Page 8 of The Witch's Orchard
“Tina, you watch too muchX-Files.”
“And I maintain that you watch too little. It’s a modern classic. ’Course, if I had the kind of dreams you—God, what is that noise?”
“On my end?”
“Yeah. It sounds like someone’s dragging a sack of cats down a gravel driveway.”
“Crows,” I say.
“Bullshit.”
“It’s true. It’s a… it’s a whole thing here.”
She pulls a fork from a drawer and a beer from the fridge and sits down at her kitchen counter to eat. She moves the noodles and meat around with a squashy sound and then takes a big bite and says, “All jokes aside, those kids are probably long dead.”
“I know.”
“Then what are you doing down there? There must be people here who’ll pay you to snoop around and be a pain in the ass.”
“Yeah,” I say. “There are. But I couldn’t turn the guy down.”
“That hot, huh?”
“That young,” I say. “He’s just a kid. Looking for his sister. He looks… haunted.”
“Ah,” she says. Like she gets it. Like she remembers helping out another sad, determined, haunted kid.
“Anyway, I said I’d look. So, I’m gonna look.”
“Well, I know that tone. No use arguing with you. But you’re a long way from home so just watch your ass, all right?”
“I will.”
“And Honey’s.”
“I will.”
We hang up and I look back down at Max’s casebook, a picture of his sister I’d left it open to. In this photo, she and Max are playing at a park. He’s pushing her on a swing and she is slightly blurred, her hair a brown swoosh behind her, her head cocked back in laughter, her mouth wide open. Beside them another little boy pushes another little girl on another swing. It is any old summer day. For this other little boy and girl, a hundred or a thousand of such instances probably lie in a heap of nearly forgotten memories. But, because Molly was taken soon after this picture was snapped, this memory, this moment, becomes important, immortal. Her laugh, frozen forever in a hazy blur, is where she ends.
Unless I find her.
“Okay,” I say to myself. “That’s enough.”
I close the scrapbook, wander into the bedroom, curl up in the quilts, and fall asleep to the screaming song of the crows.
THREE
THE PHONE BUZZES AGAINSTthe wood bedside table and I pick it up.
“It’s still fucking dark, Leo.”
He chuckles on the other end and I grumble, rubbing at the crust in my eyes.
“Yeah, but you’re already awake,” he says. And he’s not wrong. I wake up just before dawn pretty much every day, whether I like it or not. (I don’t.)
I grumble and Leo says, “Sleep okay?”
“Sure,” I say. And Leo calls, just about every day, whether I like it or not. (I do.)
