Page 79 of Poison Wood

“Johnny’s innocent,” I say, needing to say the words out loud to him.

“Innocent of that crime,” he says.

“What do you mean?”

Now he looks at me. “There’s still the skull that was found.”

“You think he was responsible for that?”

“I think it’s a possibility.”

I don’t tell him my suspicions about whose skull that could be. I’m keeping that card close to my chest for now, until I’m sure.

“I don’t think you need to be involved with anything that has to do with that school,” he says.

“That’s exactly what I should be involved with.”

He pats my arm. “I want to protect you.” His eyes look heavy, and he scratches at his five-o’clock shadow. “But I can’t seem to protect you from yourself.”

“I could say the same for you.”

He smiles at me, but the smile looks sad. “Just let the detectives handle it. You don’t need to be digging around in all of that.”

The cold air around us drops a few degrees. The antenna that tells me to listen to more than just the words is going up. “What aren’t you telling me, Dad?”

When he looks at me, his expression resembles one I remember as a kid, stern and impenetrable. “Just don’t.” Then his face softens. “I regret ever sending you to that place.”

“Dad,” I say.

“Yes?” He keeps his eyes down.

“Do you regret allowing that confession?”

He pauses but doesn’t look up. “I feel regret, yes. But I acted on evidence I felt was accurate.”

His answer sounds rote and robotic.

“It just happened so quickly,” I say. “His arrest and conviction.”

Now he looks at me. “It needed to happen fast. We believed a killer was loose and living near the school where our daughters went. We had evidence indicating a girl was dead. We couldn’t take a chance another one might go missing.”

Publicly, he always said he believed he’d handled the case without bias, but what he just said sounds dangerously close to a conflict of interest to me.

I shift gears on him and despise that I’m treating him like a story. But I hate not having answers even more than I hate interrogating my own father.

“Why’d you open a piece of mail addressed to me?” I say without any preamble.

He swallows. He stands up, and Dos bounds off his lap. “I need to check the fish feeder. Should have gone off by now.”

Oh no. You’re not getting away that easily.

I pull the farm coat tight around me and follow him down the hill behind the house. The dormant grass crunches under my paddock boots. At the end of the T-shaped dock sits a large green metal box. My father opens a hatch on the back and starts flipping switches.

“You know I’m not leaving until we talk about this,” I say.

He looks over his shoulder. “I do know that about you.”

A large bird with a white head and tail swoops close to the dock, then circles above us.