One Breath Away Page 8

  This wasn’t a new game to Mrs. Oliver. For fourteen years, not one of her students ever knew that her first name was Evelyn. It was by accident really that it became a challenge with her students. Over the years they tried to guess her name like a modern game of Rumplestiltskin, but without the beautiful princess or the funny little man, unless you counted Russell Franco, who was bound and determined to figure out the mystery.

  “Gertrude?” Russell would say as he entered the classroom. “Shirley, Margaret, Sally, Diana, Inger, Raquel?” Mrs. Oliver would shake her head and point Russell in the direction of his desk. One spring day, near the end of the school year, so hard to believe that was over thirty years ago, Russell strutted into the classroom before any of the other students arrived and said haughtily, “Good morning, Evelyn.” Mrs. Oliver was ready for this day. Not that she really cared that her students knew her first name; she just didn’t like to lose.

  “Good morning, Russell Hubert,” she said casually. Russell froze and looked at her as if to say, You wouldn’t.

  And Mrs. Oliver smiled, letting him know she most certainly would. For the final weeks of the school year, Russell continued on with the game as if nothing had happened. “Good morning, Delores, Lorraine, Ramona?” Mrs. Oliver would just smile mysteriously.

  So Mrs. Oliver was more than willing to play this guessing game with the man, especially if it meant that she could get her students released and back with their families. She had a steel-trap memory. If she thought hard about it, she could remember every single one of her former students and their parents. Certainly, this wasn’t a random invasion.

  “Sure, guess away,” the gunman said, looking at her with his dead eyes.

  “And if I’m right you’ll let the kids go?” she asked hopefully.

  “Yes, and for each wrong answer I get to shoot one.”

  Chapter 24:

  Meg

  There’s a rap on the squad car window and the thin layer of snow that covers the glass is swept away. A wrinkled, concerned face peers into the window and Gail begins to cry again. “Can I go now?” she asks, already reaching for the door handle. Her husband, Merle, at least fifteen years her senior, is standing outside the car, waiting for her to join him.

  I look to the chief, who shakes his head no. “Not quite, Gail, but we’ll get someone to take you and Merle to the station. We need to get a description of the man you saw. Then you can go on home.”

  “I feel so bad,” Gail says with a hitch in her voice. “I should be inside with everyone else, but Mrs. Brightman told me I should run, get out while I still could.”

  “Mrs. Brightman told you to leave?” Chief McKinney asks. Margaret Brightman is the school principal. “What was she doing when you left?”

  “She’s the one who threw the chair through the window. We couldn’t get out of the office area—he chained it or blocked the door.” I raise my eyebrows at the chief in surprise. Margaret Brightman is definitely not the chair-throwing type. Gail continues, sniffling as she speaks. “When I climbed out she wouldn’t come with me. She was still trying to get through to 9-1-1. The school phones weren’t working. I guess that’s what he was doing in the basement, cutting the phone lines. Margaret used her cell phone and she was cut off the first time she tried 9-1-1 and when she called back the line was busy.” Gail shakes her head. “I didn’t know such a thing could happen. She said she wasn’t going to come out of the school until all of the students and staff were out safely.”

  “What about a maintenance man?”

  Mrs. Lowell clutches at her necklace and sits up straight. “Harlan. Harlan Jones. He has his office downstairs next to the boiler room.” She looks worriedly at the chief. “Do you suppose he did something to Harlan?”

  I try to keep the conversation moving forward before the hugeness of what is happening sinks in. “Gail, was there anyone else in the office area besides you and Mrs. Brightman? Any teachers or students? Is the school nurse here?”

  “No, she’s over at the school in Dalsing today. It was just Margaret and me. I had just sent a kindergartner back to her classroom. She complained of a stomachache and I sent her back.”

  My cell phone vibrates, I peek at the screen in case it’s Maria or Tim. Stuart again. He just doesn’t stop. Two weeks ago, when I opened my mailbox and unrolled the Sunday edition of the Des Moines Observer and saw the front page, my stomach seized with dread. I don’t know exactly how Stuart got to the rape victim, how he tied her to the most powerful man in Stark County, but I know he got the information from me, although I did it unknowingly and certainly unwillingly.

  In January, late one evening, I was called to the home of Martha and Nick Crosby. Their nineteen-year-old daughter, Jamie, had come home that night near hysteria and with a suspicious-looking bruise on her face.

  “We can’t get her to tell us anything,” a tearful Martha told me. “She’s locked herself in her bedroom and won’t come out.” Nick Crosby, hands clenched into fists, pacing the living room, didn’t know what to do with himself. The two younger Crosby children, both spitting images of their father, stood by in their pajamas and bare feet looking terrified.

  “Let me try,” I told them, and sent the family off to the kitchen.

  I gently knocked on Jamie’s bedroom door. “Jamie, it’s Meg Barrett,” I told her, purposely leaving off the title of officer. She knew what I did for a living, but I didn’t want to freak her out any more than she already was. “Your mom and dad are worried about you.” I paused, waiting for a response. Nothing, just the heavy breathing of someone trying to control her sobs. “Why don’t you open the door for me, Jamie, and we can talk. I promise it will just be me, no one else. I told them all to go into the kitchen and wait.”

  I heard a rustle of footsteps on the other side of the door. “Please go away,” came Jamie’s brittle, hoarse voice.

  I leaned against the doorjamb, keeping my voice low and soothing. “I just want to make sure you don’t need medical attention, Jamie. You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to. I promise.”

  After five minutes of silence, the door slowly opened and a wide, fearful brown eye looked up at me. I waited until she nodded and stepped aside before entering her room. It was a typical teenager’s bedroom. Clothes strewn around, bulletin boards tacked with photos of friends, blue ribbons, ticket stubs and a campaign poster of Greta Merritt, a local businesswoman and the newest and youngest wildcard in the race for governor of Iowa. When Jamie saw me eyeing the poster her face crumpled into a new wave of sobs. I knew that Jamie was the nanny for the Merritt family’s two children and did some clerical work for the campaign.

  I regarded her carefully, knowing that one false move might cause her to completely clam up on me. Her left eye was slightly swollen and already turning purple. She held her right arm gingerly, close to her body. I waited, my eyes scanning her bedroom for some insight. A picture of a boyfriend or something. My eyes settled on one of the bulletin boards. It was filled with Merritt campaign paraphernalia—buttons, snapshots, bumper stickers. One photo caught my eye. Greta Merritt with her thousand-watt smile and her arm wrapped around the waist of her handsome husband, Matthew. Standing between two towheaded toddlers was Jamie Crosby, smiling shyly into the camera.

  “Someone hurt you,” I said, my eyes not leaving the photo.

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  “You were a big help, Gail,” the chief tells her as he opens the car door, and a deluge of cold air brings me back to the present.

  Gail doesn’t look convinced so I lean forward in my seat. “He’s right. We needed you out here to give us this information. Now we know what we’re dealing with. Now we can help the people inside.”

  Gail nods and pushes her door open. Merle is there to pull her out of the car and into his arms. Head down, to give them some kind of privacy, I walk away quickly. One m
an and a gun. It isn’t much, but at least we now have something more to go on.

  Chapter 25:

  Augie

  Beth is rocking gently back and forth, her shoulder scraping against mine. She has her hands over her face and is mumbling something under her breath. It takes me a few minutes to realize that she is praying. A prayer I’ve heard while flipping through the channels on the television being led by a woman with too much makeup standing in front of a huge crowd, many with their eyes closed, some with tears on their cheeks, arms outstretched, bodies swaying to the rhythm of the woman’s words. Amen, Sister, I almost say out loud, but stop myself.

  The first Sunday we were in Broken Branch our grandpa made P.J. and me go to church with him. I lay in bed, buried underneath the covers in the room that used to be my mother’s. He knocked on the bedroom door and I could hear it squeak open. I could feel him standing there in the doorway, tall and wide in the shadows. I tried to make my breathing regular and deep as if I was sleeping.

  “Augie,” he whispered, his voice as low and deep as the cows that he kept in the big barn. “Augie, time to get up. We’re leaving for church in thirty minutes.” I held completely still, hoping that he would give up and leave without me. No such luck. “Augie,” he said again, his voice booming through the room. “We’re leaving in half an hour.”

  I peeked out from under the covers, the cold air instantly numbing my nose. “I don’t feel good,” I mumbled, burying my face in the soft pillow that leaked so badly that the first morning I awoke in the cold farmhouse and looked in the mirror I thought the soft white feathers were snowflakes.

  “You have twenty-five minutes,” he said impatiently, turning away and shutting the door behind him.

  I didn’t know my grandpa well enough at that point to know just how far I could push him, so I stumbled out of bed and pulled on the same jeans I had worn the day before and a long-sleeved T-shirt. I thought for sure that when I came down the stairs in that outfit, he would send me right back upstairs to change, but he was wearing jeans himself. “Better put on a winter coat,” he said, holding out a red coat that smelled mildewy and must have belonged to my mother at one time. I almost reached out to take it from him, but quickly pulled my hand back.

  “I’m not cold,” I said, and walked right past him and climbed into the truck next to P.J., who had on a coat that had the same moldy smell but was like four sizes too big for him.

  “I know,” he said at my look. “It’s Uncle Todd’s. At least I’m warm. You’re going to freeze.”

  “At least I don’t look like a dork,” I mimicked, pulling my hands up into the sleeves of my T-shirt, trying to warm them as Grandpa climbed into the driver’s seat, the entire truck leaning to the left as he sat down. We drove in silence all the way to church, which turned out to be smaller than I thought it would be, but prettier than I thought it would be, too. I expected Grandpa to march us right up the aisle to the very front of the church, but he didn’t. Instead, he led us to the middle of the church and off to the right. I sat down on the hard wooden bench as he lowered the kneeler. I watched him carefully out of the corner of my eye. I expected him to be some kind of Holy Roller, but he wasn’t. He sang, though, clear and loud. He sounded even better than the choir director we had at my school in Revelation.

  Mom never took me and P.J. to church in Revelation. I never asked, but always wondered why. P.J. asked, though, just a week before the fire. We were sitting at the little table in our breakfast nook, eating the chicken and rice that I made for supper that night.

  “Why don’t we ever go to church?” he asked while he shoved an enormous piece of chicken into his mouth.

  If you didn’t know our mom, you’d think that she was completely ignoring us. The way she took her time eating a slice of French bread, took a long drink of water, wiped her mouth with her napkin, stood and took her plate over to the sink. This was our mother’s way of carefully thinking through what she was going to say before answering us.

  “My father made me go to church every Sunday for seventeen years, P.J., and it didn’t do me any good.” She dropped her silverware into the sink and turned back to face us. “I think a person doesn’t have to be in a church to feel close to God. The desert works just as well.” I sat at the table, silently saying, Shhh, don’t say things like that. Feeling guilty for her. “God doesn’t take attendance and even if a person goes to church every single day, that doesn’t make him some kind of saint.”

  I watched her standing over the sink, scraping rice down the garbage disposal, the same sink she would stand over a week later, her burned skin sliding off her arms and swirling down the drain. Sometimes I wonder if the burn was a punishment for what she said, even though deep down I knew that didn’t make sense, that God couldn’t be so mean.

  I look up at the clock on the wall; we’ve been sitting here for less than an hour, but it feels like forever. Mr. Ellery slides off his desk, reaches into his pocket, pulls out his cell phone, looks at it for a minute and then puts it back into his pocket.

  “Why hasn’t anyone called?” Beth asks suddenly. “Why hasn’t anyone come for us?”

  Mr. Ellery shakes his head. I’m wondering the same thing. I can’t believe we haven’t heard police sirens or heard a helicopter or something. Back in Arizona our school had lockdowns at least once every few months but nothing bad ever happened. It was always some incident somewhere in the neighborhood, no one ever came near the school. I’m also wondering about P.J. He’s such a weenie. He’s probably cowering underneath his desk right now.

  When Mom got burned, instead of helping, P.J. ran into his room and hid underneath his blankets. Which I kind of understand. It was incredibly freaky seeing our kitchen curtains going up in flames and Mom ripping them down with her bare hands, the fire streaking up her arms until it looked like she was holding a ball of flames. It was bad enough trying to get Mom out of the house; I had to pull her away from the sink and push her through the front door as she cried, “P.J., P.J.!” But to get P.J. out was nearly impossible. He wouldn’t come out from beneath his covers and I finally had to grab the ends of the blanket and drag him like he was a sack of garbage. The smoke was thick and black; my lungs felt squeezed and every breath I took felt like I was swallowing crushed chalk. My arms ached from lugging P.J. through the smoke-filled hallway, feeling my way out with my feet. When I finally found the front door and stepped out onto the front stoop blinking blindly in the hot sunshine, my mother was on her knees, a group of neighbors bent over her. Next to me on the ground, P.J. was trying to get out of the blanket, and when he finally wriggled out, his brown hair was standing up like a porcupine and his glasses were lopsided on his nose.

  The sirens from the fire trucks and the ambulance drowned out his voice as he cried, “Mom?” and tripped down the front steps, but before he could get to her the firefighters were running toward us and we were scooped up and taken away from the house that was still leaking gray smoke.

  I can imagine P.J. in his classroom right now, his arms and head tucked into his sweatshirt like a turtle, thinking to himself, If I can’t see it, it isn’t there. “Stupid weenie,” I accidentally say out loud, and Noah elbows me in the side, hard.

  Our neighbor, Mrs. Florio, called my dad for us and explained what had happened. We rode in silence in the back of Mrs. Florio’s rusty station wagon to the hospital where my dad would meet us.

  “Do you think she’s going to be okay?” P.J. asked, his brown eyes scared and big, magnified through his glasses that were smudged with soot from the fire.

  “I don’t know,” I answered honestly. The burns on our mother’s hands looked so bad, her hair on one side was burned away, her face was bright red and one ear was blistered and oozing. Before the smoke soaked into my clothes and hair, making me smell like a campfire, I could smell her skin burning, sweet and sharp at the same time. I swallowed hard, trying not
to throw up.

  “Do you think she’ll be able to come home tonight?” P.J. asked. “Do you think we’ll be able to go back home?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, and pinched my nose, trying to squeeze the awful smell away.

  “What will we do for clothes? Where will we sleep tonight? Oh, my gosh.” P.J. groaned. “My homework. Do you think my homework burned up? They make you pay for the books if you ruin them.”

  “P.J., shut up!” I said angrily. “I don’t know any more than you do.” I scooted to the far side of the car and leaned my head out the window, gulping in big breaths of fresh air.

  “You could get decapitated that way,” P.J. said snottily. “Not that you need your head.” He waited for me to ask why in the world I wouldn’t need my head, but I didn’t give him the satisfaction, and pushed my face farther out the window. “Because you don’t have a brain,” he finished proudly.

  “Ha, ha,” I answered.

  “Now, now, you two,” Mrs. Florio said with her thick Spanish accent. “You need to take care of each other. Not fight.” I loved the sound of Mrs. Florio’s voice. Sometimes I would lock myself in the bathroom and stand in front of the mirror and try to copy her deep voice, which came from far inside her throat like a cat’s purr. I imagined that I had her black, smooth, shiny hair instead of my own plain brown hair that just laid there. I’m not sure why we called her Mrs. She didn’t appear to have a husband but there were dangerous-looking boyfriends who roared up in front of her house and left early in the morning before the sun came up.

  “Augie,” my father said, coming up to me and wrapping his big arms around me. I buried my face in his chest and breathed in. He smelled like he always did, like the thick leather belt he wore around his waist and his mediciney shaving cream. “Are you okay?” he asked, stepping back and looking me up and down. “What happened?”