Page 4 of The Witch's Orchard
“Um. Yes? They’re not new or anything. I got them secondhand so—”
“I’ll drive down this evening,” I say. “Start first thing tomorrow. That okay with you?”
He nods, so excited he’s practically vibrating.
“Max,” I say. “You need to know: I probably won’t find anything. You might pay me fifty-six hundred dollars just to come down to your town and get people riled up. You understand?”
“Yeah,” he says. “I just… It’s something I have to do. I have to try.”
“Okay,” I say. “I’ll be there.”
“Great,” he says, standing, brushing nonexistent crumbs off his jeans. “Great.” He reaches a hand toward me and I shake it, feel the calluses and taut muscles of hard work, hope I’m not a waste of his money. But all a PI can ever do is the job they’re paid to do. I’m being paid to look—as hard as I can—and whatever hidden truths come to the surface is beyond my control.
“Thank you, Ms. Gore.”
“Annie,” I say. “Call me Annie.”
“Okay,” he says. “I’ll see you later.” And then he’s gone.
Tonya comes back over to the table with two empty Styrofoam boxes and I start shoveling food in. I figure I’ll take it all upstairs, reheat it on my hot plate, eat at my little kitchen counter while I go through Max’s notes.
“What’s with him?” Tonya asks, watching as Max gets into his old Toyota pickup and pulls out of the lot.
“Tonya, if I told you three little girls were kidnapped a decade ago and never found, what would you think happened to them?”
She sniffs, looks up at the grease-coated ceiling for a moment, taps her maroon acrylic nails against her bottom lip. “Dead,” she finally says. “Or maybe sold off to some foreign billionaire.”
“Hmm,” I say. I scrape Max’s fruit and biscuits and the pat of probably-not-butter into the other container.
“Or in some pervert’s basement somewhere,” she continues.
I throw her a look and she catches it, cocks an eyebrow at me, and says, “What? I listen to a lot of true crime podcasts. Usually it’s one of those. If they’re ever found at all. And usually they’re not. Is that what you’ve been hired to do? Track down three little girls?”
“No, actually. One of those little girls was returned like they got her from Walmart.”
“Returned?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“It’s weird, right?” I say. “But look at this.”
I turn to the page of the applehead dolls and watch as a full-body shiver crawls over Tonya’s skin and she makes a noise somewhere between “Gaah” and “Eeeww.”
“Applehead dolls,” I say. “Or… just apple dolls.”
“Looks like some hillbilly horseshit,” Tonya says. It’s harsh, but it’s self-defense. No one outside of the mountains has any affection for shriveled-up old-lady dolls and I can’t really blame them. “What the hell kind of town is this?”
I close up the boxes and stand, stacking them on top of each other. I grab my bag and the scrapbook and maneuver everything into a configuration I can get up the narrow staircase to my office-partment.
“That’s what I’m gonna find out,” I say, and point with my freest finger at the nearly empty mug on the table. “Any chance I could get a refill to go?”
TWO
THE SUN IS SETTINGby the time I pull onto the main (and only) drag of Quartz Creek, North Carolina. It’s a little run-down mountain town like a lot of other little run-down mountain towns where enterprise and lack of internet have drained away most of the population over eighteen and under forty. There’s a couple of boarded-up storefronts on Main Street but there’s also a pharmacy, a hair salon, and an apparently flourishing funeral parlor with a sign out front that says to ask inside about specials.
I follow the directions on my phone through the other side of town and onto a gravel road under a canopy of orange, scarlet, and yellow. The brilliant smudge of saffron in the sky beyond the mountains sets the trees alight and I smile at the sight in spite of myself. I’d just about forgotten how beautiful Appalachia is in the fall. Just about gotten far enough away in miles and years from that other, younger Annie in that other run-down, beautiful place to let myself forget.
