She meets my gaze. “I’m glad it closed down.”
“Me too,” I say.
Her shoulders relax.
“Do you remember that last Thanksgiving break?” I say.
Her shoulders raise back up to her ears. “What about it?”
“Do you remember everyone who was staying there?” I want to make sure I remember the same as her.
She reaches into her pocket and produces an almost-empty pack of cigarettes. She pops one in her mouth, then fishes back in her pocket for the lighter. She inhales and exhales before answering.
She nods. “Sure. Yeah. I remember who was staying there. It was me, Ms. Barbara, you four girls, and Johnny.”
“Do you know where Barbara O’Connor lives now?”
She shakes her head and takes another drag off her cigarette. “No idea. And you shouldn’t be focusing on just those of us staying at the school that week. Anyone could have shown up there.” She takes another drag. “Like a boy sneaking in.”
“What boy?”
She shrugs “Probably one of them St. Matthew’s boys.” She finishes her cigarette and crushes it out on the ground. “I’m no idiot. I heard them fighting.”
I have a few memories of girls sneaking boys up to their rooms, but the norm was for us to sneak out and go to them. I don’t remember any boys sneaking in the week of Thanksgiving, much less a fight. I also don’t remember any other missing persons at the time. Only Heather. If a St. Matthew’s student had gone missing, too, it would have been even bigger news.
“Are you sure about that?” I say.
“Yeah. I am. And I told the police that years ago. And they said it was probably Johnny I heard.” She rubs her arms against the cold. “But I knew Johnny. It wasn’t him.”
“This is the first time I’ve heard the possibility of someone else being at the school with us that week.”
“That’s because I was dismissed. Everybody saw Johnny and that cottage and never saw anything else.” She puts her hand on the door and starts to open it. “And now we got a body up in that school, and it ain’t that girl. She ran off for some reason that night. I think that reason’s been found. In the wall.”
She pulls the door open. “Don’t come back here. I’m done talking.”
I stop the recording. “We can talk off the record.”
She walks back into the kitchen, and I follow her. “Martha,” I say.
She stops at her station. “I said I’m done.” She looks at my phone. “I changed my mind. I don’t want anything we talked about on the record or whatever.” She looks around the kitchen like she’s worried it’s bugged. “You leave my name out of it.”
“Martha.”
“Promise me you’re not going to say my name to anyone,” she says in a whisper.
“I promise.” I tell her my cell phone number. “Just in case you change your mind.”
I weave my way back to the table in the corner and hurry to open my phone and make notes on what Martha told me. Things I’ll need to confirm with the two women who are about to meet me here.
I want to believe there’s a chance that body could have ended up in the French drain at any point that fall, but the trench was filled in the Monday after Thanksgiving. A girl had tripped on it a few weeks before and broken her wrist, and Barbara O’Connor pitched a fit about it. She warned us all to steer clear. The trench was deep and dangerous, and she lit into any girl who snooped around it. Then the week after the break, gravel trucks showed up and filled it in.
“Hey, slut,” a woman says in a throaty voice, and I know who it is even before I lift my head.
My past has arrived.
Interview Room A, Natchitoches Police Department
Date: November 30, 2002
