Chapter Nineteen
Piedmont, Louisiana
Poison Wood looms in front of me for the second time in a matter of days.
My mind is clogged and cluttered with information I fear I’ll never sort out, and I didn’t even get to the meat of what I wanted to ask my father about.
I’ll need to compartmentalize my mother’s paperwork and focus on what’s in front of me.
Not the easiest task with very little sleep and a lingering hangover.
I park the truck toward the back of the school. I’m the first one here, and my hope is I can hover in the background today. I dressed in jeans, boots, and the farm coat. No makeup, no suits. I topped off the look with my father’s Tiger Eye baseball cap.
I walk around to the front. The school’s weed-covered, hulking mass casts a deep shadow across the gravel circular drive. It’s like the building is a living, breathing entity. Like I can see the mildewed walls moving with its breath.
Johnny Adair has picked quite the backdrop for his statement today. I’d think he’d want to stay as far away from this place as possible. Then something Summer, or was it Kat, said at the Mockingbird Café comes back to me. The old adage about criminals returning to the scene of the crime.
I check my phone. I don’t have much time here alone, and I need to be careful in this quiet space. My memories live in the dark crevices here. Like the grubs and worms under the rocks in the forest, they are hiding.
“Stop.” I say it softly to myself. I smack the side of my leg with my hand and keep moving, around the side of the large brick building. Someone has come in and mowed a spot. Looks like that’s where the podium will be today.
Chickadees and woodpeckers warble and peck around me as I pick my way to the opposite side. Weeds and thorns snag at my pants as I walk up to the front of the caretaker’s cottage. I move around it and look at the prone double wooden doors that lead into the basement.
My mind feels as powerful as my dad’s bulldozer, shoving memories into the light I wish I could burn like the fallen trees.
My sixteen-year-old self on the other side of those doors.
When the dryers were spinning in the school’s basement, the smell of lavender was suffocating.
One night I heard the dryers clanging in the basement.
I snuck down, but when I opened one, it had only a tennis shoe in it.
A noisy distraction. A way to tell the staff someone was down there finishing a chore.
Then I heard the giggling, and the cellar doors at the top of the small stairs opened, and a girl came running down them.
“Shit, Rita,” she said. “You scared me.”
She was drunk.
“What are you doing down here?” I said.
“Just a little prank. Wanna help?”
I open my eyes. Where has that memory been?
I wasn’t drunk that night. I should have remembered it before now.
Yet that memory was completely erased. I force myself to go back to it.
To see it. I’ve had nightmares about it, about the zip ties, but I attributed those to what happened in Broken Bayou.
But the root of those nightmares goes back further than six months.
It goes back to that night in the basement.
To Katrina and Summer laughing as they led Heather down the stairs blindfolded, her hands tied behind her back.
“Help us,” Katrina said.
I took Heather’s arm, and she turned her head to me. “Help me.”
I open my eyes. Now that the memory has been exposed, I can’t get it out of my head. Like liquid bubbling up and over a cauldron.
“It’s her initiation,” Kat said.
“Not cool,” I said.
“Shh,” Kat said, nodding toward Heather, who was quiet now, no longer fighting us. “You know it’s just for fun.”
“Yeah, sure,” I said even though I knew no such thing.
What I did know was exactly what Heather felt.
I’d had my turn in this room. Kat, Summer, and I had been hiding in the basement late one night, laughing and drinking, and then they’d told me it was my turn to prove myself, and to hold my hands out.
I’d done it. I’d let them put the zip ties on and lead me to the room under construction, thinking I was only going to be in there a few minutes. They’d locked me in all night.
“I thought this was a joke,” Heather said. “Let me go or I’ll scream.”
“Go ahead,” Kat said. “Maybe Baldy will wake up and we’ll all get expelled.”
“Nobody’s getting expelled from this place,” Summer said, laughing. “This is where girls come who get expelled from a real school. We’re already in our punishment.”
They laughed, but Heather paled. And she didn’t scream. The three of us took her farther into the room and let her go.
“C’mon,” Kat said to Summer and me.
Heather stood still as we walked to the door, and just before Summer shut it, she said, “Nighty night.”
We shut the door, and Kat grabbed a spare cinder block from the corner and put it in front of the door. Summer and I helped move several more blocks. Then we all stood back and looked at it. Kat dusted her hands on her jeans. “We’ll let her out in the morning.”
And I laughed with them and then went upstairs and lay awake all night, telling myself I was going to go back down and let her out. But I never did.
A sharp pain jags behind my eyes. I press on my temples, then reach into my tote and grab for my medication but remember I’m out.
I find two loose Advil in my bag and swallow them dry.
I need to call my doctor, but I know he’ll say what he always says to me.
He can treat the symptoms, but I need to work on reducing my stress load and try to figure out the root cause. No thank you.
I look up at the school again. I think I know the root cause.
I wait a moment to see if the pain in my head is going to bloom or shrink back and disappear. It does neither. It stays steady. Steady I can handle. I slide on sunglasses even though the sunlight is now muted by hazy clouds. I’m not risking the light triggering something even more.
I turn my attention to the caretaker’s cottage behind me, where I saw a woman run away the last time I was standing here. Rosalie.
Nature has claimed the small structure. Vines and weeds and small bushes have twisted their way not only around the structure but into it as well.
It sits on cinder blocks and looks as if it could collapse at any minute.
The roof is partially caved in, the front door is missing, and the glass in the windows is shattered.
I move closer, and sticks crunch under my boots.
I peek inside the cottage’s open door. Poison ivy and tall thistles grow up through the busted floorboards.
I take my phone out and put the flashlight on.
I don’t risk going all the way in. Instead I lean forward and move my phone in a slow circle.
There are remnants of broken furniture and a sofa riddled with holes, the stuffing all over what’s left of the floor.
On the far wall hang rows of taxidermy animals, deer heads, wild boars, framed turkey beards.
An image of Katrina running into our room flushed and out of breath comes to mind. She was always flushed and out of breath, and she’d come into the room with her hands behind her back.
“Guess what I found?”
Summer and I had looked up from our books. “What?” Summer said.
“You have to guess,” she’d said. She leaped onto my bed and started jumping up and down. “You won’t believe it. I hit the mother lode.”
“What?” Summer said, coming to the bed.
Kat looked down at us, and we looked up at her like a scene with Sandy from the movie Grease, only she would have been the “after” Sandy, not the before.
“So,” she said. “I went into that caretaker’s cottage.” She watched us to make sure we were listening. “Did I ever tell y’all I talked my way out of a DUI last summer? And the cop gave me his phone number.”
“Kat, stop,” I said. “What did you find?”
She straightened her shoulders and pulled her hand from behind her back, and Summer gasped. Kat held out a bag containing loose weed, rolling paper, and several joints.
I put my textbook down. “What the hell?”
She waggled it in front of us. “This school just got a lot more fun, ladies.”
Summer clapped, and I joined in even though I had yet to ever try drugs of any kind.
But Katrina had a way of making you feel like everything she suggested was a good thing.
She emitted a circle of light around her that you just wanted to be a part of.
Then she’d look at you and bring you into her fold, and you were just . . . powerless.
I hear a car engine and voices coming from the front of the school. It’s time.
I walk around the far wall of the building and spot Carl and Erin by their rented van out front.
A few other people have shown up as well.
A man in a cheap suit is helping set up a podium in the mowed spot.
Two deputies, Chief Duplantis. Detective Lane Gautreaux is also present and staring at her phone.
When I spot Erin talking with Detective Gautreaux, I miss my heels and suit. I want to be the one talking to the detectives, sharing information. Getting information. If I put those heels on I’d be stepping on some toes.
My father’s voice fills my head: Mind your p’s and q’s, young lady. I looked that phrase up in college and discovered it came from Ireland and referred to minding your pints and quarts. Something I definitely didn’t do at this place.
Carl approaches me as I’m finding a place to stand, out of the way but with a clear shot of the podium.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hey. Carl . . .”
“It’s okay.”
“It’s not okay. I didn’t mean to jeopardize anything for you. I’m sorry.”
He sighs. Rubs his face. “You, more than anyone, know the rules in this game. People in other professions can get away with half truths and omissions, but we don’t get that luxury.”
“I know. This whole thing has just . . . knocked me off kilter. I made a mistake. And I’ll make sure I correct it.”
“Then what are you doing here?” he says.