Page 37 of The Witch's Orchard
“Oh no,” I breathe. I pull my gun on instinct, hold it at the ready. Check my surroundings. The forest is quiet. There’s nothing here but crows. I reholster as a sick, ugly feeling grows in my stomach.
I take a step closer, pull my jacket off, wave it at the crows. They flap and caw and finally settle on the stones, their talons scrabbling against the rough surface.
There, in the center, is a young woman. Her honey brown hair is wavy and shiny and princess-long, streaming over the fallen leaves. She wears a soft-looking red dress and she is, unquestionably, dead. The scene is like a Waterhouse painting, all bright colors and fair skin and tragedy.
Except for the ring of red around her neck, the speckles of blood in her eyes. This young woman has been strangled and left here, exposed.
Finding a corpse is never a pleasant experience.
But the corpse of a murder victim? It is something else altogether. It’s a fist closing around your heart. Oxygen burning your lungs. Blood pounding in your ears. All reminders that you are still alive while the person in front of you is dead. A sudden certainty that you continue to exist while this person remains only as a body. A memory. A victim.
Years of training have stripped whatever instinct I might once have had to scream, run, cry, vomit, call for help.
I clench my jaw shut. And I force myself to look.
The crows have been at her. Nips have been taken from her cheeks and hands, revealing red flesh within. Her eyes, though, are mercifully untouched, her delicate lids pale and thin, half shut over hazel irises and whites dotted with burst blood vessels, the evidence of her body’s desperate fight for air. A ragged ring of red encircles her pale neck. The cause of her death.
I move a little closer, careful where I put my feet.
Her Cupid’s bow mouth is slightly open above a bright white, inch-long scar on her chin. Exactly as Shiloh had described. The little girl. The excitement. The fall. The trip to get stitches.
I swallow the lump in my throat and force myself to stare at that scar.
No longer a child, then. No tiny, unmarked grave full of small, fragile bones.
A girl, very nearly a woman.
“Molly,” I breathe. “I found you.”
And my voice reverberates off the rocks and rises into the air around me.
“I found you… found you… found you…”
TWELVE
DEPUTY AJ BARNES’S HANDSquiver as he slides them from his pockets.
“Jesus,” he says, just a whisper. I almost don’t hear it.
I called the sheriff’s station first, told them there was a body in the woods. Then I called Shiloh, told her what had happened, that Max would need someone with him. I couldn’t leave the body. Max deserved to be told about this in person, but I didn’t want him coming down and finding this scene.
I took a few pictures while I waited for the cops to show up. I walked around the area, touching nothing, looking for anything that might help. I found nothing. The windy mountain night had blown leaves all over the place and I didn’t want to walk more than five feet away from her with all the crows standing sentinel on the stones, looking down at her with hungry eyes and sharp mouths.
And then Sheriff Jacobs and Deputy Barnes and an older man in a suit and a female deputy with a bag full of camera gear all tromped down the Andrews side of the gorge, crossed the creek, and made their way up to the stones.
I watched them. And I waited.
And now they were here.
“Jesus,” Barnes says again.
“Is it her?” I whisper.
We are all trying to ignore the echoing of our words, all of us talking so low it’s as if we don’t want the forest to hear us and repeat what we’ve said.
“Barnes?” I whisper again. “Is it Molly?”
He shakes his head, says, “I don’t know. She was just a tiny little kid when I saw her last. Hell,Iwas just a kid.”
