Page 81 of Poison Wood

I lean forward. “What did it say?”

“It said,Keep this safe. Poison Wood had more secrets than you know.” He lowers his head. “I thought it was about you, and I thought about how I sent you to Poison Wood because of ... you know, catching you with that boy, and then you ended up worse off. And maybe you chose to get rid of the baby. And ...”

I shut my eyes and will myself to take a slow breath. At school, Heather was a disruptor. In death, she is still disrupting. When I open my eyes, my father’s complexion has gone ashen. “Then you ...” I start, but I can’t finish it.

“Then the next thing I remember I was being wheeled into surgery.”

A log shifts in the fireplace, and he and I sit in silence a moment. Laura Sanders, Heather, seemed to know she may not get the chance to talk to me in person. Who else had she called? Who else had she mailed something to?

My phone buzzes several times in a row. I swipe it open. Kat, Carl, Dom.

I start scrolling through them and know the conversation about my mother’s autopsy is going to have to wait. From the look on my father’s face, it’s a good thing.

“Dad, maybe we can talk again later or tomorrow,” I say as I grab a coffee cup and fill it to the top. “I’ve got to go south again.”

As I head upstairs to get ready, I scan the announcement Kat sent me. Johnny Adair and his Innocence Project advocate are going to make a statement today. At Poison Wood.

Under Kat’s text is one from Dom:Remember this is not yours.

Chapter Nineteen

Piedmont, Louisiana

Saturday, February 16, 2019

9:35 a.m. CST

Poison Wood looms in front of me for the second time in a matter of days. My mind is clogged and cluttered with information I fear I’ll never sort out, and I didn’t even get to the meat of what I wanted to ask my father about. I’ll need to compartmentalize my mother’s paperwork and focus on what’s in front of me.

Not the easiest task with very little sleep and a lingering hangover.

I park the truck toward the back of the school. I’m the first one here, and my hope is I can hover in the background today. I dressed in jeans, boots, and the farm coat. No makeup, no suits. I topped off the look with my father’s Tiger Eye baseball cap.

I walk around to the front. The school’s weed-covered, hulking mass casts a deep shadow across the gravel circular drive. It’s like the building is a living, breathing entity. Like I can see the mildewed walls moving with its breath.

Johnny Adair has picked quite the backdrop for his statement today. I’d think he’d want to stay as far away from this place as possible. Then something Summer, or was it Kat, said at the Mockingbird Café comes back to me. The old adage about criminals returning to the scene of the crime.

I check my phone. I don’t have much time here alone, and I need to be careful in this quiet space. My memories live in the dark crevices here. Like the grubs and worms under the rocks in the forest, they are hiding.

“Stop.” I say it softly to myself. I smack the side of my leg with my hand and keep moving, around the side of the large brick building. Someone has come in and mowed a spot. Looks like that’s where the podium will be today.

Chickadees and woodpeckers warble and peck around me as I pick my way to the opposite side. Weeds and thorns snag at my pants as I walk up to the front of the caretaker’s cottage. I move around it and look at the prone double wooden doors that lead into the basement.

My mind feels as powerful as my dad’s bulldozer, shoving memories into the light I wish I could burn like the fallen trees.

My sixteen-year-old self on the other side of those doors.

When the dryers were spinning in the school’s basement, the smell of lavender was suffocating. One night I heard the dryers clanging in the basement. I snuck down, but when I opened one, it had only a tennis shoe in it. A noisy distraction. A way to tell the staff someone was down there finishing a chore. Then I heard the giggling, and the cellar doors at the top of the small stairs opened, and a girl came running down them.

“Shit, Rita,” she said. “You scared me.”

She was drunk.

“What are you doing down here?” I said.

“Just a little prank. Wanna help?”

I open my eyes. Where has that memory been? I wasn’t drunk that night. I should have remembered it before now. Yet that memory was completely erased. I force myself to go back to it. To see it. I’ve had nightmares about it, about the zip ties, but I attributed those to what happened in Broken Bayou. But the root of those nightmares goes back further than six months. It goes back to that night in the basement. To Katrina and Summer laughing as they led Heather down the stairs blindfolded, her hands tied behind her back.