Chapter Fourteen
Riverbend, Louisiana
The truck’s windshield wipers drag across the windshield as ice pellets smack the glass. It’s one of those days here where the temperature drops instead of going up. The road still has a sheen on it, and I slow down as I approach the turn to my father’s property.
The note from Martha Lee sits open next to me.
I tried the number she’d given me several times, but each time it had gone to an automated voicemail.
Then I did what I should have done as soon as Martha Lee had slipped me that note.
I snapped a picture of it and sent it to Carl, asking him to pass it along to Erin. He hasn’t responded.
I’m considering calling him when I spot the front gates up ahead on my left, and what’s parked next to them makes my stomach drop.
What the hell?
A news van is idling in the grass near the entrance.
I start pressing the remote to open the gate well before I get there. It starts to swing open, and a male journalist and a camera guy jump out. Not Erin and Carl, thank God. But I do recognize him. The only other reporter at the news conference earlier.
I keep my eyes forward and ease onto the property even though I’d rather floor it. I don’t want to accidentally hit this kid if he thinks he’ll be able to approach the truck. But he stays back and shouts questions at me through my closed window.
“What are you doing in town, Rita? Is it true you went to Poison Wood?”
“Do you have anything to say to Johnny Adair?”
“What does your father have to say for himself?”
“Whose skull was in that basement?”
I want to yell that he needs to go back to J-school because he obviously didn’t pay attention the first go-round. Yelling at someone’s closed window is not the way to get a story.
I drive through the open gates, stop, and wait for them to shut before I drive on.
He stays on the other side, and I exhale.
If I were him, I wouldn’t be standing around shouting.
But then I consider what I would be doing.
I’d be knocking on a door. I’d be getting a cell phone number to call.
Is that really better? Is that somehow above what he’s doing out there at the gate?
On the windy drive to the farmhouse, I have to slam on my brakes to avoid hitting a giant front-end loader scraping slush off the road. Then I see who is in the cab, behind the wheel.
My father waves at me.
I hold my hands up. “What the hell? When did you get home?”
He shrugs and motions for me to go around, which I do because it’s futile to argue with him that operating heavy equipment the day he is released from the hospital can’t be part of his recovery.
No way he’s coming down out of that cab until every last drop of slush is gone from the road.
He may even go out on the two-lane blacktop and keep going.
Although I hope he doesn’t. Not with a news van idling out there.
I know him well enough to know he’s thinking something through. Some men have sand gardens on their desks. My father has a Bush Hog and eight hundred acres of land.
At the house, I stop in the kitchen and stare at Debby as she loads the dishwasher.
“What?” she says.
“How come you didn’t tell me he was coming home?”
She rubs her forehead with the back of her hand. “It happened fast. There was paperwork and instructions and appointments to set up and medicine to get and I just got overwhelmed.”
“Was operating a front-end loader part of the instructions?”
She shuts the dishwasher and faces me. She exhales. “What do you want for dinner?”
Her exhaustion is palpable, and me storming in like this is not doing her any favors. Bottom line is I should have been at the hospital to help her.
I look down at my heels. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there to help you.” I look back up. “Whatever you make for dinner is fine.” I don’t remind her I’d told her I wouldn’t be here for dinner. Turns out my father being home and a news van idling nearby are enough to make me stay put.
Upstairs, I run a hot bath and climb into it. My mind is racing too fast. I need to slow down and sort through what has happened. If I don’t, I’m going to miss something.
I scroll through my texts, and the muscles that were just starting to loosen tense back up.
I have several from media outlets asking for a comment on Heather Hadwick, on why I didn’t disclose my connection to the story when I first went live, on how I feel about other journalists speaking out about what I did.
I pause on the last one, then open my phone and google my name.
The ripple effect of my decision to stay quiet about my source to Dom is starting to show.
Journalists across the country are posting comments and videos on social media about how my actions do not represent the actions of all journalists.
Four days ago, the opposite was being said.
I was being praised for my reporting on Broken Bayou. I was being honored for it.
Years of hard work are being ignored for one moment. But I know the rules of this game, and I broke them. Maybe, somehow, with this story I can find a way to rebuild what I knocked over.
I delete the text messages, then spot one from Carl.
Erin wants to talk.
I respond:
Okay. When?
I’ll let you know.
Can we talk?
Later.
That’s all he writes, and I leave it alone as my thoughts drift back to lunch with Summer and Katrina and to the journals on my bed.
I work to remember who was driving the truck we stole one night.
I want to say Kat was, but we stopped several times, swigging vodka from the bottle and jumping out and switching places.
I only know it wasn’t me driving, but I can’t be sure it wasn’t me who covered the driver’s eyes.
As I turn the faucet off with my foot, my cell rings. I sit up straighter in the tub, almost dropping the phone when I do. It’s the number from Martha’s note.
“Hello?” I say.
Silence.
“Hello?” I repeat.
“Who is this?” a woman says.
“Martha Lee gave me your number,” I say. “I went to Poison Wood. My name is Rita Meade. It was Carita when I was at Poison Wood.”
She exhales as I stand up out of the tub and grab a towel.
“Martha gave me a note with your phone number on it and the words follow the money,” I say, hoping she won’t hang up. “Do you know what that means?”
“You’d have to ask her.”
I dry off and find a robe hanging in my closet. “Will you tell me your name?” I cinch the robe belt around my waist.
“This is Rosalie.”
“Rosalie who?” I say as I open my phone and type the name in my notes.
“Rosalie Adair.”
My fingers freeze on the keypad. “What?”
“Yeah,” she says. “Because of you and your father, my brother has spent the last seventeen years of his life behind bars.”
“Rosalie,” I say.
“Don’t ever call this number again,” she says, and she hangs up.
I stand for several seconds in stunned silence.
“Dinner will be ready soon,” Debby yells up the stairs and snaps me back to attention.
I look at the clock. It’s four thirty.
“Sure,” I yell back.
I scroll through the numbers I’ve called recently and tap on Katrina’s.
“Hello?” she says.
“Is Summer with you?”
“Yeah.”
“Can you put me on speaker?”
“Hang on.” The sound changes. “Okay. We’re here.”
“Do you remember Johnny’s sister, Rosalie Adair?” I say.
“We remember her.” Kat answers for both of them. “She was around sometimes when I’d go to that cottage to . . . borrow some party favors.”
“Did you ever talk to her?”
“Sure,” Kat says. “She was weird even back then.”
“How so?”
“I don’t know. I just felt like she was always watching us.”
“Yeah,” Summer says. “One time I caught her in the school, snooping around. And I asked her what she was doing, and she said she was looking for her brother, but the thing is . . . she was in Crowley’s office.”
“What?”
“Yeah,” Summer says. “Creepy.”
“Wait,” I say. “What were you doing in Crowley’s office?”
“Oh boy,” Kat says.
“I was stealing the English midterm,” Summer says with an awkward laugh.
“Oh my God, I forgot about that,” I say. Our English teacher didn’t seem to notice or care that the three of us all made perfect scores on that test.
“Anyway,” Summer says. “Don’t you remember that time Rosalie showed up yelling at Crowley about money owed to her brother or something? We were all having lunch, and she was just screaming at him.”
“I don’t remember that.”
I start pacing and try to conjure up that memory, but nothing appears. I do recall seeing Rosalie around the school but only occasionally and never yelling.
“Do you know anything else about her?” I say.
“She became a nurse,” Summer says.
I stop mid-step. Was Rosalie at her brother’s old cottage recently?
“She’s not a nurse anymore,” Kat says.
“How do you know that?” I say.
“Because everybody knows Rosalie was fired for . . . accidentally . . . killing one of her patients.”
“Are you serious?” I say.
“Look it up,” Kat says.
“I’ll call you back,” I say and end the call.
I open my phone and start searching for Rosalie’s name. A Facebook profile hits, and I open it. It’s her. The woman I saw at Poison Wood. The nurse. She’s in scrubs in her profile picture, but her job status says she’s self-employed.
I backtrack to the search results and scan them until I find the article Katrina mentioned. It’s linked to an article about an appeal for Johnny. “Sister of Convicted Felon Questioned About Suspicious Death.”
The article says Rosalie was fired from Regional Home Health after a patient she was overseeing died. The family blamed Rosalie, said the death was due to her incompetence or, worse, her purposeful negligence. Rosalie’s employment was terminated, but no criminal charges were ever filed.