Page 19 of The Witch's Orchard
As she scrubs, I tell her that I was hired by Max Andrews to look for his sister.
“We tried to hire a PI once,” she says. “Well, I wanted to. We couldn’t afford it. Tommy was out of work at the time. He’d been up at the toy factory but it closed down right before… right before she was taken. It was bought out. They sent the plant to Mexico.”
“Was that Tommy who just left?”
She nods, hands me a plate. There’s a green bruise, almost healed, ringing her right wrist. I take the plate. I rinse it carefully and slide it into the plastic strainer. The kitchen’s been cleaned with vinegar and the smell still lingers. Everything in here is old or dollar store and I smile at a little pink flower in a jelly jar on the windowsill. A weed, I think, pretty and cheerful, its petals open and hoping for sun.
“What do you want to know?” Mandy says.
I ask her to tell me about the day Jessica was taken. She takes a long, shuddering breath, then nods, more at the soapy sink than me.
“I was at this playground; I needed to get out of the house for a while. There’s a Baptist church up on Laurel and they have a sweet little playground. Just some swings and a slide but it’s the real nice kind with the wood and dark green plastic? I’d taken Jessica up there to play for a while. She was swinging on the swings and… then she wasn’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I was watching her. I looked away for a second. And then she was gone.”
She pulls her hands out of the suds, wipes them on a threadbare kitchen towel, and says, “Let me show you something.”
She walks out of the kitchen and I follow her into a living room,where there’s a bricked-up fireplace and a space heater that’s not been turned on. There’s a red velour sofa and a gorgeous old rocking chair and a TV sitting on a plain pine table with a stack of DVDs next to it. But none of that is what Mandy wants to show me. She walks over to the wall behind the couch and points at the pictures hanging in a straight line the length of the wall.
There are a few children here, one girl and three boys. The oldest boy, with curly auburn hair, has pictures all the way through high school. His senior picture hangs last in the line. He’s got Mandy’s soft expression but everything else about him is like a copy-paste of Tommy. Same chiseled bones, same wavy auburn hair. The other two boys’ photos stop at football pictures somewhere in late elementary or early middle school. And then there’s the girl with the fine, straight, corn-silk blond hair. The only girl.
“Jessica,” I say.
“That’s right,” Mandy says. The kitchen towel is still in her hand, and she uses it to wipe some invisible dust from the top edge of the picture frame.
Jessica’s huge eyes stare through the lens of the camera. Ice blue, I think. There’s a pink bow in her hair and she wears a black-and-pink dress and her hands are placed delicately on her lap as no child sits in real life and all children sit in professional photographs.
“That’s just about the last one we got,” Mandy says. “Before.”
I nod my understanding.
She sighs and points at the oldest boy and says, “This is Tam. Tommy Junior is his real name but we’ve always called him Tam and that’s what he prefers. He graduates this year. Not even a year older than Jessica. Irish twins, they say. Then Jeffrey and James.”
“Mrs. Hoyle, when you saw that Jessica was missing, you found a doll. Is that right?”
She nods, closing her eyes tight. She’s still got on heavy black eyeliner and mascara from last night, and it doesn’t budge when she scrapes tears from one eye with the side of her thumb.
“An applehead doll,” she says. “An applehead doll in a sky blue dress.”
“And you showed it to the police?”
She nods again.
“Yes. And I told them someone had taken my baby girl. They…” She pauses, her mouth twisting into a bitter frown before she continues. “The cops came. Asked me questions, looked around. They checked the cars of all the people at the church that day. But it’s not like they really made an effort or anything. No dogs, no hunt in the woods up behind the church. They think us Hoyles are trash. Always have. The cops accused me of ‘misplacing’ my child.”
She laughs bitterly, hugs her arms tight to her body. She’s a small woman, shorter than me and waif-thin, her nearly white-blond hair and uncanny blue eyes and upturned nose making her look like a tragic fairy who wandered out of a storybook and never found her way back.
“How do you ‘misplace’ a child?” she asks. “Jessica was a good girl. She wouldn’t run off. She was sitting right there, swinging. Pumping her little legs. She was wearing pink tennis shoes. And then she was gone.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. And I am. I’m sorry for the way she was treated. Sorry for all the grief she’s endured. Sorry for this last photograph of Jessica beaming out at Mandy every day, a reminder of what she has lost. But I’m not here to get caught up in the maelstrom of Mandy Hoyle’s pain. I shift my weight as if I can shrug off the heaviness of the emotion that’s just been laid on me.
“What time of day was it?” I ask. “When Jessica was taken?”
“Morning,” Mandy says. “It was morning. I was pregnant at the time with James and I’d been having powerful bad morning sickness. And Jeffrey was in the backseat asleep in his car seat. That boy never once slept through the night. Bad dreams and howling like you wouldn’t believe. But he always drifted off in the mornings so I just let him sleep.”
“Did you notice anything strange before Jessica was taken? Anyone hanging around?”
