The Orchard Opens
I don’t come back for the apples. I come back because the ground won’t shut up.
By noon the county road glitters, barns lean into shadow. The welcome sign says OUR ROOTS RUN DEEP, and if that isn’t a threat it’s a prayer. I roll the window down and taste loam and diesel. The town smiles with porch teeth. The fields stare like witnesses who took a deal.
“Detective Ryder?” Sheriff Wayne Cutter waits on the station porch with a mug and a grin. Presence more than inches. “You made it.”
“Cass,” I say, taking the extra hand and letting it drop. The lobby is a museum of trophies: antlers, letter jackets, a framed flood headline. No wall for the ones who disappeared.
He gives me the tour and the sermon. Keep the peace. Mind the locals. Farming county; everything takes time. When the call comes—kids trespassing in the west orchard, found something that “looks like Halloween”—he sighs like weather. “You’ll see, it’s nothing.”
Nothing has a smell. This has it. We bounce out past silos and rusted combines. The orchard rises like a hymn, rows perfect enough to make a girl forgive geometry. Families come here to drink hot cider and pretend the world is simple. Today, the trees look tired of lying.
Three teenagers wait with trouble spread across their faces. One holds a phone, film paused on a pale curve breaking ground. A worker in a branded cap wrings his hands and keeps not looking toward Row C. “It’s old,” he says. “Could be a deer.”
“Show me,” I tell him.
The soil is black and rich, rolled smooth. The worker’s boots gouged a panic path into it. Where the kids tripped, the ground swells like a bruise. I kneel and brush with my fingers because brushes are for people who expect permission. Dirt clings under my nails the way memories do. A smooth dome of bone winks up, chamfered by roots that hold it like careful fingers.
Wayne stands back. The cap-branded man crosses himself, then stops, embarrassed. A bluebottle lands, thinks better of it, lifts.
“Human,” I say.
The kids are quieter than I expect, still learning what real looks like. A girl whispers, “We didn’t mean, we were just—”
“I know,” I say. We string tape, call the coroner, do the dance. But the orchard won’t wait. As the techs come, the earth loosens its tongue. A hand emerges six feet off, fingers curled neat as a bud. Upright. Spaced. Not dumped. Planted.
“Jesus,” a deputy says.
Wayne puts on his public face. “Let’s keep this calm,” he tells the workers. He catches my eye, voice lower. “Old ground out here. Families buy plots, scatter ashes. Could be a confusion.”
“Or a system,” I say.
The coroner squints into the hole. “She’s been here a long time.” We find the bussing of a zipper, the ghost of a shirt, a cheap pendant engraved with an initial that could be S or 5. I bag it. When we lift the skull in its cradle of roots, the orchard gives only what it must. It always keeps a receipt.
The kids’ video runs again in shaky silence. They were laughing, stealing apples. The girl catches the stumble, the flash of pale, the sound none of them will forget. I hate that this is how they’ll learn fear—through glass.
By late afternoon, patrol routes curious minivans around the access road. News will come in the morning if Wayne lets it. He prefers not to feed the city’s appetite. He talks tourism, impact, harvest weekend. He doesn’t say what he’s really afraid of: names.
The lab won’t sing for days, but names are already walking. I know one. I see his shoelaces every time I sleep. My brother’s face is a footprint in mud that never dries.
Old men come to the tape edge and say things that sound like help. “Orchard Man,” one offers, soft, amused, a bedtime story that keeps knives under the pillow. The others chuckle like it’s a joke they own. I’ve heard it: a man who planted people upright so the apples would learn the taste of sorrow. When I was twelve I laughed. Now I keep my hands in my pockets so they don’t find someone’s throat.
On the ride out, Wayne had asked the small talk questions—where I was from, whether I liked fall, if I’d ever worked farm country. I told him the truth that wasn’t small: I grew up thirty miles from these rows, and I left because a boy vanished and no one dug hard enough. He didn’t ask which boy.
We map the row. The spacing is polite: years between pits, just so. A farmer’s patience. The coroner marks a third place with the toe of her boot and looks at me. “Probable.”
“Keep digging,” I say.
Wayne wants statements. He wants me back at the office building a timeline out of imprecision. I stay with the ground until dusk leans in. The techs tarp the site and promise floodlights I don’t believe will arrive. When the last cruiser noses off and the orchard closes its face like a book, I walk the rows alone. I listen.
The wind sifts. Thin things rattle. Crickets tune. Beneath the obvious, something else. It isn’t voices. It’s counting.
I thread down Row D and cut left into the gap where a tree never took. Not bare exactly—grass veils a scab of earth tamped too smooth. My boot divots an edge and the dirt sinks a fraction, exhaling the sweet rot of warm cider. The tarp glow is far behind me, small as a star.
“You planning on getting lost?” Wayne’s voice spooks the crows. He materializes ten yards off, hands in pockets, hat tipped as if the night requires manners. “We’ll have men here at first light.”
“I sleep worse when I leave questions in the ground,” I say.
He considers, or pretends to, and offers a smile that would sell a whole pew row on forgiveness. “Questions don’t rot,” he says. “Bodies do.”
He leaves with the last truck. The gravel hushes. I kneel and press my palm to the smooth spot. The dirt is cooler than the dirt around it. Fresh work holds its breath longer. I carry a pocket knife the way other women carry lipstick. I slide it in, inch by inch, and lift a flap of sod like a scab.
Boards.
There’s a way boards speak when they’ve been cut cheap and fast: a dry shiver, a complaint about haste. These complain. A nailhead glints like a pupil. I brush with my sleeve. The top board bears scratches shallow as a child’s first letters. C, then a jerked line like a panicked A, the start of another curve.
I’d like to believe it’s coincidence. The world loves a cruel one. But the orchard has never been a comedian.
Branches tick in a breeze that wasn’t there a second ago. Far off, someone shuts a truck door, or I imagine it. My name sits half-born in splinters. The dark breathes in, holding.
The board moves under my palm, lifting from below.