Chapter Five
Riverbend, Louisiana
When I arrive at the hospital, Debby is waiting for me by the elevator.
“I thought you were right behind me?” she says.
I hold up my coffee. “Pit stop. You didn’t have to wait on me.”
“Well,” she says. “He’s in a step-down room now, so I didn’t want you to go to the wrong floor.”
I don’t bother to tell her she could have just texted this information. She seems flustered enough.
“How good are his doctors?” I ask as we step into the elevator.
Debby presses floor five. “His doctors have been amazing,” she says. “His cardiologist is the best.”
“The best of Riverbend?” I say without hiding my sarcasm. “So good that Dad had a widow-maker?”
“Well, he didn’t have a cardiologist at the time. I’m talking about the one he has now.”
“Why is it he didn’t have one? He’s sixty-eight years old. Do you know the percentage of survival from a widow-maker? Luck only lasts so long.”
Debby blanches, and the elevator doors open. My anger is a simmering cauldron. Anger at her for not taking better care of him. Anger at my father for not taking better care of himself. Anger at myself for not asking more questions about his health.
I’ve been so focused on the dead, I seem to have forgotten about the living, and having to admit that pisses me off.
As I follow Debby down the hallway, another anger brews in me as well, and it’s the one I don’t want to acknowledge. A petulant, selfish anger. One that blames my father for bringing me back here, for pulling me away from Laura Sanders and the answers I need from her.
When we walk in, a nurse’s aide is attempting to get him to eat. He is shaking his head like a five-year-old, and after seeing the food on the plate, I don’t blame him.
The room is beige with engineered hardwood floors, a hospital bed with a seafoam green blanket, and a sign that reads Call Don’t Fall next to a dry-erase board.
Debby rushes to my father’s side and starts moving his messy hair out of his face.
I focus on the dry-erase board. It lists my father’s name and date of birth, primary diagnosis—myocardial infarction—his doctor’s name, and under that, three letters that hit home even more than seeing my father last night: DNR. Do not resuscitate.
I clench my hands together and breathe. His mortality should be something I worry over, based not only on my line of work but also on the fact I lost my mother so young. But I don’t worry about him. I took the idea of him being mortal and locked it away. That’s how I protect myself from it.
I turn to face him.
I can’t protect myself from it anymore. Leaving him to go back to Miami may be a little harder than I anticipated. And, once I talk to Dom, Miami may not be an option anyway.
My father motions me over. I swallow and walk to the opposite side from Debby.
His hand reaches out for mine, and I squeeze it.
His eyes water for a moment, and I’m horrified to realize he may cry.
I’ve only seen him cry once, and it happened so quickly I still think my memories could have shaped the moment differently.
It was at my mother’s funeral. A tear had escaped before he quickly wiped it away and told me to bury my tears as deep as I could because we needed to be strong for all the people coming out that day to honor her.
He showed me how, and we’ve both kept those tears buried ever since.
I start to speak, but he interrupts me. “Get me out of here,” he says.
I smile. There we go. There’s the Judge Mac I know.
“On it,” I say, squeezing his hand. I search his face to see if he will say anything else, but he stays quiet.
“Now, we don’t need to rush anything, Mac,” Debby says. “We’ve all had a big scare, and we need to make sure you’re healthy before you come home.”
“Hospitals will kill you, Debby,” I say.
“Well, this one saved his life,” she says, meeting my gaze.
Touché. “Yes,” I say. “But I know the statistics on hospitals enough to know once they save your life, get the hell out or they’ll find a way to kill you.”
Debby purses her lips.
Dad looks at her, then at me. “We’ll do whatever the doctor says, okay?”
Debby pats his arm, but I don’t miss the look she gives me. She won.
The door swings open, and when a nurse walks in, everything about this moment shifts and changes. A cold chill settles on my skin. Something about her is familiar, her eyes. And it hits me. I knew her from Poison Wood.
“Oh my God,” the nurse says. “Carita . . . I mean Rita. It’s Grace. Grace Atchison,”
My dad and Debby are looking at us now. “You two know each other?” Debby says.
“Kind of,” Grace says. “I remember Rita from Poison Wood. I was a couple of years younger than her.”
I’m not sure why that needed to be thrown in. Probably because she doesn’t want to be associated with my class. Can’t blame her for that. And although there were under a hundred girls at Poison Wood, the older girls did not fraternize with the younger ones. Especially not my group.
Debby scrunches up her face. “I always hated they called it that. Piedmont was such a proud name down there. The Piedmont family did a lot for that part of the state, and they should have named that school Piedmont.”
“Can’t rewrite history,” I say. Unfortunately.
“So,” Grace says, approaching my father. “I came by to check on you. How are you doing?”
He nods, and his cheeks have turned even paler than when I arrived.
It’s the talk of the school. That school with its strange accidents and Halloween pranks gone wrong.
And the night one of its students ran off and never returned.
After that its doors were permanently closed, and the students scattered like inmates freed from prison, never to reunite again.
Never say never.
Debby says, “We just need to speak with his cardiologist, so we know what the plan is.”
“Absolutely,” Grace says. “Let me check a few vitals, and I’ll see what I can do to get the doctor in here sooner.”
She notes my dad’s blood pressure and respiratory rate, asks him questions about how he’s eating and drinking and how his pain level is.
He answers her questions politely, but I can see the look in his eyes that says he’s annoyed.
He’s not used to being the one examined.
He’s used to being the one on the bench looking down, examining others.
Then nurse Grace asks him if he needs help getting to the bathroom, and I think my father’s head is going to explode. His cheeks redden to the point I fear he may have a second heart attack.
“No,” he says in a sharp tone.
If Grace notices his embarrassment, she doesn’t show it. “Okay then.” She nods at me to follow her.
Outside in the hall, I follow her to the nurses’ station.
“Sorry about your dad,” she says.
“Me too.”
An awkward moment of silence sits between us. That school sits between us.
“So,” she says. “Do you keep up with the others?”
I shake my head.
“Me either,” Grace says. She hands my dad’s chart to another nurse, seated behind a computer. “Can you see about getting Dr. Baker here to see Judge Meade in room 517?”
The nurse nods but doesn’t look up.
Grace turns to me. “So tell me, why are you really here?”
“Excuse me?” Sweet little nurse Grace may not be so sweet after all.
“I mean, no offense, but . . . you know, you’re Rita Meade. I figured you were really here for the other thing.”
My body stiffens. I’m not sure which part of this statement has my blood boiling the most. And although I want to correct her with a few choice words, I prove her right by saying “What other thing?”
Her eyes widen, and she leans in closer to me. “The skull thing. I mean they finally found Heather Hadwick.”
“Oh yeah . . . that,” I say.
“Yeah, that,” she repeats back to me with a gaze that shows she wants the scoop.
Thing is, from the look in nurse Grace’s eyes, she may have more scoop than me. “Can we go somewhere and talk a minute?”
She checks her watch, then nods. “Sure. But just for a minute.”
I nod down the hall toward the open vestibule, and she follows me there.
The tall windows in the vestibule let in dull sunlight. The sky looks white today, as if the winter precip may not be done yet.
“What do you know?” I say to Grace as we stand by the window.
“What’s it like at NCN?” she says with a hungry look in her eyes.
“What?”
“You know,” she says, twirling her long brown hair and tucking it behind her ear, only to pull it out again and start over. “I thought I wanted to be a reporter too.”
Terrific.
“But,” Grace continues, “I decided I wanted to be in a profession that actually helped people.”
I cock my head to the side. I want to correct little miss thing and tell her how I help people more than she knows, but after seeing my father in a hospital room and imagining what it took to help him, my argument feels hollow.
“Anyway,” Grace says, oblivious to the moment I’m having with myself.
“These old ladies go to the school because they, like I don’t know, want to clean it up or something.
The hundredth anniversary of the school is coming up, and the historical society is interested in, like, getting it on a registry or something.
But then there’s, like, this other committee that wants to boost eco-tourism up here and they want to develop the land and the ladies in charge of that are all like glamorous ex-governors. ”
The only glamorous ex-governor I remember in this state was Summer’s mother, the woman people credited Summer’s beauty to. I would hover near her and Katrina’s mother at parents’ weekend, watching them laugh and toss their hair as if I was watching exotic birds at a zoo.
I motion with my hands for Grace to speed up.
“Okay, so,” she continues, “the historical ladies don’t want it torn down because they think the school is really special since it was built in like 1919, but I mean that place is more like a haunted house if you ask me.”
I’m losing my patience with this one. “Grace,” I say. “Do you know any information that wasn’t in the article?”
She straightens. “Maybe.”
Here we go. Some people can’t wait to give up information to me, some refuse, and then some like Grace want to tease it out. Even though I’m in no mood to play this game with her right now, I’m willing to make an exception on the off chance she may actually know something worthwhile.
I touch her arm. “Sounds more like the answer is yes. Not maybe.”
She smiles. “Okay. Yes.”
That was easy. “So what do you know?”
“Okay, I’m going to tell you, but I don’t want anyone to know you heard it from me. Like, it’s off the record or whatever.”
I nod. “Off the record. Got it.”
She leans forward. “I think one of the students at Poison Wood was . . . off.”
“What do you mean off?”
“I mean, like, psychologically.” She winds her finger next to her temple. “You know. Cuckoo.”
“It was a therapeutic boarding school, Grace.”
“I know, but I mean maybe criminally off. Like, bad.”
“Bad how?”
“Bad, like hurt somebody bad.”
Now we’re getting somewhere. “Why do you think that?”
She looks down the hall, then back to me. “I used to work at the retirement home where Barbara O’Connor is.”
“And?”
“And she and I used to visit about the school before her memory got bad. She said she always worried one of the girls at Poison Wood was violent. And she said there was a lot of stuff left behind that could prove it.”
An electric current zings up my spine. “What stuff?”
Grace studies me with a look that tells me she’s enjoying having me on the hook. “She said the administrators left everything at the school when it closed. Desks, records, all the like, you know . . .” She leans in closer. “All the counselor notes.”
“No way they left those things,” I say. “They would have been mandated to destroy the records.”
Grace pulls back and shrugs. “Like that school ever did anything it was mandated to do.” She checks her watch. “Oops. I gotta go. Been good seeing you, Rita.”
She trots back to the nurses’ station, and on my way to my father’s room, I start calculating the time it would take to make another trip.
Back in the room, I study my father. He’s fine, safe. He’s not going anywhere. I could run a quick errand and be back before I am even missed. Just a look. That’s all I’d need. A couple of hours at the most to see if what Grace told me is true.
I pull my father’s truck keys from my purse. “Dad, I’ve got to run a quick errand. I promise I won’t be gone long.” I bend over and kiss his forehead.
“You just got here,” Debby says.
“I know,” I say, shoving away the guilt weaving its way through my veins. “I’m sorry,” I say to my father.
He looks at me as if he knows where I’m going. “Where’s the story?” he says, his voice cracking around the words.
I squeeze his hand, but I don’t answer. “We’ll talk about it later.”
Outside the hospital, the wind has picked up. There’s no sleet, but the bone-chilling humidity is still lingering. February is brutal here. The cold as biting as the heat is in August.
I climb behind the wheel of my father’s truck and crank up the heat, but it does little to warm my chill as I work my way south toward the Kisatchie National Forest.