings of witches and crows and a few Xeroxes of local newspaper articles from the time of his sister’s disappearance. There are drawings of applehead dolls and pictures of them printed off the internet along with printed posts from a couple true crime bloggers. I look up the blogs and find them now defunct and, while I’m scrolling through old news articles on my phone, it buzzes and my aunt Tina’s face appears on the screen.
I answer the video call and say, “Hey, you get my note?”
“Yeah,” Tina says. “North Carolina? That’s a hell of a haul. I’m worried about my girl.”
“I’m fine.”
“I’m talking about Honey,” she says, rolling her eyes.
Tina runs a classic-car garage in Louisville and her primary concern where I’m involved mostly runs along Honey’s well-being, whether I’m treating her right—whether she needs a tune-up, whether I shouldn’t take some time off and give Honey a vacation and spa treatment in her garage. Now I can see Tina’s dimly lit kitchen behind her and I know she probably only just got home from work.
“Tina, do you remember about ten years ago when three little girls were kidnapped in the mountains in North Carolina and applehead dolls were left in their place?”
“Sure,” Tina says. She’s heating up a bowl of something in the microwave. Probably leftovers cooked and saved by her much more domestically inclined partner, Mel. I watch as she puts her big fists on her hips and waits. Tina’s a thick woman with extra-large forearms, full-sleeve tattoos, and permanently grease-stained fingernails that suggest she could pull and strip an engine block in under twenty minutes. Which wouldn’t be far off.
She looks from the microwave to the phone and says, “There wassomething weird about it, right? Wasn’t one of them brought back the next day?”
“Two weeks,” I say. “But yes.”
“I always figured it was some religious nutbar,” Tina says. “You know, serial killer doing satanic rituals. Something like that.”
The microwave dings and Tina uses a pot holder to remove the steaming spaghetti and meatballs.
