Michael Walsh Bundle (2 page)

E
DWARDSVILLE
—J
EFFERSON
M
IDDLE
S
CHOOL

Mrs. Braverman's fourth grade arithmetic class opened each school day with a moment of silence. It wasn't exactly a prayer, which the children all knew would be illegal, but neither was it a chance to sneak in a few more winks of sleep before the day began in earnest. Mrs. Braverman saw to that as she patrolled the aisles between the desks.

Rory offered up some quick thoughts in favor of his parents, his dad going away on business, his mom always rushing around in the Volvo, which she treated more like a ferryboat than a car, locked in an eternal game of Cannibals and Missionaries.

Which was, in fact, one of Rory's favorite pastimes: trying to figure out how to get various odd numbers of cannibals and missionaries across a river without ever leaving more man-eaters than men of the cloth on either side. It was a frequent subject of his doodles, but on this morning he tried very hard to visualize the scene: scary dark men with bones in their noses looking hungrily upon pale-faced creatures wearing what seemed to him to be full-length black dresses. You didn't see many holy men around Edwardsville these days, and even though the Gardners were more or less Lutherans, their minister usually wore jeans.

Rory had gotten several moves into his game of mental gymnastics when Mrs. Braverman's midwestern caw brought him out of his reverie and back to attention. He glanced at the clock on the wall and saw that, as usual, only two minutes had passed. Rory didn't like math, and of course wasn't very good at it, but he already had a firm grip on Einstein's theory of relativity: the forty-five minutes between 8:05 and 8:50
A.M.
were the Methuselahs of minutes.

Rory knew the drill, and so he flipped his book open to the homework page even before Mrs. Braverman got the words out of her mouth. Except that, on this morning, the words never came out of her mouth. Most of the other kids had done the same thing, but Mrs. Braverman had left her desk and gone over to the classroom door, a wooden one with a large pane of glass in it, the better for the principal, Mr. Nasir-Nassaad, to be able to glance in and give the class one of those looks he was famous for. Which is why, behind his back, the kids all called him Mr. Nasty-Nosy.

Some said Mr. Nasir-Nassaad was from Lebanon, others that he was really from Cleveland, and still others whispered ominously that they knew for a fact that he was a long-lost brother of Osama bin Laden. The funny part was that Mr. Nasir-Nassaad was actually pretty nice, even if he did remind Rory of one of his imaginary cannibals. It was always a disappointment when he opened his mouth and sounded like everybody else in Edwardsville: normal.

It wasn't the principal at the door, however. Rory didn't have a very good view of the door, but from the look on Mrs. Braverman's face, the visitor was somebody she didn't recognize. He could tell, because whenever she was unexpectedly interrupted, unless it was by Nasty-Nosy, she got this how-dare-you look, because as far as Mrs. Braverman was concerned, teaching was the most important thing in the world, and not to be lightly distracted.

She opened the door a crack and stuck her face in the opening. Rory could see only the back of her head. She spoke lowly, inaudibly, then took two steps back and opened the door wide.

A man came in—a man Rory recognized at once. It was the same man who had ushered him through the door as he scooted in. The blond man.

“Children,” said Mrs. Braverman. “This is Mr.—what was your name again?”

“Charles,” the man replied. He had an accent. He didn't sound like he was normal, or like he was from Edwardsville.

“Charles. He's one of our new substitute teachers, and he's going to be helping out in class today. So let's all give him a big Mississippi River welcome on his first day with us.”

The children applauded politely. “I'm just going to run down to the principal's office for a moment,” said Mrs. Braverman. “Won't be a minute.”

Mrs. Braverman took a step or two out the door, then staggered back inside the classroom as if profoundly puzzled by something that had just happened. There was an extraordinary look on her face as she turned to the class, and then she fell to the floor—sat down, heavily, as if bearing an intolerably heavy burden. She tried to say something, but no sound came out. Instead, blood suddenly poured from her mouth, her head rolled back, and her skull hit the floor with an egg-cracking report that Rory would never forget.

The new teacher, Charles, jumped into action. He leaped over Mrs. Braverman and slammed the door, locking it. Then he turned to the children.

“Everybody down,” he said. “Get under your desks and don't look up, no matter what.”

Everybody did what he or she was told. Everybody was too shocked to scream. Everybody was real scared.

From under his desk, Rory could hear Mrs. Braverman's labored breathing, growing slower. He knew she'd been shot, but had no idea who shot her. He wondered whether Charles knew first aid or CPR and, if so, when he was going to start helping her.

From outside the door came the sound of screaming and gunfire. Of running feet and the thud of bodies falling. It went on for only a couple of minutes, but childhood minutes are long, and these minutes were as close as youth gets to eternity.

Mrs. Braverman had stopped breathing. From his spot near the back, on the floor, Rory could see a widening puddle of red that had stained her pantsuit and was now spreading across the floor, toward where Annie Applegate and Ehud Aaronson were crouching. He wondered how long it would take for the blood puddle to move through the Bs and Cs and get to the Gs, and whether there would be time for him to find out.

Now it was quiet. Charles's feet moved across the room, stepped over Mrs. Braverman, and stopped in front of the door. The rest of Charles was obviously listening.

“Boys and girls,” said Charles after a few long moments. His voice was calm. Rory thought that was cool—that Charles kept it together despite what had just happened. Rory's own heart was pounding like mad. He hoped that when he grew up, he could be cool, like Charles.

“I want you all to stand up, leave your things behind and—very quietly—follow me. Everything is going to be all right. Okay?”

Nobody moved.

“You have to trust me. Stand up, keep silent, and we'll all get out of here.”

This time, everybody moved and nobody made a sound. All that fire drill practice was finally paying off. As the children began Indian-filing out of the classroom, Rory noticed that none of the girls looked at Mrs. Braverman's body through their tears, but the boys each sneaked a peek as they shuffled by. Nobody spoke a word.

“There's a good girl…good lad,” murmured the man. As Rory approached, the man's free hand reached out and stopped him. “Hold it.”

The line stopped; the children froze. It crossed Rory's mind that the man was somehow going to blame him for what happened to Mrs. Braverman. “You were almost late for school,” the man said. “What's your name?”

“Rory Gardner.”

“Was that your mother dropping you off?”

“Yes, sir.” He was close enough to Mrs. Braverman's body that he could have touched her with his foot. He closed his eyes in prayer. He didn't care whether it was illegal. He didn't care if they came to arrest him later. He had a good excuse.

When he opened his eyes, Charles was still looking at him. “It's good to have you on the team, Rory.” Charles held out his hand to Rory. “You know what our team's motto is?”

“No, sir.”

“Who Dares, Wins.”

S
T
. L
OUIS
, M
ISSOURI

KXQQ billed itself as “the St. Louis Metro Area's Number One Source for News,” but everyone knew that was bullshit. Most of the reporters were fresh out of Penney-Missouri or BU, young kids in their first jobs, ambitious but lazy, fluent in contemporary psychobabble and absolute masters of the jailhouse-jive hand gestures now de rigueur for all TV reporters, but otherwise illiterate, innumerate, and ahistorical. Deep down inside, they really wanted to be cable news anchors or Hollywood screenwriters. By the time any reporters at KXQQ found out about a story, the story was usually over.

Rhonda Gaines-Solomon stared dully at CNN with one ear cocked at the police scanner and the new issue of
Entertainment Weekly
in her hand. She was twenty-four years old, from San Bernardino, California. She hated the Midwest, hated the widebodies who inhabited this part of the country, hated the awful weather, and pretended she was really from Los Angeles, if anybody asked.

“What's hot today, Ms. Solomon?” Mr. Dunkirk always said that, especially when it was she who was hot, which was most days. Like all female on-air talent these days, Rhonda Gaines-Solomon was good looking in that tramp-next-door sort of way that everyone seemed to want lately, and she did the best she could with what God, her parents, and a discreet visit to a plastic surgeon had given her.

Still, she thought, one day she could bust Mr. Dunkirk for sexual harassment if she really set her mind to it. She noticed the way he looked her, had seen his fat wife, and figured him for a possible play if the going got tough, or she wasn't out of this burg in six months, or both.

“All quiet on the midwestern front, chief,” she replied, checking out the photo spread on Brad Pitt. It was her standard answer. Nine o'clock in the morning was far too early for St. Louis's usual repertoire of shootings, stabbings, and miscellaneous mayhem to have gotten underway yet. The perps were all still sleeping off their depredations from the previous night.

Casting a quick glance at the bank of TV screens on the newsroom wall, Mr. Dunkirk tacked toward her. “I want something juicy for the four o'clock today,” he said, checking out her legs as discreetly as possible.

“I'll see what I can do, chief.”

He hated it when she called him “chief.” “Who else've we got in the field today?”

“John and Sandy.”

That would be Mr. Kelleher and Ms. Gomez. Mr. Dunkirk started to say something, but held his tongue. Young people these days were on a first-name basis with the whole world, as if last names didn't matter, or didn't exist at all. That's why he insisted upon the use of the honorific for himself, and called all his young charges by their last names, just to remind them that they had one.

“See if one of you can get me something better than a weather story, will you?” said Mr. Dunkirk. He looked around the shabby newsroom—the only part of it that shone was the plastic set—and sighed. This was not where he had envisioned himself twenty-five years ago, when he got his first job at a small television station in upstate New York, with dreams of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite dancing in his head.

And yet here he was, stuck in the dead-end job of news director at the lowest-rated local station in one of the worst television markets in the country. Nothing good was ever going to happen to him again. His life was over.

He wondered if he should make a play for Solomon at some point, just to see what would happen, then decided to table the notion and start thinking about Christmas shopping for his wife.

“How about a cat up a tree? A homeless guy in a cardboard box?” Rhonda shouted after him as he disappeared into his office and closed the door. Every now and then she almost felt sorry for him, if it was possible to feel sorry for somebody that old and hopeless. She would never turn out that way, she promised herself; she'd kill herself long before things came to that.

A crackle on the police scanner seemed promising for a moment but it turned out to be only a hit-and-run with no fatalities.

Then the phone rang. “Newsroom.”

A pause, then a voice. Low, modulated, cultivated: a grownup's voice.

“To whom am I speaking?” There was a hint of an English accent, although truth to tell Rhonda probably couldn't distinguish among English, Australian, New Zealand, or South African if she had a gun at her head. Foreign, in any case.

“Rhonda Gaines-Solomon.”

“You will do.” A pause. “Do you know what's going on at the school?”

This might be promising. She grabbed a pen, knocked some junk on her desk out of the way, and found a scrap of paper. “What school?”

“Edwardsville Middle School. Jefferson. Do you know what's going on there?”

She glanced at the monitors to see if any of their rivals had anything about Edwardsville: nothing. A glance at the local AP wire on her laptop screen: nothing. “Far as I know, there's nothing going on at the Jefferson Middle School.”

A short pause, then a challenge—“What do you know?”

Suddenly, she realized that she'd misunderstood the question. The tipster wasn't
asking
her for information. He was
giving
her information. Rhonda's mind kicked into high gear as the import of what he was saying sank in. Frantically, she waved at Mr. Dunkirk behind the glass, but he was sipping his coffee and reading the paper.

“What is it?” she asked, her voice rising “A school shooting? What is it you're telling me?”

“How fast can you get over here?”

She was out the door so fast that Mr. Dunkirk never even saw her leave. One moment she was there—

And the next moment she was gone.