Chapter Twelve
Riverbend, Louisiana
Mockingbird Café looks like something from a Southern movie set with large black-and-white floor tiles, green iron ice cream parlor tables, and a chalkboard with today’s specials: Love at First Bite and Cupid’s Kiss, a turkey-and-cranberry sandwich and tomato-basil soup.
The Valentine’s theme has spilled over into this space as well. Red hearts and white doilies hang like garland across the room. Every table holds a pink vase with a red rose.
And worst of all, in the back room behind me sits a long table of twentysomethings at what sounds like a baby shower.
The words darling and precious and adorable drift up to me with the polite sounds of silverware on plates.
Unfortunately, I have a feeling this quaint Southern café, like Lasyone’s, does not serve Macallan at lunch.
I sit at a table in the back corner, facing out. I want to see what’s coming.
A young waitress with big blond bangs sets a menu on the table, and I let her know two more will be joining me. She returns with two more menus and a pitcher of water. She turns three glasses over and fills them.
“What else can I get you?”
“Iced tea.”
“Sweet?”
I shake my head. I’m going against the grain here. “Unsweet.” She smiles and is starting to walk off when I add, “Is Martha Lee here today?”
“Um, I’m kinda new here, but I think so. She the lady who cooks in back? Makes those Chantilly cakes people love?”
I remember those cakes. They were the best thing about Poison Wood. “That’s the one. Do you think I could go back there and say hi to her?”
The look on Bangs’s face makes me regret asking. I’m not sure why I did ask. Something about being in a polite Southern town brings out manners I didn’t even know I had.
“Um, I’m not sure about that,” the server says, scratching her head. “Customers don’t go in the kitchen.”
“No problem,” I say with my widest smile.
Her face brightens. “Oh, great. Okay then. I’ll be right back with that sweet tea.”
I don’t bother to correct her, and once she’s gone, I stand up and walk toward the back of the restaurant like I’m looking for the restrooms, which are conveniently located next to the kitchen.
I round the corner into the kitchen as if I’m supposed to be there, and I have to give it to the Mockingbird Café. Their kitchen is spotless, from the stainless steel countertops to the freshly mopped floors.
One of the cooks looks away from a boiling pot of something that smells delicious. “You lost?” he says.
“No. Just surprising an old friend.”
His eyebrows shoot up. “Hope it’s not someone with a knife in their hand.”
He’s got a point. “Martha Lee,” I say.
A woman off to herself, holding a bowl in one hand and a large spatula in the other, looks up and turns to me.
When we make eye contact, I think for sure she is going to bolt.
I seem to be having that effect on people lately.
But Martha actually does the opposite—she freezes. She looks as if she’s seen a ghost.
“Hi, Martha.”
She places the bowl and spatula on the countertop. Her eyes stay on mine, and I approach as if she were a skittish kitten.
The other cooks have stopped to watch.
“You good, Ms. Martha?” one says.
She nods. “I’m good, Harold.”
Her voice is that of a lifelong smoker, and the lines grooved across her face show she’s a woman with a story to tell.
I stop in front of her.
“Hello, Carita,” she says. “I wondered when one of you would find me after what we all just watched. You set the record.”
“Tandy Higginbottom said I may want to visit with you.”
“Did she now?” Martha says, and I can tell by the look on her face Ms. Tandy is going to be getting a call about this.
“Do you have a minute?” I say.
She nods toward a door beside us, then leads me out onto a small patch of grass next to an alley.
Low clouds scuttle overhead, and the temperature is dropping here now as well. Or else that’s just the effect this reunion is having on me.
“I’m just going to jump in here,” I say. “Do you know I’m a reporter now?”
She nods.
I pull my phone out. “Are you okay with me recording this?”
She glances down at my phone and nods again.
I press record. I say today’s date and time, then hold it up between Martha and me. “Tandy Higginbottom said Poison Wood should have been shut down long before Heather Hadwick went missing. She suggested I talk to you about why.”
Her eyes narrow, and she crosses her arms over her chest. “So you just show up here at my work, after all these years, and start with that? You think it’s going to be that easy?”
I need to get her to uncross those arms.
“Nothing about that school was easy,” I say.
She nods. “You got that right.”
“And I’ve shown up here because my father had a heart attack two days ago, and now I’ve learned a woman who reached out to me three days ago about a story is dead, and that woman’s name turns out to be Heather Hadwick. And now there’s a skull that has yet to be identified.”
She uncrosses her arms and wrings her hands. “I’m sorry about your father.”
“Thank you.”
She scratches at her gray hair. She looks around at the empty alley, then says, “I didn’t want trouble at that school.
I put my head down and did my job. I fed you girls.
” She pauses. “I tried to feed you girls. Y’all were a tough group.
Anyway, yeah, I saw some things and heard some things I shouldn’t have. ”
My pulse kicks up. “Like what?”
“Like the stealing, for one.”
“What else?” I say, my heart rate leveling back off. Stealing at Poison Wood is not a news flash.
“The sneaking around at all hours of the night.”
I nod. “And?”
“And Halloween.”
“And?” I say, not giving her time to elaborate.
“The staff was scared of you girls. I’d hear them whispering about it. Especially that one.”
Goose bumps rise on my arms. Dr. Fontenot’s notes mentioned a girl who possibly needed to be transferred. “Which one?”
“I don’t remember her name.”
Martha touches her face with her left hand and avoids looking at me when she says it.
“Yes, you do,” I say.
The door behind us opens, and the guy with a Harold name tag looks out. “Martha?”
“I’m coming,” she says.
He gives me a long look, then shuts the door.
She meets my gaze. “I’m glad it closed down.”
“Me too,” I say.
Her shoulders relax.
“Do you remember that last Thanksgiving break?” I say.
Her shoulders raise back up to her ears. “What about it?”
“Do you remember everyone who was staying there?” I want to make sure I remember the same as her.
She reaches into her pocket and produces an almost-empty pack of cigarettes. She pops one in her mouth, then fishes back in her pocket for the lighter. She inhales and exhales before answering.
She nods. “Sure. Yeah. I remember who was staying there. It was me, Ms. Barbara, you four girls, and Johnny.”
“Do you know where Barbara O’Connor lives now?”
She shakes her head and takes another drag off her cigarette. “No idea. And you shouldn’t be focusing on just those of us staying at the school that week. Anyone could have shown up there.” She takes another drag. “Like a boy sneaking in.”
“What boy?”
She shrugs “Probably one of them St. Matthew’s boys.” She finishes her cigarette and crushes it out on the ground. “I’m no idiot. I heard them fighting.”
I have a few memories of girls sneaking boys up to their rooms, but the norm was for us to sneak out and go to them.
I don’t remember any boys sneaking in the week of Thanksgiving, much less a fight.
I also don’t remember any other missing persons at the time.
Only Heather. If a St. Matthew’s student had gone missing, too, it would have been even bigger news.
“Are you sure about that?” I say.
“Yeah. I am. And I told the police that years ago. And they said it was probably Johnny I heard.” She rubs her arms against the cold. “But I knew Johnny. It wasn’t him.”
“This is the first time I’ve heard the possibility of someone else being at the school with us that week.”
“That’s because I was dismissed. Everybody saw Johnny and that cottage and never saw anything else.
” She puts her hand on the door and starts to open it.
“And now we got a body up in that school, and it ain’t that girl.
She ran off for some reason that night. I think that reason’s been found. In the wall.”
She pulls the door open. “Don’t come back here. I’m done talking.”
I stop the recording. “We can talk off the record.”
She walks back into the kitchen, and I follow her. “Martha,” I say.
She stops at her station. “I said I’m done.” She looks at my phone. “I changed my mind. I don’t want anything we talked about on the record or whatever.” She looks around the kitchen like she’s worried it’s bugged. “You leave my name out of it.”
“Martha.”
“Promise me you’re not going to say my name to anyone,” she says in a whisper.
“I promise.” I tell her my cell phone number. “Just in case you change your mind.”
I weave my way back to the table in the corner and hurry to open my phone and make notes on what Martha told me. Things I’ll need to confirm with the two women who are about to meet me here.
I want to believe there’s a chance that body could have ended up in the French drain at any point that fall, but the trench was filled in the Monday after Thanksgiving.
A girl had tripped on it a few weeks before and broken her wrist, and Barbara O’Connor pitched a fit about it.
She warned us all to steer clear. The trench was deep and dangerous, and she lit into any girl who snooped around it.
Then the week after the break, gravel trucks showed up and filled it in.
“Hey, slut,” a woman says in a throaty voice, and I know who it is even before I lift my head.
My past has arrived.
Interview Room A, Natchitoches Police Department
Date: November 30, 2002
Time: 10:00 AM
Present:
Detective Sam Terrel (ST)
Officer Constance McKinney (CM)
Witness Barbara O’Connor (BO)
ST: Good morning, Ms. O’Connor. I am Detective Terrel, and this is Officer McKinney. We need to ask you a few questions regarding the incident that occurred yesterday on November 29th. Do you understand that this interview is being recorded?
BO: Yes, I understand.
ST: Great. Can you please state your full name for the record?
BO: (Clears throat) Barbara Elizabeth O’Connor.
ST: Thank you, Ms. O’Connor. Let’s start with your position at the school.
BO: I’m a teacher and a parent to a student and now the head of school.
ST: Where were you on the early morning of November 29, around 2AM.
BO: I was in the school’s rec room watching TV. I couldn’t sleep because I had indigestion.
ST: What were you watching?
BO: A Hallmark movie.
ST: Can anyone verify that?
BO: (Chair shuffles) Yes. Our cook, Miss Martha Lee was with me.
CM: Can you provide us with Martha Lee’s contact information?
BO: Yes.
ST: Did you hear anything unusual outside while you were watching television?
BO: No. Nothing.
CM: When did you realize something was wrong?
BO: (Scoffs) When our maintenance man ran into the room screaming and covered in blood.