Chapter Fifteen
Riverbend, Louisiana
The sun is high and bright, but it’s still freezing as my sneakers bite into the gravel under me. My breath shows in the cold morning air. I like the way it feels in my lungs. It hurts, but it’s clearing my head. I need to move. I need my body to find a rhythm in the running so I can focus.
Sleep didn’t catch me until well after midnight.
When my mind finally stopped trying to make sense of the avalanche of information from yesterday: the journals, my father opening my mail, which possibly triggered his heart attack, Laura Sanders, Heather Hadwick, Katrina, Summer, Poison Wood. Crowley.
I trip on the even ground as I cross the dam of the sixty-acre lake. I can’t lock all this away in a hidden suitcase anymore.
And on top of it all was the voicemail I woke up to from Erin, not Carl, letting me know they will be in town tonight and asking if I will meet them at the Kingston Hotel downtown later. She warned me that the Halloween prank and Lisbeth Warrington’s death were starting to make the rounds.
Summer, Kat, Nurse Grace, Martha. Someone is talking.
The three dogs trail me off-leash, hopping through the dormant grass on either side of the dam, stopping to sniff and lift a leg every few seconds.
A few wispy clouds reflect off the water.
I helped my father and my uncle build this lake when I was in grade school.
Saturdays were spent picking up sticks while my father whistled to me over the grinding engine of his bulldozer and pointed to protruding roots and limbs that needed removing.
I pushed and pulled things from this land every weekend.
Now I’m here doing the same thing, but this time with my memories.
I stop and catch my breath, rest my hands on my knees.
My headache is a dull pulsing today, and even though I’ve been running for thirty minutes, no endorphins have shown up yet. Still, I keep going. The burning in my muscles feels like a way to drain myself of this toxic energy.
Two of the dogs run up to me as I turn for the driveway to the house, but the third one is nowhere to be seen. I stop and look around. The two at my feet are panting and looking up at me, and I have no idea who is who.
“Uno,” I yell. The smaller one at my side perks up.
“Dos,” I yell. The smaller at my side perks up again.
The other one completely ignores me both times. Great.
“C’mon, boy,” I yell, looking around. I start clapping and whistling and making it sound like this is the best place to be. “Good boy,” I coo at the ones at my feet even though they’ve done nothing. They both wag their nonexistent tails. “Let’s go!” I yell in a high-pitched voice.
Something cracks in the woods nearest the driveway.
“C’mon, boy,” I yell again, but no dog emerges.
My annoyance starts shifting to panic quickly.
This is not good. I should have put their stupid leashes on.
I walk up to the house, and the dogs race in when I open the door by the mudroom.
I shut the door behind them before they can dart back out; then I walk to the last garage bay, where the utility vehicle is kept.
I open the garage door and crank up the 4x4.
Its loud engine roars, and I work it into reverse and back out.
Like muscle memory, driving this thing comes back to me in fluid motions.
No power steering, so I yank the steering wheel in the direction of the woods.
The UTV lurches forward, and I drive it along the woods, calling for the dog. Nothing.
I ease along until I spot a narrow opening, one larger than a typical trail.
I kill the engine and call for the dog again.
This time something jingles in the woods.
A second later, a small animal that looks very much like one of my father’s dogs walks out of the woods covered from his head to his tail in mud.
“Great. Get over here,” I say, and the dog bounds toward me, his collar jingling as he jumps in the 4x4. He looks up at me with one blue eye and one brown. “Dos,” I say, snapping my fingers, and he wags his whole body.
I glance past him at the road and notice something else. Something in the mud. I climb out and crouch down to get a better look. Tire tracks. What the hell?
I stand up and look back at the house, specifically the second-floor window. My window. I want to tell myself I’m being paranoid, but the headlights I thought I saw the other night, the way I felt followed after leaving Poison Wood have the hairs on the back of my neck prickling.
I jump back in the UTV and steer away from the house and onto the muddy road with the tire marks.
Branches smack the sides as I bounce down it.
Someone’s car would be quite scratched up after this journey.
The trail stops at an old, rusted barbed wire fence with a metal gate. A gate that is sitting open.
I hop out and shut it, but there’s no way to lock it. That’s going to change today.
The acid in my stomach is roiling as I park back in the garage and get Dos to the laundry room.
His brothers yap and pounce on him when we come through the door.
And by the time I’m done washing him off and cleaning his collar in the laundry sink, I’m as wet as he is.
I dry him the best I can, and he takes off, zooming around the house with the other two in tow.
In the kitchen, Debby is working on a crossword puzzle at the table.
“Is he still sleeping?” I say.
She shakes her head. “Bunchin’ a fire.”
I sigh. He’s definitely got something on his mind.
Bunching a fire was a constant on this land as a kid.
Storms are also a constant in Louisiana: tornadoes, straight-line winds, derechos, and even a hurricane made it this far north once, all leaving a swath of downed trees in their wake.
Trees that needed to be moved and piled up and turned into bonfires that could probably be seen from space.
My father’s way of cleaning up and keeping order.
The day of my mother’s funeral, my father brought me home, took off his tie, and climbed up in his bulldozer in his suit and didn’t come back until well after dark.
My uncles made me dinner, and I went to bed and watched my father from my upstairs window.
The lights from his truck directed at a burning pile of downed trees.
The beeping of the dozer as he’d back up and then move forward, pushing more dead trees onto the pyre.
Sparks raced upward into the dark sky, then disappeared, and I wondered if my mother was looking down and catching those sparks as they flew up to her.
I pour a cup of coffee from the cold carafe and heat it in the microwave.
I wanted to come down this morning and slap that open envelope on the table and tell my father to start talking.
But I put on running shoes instead. Rushing into this with him may not be the best approach, even though it’s my usual approach. But nothing feels usual anymore.
I take my coffee and head for my room. I need to take the folders and journals to Erin tonight. I’m going to have to let them go. But as I pass my father’s study door, I pause.
If I was going to hide something—say, something from an envelope not addressed to me—this would be as good a spot as any. I turn the knob and step inside.
Winter light fills the room, coming through the French doors on the opposite wall. The pile of mail still sits on the desk where I dropped it. I move around to the back side and survey the desk, my gaze falling on a keypad on the bottom right drawer.
I sit in my father’s large leather chair but only pause for a second.
Although guilt is a powerful motivator, it’s not powerful enough to stop me from looking through this desk for whatever could have been in that envelope.
And I know right where to start. I type the code into the keypad on the bottom drawer and yank it open.
I’ve done a lot of things to get information over the years, but until coming back here, I’ve never crossed lines like this to get it.
First, I crossed the police tape at Poison Wood, and now this.
It’s as if just being in close proximity to that school has unearthed all the bad behavior I learned within its walls.
The drawer’s contents surprise me. It’s filled with my mother’s things: a denim shirt, paintbrushes, perfume bottles. I pick up one of the slender, curvy bottles, Giorgio Beverly Hills.
My father has filed her away as well.
“Oh, Dad,” I say to the quiet study.
I reach for the perfume, remove the cap, and smell.
The fragrance is still bold and floral, a hint of jasmine.
And I’m transported back to her. To her long brown hair tickling my face as she leaned over me to kiss me good night.
I wonder if this is a real memory or one my mind wove into existence because I needed it.
I once read our sense of smell is our oldest sense.
Smells will trigger memories buried deep within us.
I put the gold cap back on and set the bottle in the drawer before anymore memories are triggered.
I touch the soft fabric of the shirt, her shirt.
Something in it crinkles when I pick it up and hold it to my nose.
Something flutters underneath it, a manila envelope.
My pulse quickens. It doesn’t fit with the other items, yet it’s too big to have been sent in the padded envelope.
I grab it and pull it out, my eyes darting to the door.
My father or Debby could walk in at any moment. But once you cross a line you’re not supposed to, the next line holds less meaning. A slippery slope that has me working my finger under the sealed envelope before I can talk myself out of it.
The flap loosens and I peer inside at several papers. I ease my hand in and pull them out, my heart rate accelerating. My mother’s death certificate. Her birth certificate. Their marriage license.
The last sheet of paper, though, grabs my full attention.
It’s an autopsy report dated April 13, 1995, two days after my mother died.
I scan it. It looks like any other report I’ve seen on cases, but the paper starts to shake in my hand.
I don’t know if I’ve ever seen an autopsy report come back in two days.
My eyes dart from line to line. Nothing looks off.
Name: Lara-Leigh Calhoun Meade, DOB March 3, 1962, Cause of Death: Intracranial Aneurysm.
But it’s not the report itself that has this room feeling devoid of oxygen. It’s the handwritten note paperclipped to the top: You owe me.
I stand up so quickly the chair overturns and crashes to the floor. The dogs start barking down the hall and run into the room, followed by Debby.
“Are you okay?” she says, looking around the study.
I slip the report back in the drawer and shut it. I am anything but okay. “What the fuck is going on?”
She recoils. “I don’t need you speaking to me like that.”
I squeeze my eyes shut and pinch the bridge of my nose. “I’m just thinking aloud.” I open my eyes.
“Well, think aloud with better language,” she says.
I’m exhausted, reeling, and seriously regretting ever coming into this study. “Sorry,” I say, walking past her and up the stairs to my room.
Two hours later, I’m dressed in a skintight black pencil skirt and black tank top. In the bathroom, I slick my hair back into a long ponytail. I lean into the mirror. My color needs a touch-up, but overall the look is good. A bit sexy funeral, but it will work.
I add my signature red onto my lips and a little more powder.
Lastly, I dig back through my closet and find an old brown leather jacket.
It’s so outdated it’s come back in style.
I slide it off the hanger and smell it. It doesn’t smell like her anymore.
My mother wore it almost every day, even in the summer sometimes.
Her wild sandy hair tangled into a high knot on the top of her head, a paintbrush in one hand, and a messy canvas in front of her.
That’s the image that always comes to me.
A painter. Odd, because I was only ten when she died and I didn’t really know her as a painter.
I only got to know that side of her later when I’d spend hours in her art room, staring at her work and touching everything she touched.
The jacket has a splash of blue paint on it, and I stop myself from chipping it off.
A little bit of her.
I grab the box of journals and folders and my tote with my laptop in it and head for the old truck.
There are going to be a lot more things I need to talk to my father about.
But I’m glad he’s out on a piece of heavy equipment at the moment.
I can postpone it a little longer. I need a minute to process.
Processing information is an art. An art some do well and some don’t.
I’ve looked into the eyes of so many strangers over the years who were processing the death of a loved one.
I’ve seen the confusion, the fear, the anger.
I want to tell them to keep only the anger.
Anger is like gasoline. It can fuel you.
Confusion and fear will only slow you down.
Unfortunately I feel those last two tugging at me now, trying to gain traction.
No way I’m going to let that happen.