“A message from Martha Lee.”
Erin reads it and looks up. “Follow the money.”
“Rosalie told me they get mailbox money,” I say to Erin.
She looks at me. “What’s that?”
“Money from natural gas wells.” I pull up my search history from last night. Google Earth andPiedmont, Louisiana.
I zoom in and scan the area until I locate the road that leads to the Adairs’ property. Then I put in 3D mode. I can’t find a date on the images, but I do see Rosalie’s mobile home. I keep moving the image. It shows nothing but green forest. No wells, no abandoned pads. Nothing to indicate something was drilled on that land. But one thing I do see is that their land backs up to Poison Wood. The school’s massive shape stands out on the flat ground around it.
I turn it so Erin can see too and point to the image. “No wells.”
“Maybe they drilled after this was shot,” she says, looking at the screen.
“Rosalie said it was Haynesville, though. Haynesville happened in 2008.”
“So how does Grey Wolf connect to the Adairs?” Erin says.
“Heather Hadwick,” I say. “What if she’s sending the checks through her husband’s company?”
“What kind of woman would let Johnny stay in prison and think paying his sister could cleanse her conscience?” Erin says.
“A very wealthy and very troubled one.”
“If she was paying the Adairs with Grey Wolf funds, that’s not going to be good for that company,” Erin says. “Pretty risky of her.”
“Wouldn’t be that risky to the Heather I remember.”
“Did Rosalie Adair have beef with Crowley?” Erin says.
“Possibly,” I say, thinking of the fight Summer and Kat mentioned overhearing. “But what I heard is hearsay. It would need to be verified.”
“Who else could have had an issue with him?”
“Maybe whoever that pregnancy test belonged to,” I say. Meadow had written in her diary that Heather had climbed in her bed and whispered she knew everything. Is this the everything Heather knew? That one of her classmates was pregnant?
Carl frowns. “I will celebrate that man’s death if that turns out to be the case.”
I know he’s thinking about his daughters, and I have no doubt he would do whatever it took to protect them. The thought that a young girl wasn’t protected will eat at him. It eats at me too. It scratches at something that makes me ask, How did I miss this? If Crowley was a predator, why was I spared? I want to believe if he had tried anything with me, I would have fought like hell and told someone and had him arrested. But that is the thought of a woman who has clawed her way to the top of her profession. A child, even a teenager, doesn’t think like that. They guard and bury and let shame make decisions for them.
“Let’s go through who else was there during the Thanksgiving break. The police have narrowed down the window for his death to that week. No way his body would have been under the gravel if it had happened later. So he came back to the school for something. My guess is he came back that week, thinking it would be empty.”
I nod. “I agree. But it wasn’t empty.”
“Barbara O’Connor is in memory care at a local retirement home,” Erin says. “She’s not going to be much help. But she was promoted after he left, correct?”
I nod again.
“So if she’d already been promoted,” Erin says, “I’m not sure what her motive would have been.” She opens her phone and scrolls a moment then looks back up. “Martha Lee?”
“I don’t see it,” I say.
Erin nods. “So we’ve got Barbara, Martha, Johnny, Katrina, Summer, Heather, and you. And I keep going back to Heather. If she killed Crowley, it would have been a strong enough reason for her to run and stay gone.”
“Has Mulholland given you any details on Laura Sanders and her death?”
“Water in the lungs,” Erin says. “So Laura went into the ocean alive.” She shrugs. “Could be suicide.”
