Page 125 of Poison Wood

As much as I want to drive back to the Stray Cat and drink watery bourbon until my mind goes numb, I reverse the old truck into a spot in the far corner of the parking lot and call Erin.

Six minutes later, she and Carl are sitting in the truck with me.

Erin is in the front, and Carl is in the back. Erin faces me as I finish relaying what Marshall Sanders and Big Al from the bar have told me.

“Do you know where Summer Chamberlain is now?” she says.

“The Chateau Hotel here in town. But Katrina said she’s leaving so you may want to head to the hotel sooner rather than later.”

“I’m going to reach out to Detective Gautreaux and Mulholland about Summer. Both may want to speak with you as well.”

I nod.

Carl taps away on his phone, and I open mine and send a message to Katrina to call me.

Erin is on hers as well, tapping as fast as Carl. I know this energy. It’s what has fed me over the last eight years. On the crime beat, things happen at breakneck speed, and the adrenaline is addictive, but for once, I don’t feel the high.

When they are done shooting off messages, Carl and Erin hop down from the truck and give me strict instructions to hang close and keep my phone on.

Summer Chamberlain. I try to picture how she could kill Crowley and then dispose of his body. He was a large man. She would have needed help. An image of one person comes to mind. Heather.

Jasmine was Heather. I read so many of the diary entries that they blurred together, but one floats to the top. One about the night we stole the old truck from Poison Wood and hit the deer. Meadow was driving. Summer was Meadow. Meadow, who said killing something wasn’t as bad as she’d thought. Meadow, who slept with a knife under her pillow and who’s bed Heather crept into.

Then there was the love letter Marshall told me about and Summer’s secret boyfriend she called The Idiot. I inhale and release it. Oh, Summer.

As I pull away from the hotel, I call Katrina’s number, but it goes to voicemail. I don’t like this. I also don’t like the direction in which I’m steering this truck.

The inside of Johnny Adair’s small log cabin reminds me of his sister’s home, sparse and tidy. There’s a sofa against one wall, with what looks like a handmade coffee table in front of it. The kitchen is small, with a bar-style counter and stools, one of which I pull out and sit on. Johnny sits on the sofa, and Grant stands next to me.

“Where do we start?” Grant says.

“Thank you for speaking with me,” I say to Johnny. “That’s where we start.”

Johnny nods and keeps his dark eyes glued on me. Rosalie told me he’d been robbed of happiness. The hollowness in those eyes tells me she’s right.

“Do you remember a student named Summer Chamberlain?” I say.

He nods. “I remember all of you.”

I swallow. “What does that mean exactly?”

“You need to talk to those friends of yours,” Johnny says. “You girls were up to no good. And one of y’all took it too far.”

“We never took anything too far,” I say, and I hear the defensiveness in my voice. Then images of Halloween in the graveyard and joyriding with our eyes covered and stealing weed and booze come to mind. All we did was take things too far.

“That night is blurry for me, but I do remember seeing Heather running into the woods, wearing a red coat. The coat you fished out of that hiding spot in the cottage.” I was alone on that picnic table, drunk and dazed. I hadn’t heard screams. I hadn’t heard Katrina and Summer leave. “What happened in that cottage, Johnny?”

“I don’t know.” He clears his throat. “I’d been at my sister’s that day for Thanksgiving. I fell asleep on her couch, watching football. When Iwoke up it was late, really late. I was supposed to be back at the school. So I walked back through the woods.” He swallows. “That girl, Heather, was hiding out there with a red coat wrapped around her arm. She saw me and ran. That girl had two bags with her.”

Two bags. Heather wasn’t just running from Johnny. She was running from that school. “Did you tell the police that?”

“Of course I told them that.” He shakes his head. “I should have left that coat, but I didn’t. I took it back to my cottage so I could turn it in the next day. But that’s when I walked into a crime scene.”

Grant says, “Johnny was worried about having that coat, so he panicked and hid it under the floorboard.”

“That floorboard was already pulled up when I walked in,” Johnny says. “Something had already been hidden there.”

What was in those bags he saw Heather with? The answer appears in the words of Martha Lee.Follow the money.Maybe Crowley left something hidden at the school when he fled and Thanksgiving would have been the perfect week to come back and get it. And what if Summer knew that?