Page 28 of Poison Wood

I could do it anyway. Mulholland would never know. But I would. And I’ve crossed enough lines today. I need to rebuild trust, not tear it down further.

“Good,” Mulholland says. “This conversation is not an interview, at least not from you to me.”

“What can I help you with?”

“Did you know Laura Sanders?”

“No. But I knew a girl she wanted to talk about. A girl I went to boarding school with who went missing and was later determined to have been killed.”

“What was the girl’s name?”

I tell her, and Mulholland clears her throat. “According to records I found, a woman named Laura Smith lived in New Orleans from 2000 to 2005, when Hurricane Katrina hit.”

“And?”

“And two things. One, Laura Smith was thirty-two years old when she moved to New Orleans in the year 2000.”

I calculate the math quickly. “That would make her fifty-one now.” The body I saw did not look fifty-one.

“Exactly. Our victim is thirty-five. And there’s something else,” she says.

“What?”

“We think the name Laura Smith Sanders was an alias.”

I swallow. I feel it, that first tingle of a big story. That first moment when I know something is about to change.

The temperature in the truck drops several degrees despite the fact I have the heat blasting.

Blocks of memories start tumbling through my mind. The bartender at the Setai saying “salon blond.” Not a natural blond. Marshall Sanders saying “Laura had her demons.” And sharpest of all, the memory from momentsago. A detail clicking into focus. Heather walking into the classroom in her Black Sabbath T-shirt. The neck cut out and hanging off one shoulder.

I shut my eyes a moment and work to keep my voice steady as I say, “Detective, what was the tattoo on Laura Sanders’s shoulder?”

More shuffling on her end. She clears her throat. “A lotus flower.”

I drop my head into my hands and press on the pain throbbing in my temples. “Oh my God.”

The photos in the suitcase from my old closet. The one showing the gold locket. A necklace I had secretly returned to its owner when we were students at Poison Wood and seen around the neck of a little girl only yesterday.

“We found some odd keepsakes at Laura Sanders’s home,” Mulholland says. “One was an old Louisiana driver’s license.”

“What was the name on the license?”

She clears her throat. “Heather Hadwick. We have reason to believe Laura Sanders’s true identity was Heather Hadwick.”

Poison Wood Therapeutic Academy for Girls

Kisatchie National Forest

August 15, 2001

Meadow

Dear Diary,

Nothing happened today.

Jasmine