Chapter Thirty-Three
Natchitoches, Louisiana
“Dad!” I hurry to his side. Blood is pooling under him. “Oh my God, Dad.”
His eyes open.
Summer follows me to his side, chewing her fingernail and mumbling to herself.
Fading afternoon light fills the small windows at the top of the far wall. “It’s going to be okay, Dad,” I say, my eyes adjusting to the darkening room. “I’m going to get an ambulance.”
“What are those?” Summer’s voice sounds like a croak.
I follow her gaze to the filing cabinets and papers. “Things that shouldn’t be here.”
“Rita,” my father says in a weak voice.
“It’s okay. It’s okay.” I drop my tote next to him and pull my sweater off so I’m just in my T-shirt and put it under his head.
“What kind of things?” Summer says.
“You need to help me,” I say to her. “Go upstairs and see if you can get a signal. Find Katrina. Call 911.”
I look at the small set of stairs that leads up to the cellar doors, wondering if there is any way I can get him up those and out of this basement.
I run over to them and push on the doors.
They don’t open. I push again and again.
They don’t budge. “Damn it.” Chief Duplantis said they were working to secure the building the best they could.
They must have started with these doors.
I race back to my father and press my sweater into the back of his head.
Summer is rocking on her feet and staring at the mess against the far wall. “You have to get out of here.”
“What?”
She looks at me. “Leave.” Her voice hardens as she looks up at the basement door. “Now.”
“I’m not leaving my father here.”
“She’ll think I’ll called you.”
“Who? What are you talking about?”
“She’s going to try to pin Crowley’s murder on us.”
“Who is us?”
“That’s why she wanted us in the basement. It probably has to do with whatever is over there.” She points to the boxes and papers with a shaky finger. “And then your dad showed up.” She whimpers as she looks down at him. “And then he fell and I started screaming and—”
“Summer.” My breathing falters. “Stop talking.” I need to get upstairs and call for help, but it feels as if I’m breathing through a straw. I tell myself not to panic, but panic is all I feel. My chest starts to feel tight.
Oh no, not here, I think. Not now.
Four things I can see, my father, the filing cabinets, the dryers, the shotgun.
I close my eyes. Three things I can hear.
Creaking on the stairs, Summer sobbing next to me.
The third sound stops my panic attack cold and replaces it with real panic.
A clacking sound, followed by a soft click-clack and a solid metallic clunk.
A shotgun just got racked. I open my eyes, and Rosalie is aiming her shotgun at me for the second time.
Summer screams, and my body starts to shake. “I need to get my father out of here. He’s injured. He needs to get to a hospital.”
Rosalie studies my father.
“Rosalie,” I say.
She looks at Summer. “Where is she?”
Summer whimpers. “I don’t know.”
Rosalie glances up the stairs, then back to me. “What are you doing here?”
“Please put the gun down,” I say.
“You’re not supposed to be here. This isn’t about you.”
Rosalie made it clear to me at her house how she feels about the unfairness of it all. Her anger for what happened to her brother is understandable, but is she angry enough to pull that trigger?
Summer has stopped rocking, but I catch her looking at the file cabinets and overturned boxes on the far wall again.
I hold my father closer. “He’s hurt. You’re a nurse. You could help him.”
Rosalie’s face softens.
I maintain eye contact with her. “Whatever this was supposed to be, it’s changed, and I need you to please help me.”
She lowers the gun, and I exhale. “Let me have a look.” She sets the gun on the ground and kneels beside my father, cradling his head in her hands. “We need to get him to a hospital.”
“Nobody’s going anywhere,” a woman says in a calm Southern drawl.
Rosalie and I turn toward Summer, but she’s not the one who spoke.
Eleanor Chamberlain walks out from the shadow by the file cabinet, wearing a tailored cream suit the same color as her hair.
I haven’t seen Summer’s mother in years, but she still looks the way I remember her at parents’ weekend, poised and beautiful. She stands out against the mildewed rot in this basement. Eleanor’s beauty and calmness are not helping my anxiety. They are adding to it.
My mind is tripping over itself, trying to make sense of what is happening. If Rosalie called my father and Katrina’s father, it would make sense she called Summer’s mother too. But why? What the hell does Eleanor Chamberlain mean Nobody is going anywhere?
As I start to speak, Eleanor says, “Rosalie thinks she can frame us. For Archibald Crowley’s murder.” She stands next to Summer, who’s twisting her hands in front of her.
I turn to Rosalie, but her eyes are on her gun, lying at Eleanor’s feet.
The air in the basement feels heavy like it does at home just before a spring storm. I glance at my father’s gun and wonder how quickly I can grab it. Then I spot my tote, the stun gun peeking out from the opening. I shift closer to it.
“I called you,” Rosalie says. “But I also called the DA and the judge to show them who you really are. I thought this place would be appropriate.”
Eleanor Chamberlain smiles. “You’re such a fool, Rosalie.”
“You’re not going to get what you wanted, though. I lied about having that coat. I didn’t lie about what was in the pocket. The police have it now.”
Eleanor’s smile falters. Bile rises in my throat as I raise my gaze to her head. A fist full of blond hair.
An animal instinct tells me to get ready.
Rosalie reacts first. She lunges for her shotgun, but Summer moves a second faster and kicks it away. In one deft move, Eleanor retrieves it and holds it up against her shoulder like the hunter she is. My father had called her the best. The one with the most patience.
I move my body between my father and Eleanor’s raised gun. His shotgun is only a few feet away.
“Rosalie,” Eleanor says as if she is speaking to a child. “Your brother killed Crowley.”
“Johnny knew it was you,” Rosalie says. “He saw you that night. The police didn’t believe him back then. He couldn’t prove it. Until that coat.”
I look between Eleanor and Summer. The coat Johnny hid, thinking it would incriminate him. The hair in the pocket. The pregnancy test. The love note Heather saved. How far would Eleanor Chamberlain go to protect her daughter and herself?
“Summer,” I say.
Something creaks on the staircase above us.
Summer raises her head and looks at me. “I was the idiot,” she says in a barely audible whisper.
“I didn’t mean for it to go that far. I was just flirting, you know.
I was just trying to prove something, get out of Poison Wood, but I needed money and”—she releases a slow, shaky breath—“then Heather found out I was pregnant.”
Eleanor’s jaw clenches. “That’s enough.”
Summer’s jaw matches her mother’s. She’s no longer chewing her fingernails. “It is enough.” Her voice strengthens. “I’m done.”
Eleanor’s eyes darken. I catch Rosalie looking toward the stairs. Johnny is pressed against the wall near the bottom step. He made it down those stairs as if he were Summer’s size.
“I’m done lying.” Summer turns in my direction. “Heather walked in that cottage at the wrong time. She saw us all fighting, yelling. I had that stupid knife I kept under my pillow. I didn’t mean to cut her with it. Crowley grabbed me.”
Eleanor looks at Summer like she wants to kill her. “Shut up, Summer.”
Summer gasps but doesn’t stop talking. “Heather grabbed the shovel. She was just trying to get him to let go of me. After she hit him, he was still alive.”
“Stop!” Eleanor yells.
Summer flinches and looks at her mother. “Until she gave him the insulin.”
Now it’s Eleanor’s turn to gasp. “No,” she says in a whisper.
Summer trembles but keeps her eyes on me. “I know why Heather called you. She trusted you. She called me too. She said we needed to talk to you together, come clean since the skull had been found. But I refused to go.”
I stare at Eleanor Chamberlain. Summer had said at our lunch her mother was diabetic. And insulin, when injected in a nondiabetic, is poison. Did Eleanor take her insulin to Miami as well?
“I went to prison instead of you.”
We all turn toward the stairs. Johnny towers over us. Eleanor faces him, her finger on the trigger.
“Someone has to pay for that,” Johnny says.
Eleanor points the gun back toward Rosalie. “It might be your sister who pays if she doesn’t kick that gun over to me.” She nods to my father’s shotgun near Rosalie’s feet.
“Keep that gun on me,” Johnny says to Eleanor. His eyes dart to his sister. “Rosalie, do what she says.”
But instead of kicking my father’s gun, Rosalie bends down and grabs it.
A thundering boom echoes on the cinder block walls around us. Summer screams, and Rosalie falls to the concrete floor, blood pooling around her.
“No!” Johnny yells and lurches toward Eleanor.
Eleanor swings the gun in his direction, shucks it, and fires again. His shoulder bursts in an explosion of tissue and bone. Johnny howls and falls to the floor, and Eleanor wastes no time swinging her gun in my direction. She’s fired twice. She could have at least two shots left.
“Wait,” Summer yells in a hoarse voice.
But I have no intention of waiting as her mother walks up to me. Rosalie was wrong. It’s the sins of the mother at work here, not the sins of the father.
My eyes dart to my father’s gun, but I can’t get to it. I can get to something else, though.
“Mom,” Summer yells in a voice that sounds more animal than human.
Eleanor flinches and looks back just long enough for me to act. I yank my Taser from my bag, flip it on, and strike. I aim center mass. Dead in her chest.
Eleanor screams and drops the gun. She falls to the floor, convulsing.
Summer screams again, but I don’t take a second to think about what has just happened. I grab the gun closest to me and hold it over Eleanor’s shaking body.
“Get my phone from my purse, Summer, and run until you get a signal. Tell 911 to send multiple ambulances. I’ll kill her if you don’t.”
Summer scrambles off the floor, grabs my phone, and runs.
Rosalie’s chest is still moving, as is my father’s. Johnny has somehow dragged his way to his sister’s side. I keep the gun pointed at Eleanor, my hands covered in my father’s blood. And we stay that way, protecting the people we love, until I hear someone breaking into the cellar doors.
Paramedics race in and start tending to my father, Rosalie, Johnny, and Eleanor. Stretchers are brought in, and I fight my way into the ambulance with my father even though the police are telling me they need to talk to me.
A paramedic starts an IV in my father’s arm, and another shuts the doors.
Red and blue lights slice through the night and bounce off the walls of Poison Wood.
Sirens wail as we pull away. I take my father’s hand and squeeze it, watching through the back windows of the ambulance as the molded brick structure of Poison Wood grows smaller and smaller.
Until it’s gone.