Page 16 of The Witch's Orchard
“And you have dance tonight,” Kathleen says.
“Oh!” Nicole says. “Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I’ll get my stuff.”
Nicole runs off, and I hear her rummaging in her room while Kathleen shakes her head, exhausted.
“Look,” she says. “Go around and sit on the back porch. You can talk to me once Olivia starts her shows.”
“Okay,” I say, because it’s better than nothing. She shuts the door and I walk around to the back of the house, where I find a little red-stained deck, a porch swing, and a few dewy deck chairs around a glass-topped table. Another oak tree stands just past the railing, so the deck is covered with slick yellow leaves. I notice a cobweb attached to three different points on the porch swing. It wavers a little but I don’t see the spider. Dewdrops drip onto the wet wood.
I rattle off the moisture from one of the chairs, then give it a final, inadequate drying swipe with a hankie from my bag. A few moments later, a voice says, “Bye!” An engine starts and a car rolls away.
A few more moments and Kathleen slides open the back door and comes outside with a cup of coffee that she hands to me. She wipes down her seat with her sweater sleeve and then sits with a bone-weary sigh.
“Gonna be a wet winter,” she says.
I nod like I understand weather, take a sip of coffee, put it down in front of me. I wait to see if Kathleen is going to start the conversation. When she doesn’t, I say, “Max Andrews hired me because he’s desperate to find his sister.”
Kathleen is still looking out toward the yard, so I continue, “He’s not ready to give up.”
“I wouldn’t be either,” Kathleen says. She reaches into the pocket of her sweater and pulls out a pack of menthols with a pink plastic lighter stuffed in the cellophane. “Mind?”
I shake my head. She lights up.
“When Olivia was taken…” she starts, and then stops, takes a long drag, lets it out. “When she was taken, I thought my world had ended. We knew that Jessica Hoyle had gone missing nearly a month before. Same exact thing. An applehead doll and everything. We knew she’d not been found. The whole town knew about it but…”
“What?”
“The Hoyles aren’t… They weren’t, um… God, it’s awful to say. But they’re kind of trashy.”
I feel my teeth grit together as the familiar slur “trashy” sears through my mind and dredges up old memories. I force myself to take another sip of the coffee, nod encouragingly.
“The Hoyles were… Look, they seemed like the kind of people whose kid might have a death by misadventure and they cover it up.”
The words are out of her mouth like a train. She’s trying to get past them. Past that guilty feeling of suspicion too easily arrived at, another mother’s grief too easily brushed aside.
“And, I remember some folks saying that it was all just a big scam. That the family was faking the kidnapping for media attention, donations, whatever. The day after Jessica was taken, Tommy—Jessica’s father—started an online donation fund to hire a PI, which, of course, he never did. Anyway, you read stories about things like that, and the Hoyle clan? Well, I hate to say it, but they fit the type.”
“Did anyone prove anything?”
“No,” Kathleen says. “And even if it had been some kind of Hoyle con, they would’ve stuck to just having Jessica go missing. But it was only a month later that Olivia was taken, and, just like with Jessica, there was an applehead doll. Of course, once that happened, people started takingMandy—that’s Jessica’s mother—seriously. That’s when it became real. For everyone. For me.”
“Tell me about the day. Do you remember it?”
“Of course. We were at a church picnic, down at the park. It used to be a yearly thing. We’d just put the food out. I was getting a plate and I was trying to juggle both girls. Nicole was seven at the time and very chatty. We always had to keep an extra eye on Olivia, you know, even then. She’s autistic, which we know now, but… this is a small town and she was still so young, just barely five years old. You have to understand. It wasn’t until later that we took her to a specialist.”
I nod and take another drink of coffee, hoping she’ll continue.
“Anyway, Nicole was going on and on about what all was on the dessert table and I was listening to her. She asked me a question about the bowl of ambrosia, I remember, and I was answering her and when I turned to look for Olivia, she was gone.”
Tears well up in Kathleen’s eyes. She blinks them away. Takes another long drag of her smoke. Sharp mint and acrid tobacco fill my nose.
“I just let go of her hand for asecond.That’s all it took. She was gone. I screamed her name but… she was never… she wouldn’t have answered. Some other people asked what was going on. We all spread out and searched for her. I found my husband, Arnold, over by the music stage. He’d been going to play his guitar. We looked everywhere. I took him back to the buffet table where I’d lost her, and there it was.”
“The applehead doll,” I guess.
“Yes. It was horrible. A little red velvet dress. That awful, shriveled face.”
Kathleen shivers and taps her cigarette against the hard plastic arm of the deck chair. Gray ash falls to the planks and turns to thin sludge.
