Page 18 of The Witch's Orchard
Nothing happens. I smack the dash again, right in the middle.
Lo and behold, the vents sputter to life and warm air breezes onto the windshield and the fog begins to clear.
“Presto!” I say. The Fog Hog makes no reply. The rain falls in heavy drops.
“You just need to wake up, Honey?” I ask the car. She rumbles. The heat vents blow.
I look back at my phone and check that I’m on the right track. This old mountain road is nothing but trees and deadly drop-offs and I’m lucky I found this shoulder at all. I pull back onto the road, go three more miles, then turn down Garbler Lane.
Honey sloshes in and out of the underfilled divots in the road. This place hasn’t been re-graveled in years, I think, and it’s been washed out by rains like this one over and over. Scraggly apple trees grow, higgledy-piggledy, along the lane, their twisted gray branches bare of fruit.
“Jesus,” I spit as we skid across a particularly bad dip.
I pass two run-down houses and a couple old single-wides before I come to the last house on the lane. It’s like a shabby, ugly older brother of Max’s family farmhouse, and the old adage “Too proud to whitewash, too poor to paint” comes to mind. The siding is dirty and gray, or stained green on the side nearest some huge old conifers. The roof slumps a little toward the chimney. The columns that support the porch are crumbling. A chain-link fence surrounds the house and, just inside, there’s a muddy patch where a dog sleeps with his nose poking outside a red doghouse. It’s a black nose on a white muzzle. Just like Snoopy.
I pull up and park beside a relatively new Chevy pickup and an old, battered Civic—mostly red but with a blue trunk lid. I reach into the backseat for my leather jacket, maneuver it on over the blazer, get out of the car.
The dog hears the car door and jolts out of his little house like it’s on fire. He’s an unneutered pit, and he lurches against the length of his chain, scrabbling his powerful paws into the wet mud and snapping his maw at me, snarling and barking and growling.
If anyone’s in there, they’ll hear Snoopy and come check things out.
I stand at the fence and wait.
Sure enough, there’s a waver in the curtains and then the door opens. A man steps outside. He’s tall and lanky and he’s wearing a tight T-shirt under an open flannel along with about three days of rust-colored scruff. This, I think, must be Tommy Hoyle, father of the first girl taken, Jessica.
“Who the hell are you?”
I tell him who I am, who hired me, what I’m doing there.
He shakes his head.
“Go away,” he hollers. Then, “Shut the fuck up!” at Snoopy.
He turns and goes back in the house. The dog settles down for a minute and looks at me. I look back at him. We both wait for something else to happen.
After a few more moments, it does. The door opens again and the guy comes back out, walks down the steps and across the old concrete stepping stones and through the gate.
“Mister Hoyle?” I ask. But he doesn’t pay any attention. Just keeps going. Once he’s past me, he says to the air in front of him, “She wants to talk to some fucking detective, who the fuck am I to say no?” He smells like mouthwash and grilled cheese.
He steps up into his pickup and starts it and backs up, just barely missing Honey (practically a shooting offense, in my book) before he wheels it around and kicks up mud and gravel as he revs away.
I’m still glaring after him when the door opens again, and a woman comes outside in an old green rain jacket.
She points her finger at Snoopy, snaps, says, “Dozer. Shut it. Go sit down.” The dog obeys. She tosses him what looks like a chunk of Velveeta and the dog catches it and disappears into his house.
She comes to the gate, opens it, lets me in.
“I’m Mandy Hoyle. Come on in.”
Jessica’s mother. Immediately, I see the resemblance. The pale blue eyes, light blond hair, and milk-white skin. Something else, too. Some quality I can’t quite put my finger on.
“Okay,” I say, and follow her.
Inside, the house is old and worn and chilly. It’s cluttered with knickknacks and shoes of all sizes and hoodies cast over the backs of chairs, but there are no dust balls on the floor or empty cans and unopened mail sitting around. The house is cluttered but clean. I follow Mandy into the kitchen, where she takes off the rain jacket and slips it over the back of awhite kitchen chair before picking up a plastic scrub brush. She’s been doing the breakfast dishes, I see. The sink is full of sudsy water and Corning plates from thirty or forty years ago. Yellow flowers and butterflies adorn the rim of the cream-colored plates.
“I’ll rinse,” I say.
“Sure,” Mandy says.
