“I’m glad you waited.” I hugged her. “Want to get some ice cream?”
“Mom wants me to pick up some ice and fill our coolers. You know, in case we lose power tomorrow.”
“I’ll drive you.”
“I was hoping you’d say that. I didn’t know how I was going to balance, like, forty pounds of ice on my scooter.”
I laughed and drove her to a convenience store. Only one soggy bag of ice lay in the bottom of the silver insulated hut outside the store. We bought it and moved on to the Winn-Dixie, where they were completely out of ice.
“People buy up ice before a hurricane,” the helpful clerk explained the obvious, “for if the power goes out. Otherwise, you’ve got to throw out a lot of spoilt food if Georgia Power don’t get the electricity back up quick enough. I lost a shitload of venison steaks last time.”
Barely pausing to commiserate with the clerk, who seemed inclined to list every food item he’d lost after the last hurricane, we hustled back to the parking lot. “I’ve got an idea,” I told Rachel, and pointed the car toward Magnolia House, Vonda’s B&B. They had a commercial ice making machine and I was sure she’d give us enough ice to fill Rachel’s cooler.
“Have you found anything out?” Rachel asked diffidently as we waited at a red light. “About Braden’s murderer, I mean?”
Keeping my eyes on the traffic even though it was abnormally light, I told her about some of the conversations I’d had.
“I’ve met Braden’s cousin,” Rachel volunteered when I told her about finding Catelyn at the McCullerses’ house. “She’s really nice. She’s majoring in psychology because she wants to help teens with depression and addiction problems. She got all interested in that when she visited Braden at Sandy Point.”
“Sandy Point? Is that—?”
“It’s the place he went to for depression counseling and stuff when he was, like, thirteen. He said it saved his life. He met with doctors and therapists and had ‘group’ and did a lot of stuff outdoors like hiking and fishing in the lake. I guess he was there for three or four months.”
I hit the brakes and the car behind me honked before swerving around the Fiesta. I stared at Rachel. “Sandy Point is a hospital sort of place? It’s not a summer camp?”
She shook her head. “No. Sandy Point Residential Intervention Center. It’s a place for kids and teens with depression or addictions or eating disorders and stuff. Braden told me it cost his folks over a hundred thousand a month to keep him there.”
The unbelievable number startled me, but I let it go. I was more interested in figuring out why Mark Crenshaw had been wearing a Sandy Point tee shirt and looking very much at home on what had to be the Sandy Point campus in the photo on the McCullerses’ refrigerator.
Chapter Nineteen
MY BRAIN BUZZING, I DROPPED RACHEL OFF AT HER scooter after we heisted some ice from Vonda and loaded it into coolers at Rachel’s house. Still parked in the high school lot, I dialed Agent Dillon’s number and told him that Mark Crenshaw had been in a mental health facility with Braden McCullers.
“That’s potentially interesting,” he said when I finished. “How do you know this?”
I explained, and asked, “Can you find out if Mark was really there? And what he went there for?”
“Maybe,” Dillon said. “Health records—especially mental health records—are notoriously hard to get. And I don’t know that we have probable cause to persuade a judge to issue a subpoena for the records. We don’t know, after all, that there’s any tie between the Crenshaw kid’s stay at Sandy Point and Braden McCullers’ murder.”
“That’s true,” I admitted, feeling a bit deflated, “but it seems strange he wouldn’t have mentioned it.”
“No, it doesn’t. It may be cool for adults to talk about being in therapy and paying their therapists a hundred bucks an hour to ‘analyze’ them, but I’m darned sure a high schooler would think it was as uncool as a pocket protector and a Barbie lunchbox.”
“I had one of those.” I’d taken the lunchbox to school every day in first and second grade, gazing at Barbie in her pink ruffled evening gown as I ate my PB&J and drank the milk Mom always put in the little thermos that came with the lunchbox.
“Mine was Batman.”
“Of course it was.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Dillon’s voice was half suspicious, half amused.
“You just seem like a superhero kind of guy,” I said.