Page 74 of The Witch's Orchard
I don’t say anything. And neither does AJ.
Neither of us has to.
TWENTY-FIVE
LATER, TWO MOSTLY EMPTYboxes of pizza lie conquered on the coffee table in front of us. AJ sips a beer while he consolidates the leftovers into a single box.
“What do you think of this?” I ask, holding up one of the papers Nicole gave me.
He considers the picture in my hand. I’ve just found them, folded up in my bag, not having looked at them since I left Starling Point.
He shuts the empty boxes and licks some orange grease from his thumb.
“Where’d that come from?” he asks.
“An interested party. Tell me what you see.”
“Is this like an inkblot test?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Just like that.”
“Spirals. Hmm. They’re like… seashells.”
“Huh,” I say.
“Seashells, or maybe snail shells. That’s what it makes me think of.”
AJ’s out of uniform now, wearing a pair of sweatpants and a plain beige T-shirt of mine. Most of my loungewear is men’s and oversized, but I get the feeling AJ wouldn’t be bothered by a pair of cute terry cloth shorts either, long as he gets out of his brown polyester. His big body is solid but not stiff as he leans forward on his knees and studies the picture.
“Where’d it really come from?”
“Olivia Jacobs. She drew them after she was brought back and, according to her sister, she’s been drawing them ever since.”
“All crayon.”
“Yeah. And she hides them from her mom.”
“Interesting.”
“I mean, she was questioned when she was brought back, right?”
“As far as anyonecouldquestion her, yeah. But they didn’t get anything from her.”
“She was still so little,” I say. “How much of what happened would she have even understood, let alone been able to convey to a bunch of people in uniforms?”
He shrugs and stands and takes the pizza stuff into the kitchen. Folds the empty boxes in half and slides them into the trash, puts the box of leftovers in the fridge. He comes back and opens a worn backpack that he probably carried around at college and pulls out a laptop. From a little pocket, he takes out a USB drive and plugs it in.
“The files?” I ask, as he opens the folder on the drive and reveals tons of scanned documents and photos.
“Yeah,” he says. “Witness statements, newspaper articles, photos, police reports. And the stuff I could find from the FBI, too. Reports they wrote up, photographs they took. Some forensics.”
“Did you have time to look at any of it?”
“Well, no, not really. I scanned some of the initial reports and glanced at a few pictures. It’s mostly just the applehead dolls, though. Besides that, there wasn’t much of anything to take a picture of. Just empty places where those girls had been. The park and church were too heavily trafficked to get clean prints of any kind and no other evidence was found on the scene. There were no prints besides the Andrewses’ and a few other family members and guests at the Andrews place.”
He pulls the photos up and we look through them. The empty swing set. The empty park grounds. The empty living room.
We look through the police reports.
