Page 20 of Poison Wood

Thing is, from the look in nurse Grace’s eyes, she may have more scoop than me. “Can we go somewhere and talk a minute?”

She checks her watch, then nods. “Sure. But just for a minute.”

I nod down the hall toward the open vestibule, and she follows me there.

The tall windows in the vestibule let in dull sunlight. The sky looks white today, as if the winter precip may not be done yet.

“What do you know?” I say to Grace as we stand by the window.

“What’s it like at NCN?” she says with a hungry look in her eyes.

“What?”

“You know,” she says, twirling her long brown hair and tucking it behind her ear, only to pull it out again and start over. “I thought I wanted to be a reporter too.”

Terrific.

“But,” Grace continues, “I decided I wanted to be in a profession that actually helped people.”

I cock my head to the side. I want to correct little miss thing and tell her how I help people more than she knows, but after seeing my father in a hospital room and imagining what it took to help him, my argument feels hollow.

“Anyway,” Grace says, oblivious to the moment I’m having with myself. “These old ladies go to the school because they, like I don’t know, want to clean it up or something. The hundredth anniversary of the school is coming up, and the historical society is interested in, like, getting it on a registry or something. But then there’s, like, this other committee that wants to boost eco-tourism up here and they want to develop the land and the ladies in charge of that are all like glamorous ex-governors.”

The only glamorous ex-governor I remember in this state was Summer’s mother, the woman people credited Summer’s beauty to. I would hover near her and Katrina’s mother at parents’ weekend, watching them laugh and toss their hair as if I was watching exotic birds at a zoo.

I motion with my hands for Grace to speed up.

“Okay, so,” she continues, “the historical ladies don’t want it torn down because they think the school is really special since it was built in like 1919, but I mean that place is more like a haunted house if you ask me.”

I’m losing my patience with this one. “Grace,” I say. “Do you know any information that wasn’t in the article?”

She straightens. “Maybe.”

Here we go. Some people can’t wait to give up information to me, some refuse, and then some like Grace want to tease it out. Even though I’m in no mood to play this game with her right now, I’m willing to make an exception on the off chance she may actually know something worthwhile.

I touch her arm. “Sounds more like the answer is yes. Not maybe.”

She smiles. “Okay. Yes.”

That was easy. “So what do you know?”

“Okay, I’m going to tell you, but I don’t want anyone to know you heard it from me. Like, it’s off the record or whatever.”

I nod. “Off the record. Got it.”

She leans forward. “I think one of the students at Poison Wood was ... off.”

“What do you mean off?”

“I mean, like, psychologically.” She winds her finger next to her temple. “You know. Cuckoo.”

“It was a therapeutic boarding school, Grace.”

“I know, but I mean maybe criminally off. Like, bad.”

“Bad how?”

“Bad, like hurt somebody bad.”