Chapter Six #2
But I had survived four years here, then escaped to Tulane.
College saved me. It gave me a way to avoid the constant questions asked about Heather.
A way to block it out and move on. News of Heather’s disappearance and the arrest of Johnny Adair was all anyone could talk about in this part of the state, but in New Orleans that story had competition.
In my current career I know all too well another tragedy is always waiting to happen, waiting to upstage the latest one.
Trauma doesn’t take a day off, and it always loves to outdo itself.
I creep up to the black maw that was once a locked back door. I swallow. This is a first. Of all the times I snuck out of this door, now I’m sneaking in.
I could turn around now and drive away from this rotten box of memories.
But my father’s words the day I told him I’d landed my first job at a local Texas news station come back to me.
“That’s great,” he said. “But did you come this far to only come this far? Remember you’re not done; you’re just getting started. ”
I’m just getting started here too.
The smell of dust and decay washes over me as I step inside the rotting vestibule. But under those smells is another one. It can’t possibly still be here, but my brain believes it is. Sweet and sickly. Lavender.
Keep moving, I tell myself.
A wooden staircase sits on my right, its banister in splinters on the floor. Vacant long hallways flanked with doors feed off both sides of the open space. The classrooms.
The floor groans under my feet as I walk forward.
The deeper I go into the school, the darker it gets.
Black grime covers the walls and ceiling.
Cobwebs tickle my face as I walk. Streams of light filter in through the cracked parts of the boarded windows.
I push one of the classroom doors open with my finger.
A loud creak, then a scurrying sound and a flash of something small and furry running for me.
“Jesus,” I yell.
A mouse scurries past me down the hall.
I shiver and move into the room. It’s beyond creepy. Empty booze bottles litter the warped wood floor. A single old desk sits overturned and covered in caked-on filth. The chalkboards on both walls are covered with chalk phrases and initials and names, none I recognize.
As I start to exit the room, I hear it. A clatter, like something has fallen over deep in the bowels of the building. Wind howls through the boarded windows. Last thing I need is for the roof to cave in. I need to be quick here.
I open my phone, still one bar, and turn on the flashlight. I step back into the hallway and scan the light in both directions. Most of the doors are shut. A few are missing. The classrooms are all in states of disrepair.
A broken door hangs lopsided on one hinge on my right.
The cold I feel isn’t just the winter air anymore.
That door once led to a basement. A cold, damp cinder block room whose walls were always slick with humidity.
Police tape covers the door. I study the doorknob, then pull the yellow tape aside and shine my flashlight on the rickety stairs leading down into the dark.
The reasons to turn around are too many to list. The least of which is if I get caught on the other side of this police tape, the fragile ice my career is sitting on will crumble.
But I want to know what was left behind. Besides, if I get a scoop I can share with Erin and Carl, it could make up for the damage I’ve done.
The voice in my head is back and laughing. Whatever you need to tell yourself.
I ignore it as I place my foot on the first step.
The old railing on my left looks as if someone took a sledgehammer to it, so there’s nothing for me to hold on to except the cold wall on my right as I work my way down.
But when I touch my fingers to it to steady myself, I feel something besides the cold in it.
Something alive, pulsing inside it. I pull my fingers back, and as I do I take a step without looking and realize I’ve stepped into air.
I scream and land hard on the concrete floor below. I lie still for a minute and assess the damage done. My hip is throbbing and my neck feels as if it’s been hyperextended, but nothing feels broken.
I sit up and knock the dust off my clothes and scan for my phone.
A chill washes over me. Not just the chill from the cold in this dank, windowless place but a chill from the past. Voices of girls, laughing and gossiping, fill my head.
I always hated it down here. And now here I am voluntarily returning.
I snag my phone off the floor. A phone no longer showing cell service. I need to be quick here.
The basement is covered in dust with large swaths of it disturbed because of the recent activity here. Old washers and dryers are piled in one corner on the right. The hot-water heater lies rusted on its side.
I swing the phone flashlight toward the wellness room that never quite got finished.
More yellow police tape sections off this corner.
In the room, the concrete floor has been jackhammered to the dirt below.
A large, gaping hole is open, and it smells like upturned dirt.
Part of one wall has been completely removed to the studs. The spot where the skull was found.
I stay on this side of the tape this time, but I open my camera and start videoing. I don’t know what I’m doing or why I’m doing it, but I know if Carl was with me, he’d shoot the room.
When I’m done, I move back to the opposite side of the basement, where boxes and file cabinets sit against the cinder block wall with papers littering the floor beneath them.
One stack of file boxes has white labels with graduation years printed on them.
I ease up to them and crouch down to the scattered manila folders and typed sheets of paper.
I pick one up. A last name is printed on the tab.
I pick up another one. Another last name.
Looks like old records, the ones left here to rot.
This is insane. None of this should be here. Grace mentioned kids breaking in here all the time. No telling what they have seen and read.
I move to the old metal filing cabinets and open one. More folders are inside. They are organized by year, dating back to the sixties. What a mess. And when old students get wind of this—and now that the police have been down here, they will get wind of it—what a legal mess it will be.
I scan my light over them until I find the ’90s, and I pull out a large stack from ’93 to ’03, the year the school closed.
I grab the ones from the years I attended and shove them into my tote, telling myself I’m just borrowing them.
I’ll read through them and return them. It’s not like someone is going to miss them.
Then I spot a file box labeled Class of 2003.
Even though the school closed before we could graduate, technically we were still the Class of ’03.
I try to work it out from under the others without disturbing them, but the boxes topple over and crash to the floor.
I stare at the contents that spilled out.
Journals. Hundreds of them. I open the lid to the Class of 2003 box, and it is filled with journals too. Each one is labeled with a student number. My breathing grows shallow. These should not be here either. Someone seriously messed up. No way all this should have been left behind.
As I replace the top on the box, something clatters again upstairs. I need to get out of here, and just in case that clatter is a police officer who wouldn’t take kindly to a news reporter walking off with a box of papers, I opt for another way out.
I glance at the opposite side of the large room to the back corner where another set of wooden steps leads up to a pair of cellar doors. The whispers from my past are back: Hey, guys, there’s another way out of this place.
I walk up the short set of steps with the box balanced against my hip, unlatch the doors, and push. The doors fall open with a crash, and blinding morning light hits me. I squint and shield my eyes.
As I’m carrying my contraband out into the cold day and heading for the truck, I notice the small cottage sitting off on its own.
The caretaker’s cottage. Johnny Adair’s cottage.
Rarely did I go near it, but the few times I looked in, I remember one room with a cot and hot plate and tools.
But I know some of the girls dug around in there on occasion, looking for booze, cigarettes, or weed.
The last girl that was in there, though, was Heather. Her blood and DNA had been found all over it the night she disappeared.
I glance behind me toward the circular driveway. Mine is still the only vehicle here. One quick look in the cottage wouldn’t be that bad. I’ve already broken about a dozen rules anyway. What’s one more? But when I turn back to the cottage, I freeze.
A woman is standing in the doorframe. She is wearing bright-blue scrubs and looks to be in her late forties. She’s tall and fit, possibly a former college athlete. Her dark eyes study me.
My brain is screaming run, but it’s also telling me something about this woman is familiar.
“It’s cool,” I say.
And then she’s the one who runs.
“Hey,” I yell. “Wait.”
I watch her scamper to a narrow opening in the woods, and then she’s gone, swallowed up by the shadows.