Chapter Twenty-Nine
Natchitoches, Louisiana
Natchitoches is normally a quiet town even on a busy day. But not today. Today it is a busy town on a busy day.
The cobblestoned Front Street is packed with parked cars and news vans. The only thing still moving slowly is Cane River.
As I walk along the sidewalk opposite the river, I sense the energy has shifted in this town just as it did in Broken Bayou, an electric current crackling in the humid air.
The media are going to clog the streets and the cafés. They’re going to stop into the quaint gift shops, not to purchase items but to ask questions. I know this because I’ve done it. And I’m about to do it again.
A chime sounds when I enter Oui Oui, an oddly named gift shop filled with country French housewares and French classical music.
Dishes, tea towels, candles, and jewelry cover the tops of antique tables and fill antique armoires.
Oushak rugs litter the floor. This place is curated within an inch of its life.
A girl in her twenties with dark hair and dark eyes emerges from behind a curtain in the back. “Let me know if you need any help,” she says.
“Just looking,” I say. She’s too young. I need to talk to someone who’s been around long enough to remember Poison Wood.
I browse the items and pick up a candle labeled Magnolia and smell it.
It smells like gardenias, like Debby’s perfume.
A peace offering wouldn’t be the worst idea.
I take it to the counter and purchase it for her.
Back on the sidewalk, I spot something I didn’t even realize I was looking for.
A bar, the Stray Cat. It’s nestled in between a deli and a law office, and a small neon sign says Open.
Of course it’s open. Liquor stores have drive-thru options in Louisiana, and bars rarely close.
I’ll bet this one, like the ones in South Louisiana, have hurricane parties in late summer when the storms start building in the Gulf.
Inside, the bar is dark and a horrible country song about tequila serenades the smattering of patrons. A few men dot the place, but I don’t see any other women. A pool table sits in the back, abandoned.
Perfect. I don’t want to talk to people who go to bars at night. I want to talk to the day drinkers. They have better stories to tell.
A bartender with a wiry gray beard approaches me with a look that says he knows I’m trouble. “What can I get ya?” he says.
“How about an old-fashioned? Twelve-year-old Macallan.”
“Lady, the only thing that’s twelve years old in this place is the bar nuts.”
I give him a smile. “Whatever you have is fine.”
I take my drink to a small wooden table off by itself.
I don’t need to be joining the day drinkers, but I also don’t want to stand out any more than I already do.
I take a small sip of what could possibly be the worst, most watered-down bourbon I’ve ever tasted.
I could shoot the whole glass and not get drunk.
Which is good. Drunk at eleven in the morning is not a good look.
I sip and observe, waiting to find the one. The one who looks like a talker.
Even in my baggy sweater and farm coat, I’m getting stares. I wish I’d put on a suit. At least then I’d feel more in my element. In these clothes I feel like an amateur.
That word opens up a memory of a job interview I had ten years ago when I was cocky and hadn’t learned that with men, sometimes it paid to be demure, even if you were just faking it.
Rick Stone from my current station’s affiliate in Los Angeles was interviewing me for a piece on up-and-coming female crime reporters.
He made the mistake of asking me if I was grateful for that opportunity.
“Are you grateful, Rick, for the opportunity to interview me?”
“Um.”
“Do you ask the men who sit in this chair if they are grateful?”
“I—”
“I doubt it. So you can move on to the next question, and while you’re at it you can suck my—”
“Okay,” one of the show producers said, scurrying out to us. “Let’s take a break.”
Rick’s face turned a hideous shade of red. He removed the mic from his shirt and stood up. “This interview just got canceled.”
I doubled down. “Great.” I removed my own mic and stood as well. “What a waste of time.”
Rick glared at me, and as he moved past me, his shoulder knocking into mine, he whispered, “Stupid little girl.”
And then I did something I really regretted; I let my anger turn to tears. I cried on the spot, in front of him, humiliating myself and giving him ammo for the smug look on his face as he watched me. I’ll never forget that look.
Then he smiled and called me something even worse: “Amateur.”
I shut my eyes and remind myself I’m not an amateur anymore. But I’m certainly dressed like one today in my baggy clothes. A fact that just might work to my advantage here.
And when I open my eyes, I spot my prey.
He’s at the end of the bar, and he’s just received a fresh drink. He’s talking to the bartender about SEC football and getting louder by the second. Bingo.
A couple of old men make their way to the pool table as I move back to the bar.
The guy with his fresh drink glares at me. “What are you staring at?”
Great. I offer him a quick smile.
“Leave her alone, Bones,” the bartender says.
“She looks like trouble,” Bones says to the bartender.
“She looks like less trouble than the other ones who have come by,” the bartender says.
The other ones. The other crews are moving as quickly as I’d expect them to.
“You look like you know things,” I say to Bones.
He squints at me.
“You a reporter?” His words slur a little.
“Good eye,” I say and hold out my hand. “Rita Meade.” I decide on the fly to go full speed. I don’t have time for games.
Recognition dawns on his face. “Shit,” Bones says.
The bartender has worked his way back down to us as he dries a lowball glass in his calloused hands. Good. The more the merrier.
“Your reputation precedes you,” the bartender says.
“I hope that’s a good thing,” I say.
“You’re here about Poison Wood,” the bartender says.
Bones chokes on his sip. No going back now. The look on the bartender’s face tells me I can leave drunk Bones alone now. He’s not the man I need to be talking to after all.
“Those historical-preservation ladies should have left well enough alone. Let those people tear it down,” Bones says. “Build that eco-lodge thing. Woulda been a lot better than all this mess.”
Bones slides off his stool and takes his drink to a table near the back. I watch him for a second, then refocus on the bartender.
“What’s your name?” I ask him. He sets the glass down, rubs his hands on the side of his pants, and then holds a hand toward me. “Name’s Big Al.” He doesn’t offer his last name.
“Nice to meet you, Big Al.”
He exhales. “What the hell is going on around here?”
“Whatever it is, it’s only starting,” I say.
“Great.” He leans his large arms on the counter. “Papers are saying you went to that school.”
I nod. “I did.”
“So seems to me, you know ever’thing that happened there.”
“You’d be surprised.”
He looks down the bar, then back to me. He nods toward my phone. “You gonna record this or something?”
I clear my throat. “No. Someone else will eventually find you and do that. Today I’m just a patron asking a few questions.”
The wrinkles on his forehead scrunch up. “What kind of questions?”
“Were you here when Heather Hadwick went missing?”
“Yes, I was. I was here for the searches, for the trial, everything.”
I wonder if he knows who my father is. I’m guessing if he knows I attended Poison Wood, he knows who my father is.
“Do you know anything about gas wells in this part of the state?” I say, shifting gears.
The two guys playing pool start hollering about one of them cheating.
“Cut it out,” Big Al yells at the men. He looks back to me. “What about them?”
“Has the Haynesville Shale played out down here?” I ask.
“Haynesville didn’t make it this far south,” he says. “Nobody down here got any of that money.”
The door opens to the bar, and a new patron comes in, bringing with him a waft of fresh air. The man sits at the opposite end of the bar and motions for Big Al.
“Hang on,” he says. He goes to the other end to help his new patron.
When he comes back I say, “What about the Adairs’ land? I heard they have a lot.”
“Yeah, they got a lot. Their granddaddy left it to ’em. Been in their family for generations.”
“What do you know about Rosalie Adair?”
He scratches his beard. “She’s a crafty one, that one.”
“Crafty?”
“Everybody around here felt bad for her after Johnny went away. They had all that land, and she was left to figure out how to take care of it. So we raised some money for her, but it wasn’t near enough.
But she never lost the land, so she paid those bills somehow.
Then all these rumors started. You know how it is in a small town. ”
I nod. I know exactly how it is. That’s why I’m in a bar at eleven in the morning. “What kind of rumors?”
“People talking, wanting to believe she was a ne’er-do-well like her brother. Rumors about that patient who died. About Rosalie blackmailing someone and that she was sitting on a stack of cash out there.”
“What do you know about Archibald Crowley?”
Big Al’s lip curls up. “I know he never paid off his tab here.”
“Did you ever see him in here with Rosalie Adair?”
He shakes his head.
“Did you ever see him in here with any of the Poison Wood students?” I say.
Big Al chokes. “What? That guy? No way he’d hang out with students. All he ever said was there was nothing worse than a teenage girl.” He makes a face. “No, that’s not right. What was the word he used?” He snaps his fingers. “Diabolical. There’s nothing more diabolical than a teenage girl.”
I cock my head to one side. Sounds about right.
“Best I remember, he’d come in here, order a chardonnay, and sit in the corner alone,” Big Al says.
I glance in the corner at Bones, who is sitting there alone now; then I look back at Big Al. “What do you know about the eco-lodge Bones mentioned?”
“The state and the historical-preservation society have been at odds for years over that school. I think it goes back fifteen years. At the time, we finally had a governor interested in this part of the state and Ms. Tandy had to go and fight her on it. Governor Chamberlain had a vision. Would have been a good one too. But Ms. Tandy was a dog with a bone.”
I smile and shake my head at the exact phrase Tandy used when referring to Summer’s mother.
Big Al looks toward the pool table and yells at the guys whose arguing has reached fevered pitch. “Hey! Knock it off.”
He walks around the end of the bar and takes their pool cues from them, and I take that as my cue to move on.
The sunlight, although muted, is bright enough after I was in the dark bar to make my eyes water. I shield them as I walk toward the truck. I pull out my phone and text Summer and Katrina.
Where are you?
Kat replies:
Presidential suite at The Chateau hotel.
Are your parents here?
Yep. Heard your dad is coming too. United front and all
I start to type back that my father will be doing no such thing. No way he’d come down here. He just got back home. But I stop before I send it. My father’s behavior lately has been the exact opposite of what I expect. Instead I type:
Should we meet there?
No. Crazy here with media. It will just be me. Summer’s going somewhere.
I’m about to ask where when the gift shop door chimes and I look up.
A man in an expensive cashmere sweater and dark sunglasses walks out of Oui Oui.
He looks familiar. I scroll through images in my head; then he steps out into the cobblestone street and takes the hand of the young girl at his side. I inhale so quickly I cough and choke.
I race for the truck and get behind the wheel as the man and his daughter pull away from the curb. I flip a U-turn in front of a dump truck, which lays on its horn, but I don’t care.
No way I’m letting Marshall Sanders and his daughter out of my sight.