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The chief has been waiting patiently, looking very somber and formal in his dress uniform. He’s the only man Noah has ever seen who wears white dress gloves. It reminds him of a cartoon character, because in cartoons the hands look like gloves. Thinking of the chief as a variation on SpongeBob or Goofy makes Noah smile. His secret, you’ll-never-guess-why-I’m-laughing smile. He stares into his folded hands, grinning to himself and fighting back a giggle.
The giggle wins when the clown suddenly enters the gymnasium. Noah knows he’s not a real clown—there’s no rubber nose or makeup—but like all of the other children he can’t help but laugh when the man with the little janitorial cart bumps through the gym door. Because at that precise moment the police chief has stepped behind the podium and is testing the microphone by tapping it with one of his white-gloved fingers. Tap, tap, tap. There’s something comical about the contrast between the somber, formally dressed policeman and the disheveled-looking man hurriedly pushing the little cart right out onto the gymnasium floor. The man pushing the cart has a pinched look on his face, as though he’s smelling something bad. A fart maybe. That’s funny. He’s wearing earbuds and bobbing his head to the beat, and that’s funny, too, because no one else can hear the music. Even the mop sticking up from the cart looks comical, as does the fact that one of the cart wheels is spinning wildly around.
The children laugh uproariously.
Noah notes that Mrs. Delancey is smiling, too. So maybe the sudden entrance of the funny man with the cart is part of the D.A.R.E. presentation. That’s how it looks. The puzzled expression on the policeman’s round face appears to be exaggerated, as does Mrs. Konrake’s look of stern consternation. It’s all part of the entertainment, like at a circus or a TV show, with everybody playing his or her part.
The funny man reaching into the funny cart for some sort of funny prop. The nice policeman reacting hastily, awkwardly, fumbling at his belt.
A loud popping noise like a balloon exploding, or a really loud party favor.
Noah is studying Mrs. Delancey when it happens, so at first he has no idea why the shrieks of laughter have turned into shrieks of screaming.
8. A Very Dangerous Word
I’m in the library discussing books with Helen Trefethern when the first siren goes by. Helen runs our little two-room public library with a velvet fist, and she almost always has suggestions on what books Noah and I might enjoy reading together. Stormrider was her idea.
“There’s a bunch more books in that series,” she tells me. “And if he gets sick of spy stories and wants something funny, you might try Hoot. Really smart and sassy, and it will make you laugh out loud. I think Noah will like it—he’s a tough one to pick for—but I’m certain you’ll love it.”
Helen is about my mother’s age—or the age my mom would be were she still alive—and a real Humble native with family roots that extend back a century or more. Unlike most of the local best and brightest who go away to college—in her case Syracuse—she had returned to marry and raise a family. Her husband had passed away a year or so before we lost Jed, so that was another thing that bridged the age difference and made me think of Helen as one of my trusted local friends. As opposed to my old New Jersey posse, who have no idea why I vanished, or where I might have gone.
“So how’s he doing?” she asks. With her it’s not a casual question—she really wants to know.
“Better,” I tell her, with great relief. “New year, new teacher, it’s really made a difference.”
Last year Noah went through this disruptive behavior phase, mostly by acting the clown. They told me—very pointedly—that you can’t teach a classroom of children when they’re howling with laughter because my son has attached erasers to his ears like headphones, or when he is making ghostly noises from inside the air ducts. He always had the tendency to go his own way, right from kindergarten, and for a couple of months after the accident it got worse. Much worse. There were many calls from the principal requesting that I take Noah home, which of course I did. What I would not agree with was the advice offered by the school district’s child psychologist, who thought my son’s behavioral problems could be improved with psychotropic drugs. A cocktail of Ritalin and Paxil. As if grief can be erased by a pill. And even if it can, would you really want to?
The psychologist pushed, but I stood my ground and this year has been better. This year Noah has a crush on his homeroom teacher, and if you think that makes his mother jealous, you’ve no idea how relieved I am that my brilliant little boy has been trying to impress Mrs. Delancey with his good behavior.
It helps that Irene Delancey has a graduate degree in mathematics. No doubt she could be making a lot more money as an actuary, or whatever else math types do when they focus on making money. Instead of chasing the bucks, Irene decided to teach in public schools, this being her first year at Humble. I find her a bit cool and cerebral—she’s one of those unflappable types—but she’s been devoting a lot of extra time and energy to dealing with Noah, and for that I am grateful.
It’s the second siren that finally gets my attention. Two sirens in less than a minute. Must be an accident. Traffic or farm—and around here farm accidents tend to be the most horrific.
Helen says, “Humph,” and ambles over to a window overlooking the street. “Haley? Those were troopers.”
I join her at the window. “Not local cops?”
“State police. Must be serious. Escaped prisoners, maybe?”
The nearest prison is in the next county, fifty miles distant, but we Humble residents worry because four years ago Mildred Peavey was tied up and gagged and had her car stolen by one such escapee. The really tragic part is that Mildred lived alone and it was several days before anybody missed her. By then she’d died of a stroke, still bound and gagged. So the notion of an escaped prisoner is our local boogeyman.
Here comes another siren, a shrill wee-waw wail from a light-flashing ambulance. And this time we’re both able to see it take a left turn onto Academy Road.
“Oh my god,” says Helen, stealing a look at me. “The school.”
By the time I get there, half a dozen state cop cars have arrived, as well as the ambulance. A young trooper with a bright pink face is frantically trying to control the incoming traffic.
Hopeless.
Parents, mostly mothers, are converging from every direction. Most are not bothering to find a parking space, but are abandoning their vehicles and running toward the school, eyes wide with concern, or panic—both.
I’m one of them. Under normal circumstances I’m a pretty calm and rational person. But this is not normal. You can feel it in the air, pick it up from the way the young cops don’t want to look us in the eye. Something terrible has happened.
There’s talk among the moms about panicked phone messages from inside the building. From teachers and also from a few students who apparently ignored the ban on cell phones. Something terrible has happened but no one seems to know what, exactly.
All I know for sure is that Noah doesn’t have a cell phone. Since when do fourth graders need such things?
Since right this very minute.
What kind of mother am I, not foreseeing the need?
“Get them out!” someone shouts.
The crowd surges forward, and me with it.
Uniformed state troopers armed with shotguns are barricading the school entrance.
“Nobody gets in! Stay back!” one of them bellows, his voice cracking.
“What’s happening? What’s wrong?”
That’s me, pleading. Sounding like a frightened ten-year-old, and feeling that way.
The young trooper with the big voice and the baby-blue eyes shakes his head reluctantly, as if he’s under orders not to divulge information. “You’ll have to get back!” he repeats, pointing a finger at me.
Beside me, a furious, tubby little woman ignores the shotguns and the big shoulders barring her way, and attempts to burrow through the troopers, screaming, “They’ve got the kids! They’ve got the kids!”
It’s Becky Bedlow. She has a boy in Noah’s class, a shy little guy, small for his age. And when she says they’vegot the kids in that desperate tone of voice we all know what it means.
Mad bombers, terrorists, Columbine. Every fear we’ve ever had, every nightmare news story, has come careening into our little school. It’s like the entire town is having a panic attack. Mothers are shouting, demanding to be let into the school. The troopers look shocked and maybe a little frightened by the raw passions being expressed—some of it scatological—but refuse to back down.
“Establish a perimeter!” one of the older troopers bellows. From the way they react he’s the big boss, the man in charge.
“What’s happening! Somebody tell us what’s happening!”
The trooper in charge—he’s got a jaw as big as a clenched fist, eyes as pale as gray ice—wades into the crowd, holding up his hands, palms out like a traffic cop.
“Stop it!” he commands. “Stop right there!”
Amazingly enough, he’s rewarded with a cessation of shoving. As the volume lowers, I can hear women weeping. I’m one of them.
“We have a hostage situation!” the big trooper explains. “Man with a gun, barricaded inside the gymnasium with most of the children and teachers.”
“What about the children? What about the kids?”
“As far as we know, no children have been harmed. But if anybody tries to force their way inside, that may change, do you understand? You’ll only make it worse, maybe get somebody killed. So allow us to establish a perimeter. Allow us to do our jobs. Please!”
It takes more persuasion, but within a few minutes he has managed to get us all back behind a flimsy barricade of yellow crime scene tape that has been hastily erected at the far side of the parking lot.
Before I can get my breath I notice a nearly hysterical Meg Frolich waving around her iPhone. Evidently she’s just received an image from her daughter’s cell phone, somewhere inside the school. “Look at this!” she’s screaming, trying to get a beleaguered state trooper’s attention. “They shot Chief Gannett! He’s dead! They killed him! Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god!”
I try to get a glimpse of the tiny image on the iPhone screen, but someone else wrestles it away. Can it be real? Does she have it right? Could the child have misunderstood whatever it is that’s happening inside? Maybe this is all a scary mistake, a group panic kind of deal. But it seems so real, this strange gravity of fear that thickens the air somehow, making it hard to breathe.
Not knowing is killing me. It feels as if icy fingers are clawing at my insides. The way it did when they told me Jed’s plane was down with no survivors. An end-of-the-world sensation, as though I’m falling and falling and it will never stop. The vertigo makes me so dizzy I have to sit down on the grass and cry until my eyes are blind with tears.
Noah, Noah, Noah. I know he’s in there with all the other children, with his teachers and maybe even the principal, but in my head he’s all alone.
9. An Angry Blur
Whatever the cops know, they’re not sharing it with us. Not beyond “man with a gun in the gym.”
Most of what I learn is secondhand at best. An uncertainty that somehow adds to the fear. For example, Megan Frolich had her iPhone seized by the state troopers, with vague promises of getting it back once the images have been downloaded. So we have to rely on what she recalls of the pictures and the accompanying text message from her eleven-year-old daughter.
“I know what she was trying to say,” she insists, her normally pretty eyes looking like overinflated pink balloons. “Bd, that’s ‘bad’ and m-n, that’s ‘man’—s-t has to be ‘shot’ and c-o-p is ‘cop,’ that’s obvious. ‘Bad man shot cop.’ Then c-a-n-t and then m-v, must be ‘can’t move,’ right? And A-f-r-d is ‘afraid.’ I know it is! She repeated it three times. Afraid, afraid, afraid. Bad man shot cop. Can’t move. Afraid, afraid, afraid.”
The accompanying image, as Meg remembers it, is a slightly blurred snapshot of the gymnasium floor, as seen from the stands. On the gym floor is what appears to be a blue plastic tarp. Not lying flat, but jumbled, covering something. And in proximity to the mysterious blue tarp—that very disturbing blue rectangle—Meg recalls a young man who looked, she says, vaguely familiar. Someone local maybe. Meg hadn’t actually seen a gun in the man’s possession—only part of him was on-screen—but she formed the impression he was agitated.
“It was the way he blurred,” she says, trying desperately to grasp whatever meaning had been imbedded in the image. “An angry blur, does that make sense?”
We all agree that it makes perfect sense. An angry blur, a frightened girl. Afraid, afraid, afraid. We’re all afraid, frightened out of our wits, and the sense of anxious dread exuding from the cops—state, local, and county—doesn’t do anything to allay our fears.
We’re waiting, all of us, cops and parents, for whatever comes next. Wrestling with the awful notion that the world as we know it, our little patch of it, may be coming to an end. That from this moment on our lives will be altered. Unbearable. I’m gritting my teeth so hard my jaw aches. All around me desperate parents are calling family and friends, and it occurs to me, with a body-wrenching pang of sorrow, that I have no one to call. Jed is gone. I have no siblings. My mom died in her late fifties of breast cancer. My father, twelve years her senior, passed a year later. My old New Jersey homies have no idea where I am these days and I have to keep it that way. And my new, local friends already know about the situation at the school because by now the whole village has heard about it. Indeed most of the population seems to be on-site, milling around the parking lot and athletic field in a state of shock and anxiety.
This can’t be happening. Bad things happen to good people, I know that, but do bad things keep happening? Isn’t it enough to lose a husband so young? What will I do if something happens to my precious boy?
I somehow force my eyes to focus on the school. Noah’s school. It looks so peaceful. A cheerful little elementary school, carefully constructed of cinder block and brick to keep our children safe. A typical, totally normal public school found anywhere in suburban or small-town America. The main building is one story with a flat roof and plenty of glass to make the classrooms airy and filled with light. The boxy, windowless gymnasium at one end, higher than the rest of the building.
The gymnasium is where the bad thing is happening. Men in various uniforms swarm around the base of the gym. A wiry, long-limbed deputy from the county sheriff’s department begins scaling the wall, inching up a drainpipe like a black spider. As he hunches and turns I catch the white letters emblazoned on his padded vest.
SWAT.
Oh my god.
“Haley?”
It’s my librarian friend Helen, crouching in the grass, reaching out to touch my tear-soaked chin, a look of sorrow and concern on her open face. Next thing, we’re hugging and it’s all I can do not to call her ‘mom,’ the sense of maternal concern is that strong.
“Easy now,” she says, trying to comfort me. “They’ll get them out. It will be okay, you’ll see.”
“You think?” I respond, trying to smile.
“I heard it was Roland Penny. He’s harmless, Haley. Roland would never hurt the children.”
“Who?”
“Roland Penny. Kids used to call him ‘roll of pennies.’ Local boy. The cops have pictures from inside. Cell phone images. They recognize him.”
I want to believe her, that everything will be okay, but something in me can’t. Something in me expects the worst.
“Someone got shot,” I say. “That’s what we heard.”
Helen nods. “They think it was poor Leo Gannett. He’s been chief for years and he’s got a long history with Roland Penny, from when Roland was a kid.”
Just listening to her, my heart starts to slow, approaching something like normal. “How do you know all this?”
Helen smiles, her eyes crinkling with affection. “My sister’s boy, Thomas. He’s with the State Police Emergency Response Team. That’s him over there by the ambulance. Isn’t he a handsome boy? Listen to me, Haley. They’ve got it under control. They know who they’re dealing with. That’s what Thomas says and I believe him.”
“They’re going to start shooting, aren’t they?”
More men with SWAT lettered on their backs, a whole team armed with deadly looking rifles is assembling near one of the emergency exit doors.
“Not unless they have to,” Helen assures me. “They know about all the children, Haley. They won’t risk hurting the kids.”
“What does he want, this crazy man? What does he want?”
Helen shakes her head and sighs.
10. Can You Help Me Occupate My Brain?
Nobody warned him about the smell. Pack a hundred and fifty little kids in a gymnasium, scare the pee out of them, and you get these nasty, eye-watering fumes. Roland has been to the old Yankee Stadium exactly once in his life, on a church-sponsored outing for troubled youths, and the stadium lavatories smelled a lot like this, overflowing with urine and puked-up beer. No beer stink today, so it could be worse. And if the little brats are weeping and wailing—and many of them are—he can’t hear a thing, thanks to the Black Sabbath tracks bruising his eardrums. Turns out to be a good idea, the iPod, providing a useful soundtrack to events that have been ever so carefully orchestrated. Helps him concentrate. Leave the earth to Satan and his knaves. Yeah. Go Ozzy.
As to the plan, so carefully conceived by The Voice, so far so good. The essential action, taking out the cue-ball cop, had proved even easier than Roland had imagined. He’s destroyed the man thousands of times in his imagination, sometimes roasting him alive, but this had been as simple as raising the weapon and applying the slightest pressure on the customized trigger. What with the music pumping through his earbuds, he never even heard the pop. And old cue ball went down like a puppet with cut strings. Roland was expecting him to be blown backward, like in the movies, but the reality was he simply dropped where he stood, dead before he hit the floor.
True, there was a disturbing amount of blood, but Roland managed not to obsess on that, and whipped the blue tarp out of his handy little cart, covering both the body and the blood, exactly as he had been instructed. Out of sight, out of mind. Besides, it felt really good, knowing his old nemesis was no longer in the world. And when he saw the stricken looks of shock and horror coming from all those little faces in the stands, and the teachers recoiling in fear, man, he got pumped. What I’m talkin’ about, dude! Carpe diem like the book said. Seize the day. Make it your own. Establish who you are and what you desire. Ignore all contrary voices, tune them out, find your inner voice and concentrate on what you want. Visualize it. Make it so.
And he’d done it, he’d made it so. Told the stubby little principal to take the chains and padlocks he’d provided. She had followed his command, chained the exit doors, and then when a glimpse of defiance flashed in her beady little eyes, he promptly cuffed her with the late cue ball’s own official cop cuffs and commanded that she sit down, shut up, or get tarped. After that she was compliant, didn’t have the courage to look him in the eye.
“Listen up, toadstools! Anybody moves, I open fire, okay? And when the clip is empty, I detonate the bomb! Did I mention the bomb? No? Well, I got a bomb. And it’s really cool. Fifty pounds of C-4, which is enough to turn you all into jelly beans!”
Roland is unaware that with the music blasting, he’s shouting in a way that makes him sound like a raving madman. A babbling, out-of-control psycho. But that makes him all the more effective. None of his captives doubt that he will kill again at the slightest provocation.
“So stay in your seats!” he shouts. “Don’t move! You want to use your phones, make a few calls, go ahead! Let ’em know I got it under control!”
He raises his other hand, showing off the Sony TV remote he has cleverly modified, guided by The Voice. “See this! It’s a detonator! Tell all your friends! Press this button, we all go boom!”
Roland and The Voice had debated the cell phone issue when the plan was being formulated. At first Roland thought he should confiscate all the phones, take control of communication, but The Voice reminded him how difficult that might be. Many of the teachers would have cells, a lot of the kids might have them stashed, and texting made it easy to send messages without being obvious. One man couldn’t search all those kids and teachers, not by himself, and the whole purpose of the plan was that he do it alone, his own personal one-man show. Thus proving that he was ready to move on to the next level.
So the idea was, embrace the captives’ ability to communicate with the outside world. No need for Roland to use his own cell, or share his own identifying vocal patterns with the authorities. Let little Kelly or Timmy make the call. That way he can concentrate on managing the situation, not get distracted by some dippy hostage negotiator. Excuse me, Mr. Penny, would you kindly step intoour telescopic sights? No way. The Voice was right. Let the communication flow. Concentrate on the plan. Execute.
And whatever you do, don’t look at the tarp, or what seems to be flowing out from under it.
“People think I’m insane because I’m drowning all the time!” he shouts, unaware that he’s singing along with the heavy-metal lyrics pounding into his head. “Can you help me occupate my brain?” he screams. “Oh yeah!”
He’s right. Everybody in the gymnasium, students and teachers, and staff, they all think he’s totally insane.
11. The Calculus Of Heaven
Noah is pretty sure what it means to be turned into jelly beans. That’s what happens when a bomb goes off. You get blown into pieces no bigger than jelly beans. Not that he intends to explain it to the other kids, many of whom are confused about what the crazy bad man said. Jelly beans? Is the bad man going to give us candy?
