Page 98 of The Witch's Orchard
“Have you ever visited Susan McKinney?” I ask.
There’s a hesitation. She looks down, away from me, and then at her fingernails.
“She buys my rose hips from me.”
“That’s not what I asked,” I say. “Have you ever visited her, in her cabin.”
“I—yes. Several years ago, after Harvey died. I was grieving. I needed… I don’t know. I needed someone to talk to, I suppose. I’d heard about her in town.”
“Did she tell your fortune?”
“Yes. It was all just hokum. Platitudes,” she says, letting out a frustrated exhalation. “I should never have gone. Susan McKinney knows the plants of these mountains better than anyone and her teas are second to none but, when it comes to any sort of…ability,she’s no less a fraud than the psychics you see on television.”
I feel certain there’s something else there. Something she isn’t saying. I wait awhile longer. Let the grandfather clock tick by. But she offers nothing else.
Eventually, I ask, “Do you know the story of the Quartz Creek Witch?”
“Yes. Harvey told me the story several years ago.”
“There are a few different versions,” I say. “Could you tell me the one you heard?”
“I’m not sure if I remember it.”
“Just tell me what you remember,” I say.
“There was a witch, long ago, who lived deep in the forest amid a grove of enchanted apple trees,” she says. She begins slowly, but, as the story goes on, her voice picks up a melodic lilt.
“The apples shone with the brilliance of emeralds and rubies, even in winter. Even in the coldest winter. The worst winter. One night, a poor widow woman knocked on the witch’s door, begging for apples from the witch’s grove. She said that her husband had been a woodcutter. That he had died in the forest and now she and her children were starving. The witch saw the woman’s two beautiful daughters, their eyes hollow with hunger and grief, and she offered the woman a trade. She promised the woman that if she handed over her daughters, then the woman would never want for apples. Would never be hungry or cold or sad again. The woman agreed to the deal.”
Deena pauses to take a breath and her chin wobbles almost imperceptibly before she continues.
“But the witch was cunning. She turned the woman into one of her apple trees. And the woman bore fruit forever after, and stood silently by as her daughters grew into beautiful young women who sang like the dawn chorus. Eventually, the girls forgot about their mother, forgot even that it was the witch who had given them their power. The witch turned them into birds, fearing to lose them. But the daughters, in their fury, only plucked out her eyes. Then, they took her eyes and threw them into Quartz Creek, where the witch’s eyes could see only the sky through glassy water.”
I feel my jaw open at this section of the story but stay silent as Deena finishes.
“The witch, blinded and grieving, mourned them desperately, and in her mourning she became a crow. Destined to wear black forevermore. She flew blindly from the house, crying for them. Hoping for their return. She searches still, even to this day, Harvey used to say. That is why you hear the crows here screaming each night. They are screaming the names of those girls, lost forever to the hills.”
Deena’s eyes glisten, and she dabs at their corners with the knuckle of one finger.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s a silly old folk story. It’s just the last time I heard it, I was sitting where you are now. And Harvey was telling it to me. It was only a few weeks before he passed.”
“No need to apologize,” I tell her. “Grief has a way of sneaking up on us, reminding us how powerful it is, even after a very long time.”
She nods.
I stand, and Deena does too.
“I doubt I’ll be the last one to come around asking questions,” I tell her. “The FBI is on their way, because of Lucy. I imagine they’ll want to talk to anyone who was a witness the last time.”
“Again,” she says, with a sad sort of exhaustion. “It’s happening again.”
“Yes,” I say.
I give her one last look. With her silvering blond hair and her keen blue eyes and impeccable makeup and clothing. As before, I see the fragility of her. The glassiness of her eyes when she looks toward the wall of windows and says with a soft whisper, “Those poor girls.”
I walk with her to the front door and pause at a small, stylish end table next to it. Her keys rest in a hand-lathed bowl, and beside it is a framed photograph.
From perhaps twenty years before, it is the Drakes’ wedding photo. Deena was in her early thirties, I remind myself, though she looks nearly the same age in the photo as she does now. The photo is a crisp black-and-white, perfectly balanced, and the couple stands together, under a bower, in a beautiful rose garden. Deena wears a pale, flawlessly tailored dress that just skims the short grass at her feet. Harvey wears a well-made suit. Her hair is cut in a twenty-years-ago version of the bob she wears now and her makeup is natural and timeless, just as now. Deena’s light coloring is nicely contrasted by Harvey’s dark features. Dark hair, dark brown eyes, tanned skin. They smile serenely in the face of this evanescent moment.
