Chapter Eighteen
Riverbend, Louisiana
I steer the truck to the end of a dead-end street past the last house.
It’s another one-story with brown brick, and it has a neighbor on its left, but on the right is a forest with a dirt road leading into it.
Bingo. I turn off the street and drive through the rutted grass to the trail’s entrance, hoping the neighbor isn’t looking out their window.
Several times I have to slow to a crawl to dodge branches.
I arrive at the old metal gate and barbed wire fence that separates the back of our property from the neighbors and park on our side.
I hop down and pull the heavy chain and lock I purchased from the bag in the back seat.
My heels sink in the muck as I carry them to the gate and drape the chain over with a loud clang.
Then I thread it through and click the lock into place.
I choose my mother’s birth year for this code.
I stand back and look. Better.
The house is quiet when I roll my suitcase into the kitchen, carrying my muddy shoes and large to-go coffee I grabbed from the hotel lobby on my way out. Quite the walk of shame. Thing is, I don’t feel any shame. Last night with Grant was . . . refreshing.
Debby is in her usual spot at the table with her crossword.
I walk to the coffeepot and add hot coffee to my to-go cup, then go to the drawer at Debby’s small built-in desk and find the bottle of Advil.
“Look what the cat dragged in,” she says, peering over her readers.
Debby is already dressed. I’m starting to think she sleeps in her clothes. I have yet to catch her in pajamas. My father is nowhere to be seen. I pop four Advil in my mouth and swallow them with the coffee.
I head to the mudroom by the garage and put on a large farm coat and slip my bare feet into paddock boots, then head to the French doors that lead to the back patio.
My head throbs against the cold air, but it feels good as I pull my coat tighter.
It’s what I need. I sit in one of the chairs and watch streaks of pink start to form in the cloudless sky.
The mornings here never cease to amaze me. They are soft and gentle, the sun easing up like a parent checking on a sleeping child. It’s a strange juxtaposition to the chaos happening inside me.
Birds chirp and zip through the air. Birds are a given in Louisiana any time of year, especially if you live next to a body of water.
This farm is no exception. Gray herons and white egrets glide over the still water alongside wood ducks and geese.
Geese that seem to be nesting in my father’s backyard.
Then the crack of a gunshot echoes over the lake, and I choke on the sip I’m taking. The barrel of my father’s shotgun is visible through his downstairs closet window.
“Dad!”
Another shot. My ears ring. A giant flock of black cormorants lifts off the lake and scatters in all directions.
“Goddamn scavengers,” my father says from the depths of his closet. A closet he added a window to when he built this place so he’d always have a view of the lake he built as well. “They’re gonna eat all my bass.”
Some things never change. Judge Mac doesn’t take kindly to trespassers, especially the feathered kind. I’d worry about neighbors, but he doesn’t have any. The only things that hear his gunshots are deer, armadillos, and gators. And now possibly a news van at the gate.
“Rita,” my dad yells, still unseen. “Wanna take a shot?”
“Killing cormorants is illegal,” I yell back at him.
“I don’t kill ’em. I just scare ’em.”
He laughs, but I don’t laugh with him. He’s not going to be so jovial once I start talking.
“Hang on,” he yells. “I’m coming out.”
My stomach drops. Here we go.
His window snaps shut, and a moment later he’s by my side, his own cup of coffee in hand, his robe seeming to swallow him. Uno and Tres race past us for the backyard, which slopes to the water, barking at geese.
“What the hell are you doing?” I say to him.
He holds up his mug. “Enjoying my coffee.”
“Really, Dad?”
“Ah, c’mon. Let an old man have a little fun.”
“Your idea of fun is going to kill us both.” Something in my voice cracks on those words, and I look away from him.
His hand squeezes my shoulder. “I’m okay,” he says. “It’s okay.”
“So, I put a lock on that back gate. The one by that dirt path.”
“Probably not a bad idea given what’s at the front gate.”
“Hold them off as long as you can, Dad. I’ll help you.”
“There’s nothing to say,” he says, but the creases between his brows say otherwise. He’s worried. And he should be. He’s also wrong. There’s a lot to say. And I need to figure out where to start.
“You know it looks bad that you and the DA and the governor all had daughters at that school.”
He doesn’t respond. Just keeps his gaze on the lake as he calls Dos to jump up on his lap.
I shift gears. “With the DNA confirming Laura Smith Sanders was actually Heather Hadwick, Johnny will be released soon, Dad.”
My father pets both dogs. “He already has been.”
My breathing stops for a moment. “What? When?”
“Early this morning. Three a.m.”
I shake my head. “I knew it would be fast, but I didn’t know it’d be that fast.”
“Yeah. The new DA is in an election year. I can promise you he was working behind the scenes on that release even before the DNA came back so he could act quickly. Be the hero.”
“When were you going to share this with me?” I say, eyeing him.
“I just did.”
“Yeah, but you could have led with that.”
He stays silent. I think of the padded envelope. What else could he be keeping from me?
“Johnny’s innocent,” I say, needing to say the words out loud to him.
“Innocent of that crime,” he says.
“What do you mean?”
Now he looks at me. “There’s still the skull that was found.”
“You think he was responsible for that?”
“I think it’s a possibility.”
I don’t tell him my suspicions about whose skull that could be. I’m keeping that card close to my chest for now, until I’m sure.
“I don’t think you need to be involved with anything that has to do with that school,” he says.
“That’s exactly what I should be involved with.”
He pats my arm. “I want to protect you.” His eyes look heavy, and he scratches at his five-o’clock shadow. “But I can’t seem to protect you from yourself.”
“I could say the same for you.”
He smiles at me, but the smile looks sad. “Just let the detectives handle it. You don’t need to be digging around in all of that.”
The cold air around us drops a few degrees. The antenna that tells me to listen to more than just the words is going up. “What aren’t you telling me, Dad?”
When he looks at me, his expression resembles one I remember as a kid, stern and impenetrable. “Just don’t.” Then his face softens. “I regret ever sending you to that place.”
“Dad,” I say.
“Yes?” He keeps his eyes down.
“Do you regret allowing that confession?”
He pauses but doesn’t look up. “I feel regret, yes. But I acted on evidence I felt was accurate.”
His answer sounds rote and robotic.
“It just happened so quickly,” I say. “His arrest and conviction.”
Now he looks at me. “It needed to happen fast. We believed a killer was loose and living near the school where our daughters went. We had evidence indicating a girl was dead. We couldn’t take a chance another one might go missing.”
Publicly, he always said he believed he’d handled the case without bias, but what he just said sounds dangerously close to a conflict of interest to me.
I shift gears on him and despise that I’m treating him like a story. But I hate not having answers even more than I hate interrogating my own father.
“Why’d you open a piece of mail addressed to me?” I say without any preamble.
He swallows. He stands up, and Dos bounds off his lap. “I need to check the fish feeder. Should have gone off by now.”
Oh no. You’re not getting away that easily.
I pull the farm coat tight around me and follow him down the hill behind the house. The dormant grass crunches under my paddock boots. At the end of the T-shaped dock sits a large green metal box. My father opens a hatch on the back and starts flipping switches.
“You know I’m not leaving until we talk about this,” I say.
He looks over his shoulder. “I do know that about you.”
A large bird with a white head and tail swoops close to the dock, then circles above us.
“Is that an eagle?” I say.
“Yep. He’s waiting for his breakfast.” He shuts the hatch and stands up. “There.”
The large green fish feeder grinds to life, and I jump. Tiny pellets shoot from it into the water. The dogs bark as bream splash on the surface, eating the food. And the eagle strikes. It dives down and scoops up a bream and flies off.
“Holy shit.”
My dad laughs. “He knows when the buffet opens. Even when the time changes, he’s on time.”
“Wow.”
“Sign of a smart hunter.”
The phrase hits wrong with me. Everything leads me back to Poison Wood. There was a smart hunter on those grounds. Smart or lucky. But the luck ran out.
My father starts back for the house, and I walk beside him.
“Why’d you open it?” I say.
He glances at me. “I was going to tell you about that.”
“Not an answer,” I say, walking behind him into the house.
My phone chirps, and it’s Grant, telling me he has to leave town for a bit today and hoping we can get together when he comes back. He’ll be in Riverbend a few more days for work. I tell him that’d be nice. I debate adding more but leave it at that. It’s simple, and it’s the truth.
“I like that smile,” my father says as we enter the kitchen.
It’s warm inside, and a fire crackles in the small brick fireplace by the breakfast table. A note rests on a plate at his spot. Debby saying she’s at the barn, feeding the horses.
He pulls out a chair and sits. Then he looks up at me. “May not be smiling in a minute, though.”
“What does that mean?”
“Miami has been on my radar recently.”
I sit next to him. My smile indeed gone.
“Laura Sanders reached out to me.”
My heart rate spikes. “What?”
“She called me.”
“When?”
“A few days before that package arrived for you.” He rubs his five-o’clock shadow. “How did she get my cell phone number?”
“It’s not as hard as you think, Dad. What did she say?”
“That she had mailed something important to the house. She said it was about Poison Wood and she would explain it all to you.”
I take a minute to respond. Just like I held back information from Dom, it seems my father was doing the same thing to me. Lying by omission. “Why didn’t you call me immediately?”
“I was going to,” he says. He pulls his robe tighter over his chest, over the scar.
“The package came that day, and I wanted to see what the hell was in it. I didn’t know who Laura Sanders was, but when she mentioned that school, I had to open it.
Then I saw it was a . . . pregnancy test, and it looked old, and all I could think was it was yours, from high school. ”
“Mine? Dad, it wasn’t mine.”
“There was a note with it.”
I lean forward. “What did it say?”
“It said, Keep this safe. Poison Wood had more secrets than you know.” He lowers his head.
“I thought it was about you, and I thought about how I sent you to Poison Wood because of . . . you know, catching you with that boy, and then you ended up worse off. And maybe you chose to get rid of the baby. And . . .”
I shut my eyes and will myself to take a slow breath. At school, Heather was a disruptor. In death, she is still disrupting. When I open my eyes, my father’s complexion has gone ashen. “Then you . . .” I start, but I can’t finish it.
“Then the next thing I remember I was being wheeled into surgery.”
A log shifts in the fireplace, and he and I sit in silence a moment. Laura Sanders, Heather, seemed to know she may not get the chance to talk to me in person. Who else had she called? Who else had she mailed something to?
My phone buzzes several times in a row. I swipe it open. Kat, Carl, Dom.
I start scrolling through them and know the conversation about my mother’s autopsy is going to have to wait. From the look on my father’s face, it’s a good thing.
“Dad, maybe we can talk again later or tomorrow,” I say as I grab a coffee cup and fill it to the top. “I’ve got to go south again.”
As I head upstairs to get ready, I scan the announcement Kat sent me. Johnny Adair and his Innocence Project advocate are going to make a statement today. At Poison Wood.
Under Kat’s text is one from Dom: Remember this is not yours.