by Jodi Picoult
Guenther and Patrick looked at each other. The principal did not just identify the bodies; he also gave a little one-or two-sentence eulogy each time. Patrick supposed that the man couldn’t help himself—unlike Patrick and Guenther, he wasn’t used to dealing with tragedy in the course of his normal occupation.
Patrick had tried to retrace Peter’s footsteps, from the front hallway to the cafeteria (Victims 1 and 2: Courtney Ignatio and Maddie Shaw), to the stairwell outside it (Victim 3: Whit Obermeyer), to the boys’ bathroom (Victim 4: Topher McPhee), through another hallway (Victim 5: Grace Murtaugh), into the girls’ bathroom (Victim 6: Kaitlyn Harvey). Now, as he led the team upstairs, he took a left into the first classroom, trailing a smeared line of blood to a spot near the chalkboard where the body of the only adult victim lay . . . and beside him, a young man with his hand pressed tight over the bullet wound in the man’s belly. “Ben?” McAllister said. “What are you still doing here?”
Patrick turned to the boy. “You’re not an EMT?”
“I . . . no . . .”
“You told me you were an EMT!”
“I said I’d had medical training!”
“Ben’s an Eagle Scout,” the principal said.
“I couldn’t leave Mr. McCabe. I . . . applied pressure, and it’s working, see? The blood’s stopped.”
Guenther gently removed the boy’s bloody hand from his teacher’s stomach. “That’s because he’s gone, son.”
Ben’s face crumpled. “But I . . . I . . .”
“You did the best you could,” Guenther assured him.
Patrick turned to the principal. “Why don’t you take Ben outside . . . maybe let one of the doctors take a look at him?” Shock, he mouthed over the boy’s head.
As they left the classroom, Ben grasped the principal’s sleeve, leaving a bright red handprint behind. “Jesus,” Patrick said, running a hand down his face.
Guenther stood up. “Come on. Let’s just get this over with.”
They walked toward the gymnasium, where Guenther certified the deaths of two more students—a black boy and a white one—and then into the locker room where Patrick had ultimately cornered Peter Houghton. Guenther examined the body of the boy Patrick had seen earlier, the kid in the hockey jersey whose cap had been blown off his head by a bullet. Meanwhile, Patrick walked into the abutting shower room and glanced out the window. The reporters were still there, but most of the wounded had been dealt with. There was only one waiting ambulance, instead of seven.
It had started to rain. By the next morning, the bloodstains on the pavement outside the school would be pale; this day might never have happened.
“This is interesting,” Guenther said.
Patrick closed the window against the weather. “Why? Is he deader than the rest of them?”
“Yeah. He’s the only victim that’s been shot twice. Once in the gut, once in the head.” Guenther looked at him. “How many guns did you find on the shooter?”
“One in his hand, one on the floor here, two in his backpack.”
“Nothing like a little backup plan.”
“Tell me about it,” Patrick said. “Can you tell which bullet was fired first?”
“No. My educated guess, though, would be the one in the belly . . . since it was the slug to the brain that killed him.” Guenther knelt beside the body. “Maybe he hated this kid most of all.”
The door of the locker room flew open, revealing a street cop soaked by the sudden downpour. “Captain?” he said. “We just found the makings of another pipe bomb in Peter Houghton’s car.”
* * *
When Josie was younger, Alex had a recurring nightmare about being on a plane when it went into a nosedive. She could feel the spin of gravity, the pressure that held her back in her chair; she saw purses and coats and carry-on luggage burst out of the overhead compartments to fall into the aisle. I have to get to my cell phone, Alex had thought, intent on leaving Josie a message on the answering machine that she could carry around forever, digital proof that Alex loved her and was thinking of her at the end. But even after Alex had grabbed her phone from her purse and turned it on, it took too long. She’d hit the ground when the phone was still searching for a signal.
She’d awaken shaking and sweaty, even as she dismissed the dream: she rarely traveled apart from Josie; she certainly didn’t take flights for her job. She’d throw back the covers and head to the bathroom and splash water on her face, but it didn’t stop her from thinking: I was too late.
Now, as she sat in the quiet dark of a hospital room where her daughter was sleeping off the effects of a sedative given to her by the admitting doctor, Alex felt the same way.
This is what Alex had managed to learn: Josie had fainted during the shooting. She had a cut on her forehead decorated with a butterfly bandage, and a mild concussion. The doctors wanted to keep her overnight for observation, to be safe.
Safe had a whole new definition now.
Alex had also learned, from the unending news coverage, the names of the dead. One of whom was Matthew Royston.
Matt.
What if Josie had been with her boyfriend when he was shot?
Josie had been unconscious the whole time Alex had been here. She was small and still under the faded hospital sheets; the tie at the neck of her hospital johnny had come unraveled. From time to time, her right hand twitched. Alex reached out now and grasped it. Wake up, she thought. Prove to me you’re okay.
What if Alex hadn’t been late to work that morning? Might she have stayed at the kitchen table with Josie, talking about the things she imagined mothers and daughters discussed but that she never seemed to have the time to? What if she’d taken a better look at Josie when she hurried downstairs, told her to go back to bed and get some rest?
What if she’d taken Josie on a spur-of-the-moment trip to Punta Cana, San Diego, Fiji—all the places Alex dream-surfed on her computer in chambers and thought about visiting, but never did?
What if she’d been a prescient enough mother to keep her daughter home from school today?
There were, of course, hundreds of other parents who’d made the same honest mistake she had. But that was shallow comfort to Alex: none of their children were Josie. None of them, surely, had as much to lose as she did.
When this is over, Alex promised silently, we will go to the rain forest, or the pyramids, or a beach as white as bone. We will eat grapes from the vine, we will swim with sea turtles, we will walk miles on cobblestone streets. We will laugh and talk and confess. We will.
At the same time, a small voice in her head was scheduling this paradise. After, it said. Because first, this trial will come to your courtroom.
It was true: a case like this would be fast-tracked to the docket. Alex was the superior court judge for Grafton County, and would be for the next eight months. Although Josie had been at the scene of the crime, she wasn’t technically a victim of the shooter. Had Josie been wounded, Alex would have automatically been removed from the case. But as it stood, there was no legal conflict in Alex’s sitting as judge, as long as she could separate her personal feelings as the mother of a high school student from her professional feelings as a justice. This would be her first big trial as a superior court judge, the one that set a tone for the rest of her tenure on the bench.
Not that she was really thinking about that now.
Suddenly, Josie stirred. Alex watched consciousness pour into her, reach a high-water mark. “Where am I?”
Alex combed her fingers through her daughter’s hair. “In the hospital.”
“Why?”
Her hand stilled. “Do you remember anything about today?”
“Matt came over before school,” Josie said, and then she pushed herself upright. “Was there, like, a car accident?”
Alex hesitated, unsure of what she was supposed to say. Wasn’t Josie better off not knowing the truth? What if this was the way her mind was protecting her from whatever she’d witnessed?
“You’re fine,” Alex said carefully. “You weren’t hurt.”
Josie turned to her, relieved. “What about Matt?”
* * *
Lewis was getting a lawyer. Lacy held that nugget of information to her chest like a hot stone as she rocked back and forth on Peter’s bed and waited for him to come home. It’s going to be all right, Lewis had promised, although she did not understand how he could make so specious a statement. Clearly this is a mistake, Lewis had said, but he hadn’t been down at the high school. He hadn’t seen the faces of the students, kids who would never really be kids again.
There was a part of Lacy that wanted so badly to believe Lewis—to think that somehow, this broken thing might be fixed. But there was another part of her that remembered him waking Peter at four in the morning to go out and sit in a duck blind. Lewis had taught his son how to hunt, never expecting that Peter might find a different kind of prey. Lacy understood hunting as both a sport and an evolutionary claim; she even knew how to make an excellent venison stew and teriyaki goose and enjoyed whatever meal Lewis’s hobby put on the table. But right now, she thought, It is his fault, because then it couldn’t be hers.
How could you change a boy’s bedding every week and feed him breakfast and drive him to the orthodontist and not know him at all? She’d assumed that if Peter’s answers were monosyllabic, it was just because of his age; that any mother would have made the same assumption. Lacy combed through her memories for some red flag, some conversation she might have misread, something overlooked, but all she could recall were a thousand ordinary moments.
A thousand ordinary moments that some mothers would never get to have again with their own children.
Tears sprang to her eyes; she wiped them with the back of her hand. Don’t think about them, she silently scolded. Right now you have to worry about yourself.
Had Peter been thinking that, too?
Swallowing, Lacy walked into her son’s room. It was dark, the bed neatly made just as Lacy had left it this morning, but now she saw the poster of a band called Death Wish on the wall and wondered why a boy might hang it up. She opened the closet and saw the empty bottles and electrical tape and torn rags and everything else she had missed the first time around.
Suddenly, Lacy stopped. She could fix this herself. She could fix this for both of them. She ran downstairs to the kitchen and ripped three large black thirty-three-gallon trash bags free from their coil before hurrying back to Peter’s room. She started in the closet, shoving packages of shoelaces, sugar, potassium nitrate fertilizer, and—my God, were these pipes?—into the first bag. She did not have a plan about what she would do with all these things, but she would get them out of her house.
When the doorbell rang, Lacy sighed with relief, expecting Lewis—although, if she’d been thinking clearly, she would have realized that Lewis would have simply let himself in. She abandoned her haul and went downstairs to find a policeman holding a slim blue folder. “Mrs. Houghton?” the officer said.
What could they possibly want? They already had her son.
“We’ve got a search warrant.” He handed her the paperwork and pushed past her, followed by five other policemen. “Jackson and Walhorne, you head up to the boy’s room. Rodriguez, the basement. Tewes and Gilchrist, start with the first floor, and everyone, let’s make sure you cover the answering machines and all computer equipment . . .” Then he noticed Lacy still standing there, stricken. “Mrs. Houghton, you’ll have to leave the premises.”
The policeman escorted her to her own front hallway. Numb, Lacy followed. What would they think when they reached Peter’s room and found that trash bag? Would they blame Peter? Or Lacy, for enabling him?
Did they already?
A rush of cold air hit Lacy in the face as the front door opened. “For how long?”
The officer shrugged. “Till we’re done,” he said, and he left her out in the cold.
* * *
Jordan McAfee had been an attorney for nearly twenty years and truly believed he had seen and heard it all, until now, when he and his wife, Selena, stood in front of the television set watching CNN’s coverage of the school shooting at Sterling High. “It’s like Columbine,” Selena said. “In our backyard.”
“Except right now,” Jordan murmured, “there’s someone to blame who’s still alive.” He glanced down at the baby in his wife’s arms, a blue-eyed, coffee-colored mixture of his own WASP genes and Selena’s never-ending limbs and ebony skin, and he reached for the remote to turn down the volume, just in case his son was taking any of this in subconsciously.
Jordan knew Sterling High. It was just down the street from his barber and two blocks away from the room over the bank he rented as his law office. He had represented a few students who’d been busted with pot in their glove compartments or who got caught drinking underage at the college in town. Selena, who was not only his wife but also his investigator, had gone into the school to talk to kids from time to time about a case.
They hadn’t lived here very long. His son Thomas—the only good thing to come out of his lousy first marriage—graduated from high school in Salem Falls and was now a sophomore at Yale, where Jordan spent $40,000 a year to hear that he had narrowed down his career plans to becoming either a performance artist, an art historian, or a professional clown. Jordan had finally asked Selena to marry him, and after she’d gotten pregnant, they’d moved to Sterling—because the school district had such a good reputation.
Go figure.
When the telephone rang and Jordan—who didn’t want to watch the coverage but couldn’t tear his eyes away from it either—made no motion to answer it, Selena dumped the baby in his arms and reached for the receiver. “Hey,” she said. “How’s it going?”
Jordan glanced up and raised his brows.
Thomas, Selena mouthed. “Yeah, hang on, he’s right here.”
He took the phone from Selena. “What the hell is going on?” Thomas asked. “Sterling High’s all over MSNBC.com.”
“I don’t know any more than you do,” Jordan said. “It’s pandemonium.”
“I know some kids there. We competed against them in track and field. It’s just—it’s not real.”
Jordan could still hear ambulance sirens in the distance. “It’s real,” he said. There was a click on the line—call-waiting. “Hang on, I have to take this.”
“Is this Mr. McAfee?”
“Yes . . .”
“I, um, understand that you’re an attorney. I got your name from Stuart McBride over at Sterling College . . .”
On the television, a list of the names of the known dead began to scroll, with yearbook pictures. “You know, I’m on the other line,” Jordan said. “Could I take down your name and number, and get back to you?”
“I was wondering if you’d represent my son,” the caller said. “He’s the boy who . . . the one from the high school who . . .” The voice stumbled, and then broke. “They say my son’s the one who did it.”
Jordan thought of the last time he’d represented a teenage boy. Like this one, Chris Harte had been found holding a smoking gun.
“Will you . . . will you take his case?”
Jordan forgot about Thomas, waiting. He forgot about Chris Harte and how the case had nearly turned him inside out. Instead he looked at Selena and the baby in her arms. Sam twisted, grabbing at her earring. This boy—the one who had walked into Sterling High this morning and committed a massacre—was someone’s son. And in spite of a town that would be reeling for years, and media coverage that had already reached the point of saturation, he deserved a fair trial.
“Yes,” Jordan said. “I will.”
* * *
Finally—after the bomb squad had dismantled the pipe bomb in Peter Houghton’s car; after one hundred and sixteen shell casings had been found scattered in the school from fired bullets; after the accident recon guys had begun to measure the evidence and the location of the bodies so that they could produce a scale diagram
of the scene; after the crime techs had taken the first of hundreds of snapshots that they would put into indexed photobooks—Patrick called everyone together into the auditorium of the school and stood on the stage in the near darkness. “What we have is a massive amount of information,” he told the crowd assembled before him. “There’s going to be a lot of pressure on us to do this fast, and to do this right. I want everyone back here in twenty-four hours, so that we can see where we’re at.”
People began to disperse. At the next meeting, Patrick would be given the completed photobooks, all evidence not being sent to the lab, and all lab submissions. In twenty-four hours, he’d be buried so far underneath the avalanche he wouldn’t know which way was up.
While the others headed back to various parts of the building to complete the work that would take them all night and the next day, Patrick walked out to his car. It had stopped raining. Patrick planned to go back to the station to review the evidence that had been seized from the Houghtons’ home, and he wanted to talk to the parents, if they were still willing. But he found himself pointing his car instead toward the medical center, and he pulled into the parking lot. He walked into the emergency entrance and flashed his badge. “Look,” he said to the nurse, “I know you had a lot of kids come through here today. But one of the first was a girl named Josie. I’m trying to find her.”
The nurse fluttered her hands over her computer keyboard. “Josie who?”
“That’s the thing,” Patrick admitted. “I don’t know.”
The screen swam with a flurry of information, and the nurse tapped her finger against the glass. “Cormier. She’s up on the fourth floor, Room 422.”
Patrick thanked her and took the elevator upstairs. Cormier. The name sounded familiar, but he couldn’t quite place it. It was common enough, he figured—maybe he’d read it in the paper or seen it on a television show. He slipped past the nurses’ desk and followed the numbers down the hall. The door to Josie’s room was ajar. The girl sat up in bed, wrapped in shadows, talking to a figure that stood beside her.
