Chapter Seven
Riverbend, Louisiana
I set the box I borrowed on the front seat of the truck, then climb in and lock the doors. I scan the woods where the woman disappeared, but I don’t see her. I think about what could have happened if she hadn’t run. I need to be more careful.
Be careful, Rita.
Shivering, I crank the truck’s engine and pull away from the school, heading north once I get back to the main road.
I pull into the small town of Piedmont, and this time I get stuck behind the parade I saw on my way down.
The car behind me does a U-turn and speeds off, although I’m not sure where that person thinks they’re going.
It’ll be faster to follow a five-mile-an-hour parade.
A white sedan pulls out from a side street and tucks in behind me. Welcome to the conga line.
But the conga line has come to a stop.
A guy jumps from a makeshift float consisting of a tractor pulling a flatbed trailer and walks toward the line of cars, yelling there’s a problem with the lead float. One thing I know about parades in these parts is, aside from beads, you are guaranteed at least one float with a flat.
The cars behind me honk, and I examine the box on the seat next to me, its lid in place.
A lesson from my college Greek mythology class comes to mind about Pandora’s box.
Pandora opened it out of curiosity and released pain, anger, sickness, and jealousy into the world.
And when she tried to put the lid back on, it was too late.
It may already be too late, but I put the truck in park and opt for the folders in my tote instead.
The papers in the first folder are torn and water damaged, and from what I can tell, most are transcripts, but it’s impossible to read any names.
The second folder is more interesting. It’s filled with mental health evaluations.
The names are redacted, but they are in better shape and easier to read.
Several have general notes with similar phrases: problems with authority, disruptive in class, hypersexualized, eating disorders.
Things that could have described any number of girls in my graduating class, including me.
We were all there for a reason. But there are three that are more specific than the others and from my freshman year, when it felt like we lived under a microscope.
Like the teachers and counselors were always watching us.
And what had Grace said? One of us could have been violent.
Is that why Laura Sanders reached out to me?
I set those three forms side by side on the seat next to me.
Privileged and Confidential
1999 Group Session Notes
Date: September 1999
Student Number: 031
From: Dr. Janet Fontenot
Student is exhibiting signs of being histrionic. She enjoys being the center of attention and she also enjoys judging others. She uses her looks to get attention. She is also quite flirty with the male staff. I will need to talk with the male teachers about how to respond to her.
On the outside Student is fun and lively. But I see her fragile sense of self at her core. She is quite threatened by the other girls’ beauty. There is an insecurity buried inside of her I will need to explore but only when the moment is right.
Privileged and Confidential
1999 Group Session Notes
Date: September 1999
Student Number: 050
From: Dr. Janet Fontenot
Student is pushing her boundaries to the point she is getting in trouble almost every day. She has a willful disobedience about her, is defiant, and has been caught in multiple lies. Her anger and irritability are front and center.
I’m still studying her behavior but it seems to fit with Oppositional Defiant Disorder.
Privileged and Confidential
1999 Group Session Notes
Date: September 1999
Student Number: 025
From: Dr. Janet Fontenot
Student is displaying intense mood swings and enjoys yelling in Group.
If she is offended she will get directly in offenders face and scream as loud as she can.
She is also impulsive and showing signs of an eating disorder.
Student has also stated to other students she will kill herself if her boyfriend breaks up with her.
I am requesting a full psych eval for Borderline Personality Disorder. Her chronic feelings of emptiness have come out in a private session. Student will likely need to transfer to a different environment.
I knew our counselors were keeping notes—some did it while we were in group—but I’d never seen what they’d written.
These are some serious diagnoses. The student numbers I saw on tests and financial statements for my dad did not correlate with these.
This was a separate numbering system. A secret way to designate us.
I wonder if one of these is me. Could they have possibly diagnosed me with something like this?
Katrina’s husky voice fills my head.
“What are you in for?”
She was following me down the hall to math on my second day.
What was I going to say? Talking back to my dad?
Breaking curfew? Almost having sex? I’d been there all of forty-eight hours, and I’d already heard stories about stealing cars, punching cops, and selling drugs.
And that was just Katrina. She walked the halls of Poison Wood with a magnetic field surrounding her.
Despite her long list of offenses, I wanted in it.
Something about getting attention from her made me feel special. I liked feeling special.
So I lied to her. I told her I’d stolen my dad’s car and wrecked it into a Circle K, and we were instant friends.
Then Heather had shown up, an outsider whose aunt and uncle attended parents’ weekend, not her parents.
Her parents had both died in a car accident.
I’d felt so sorry for her. As angry as I was at my father for leaving me at Poison Wood, at least I still had a father to be angry at.
Heather was angry too. But she always seemed to be angry at herself.
I’d seen the marks on her thighs on those first warm spring days when we’d race for the back lawn after class with our towels to start our tans.
Heather always kept her shorts on, but I saw the cuts.
She’d been trouble from day one. Trouble by even Poison Wood’s standards.
The first day of class she walked into English wearing skintight cutoffs and a Black Sabbath T-shirt.
Her nails were painted black, and her eyes looked like she’d smudged ashes around them.
I’d never seen makeup like that before. She had red hair, and eyes like one of my barn cats, golden brown.
“Where’s your uniform, Heather?” our history teacher asked.
“In my room.”
“I’ll need you to go put it on. Now.”
Heather looked around at all of us in our navy-and-green plaid skirts and white starched shirts, knee-high socks and Mary Janes. And even with my skirt cut two inches shorter, I suddenly felt like a little girl.
“No,” Heather said.
“Young lady, you just got yourself detention.”
“Cool.”
And she walked out of the classroom.
The float up ahead starts to move and the guy gives a thumbs-up. Several of the cars in front and behind me honk again. The car in front of me lowers a window and claps for the men to see.
I grab my phone and google borderline personality disorder. The descriptions include acute fear of abandonment, self-harm, risky behavior. A picture of a painting by Edvard Munch appears next to the description. The title is Despair.
I study it and don’t like the way it makes me feel, like the ghost of Edvard somehow painted this after looking into one of the rooms in my mind I keep locked away.
The one that holds the emotions I buried at my mother’s funeral.
For years I’ve believed I buried them with her, when really I only buried them within myself.
A toxic little jewel box filled with pain and anger instead of gold and diamonds.
No ballerina twirling in the middle. Only the wispy ghost of my mother.
I keep my eyes darting from the slow-moving parade to my phone as I exit that search and start another one for oppositional defiant disorder.
It’s generic to the point of being useless.
Every kid has that one. I move on to histrionic.
This one doesn’t seem that bad to me. Dramatic and flirty.
Actresses, women who like to be on camera. Women like me.
I glance down at the folders. These forms should have been shredded when the school closed. They contain confidential information about every girl who entered those ridiculously large wooden front doors.
My phone rings and I jump. It’s a number with a 305 area code.
“Rita Meade here,” I say when I answer.
“It’s Detective Mulholland,” she says. “We need to talk about Laura Sanders.”
“Yes, we do.”
I shove the folders back to my tote and pull the lid off the box. Inside are several college-ruled writing journals in one color, dark green. The same green from our uniforms.
There are no names on any of them. They are labeled with plant or nature names from the Kisatchie National Forest. Some odd way to connect us to our environment. Ivy. Meadow. Holly. Honeysuckle. Jasmine. Fern. Cedar. Cypress.
“When did Laura Sanders contact you?” Mulholland says.
I pull my gaze back to the front windshield. “The night of February tenth. After my live interview. She told me she wanted to talk in person on the twelfth. I booked a flight down on the eleventh, though. I like to arrive early so I’m ready to go when my source is ready.”
“Did you and Laura Sanders confirm a time and place to meet?”
“No. She never responded to my text messages.” The people on the makeshift float in front of me throw beads and candy at the bundled residents sitting on the side of the street. “Detective, what’s going on with her? Something feels very off to me.”
“Something’s off all right,” she says. “Of all the reporters she could have reached out to, why you?” Mulholland says. I swallow. “You going to clam up on me like you did the other day?”
“No,” I say. “She chose me because she wanted to talk about a school I once attended. And about a girl who went missing from that school.”
I hear the shuffling on her end like she’s digging through papers. “What state is this school in?”
Prickles thread up the back of my neck. “Louisiana. Why?”
“Appears Laura Sanders lived in New Orleans at one point. When her maiden name was Smith.”
If Laura Sanders once lived in New Orleans, could she have attended Poison Wood? Like nurse Grace, she could have been in another class than me. But I don’t recognize the name Laura Smith.
“What’s the significance of that?” I ask Mulholland.
“Just something that doesn’t add up. Hang on.”
The parade finally turns off, and I find a spot on the shoulder to pull over. The white car and the line of cars behind it go around me.
I keep Mulholland on speaker and open my recorder app. “Are you okay with me recording this?”
“I was contacted by an Erin Stockwell about this case. She said she’d be handling this for NCN. Are you working with her?”
“No. I’m not. Not yet anyway.” I put my phone away. “No recording.”
I could do it anyway. Mulholland would never know. But I would. And I’ve crossed enough lines today. I need to rebuild trust, not tear it down further.
“Good,” Mulholland says. “This conversation is not an interview, at least not from you to me.”
“What can I help you with?”
“Did you know Laura Sanders?”
“No. But I knew a girl she wanted to talk about. A girl I went to boarding school with who went missing and was later determined to have been killed.”
“What was the girl’s name?”
I tell her, and Mulholland clears her throat. “According to records I found, a woman named Laura Smith lived in New Orleans from 2000 to 2005, when Hurricane Katrina hit.”
“And?”
“And two things. One, Laura Smith was thirty-two years old when she moved to New Orleans in the year 2000.”
I calculate the math quickly. “That would make her fifty-one now.” The body I saw did not look fifty-one.
“Exactly. Our victim is thirty-five. And there’s something else,” she says.
“What?”
“We think the name Laura Smith Sanders was an alias.”
I swallow. I feel it, that first tingle of a big story. That first moment when I know something is about to change.
The temperature in the truck drops several degrees despite the fact I have the heat blasting.
Blocks of memories start tumbling through my mind.
The bartender at the Setai saying “salon blond.” Not a natural blond.
Marshall Sanders saying “Laura had her demons.” And sharpest of all, the memory from moments ago.
A detail clicking into focus. Heather walking into the classroom in her Black Sabbath T-shirt.
The neck cut out and hanging off one shoulder.
I shut my eyes a moment and work to keep my voice steady as I say, “Detective, what was the tattoo on Laura Sanders’s shoulder?”
More shuffling on her end. She clears her throat. “A lotus flower.”
I drop my head into my hands and press on the pain throbbing in my temples. “Oh my God.”
The photos in the suitcase from my old closet. The one showing the gold locket. A necklace I had secretly returned to its owner when we were students at Poison Wood and seen around the neck of a little girl only yesterday.
“We found some odd keepsakes at Laura Sanders’s home,” Mulholland says. “One was an old Louisiana driver’s license.”
“What was the name on the license?”
She clears her throat. “Heather Hadwick. We have reason to believe Laura Sanders’s true identity was Heather Hadwick.”