Page 117 of The Witch's Orchard
“It was Tommy,” I guess. “He’s the one who broke in.”
She nods. “I found it this morning.”
I take the book from her, open the door, invite her inside. She follows reluctantly, and I go about making coffee. When the pot’s sputtering, I open the book on the countertop.
“The book and this box,” she says, taking my gun case out and putting it on the counter.
I smile at the case, run my fingers over it, over the place where I know Leo’s words are carved on the inside.
“Is it worth a lot?” Mandy asks.
“Yeah,” I say. “More than I’d realized.”
I put out a basket of Shiloh’s cookies. They’re a little stale now but still delicious. She doesn’t take one.
“The truck’s been acting up,” she says. “So Tommy took my car to the factory the other day. The sheriff’s station has taken it for evidence and I needed wheels, so I asked a friend to come take a look at it this morning. When he did, he found this stuff under the seat. I’d guess Tommy took the box to sell but just hadn’t found a buyer yet. With the scrapbook, Idon’t know why he took it. I went to the hospital and asked him today. He said he was going to give it to me. He said maybe I’d see something in there that would help find Jessica. Who knows with Tommy. He can be thoughtful sometimes. Kind, even.”
“I know,” I say. No woman stays with a man who is bad every moment of every day. They always stay for the good moments that happen in between. They bask in the shimmer of dappled sunshine that appears between the storms. They weather everything else.
I think of the Happy Paws Veterinary Clinic, the many black eyes my own mom tried to hide over the years, the smell of iodine as I swabbed it onto her swollen lips. I wonder what my mom is doing now, if she’s okay, and dismiss the thought as soon as I have it.
I can’t save someone who refuses to be saved while Mandy Hoyle is sitting here in my kitchen asking for help finding her only daughter.
The coffee finishes dripping, and I pour two cups and slide one across the counter to Mandy, who finally settles on a barstool. She adds plenty of milk and sugar and takes a cookie too.
“Did you see anything?” I ask. “In the casebook?”
“I don’t think so,” she says. “It was hard to look through, at first.”
She sighs and turns the pages, one after another, her slender fairy fingers traveling over the photographs and newspaper clippings and the little-kid version of Max’s handwriting that gradually turns into the grown version.
She shakes her head.
“I want to find Jessica,” she says. “I keep thinking that I shouldknowsomething. I should have a mother’s intuition or a dream or a gift from the Lord. Anything. Odette—Tommy’s sister—she used to believe in all that. Prophetic dreams. Guardian angels and guiding lights. All that kind of thing. But I never… I’ve always had faith, but, you know, it’s hard sometimes. Especially when all I can think about is that morning. The morning Jessica was taken. How tired I was. How guilty I felt and still feel for—”
She sniffs and dabs at her good eye with the pad of her thumb. Thetear in the black eye makes its way past the swollen flesh and eventually falls and slaps the countertop. It doesn’t make a sound.
“I was so tired and I needed to go to work but they hated it when I brought my kids. It shouldn’t have been a problem, really, Jessica was so good—”
“Was this at Ellerd’s Diner?”
She shakes her head, says, “No, I couldn’t. I couldn’t work there when my kids were little because they wouldn’t let me bring them and I couldn’t afford day care. Jessica was old enough to be in Head Start but the program shut down a couple years before. So, usually, if I could swing it, I’d take them over to Mommy’s Day Out.”
“Mommy’s Day Out?”
“Yeah,” she says. “At the churches.” She takes a nibble of the cookie and stops. Her teeth are hurting. I’ve seen it before.
“Like a day care?” I ask.
“Well, sort of. Different churches, on different days, would have a time—usually like ten to twelve—where you could drop your kids off. There was one at Valley Methodist every Tuesday. Another one at First Baptist that was two days a week. And another one at Good Hope. Programs like that are supposed to be for housewives. So they can do shopping or whatever, but…”
“But you used the time to work.”
“Yes. Whatever I could pick up. Cleaning houses mostly. Though Tommy didn’t like that. He never liked me cleaning, but what else was I supposed to do? And he was taking building work whenever someone offered. You’d never think it to look at him, but he can build anything. He can just picture it and get ahold of some wood and next thing you know… there it is. When we were in high school, he would build these haunted houses.”
“Whole houses?”
“Well, no,” she says, a faint blush in her cheeks. “There’s a lot of old, abandoned homesteads around here. He would use those as the skeleton, put a maze inside, and fill it up with all kinds of things. Ghosts and creepynoises and whatever. Every year a different one. It cost five dollars to get in but it was worth it. I reckon he made a killing every year. That’s how I really met him. He was two years ahead of me in school and in a totally different crowd. I was the same year as his sister, Odette, and I wanted to go one year and asked if she would take me. She didn’t want to, at first. I think it was sort of embarrassing for her, and she was the sensitive type. Didn’t like being startled, you know. Actually—”
