Praise for Heather Gudenkauf

‘Brilliantly constructed, this will have you gripped until the last page …’

Closer

‘Deeply moving and lyrical … it will haunt you all summer.’

Company

5 stars ‘Gripping and moving’

Heat

‘Her technique is faultless, sparse and simple and is a master-class in how to construct a thriller … A memorable read … A technical triumph.’

Sunday Express

‘It’s totally gripping …’

Marie Claire

‘Tension builds as family secrets tumble from the closet.’

Woman & Home

‘This has all the ingredients of a Jodi Picoult novel.’

Waterstones Books Quarterly

‘Set to become a book group staple’

The Guardian

‘A skilfully woven thriller that will keep you hooked to the end’

Choice magazine

‘Jodi Picoult has some serious competition in Heather Gudenkauf.’

Bookreporter

‘Deeply moving and exquisitely lyrical, this is a powerhouse of a debut novel.’

Tess Gerritsen, No. 1 Sunday Times bestselling author

‘Fans of Jodi Picoult will devour this great thriller.’

Red

‘The author slowly and expertly reveals the truth in a tale so chillingly real, it could have come from the latest headlines.’

Publisher’s Weekly

‘Heart-pounding suspense and a compelling family drama come together to create a story you won’t be able to put down.’

Diane Chamberlain, bestselling author of

The Midwife’s Confession

‘This haunting psychological thriller lives up to expectation. Jodi Picoult or perhaps Joanne Harris are the nearest comparisons.’

Peterborough Evening Telegraph

‘A great thriller, probably the kind of book a lot of people would choose to read on their sun loungers. It will appeal to fans of Jodi Picoult.’

Radio Times

‘An enchantingly lyrical novel mixed with shockingly menacing overtones’

Newbooks

‘Gripping and powerful, right to the end’

Northern Echo

‘Secrets are slowly revealed by Gudenkauf’s skilled writing.’

NY Metro

‘A real page-turner’

Woman’s Own

About the Author

HEATHER GUDENKAUF is the critically acclaimed author of the New York Times bestselling novels The Weight of Silence and These Things Hidden. Her debut novel, The Weight of Silence , was picked for The TV Bookclub. She lives in Iowa with her family.

Read more about Heather and her novels at www.HeatherGudenkauf.com

Also available from Heather Gudenkauf

THE WEIGHT OF SILENCE

THESE THINGS HIDDEN

One Breath Away
Heather
Gudenkauf

For Alex, Anna and Grace

~My three wishes

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

As always, enormous gratitude goes to my agent, Marianne Merola, for her wisdom, guidance, attention to detail and her friendship. Thanks also to Henry Thayer for his behind-the-scenes support.

A thousand thanks to my editor, Miranda Indrigo, whose insights and suggestions are always spot on. Thanks also to all the folks at HQ—especially Margaret O’Neil Marbury and Valerie Gray. I’m so proud to call HQ my home.

Thank you to John and Kathy Conway and Howard and Shirley Bohr for opening up their homes and farms to me as I researched the novel. I always enjoy our time together.

Much appreciation goes to Mark Dalsing, whose advice in regard to police procedure and his early readings of the manuscript were invaluable.

A heartfelt thank-you goes out to my parents, Milton and Patricia Schmida, my brothers and sisters and their families, for their generous support and enthusiasm.

Much love and thanks to Scott, Alex, Anna and Grace—I couldn’t do it without you.

Holly

I’m in that lovely space between consciousness and sleep. I feel no pain thanks to the morphine pump and I can almost believe that the muscles, tendons and skin of my left arm have knitted themselves back together, leaving my skin smooth and pale. My curly brown hair once again falls softly down my back, my favorite earrings dangle from my ears and I can lift both sides of my mouth in a wide smile without much pain at the thought of my children. Yes, drugs are a wonderful thing. But the problem is that while the carefully prescribed and doled-out narcotics by the nurses wonderfully dull the edges of this nightmare, I know that soon enough this woozy, pleasant feeling will fall away and all that I will be left with is pain and the knowledge that Augie and P.J. are thousands of miles away from me. Sent away to the place where I grew up, the town I swore I would never return to, the house I swore I would never again step into, to the man I never wanted them to meet.

The tinny melody of the ringtone that Augie, my thirteen-year-old daughter, programmed into my cell phone is pulling me from my sleep. I open one eye, the one that isn’t covered with a thick ointment and crusted shut, and call out for my mother, who must have stepped out of the room. I reach for the phone that is sitting on the tray table at the side of my bed and the nerve endings in my bandaged left arm scream in protest at the movement. I carefully shift my body to pick up the phone with my good hand and press the phone to my remaining ear.

“Hello.” The word comes out half-formed, breathless and scratchy, as if my lungs were still filled with smoke.

“Mom?” Augie’s voice is quavery, unsure. Not sounding like my daughter at all. Augie is confident, smart, a take-charge, no one is ever going to walk all over me kind of girl.

“Augie? What’s the matter?” I try to blink the fuzziness of the morphine away; my tongue is dry and sticks to the roof of my mouth. I want to take a sip of water from the glass sitting on my tray, but my one working hand holds the phone. The other lies useless at my side. “Are you okay? Where are you?”

There are a few seconds of quiet and then Augie continues. “I love you, Mom,” she says in a whisper that ends in quiet sobs.

I sit up straight in my bed, wide awake now. Pain shoots through my bandaged arm and up the side of my neck and face. “Augie, what’s the matter?”

“I’m at school.” She is crying in that way she has when she is doing her damnedest not to. I can picture her, head down, her long brown hair falling around her face, her eyes squeezed shut in determination to keep the tears from falling, her breath filling my ear with short, shallow puffs. “He has a gun. He has P.J. and he has a gun.”

“Who has P.J.?” Terror clutches at my chest. “Tell me, Augie, where are you? Who has a gun?”

“I’m in a closet. He put me in a closet.”

My mind is spinning. Who could be doing this? Who would do this to my children? “Hang up,” I tell her. “Hang up and call 9-1-1 right now, Augie. Then call me back. Can you do that?” I hear her sniffles. “Augie,” I say again, more sharply. “Can you do that?”

“Yeah,” she finally says. “I love you, Mom,” she says softly.

“I love you, too.” My eyes fill with tears and I can feel the moisture pool beneath the bandages that cover my injured eye.

I wait for Augie to disconnect when I hear three quick shots, followed by two more and Augie’s piercing screams.

I feel the bandages that cover the left side of my face peel away, my own screams loosening the adhesive holding them in place; I feel the fragile, newly grafted skin begin to unravel. I am scarcely aware of the nurses and my mother rushing to my side, tearing the phone from my grasp.

Augie

My pants are still damp from when Noah Plum pushed me off the shoveled sidewalk into a snowbank after we got off the bus and were on our way into school this morning. Noah Plum is the biggest asshole in eighth grade but for some reason I’m the only one who has figured this out and I’ve only lived here for eight weeks and everyone else has lived here for their entire lives. Except for maybe Milana Nevara, whose dad is from Mexico and is the town veterinarian. But she moved here when she was two so she may as well have been born here, anyway.

The classroom is freezing and my fingers are numb with the cold. Mr. Ellery says it’s because it is not supposed to be below zero at the end of March and the boiler has been put out to pasture. Mr. Ellery, my teacher and one of the only good things about this school, is sitting at his desk grading papers. Everyone, except Noah, of course, is writing in their notebooks. Each day after lunch we start class with journal time and we can write about anything we want to during the first ten minutes of class. Mr. Ellery said we could even write the same word over and over for the entire time and Noah asked, “What if it’s a bad word?”

“Knock yourself out,” Mr. Ellery said, and everyone laughed. Mr. Ellery always gives time for people to read what they’ve written out loud if they’d like to. I’ve never shared. No way I’m going to let these morons know what I’m thinking. I’ve read Harriet the Spy and I keep my notebook with me all the time. Never let it out of my sight.

In my old school in Arizona, there were over two hundred eighth graders in my grade and we had different teachers for each subject. In Broken Branch there are only twenty-two of us so we have Mr. Ellery for just about every subject. Mr. Ellery, besides being really cute, is the absolutely best teacher I’ve ever had. He’s funny, but never makes fun of anyone and isn’t sarcastic like some teachers think is so hilarious. He also doesn’t let people get away with making crap out of anyone. All he has to do is stare at the person and they shut up. Even Noah Plum.

Mr. Ellery always writes a journal prompt on the dry erase board in case we can’t think of what to write about. Today he has written “During spring break I am going to …”

Even Mr. Ellery’s stare doesn’t work today; everyone is whispering and smiling because they are excited about vacation. “All right, folks,” Mr. Ellery says. “Get down to work and if we have some time left over we’ll play Pictionary.”

“Yesss!” the kids around me hiss. Great. I open my notebook to the next clean page and begin writing.

“During spring break we’re going to fly back to Arizona to see our mother.” The only sounds in the classroom are the scratch of pencils on paper and Erika’s annoying sniffles; she always has a runny nose and gets up twenty times a day to get a tissue. “I don’t care if I ever see snow or cows ever again. I don’t care if I ever see my grandfather again.” I am hoping with all my might that instead of coming back to Broken Branch after spring break, my mother will be well enough for us to come home. My grandfather tells us this isn’t going to happen. My mother is far from being able to come home from the hospital. My mom will be in Arizona until she is out of the hospital and well enough to get on a plane and come here so Grandma and Grandpa, who I met for the first time ever a couple months ago, can take care of all of us. But it doesn’t matter what my grandpa says—after spring break, I am not coming back to Broken Branch.

A sharp crack, like a branch snapped in half during an ice storm, makes me look up from my notebook. Mr. Ellery hears it, too, and stands up from behind his desk and walks to the classroom door, steps into the hallway and comes back in shrugging his shoulders. “Looks like someone broke a window at the end of the hallway. I’m going to go check. You guys stay in your seats. I’ll be right back.”

Before he can even leave the classroom the shaky voice of Mrs. Lowell, the school secretary, comes on the intercom. “Teachers, this is a Code Red Lockdown. Go to your safe place.”

A snort comes from Noah. “Go to your safe place,” he says, mimicking Mrs. Lowell. No one else says a thing and we all stare at Mr. Ellery, waiting for him to tell us what to do next. I haven’t been here long enough to know what a Code Red Lockdown is. But it can’t be good.

Mrs. Oliver

The morning the man with the gun walked into Evelyn Oliver’s classroom, she was wearing two items she had vowed during her forty-three-year career as a teacher never to wear. Denim and rhinestones. Mrs. Oliver was a firm believer that a teacher should look like a teacher. Well-groomed, blouses with collars, skirts and pantsuits crisply ironed, dress shoes polished. None of that nonsense younger teachers wore these days. Miniskirts, tennis shoes, plunging necklines. Tattoos, for goodness’ sake. For instance, Mr. Ellery, the young eighth-grade teacher, had a tattoo on his right arm. A series of bold black slashes and swoops that Mrs. Oliver recognized as Asian in origin. “It means teacher in Chinese,” Mr. Ellery, wearing a sleeveless T-shirt, told her after, embarrassingly, he caught her staring at his deltoid muscle one stifling-hot August afternoon during in-service week when all the teachers were preparing their classrooms for the school year. Mrs. Oliver sniffed in disapproval, but really she couldn’t help but wonder how painful it must be to have someone precisely and methodically inject ink into one’s skin.

Casual Fridays were the worst, with teachers, even the older ones, wearing denim and sweatshirts emblazoned with the school name and logo—the Broken Branch Consolidated School Hornets.

But on this unusually bitter March day, the last day school was in session before spring break, Mrs. Oliver had on the denim jumper she now knew she was going to die while wearing. Shameful, she thought, after all these years of razor-sharp pleats and itchy support hose.

Last week, after all the other third graders had left for the day, Mrs. Oliver had tentatively opened the crumpled striped pink-and-yellow gift bag handed to her by Charlotte, a skinny, disheveled eight-year-old with shoulder-length, burnished-black hair that chronically housed a persistent family of lice.

“What’s this, Charlotte?” Mrs. Oliver asked in surprise. “My birthday isn’t until this summer.”

“I know,” Charlotte answered with a gap-toothed grin. “But my mom and me thought you’d get more use out of it if I gave it to you now.”

Mrs. Oliver expected to find an apple-scented candle or homemade cookies or a hand-painted birdhouse inside, but instead pulled out a denim stone-washed jumper with rhinestones painstakingly arranged in the shape of a rainbow twinkling up at her. Charlotte looked expectantly up at Mrs. Oliver through the veil of bangs that covered her normally mischievous gray eyes.

“I Bedazzled it myself. Mostly,” Charlotte explained. “My mom helped with the rainbow.” She placed a grubby finger on the colorful arch. “Roy V. Big. Red, orange, yellow, violet, blue, indigo, green. Just like you said.” Charlotte smiled brightly, showing her small, even baby teeth, still all intact.

Mrs. Oliver didn’t have the heart to tell Charlotte that the correct mnemonic for remembering the colors in the rainbow was Roy G. Biv, but took comfort in that fact that she at least knew all the colors of the rainbow if not the proper order. “It’s lovely, Charlotte,” Mrs. Oliver said, holding the dress in front of her. “I can tell you worked hard on it.”

“I did,” Charlotte said solemnly. “For two weeks. I was going to Bedazzle a birthday cake on the front but then my mom said you might wear it more if it wasn’t so holiday-ish. I almost ran out of beads. My little brother thought they were Skittles.”

“I will certainly get a lot of wear out of it. Thank you, Charlotte.” Mrs. Oliver reached over to pat Charlotte on the shoulder and Charlotte immediately leaned in and wrapped her arms around Mrs. Oliver’s thick middle, pressing her face into the buttons of her starched white blouse. Mrs. Oliver felt a tickle beneath her iron-gray hair and resisted the urge to scratch.

It was Mrs. Oliver’s husband, Cal, who had convinced her to wear the dress. “What can it hurt?” he asked just this morning when he caught her standing in front of her open closet, looking at the jumper garishly glaring right back at her.

“I don’t wear denim to school, and I’m certainly not going to start wearing it just before I retire,” she said, not looking him in the eye, remembering how Charlotte had rushed eagerly into the classroom at the beginning of the week to see if she was wearing the dress.

“She worked on it for two weeks,” Cal reminded her at the breakfast table.

“It’s not professional,” she snapped, thinking of how on each passing day this week, Charlotte’s shoulders wilted more and more as she entered the room to find her teacher wearing her typical wool-blend slacks, blouse and cardigan.

“Her fingers bled,” Cal said through a mouthful of oatmeal.

“It’s supposed to be ten below outside today. It’s too cold to wear a dress,” Mrs. Oliver told her husband, miserably picturing how Charlotte wouldn’t even look her way yesterday, defiantly pursing her lips and refusing to answer any questions directed at her.

“Wear long johns and a turtleneck underneath,” her husband said mildly, coming up behind her and kissing her on the neck in the way that even after forty-five years of marriage caused her to shiver deliciously.

Because he was right—Cal was always right—she had brushed him away in irritation and told him she was going to be late for school if she didn’t get dressed right then. Wearing the jumper, she left him sitting at the kitchen table finishing his oatmeal, drinking coffee and reading the newspaper. She hadn’t told him she loved him, she hadn’t kissed his wrinkled cheek in goodbye. “Don’t forget to plug in the Crock-Pot,” she called as she stepped outside into the soft gray morning. The sun hadn’t emerged yet, but it was the warmest it would be that day, the temperature tumbling with each passing hour. As she climbed into her car to make the twenty-five-minute drive from her home in Dalsing to the school in Broken Branch, she didn’t realize it could be the last time she made that journey.

It was worth it, she supposed, after seeing Charlotte’s face transform from jaded disappointment to pure joy when she saw that Mrs. Oliver was actually wearing the dress. Of course Cal was right. Wearing the impractical, gaudy thing wouldn’t hurt anything; she’d had to suffer the raised eyebrows in the teacher’s lounge, but that was nothing new. And it obviously had meant a lot to Charlotte, who was now cowering in her desk along with fifteen other third graders, gaping up at the man with the gun. At least, Mrs. Oliver thought, shocking herself with the inappropriateness of the idea, if he shot her in the chest, she couldn’t be buried in the damn thing.

Meg

I’m trying to figure out what I’m going to do with all my free time for the next four days as I drive idly around Broken Branch in my squad car. This will be the first year that I won’t have Maria with me for spring break. By the looks of things, spring doesn’t seem like it will be appearing any time soon, even though it officially arrived two days earlier.

By rights, Tim should be able to have Maria this vacation; she’s spent the past two with me. But I had it all planned out for tomorrow, my day off. We were going to bake Dutch letters, flaky almond-flavored cookies, the one family tradition I’ve kept from when I was young. Afterward we were going to pitch a tent and have an old-fashioned campout in the living room. Then we were going to take advantage of the freak snowstorm to go snowshoeing at the bottom of Ox-eye Bluff with hot chocolate and marshmallows and oyster chowder when we got home. I even persuaded Kevin Jarrow, the part-timer on our police force, to pick up my Saturday shift so I could spend it with Maria. But this time Tim insisted. He finally scored a full five days off from his job as an EMT in Waterloo, where we both grew up.

“Listen, Meg,” he said when he called me the day before yesterday. “I don’t ask for much, but I really want Maria this school break….”

“She’s not an item on your grocery list,” I said hotly. “I thought we had this all figured out.”

“You had it all figured out,” he said. Which was true. “I want to spend a few days with her and I don’t think there’s anything unreasonable about that.”

“Where did this suddenly come from?” I asked.

“Hey, I’ll take any minute I can get with Maria and you know it. Besides, you’ve had her the past two holidays.” He was getting angry now. I imagined him sitting in the duplex we once shared, rubbing his forehead the way he did when he was frustrated.

“I know,” I said softly. “I just had it all planned out.”

“You could always come spend some of the time with us,” he said cautiously. I sighed. I was too tired to have this conversation. “Meg, you know I never did the things you thought I did.” Here we go, I thought. Every few months Tim insists that he didn’t have the affair with his coworker, that she was an unstable liar who had wanted something more, but whom he had rebuffed. Some days I half believe him. This isn’t one of those days.

“You can pick her up on Wednesday after school,” I told him.

“I was hoping tomorrow, after I get done with work. Around noon.”

“She’ll miss her last day of school before vacation. That’s when they do all the fun things.” It sounded lame, I know, but it was all I had.

“Meg,” he said in that way he has. “Meg, please …”

“Fine,” I snapped.

So yesterday I said goodbye to my beautiful, funny, sweet, perfect seven-year-old daughter. “I’ll call you every day,” I promised her, feeling like I was saying goodbye forever. “Twice.”

“Bye, Mom,” she said, swiping a quick kiss across my cheek before climbing into Tim’s car.

“If it hasn’t all melted, we’ll go snowshoeing when you get back,” I called after her.

“So, we’ll be at my folks tomorrow night for dinner and at my sister’s on Sunday.” His face turned serious. “I ran into your mom last week.”

“Oh,” I said as if I didn’t care.

“Yeah, they’d really like to see Maria.”

“I bet they would,” I grumbled.

“Is it okay if I take her over to see them?”

I shrugged. “I guess.” My parents weren’t bad people, just not particularly good people. “Promise me you won’t leave her at the trailer, it’s a death trap. And make sure Travis isn’t hanging around when you visit.” My brother, Travis, is one of the main reasons I became a police officer. Growing up he made my parents’ lives miserable and mine pure hell. It seemed like every week a police officer was at the door of our trailer, Travis in tow. They gave him more than enough chances to get his shit together and he blew it time and time again. It wasn’t until the summer I was thirteen and Travis was sixteen, when he threatened my father with a kitchen knife, smacked my mother across the face and ripped out a chunk of my hair as I tried to pull him away from them, that the police finally got serious.

“What do you want to do?” Officer Stepanich, a frequent visitor to our home, asked wearily. His young female partner, Officer Demelo, stood by silently, taking in the broken glass, the knocked-over chairs, the bald spot on the top of my head. Welcome to our lovely home, I wanted to say, but instead my face burned with shame.

Fully expecting my parents to finally say enough is enough and have Travis’s ass arrested for assault, they once again refused to press charges.

“What do you want to do?” Officer Demelo asked, and I looked up in surprise when I realized she was talking to me and only me.

“Now, now,” Officer Stepanich said, “this is really a parent decision.”

“I don’t think that wad of hair on the floor got there by itself and I can’t imagine that Meg here pulled it out of her own head,” Officer Demelo said, her eyes never leaving mine. I was surprised she remembered my name and even more impressed that she ignored the obviously senior officer’s lead. “Let’s see what she wants to do,” Officer Demelo insisted.

Travis smirked. He was six inches taller and about eighty pounds heavier than I was, but in that moment, knowing that only an ignorant coward would beat on his family the way he did, I felt stronger, more powerful. He thought he was invincible. But in that sliver of a moment, I knew that there was a way out for our family.

“I want to press charges,” I said, speaking only to Officer Demelo, who didn’t look much older than I was, but carried herself with a confidence I wanted for myself.

“You sure that’s what you want to do?” Officer Stepanich asked.

“Yes,” I said firmly. “I do.” Officer Stepanich turned to my parents, who looked bewildered but nodded their agreement. They took Travis away in handcuffs. He came back home a few days later. I expected him to exact some kind of revenge upon me, but he kept his distance, didn’t lay a hand on me. It didn’t keep him out of trouble, though. Over the years he’s been in and out of jail, most recently for drug possession. That arrest twenty years ago didn’t change Travis, but in my mind it saved my life.

“Travis will get nowhere near Maria,” Tim promised. He looked as if he’d like to say more, then settled on, “Talk to you later, Meg.” He drove away with Maria waving happily goodbye.

My windshield wipers can barely keep up with the thick snow that is falling. Great, I think. I’ll be shoveling for hours after I end my ten-hour shift at three o’clock. I debate whether to still make the Dutch letters tomorrow and decide to ditch that idea; instead, I’ll sleep in, watch TV, pick up a pizza from Casey’s and feel sorry for myself.

I feel my phone vibrate in my coat pocket. I peek at the display thinking it might be Maria. Stuart. Shit. I stuff my phone back into my coat. Stuart, a newspaper reporter who wrote for the Des Moines Observer and lived about an hour and a half from Broken Branch, and I called it quits about a month ago when I found out he wasn’t actually separated from his wife like he told me. Nope, they were still living under the same roof and, at least from her perspective, happily married. Yeah, the irony isn’t lost on me. I divorced my ex for screwing around and I end up being the other woman in some poor lady’s nightmare. Stuart said all the usual crap: I love you, it’s a loveless marriage, I’m leaving her, blah, blah, blah. Then there was the little issue where Stuart used me to get the biggest story of his career. I told him if he didn’t shut up I was going to shoot him with my Glock. I was only half joking.

I flip open the phone. “I’m working, Stuart,” I snap.

“Wait, wait,” he says. “This is a business call.”

“All the better reason for me to hang up,” I say shortly.

“I hear you’ve got an intruder at the school,” Stuart says in his breezy, confident way. Asshole.

“Where’d you hear that?” I ask cautiously, trying not to give away the fact that this is news to me.

“It’s all over, Meg. Our phone at the paper has been ringing off the hook. Kids are posting it on their walls and tweeting all about it. What’s going on?”

“I can’t comment on any ongoing investigation,” I say firmly, my mind spinning. An intruder at the school? No. If there was something going on I would know about it.

“Maria. Is she okay?”

“That’s none of your business,” I say softly. I wasn’t the only one Stuart hurt.

“Wait,” he says before I can hang up. “Maybe I can help you.”

“How’s that?” I say suspiciously.

“I can track the media end of things, keep you informed of what we hear, give you a heads-up on anything that sounds important.”

“Stuart,” I say, shaking my head. “Honestly, nothing you have to say to me is important anymore.”

Will

That morning, as Will Thwaite watched his grandchildren climb onto the school bus, the horizon not yet shaded with the petal-pink edging that comes before the sunrise, he realized, as he often did in the dark-cornered mornings, that he missed his wife terribly. He was so used to having Marlys there right by his side working the farm. She was the one who shook him awake at five each morning, the one who pushed a thermos of hot coffee into his hands and sent him out the door with the promise of a hot breakfast upon his return from feeding the cattle. He felt her absence the way one might miss a limb. Fifty years they would be married, this coming fall. He tried to remember the last time she had been away from the farm overnight and settled upon eleven years ago when she went to visit their fourth son, Jeffery, his wife and their newborn daughter in Omaha. She had packed a bag for four days, climbed into the Cadillac, hollered out the window that there were meals in the freezer for him to put in the microwave and drove away in a cloud of deep brown Iowa dust.

He sipped at his coffee, wincing at its bitter taste, not at all like Marlys’s, understanding why Marlys had to stay away for so much longer this time. It had been two months already and still she couldn’t give him a date when she would be returning home. Their youngest child and only daughter needed so much care and was having so many setbacks from the accident that it could be well into April before he would next see his wife. For many years Will thought that he might never see Holly again, she was set so hard against him. He suspected that if he tried to pin Holly down to exactly why she hated him, she wouldn’t quite be able to say, though she managed to poison his grandchildren against him. At least the boy, P.J., a quiet child with brown eyes, thick round glasses and the soul of an old man, had warmed to him rather quickly. The girl, Augustine—Augie—was a different matter altogether. When Will walked into the hospital, the cool institutional air a welcome reprieve from the dry, incessant Arizona heat, he felt a quickening of his pulse as he turned the corner and entered the burn unit. Slouching in an uncomfortable-looking chair was his daughter. But of course it wasn’t Holly, it couldn’t be. Holly was in a hospital bed recovering from third-degree burns. Besides, the forlorn creature before him was much too young to be Holly. But she had Holly’s pale skin, brown hair and plump roundness. Not fat by any means, but solid, in a healthy farm girl way, and he smiled inwardly at the thought. This was his granddaughter, and for a brief moment Will thought that this was his chance, his opportunity, to reclaim his wayward daughter, who for the past fifteen-odd years had dismissed him for reasons he couldn’t quite determine.

His hopes were quickly squelched when Marlys, always emotive and loud in the most inappropriate places, squealed in delight at seeing her grandchildren for the first time.

“Augustine? P.J.?” she asked loudly, causing the other visitors’ heads to snap up. She held her arms out to the children, expecting, Will supposed, for Augie and P.J. to leap from their seats and bound into them. Instead, the two gaped up at their grandmother, who Will had to admit was quite the sight. The worry over Holly, the frantic packing, the scrambling to make sure the farm duties were covered, had exhausted Marlys even before they left Broken Branch. Then there was their flight, the first ever for Marlys, and not knowing the ins and outs left her feeling small and inept. After finally arriving in Revelation and seeing her grandchildren, Marlys could no longer hold back the emotion. She gathered the stunned children into her arms, pushed them back from her at arm’s length after a moment to get a good look, then pulled them back to her.

“We’re your grandparents,” she cried through her tears. “Oh, aren’t you beautiful?” she said to Augie, whose mouth lifted into a wisp of a smile. “You look just like your mother did at your age. And you.” Marlys turned to P.J., lifting his chin with one work-worn finger. “Aren’t you a handsome young thing?” Her tears dripped down her wrinkled cheeks and plopped onto P.J.’s upturned face. The boy didn’t squirm away or wipe the moisture away from his forehead, but looked in awe up at his grandmother and then cast an unsure glance at his grandfather, who shrugged as if to say, I don’t know what she’s doing, either. When Will turned his gaze to Augie, hoping to share in the levity of moment, he was met with an accusing, suspicious glare. Holly had already filled his granddaughter with the tales of her childhood. The backbreaking work, the isolation of the farm, the battles over curfew, the unfairness of it all. While Marlys preened over the children, who basked in the attention, Will stepped back and busied himself with finding a nurse who could give him some information about the condition of his daughter.

Now, two months later, he was no closer to breaking down the wall that separated him from his granddaughter. God knows he had tried. He understood how hard being away from her mother must be for Augie and he tried to give her space. He waited one full week before telling her that chores were an essential part of living on the farm, that she needed to contribute. It had been easy with P.J., who followed his grandfather with rapt attention. Augie, on the other hand, would retreat to her room, Holly’s old bedroom, each day after school and wouldn’t emerge until the next morning. She answered any questions in monosyllabic grunts and refused to eat with them. Claimed to be a vegetarian, scowled and scoffed at the fact that he was a cattleman, that he raised animals for food. He knew better than to argue with Augie, tried to be patient. Though at times he thought he would explode with frustration, he vowed to try and educate her gradually, if not a bit gruffly. But she certainly didn’t make it easy for him. She still glared at him with disdain and took every opportunity she could to argue and disagree with what he said. It was like raising Holly all over again. But the thing was, over the years, after his relationship with his daughter had disintegrated into far-flung memories of when she was little and thought he hung the moon, he swore if he had the chance to do it over again, he would do things differently. Now the opportunity had presented itself in Augie, a clone of his daughter, and damned if he still couldn’t get it right.

Holly

Once again I woke up to another morning in the hospital. I’m beginning to think that I’ll never be able to leave this place. I want to rip the IV from my arm and run away screaming. My entire life I’ve been trying to get free, first from my folks and from Broken Branch and all its small-town hokeyness. Then it was from my marriage to David and the way being tied to one person, or maybe it was just him, suffocated me. So first I severed ties with my Iowa family, leaving them behind without a hug or a kiss, just an I’ve gotta get out of here or I’m going to die, and not once did I ever look back. Ran away to Colorado with a boy who I grew up with. We got sick of each other after only a year, so off I went to Arizona where I ended up going to cosmetology school. There I met David; we got married and had Augie. That fiasco lasted an entire seven years. He tried to get me to stay, said he wanted another baby, wanted to grow old together. I told him I couldn’t live this way anymore, that I would die if I had to wake up one more morning looking at the same god-awful flocked wallpaper or listen to our next-door neighbor go on and on about how the neighborhood was going to hell.

“We’ll take off the wallpaper,” David had said. “We can move,” he promised. So we took down the wallpaper and I got pregnant. But he knew. He understood that it wasn’t the wallpaper or the neighbors. It was us. Really me, who couldn’t stand being there, being married, being trapped in the suburbs, which isn’t all that different from small-town Iowa. David looked so hurt, so wounded, when he watched P.J. People tended to regard me that way after they’ve been around me for any length of time. First my mother and father. Especially my father. How I took private glee in the look on his face when I told him that living on a farm was like hell on earth, that spending one more minute in Broken Branch was a minute wasted, thrown away, never to be retrieved. My older brothers called me selfish and ungrateful. My mother cried. I felt bad about that. But it didn’t make me want to stay. My father actually helped carry my suitcase out to the old Plymouth Arrow I had saved up for by detasseling corn every summer since I was thirteen.

“You are seventeen years old, Holly,” my father said. “And I know you think you’ve got all the answers, but what you are doing to your mother is inexcusable.”

“I can’t spend another day here,” I told him, not able to look him in the eyes, instead staring over his shoulder out at the acres and acres of ankle-high seed corn. “I can’t explain it.”

My father was quiet for a minute. His green John Deere hat perched on his head, pulled low so that his eyes were shaded. But I already knew they were looking at me with disapproval. He leaned against the back hatch of the Plymouth, his tan arms folded across his chest. “You’re ashamed of being the daughter of a farmer? You think you’re too good enough for this life? Is that it?”

I shook my head, mortified. “No! That’s not it.”

“Well, from where I’m standing, it sure appears that way. I understand you wanting to travel, see the world, but there’s no need to leave this way, like you’ve waited your whole life to get away from your mother and me.”

But I have, I wanted to say to him, but didn’t. “I just can’t seem to stand myself in my own skin while I’m here,” I tried to explain, knowing that I was failing miserably.

“You think that’s going to change when you drive away from here? You think your skin is going to fit you any better?”

“Yes, in fact, I do,” I said, shaken that he had pegged it exactly. I was terrified that wherever it was I ended up I would feel the exact same way. That I needed to leave.

“You’ll be back,” my father said with a sureness that made my chest hum with anger. “You’ll come back, and when you do, you owe your mother an apology.”

“I won’t be back,” I spat back. “I’m never coming back here, ever.”

My father shook his head and laughed a little. A light chuckle. “Oh, you’ll be back.” He reached out to give me a hug but I stepped past him. “Well, I guess you’ve been through about every boy and man in the county, not much left to stay for.” I just climbed into my car without even saying goodbye. As I pulled away from the farm, I looked in my rearview mirror and there was my father, already turned away from me, surrounded by the dust and gravel kicked up into the air from my tires, heading toward his cattle that never seemed to disappoint and certainly never talked back to him.

I was true to my word. I had never returned, not once, to Broken Branch in the eighteen years since I left. But I wonder if I did the next worse thing by sending my children there.

Mrs. Oliver

Mrs. Oliver hardly dared to look away from the stranger standing in front of her, but the cries of her students pulled her gaze away from the man who looked vaguely familiar.

Sixteen of the seventeen children were helplessly staring up at Mrs. Oliver, some with tears in their eyes, waiting for direction as to what to do. The monthly tornado and fire drills had done nothing to prepare them for this. Not even the Code Red Lockdown drills could have readied them for the surprisingly calm, albeit slightly manic-looking man dangling a gun from his fingers. Only one child, P. J. Thwaite, the son of one of her former students, Holly Thwaite, was peering raptly at the man, scanning his face, not as if he knew him, but as if maybe, at one time, he had seen him somewhere before. The man stared back at P.J., his expression flat and unemotional, which unnerved Mrs. Oliver even more.

As a classroom teacher Mrs. Oliver couldn’t begin to count the number of times she had needed to appear unruffled and completely in control. There was the time, her first year teaching no less, when seven-year-old Bert Gorse, on a dare, decided to climb to the top of the tall steel slide and try to jump and grab onto the branch of a nearby maple tree. Mrs. Oliver remembered watching in horror from her position across the playground as Bert leaped into the air, his eyes screwed shut, his hands reaching for the branch, fingers clawing at the rough bark. “For God’s sake!” she yelled before she could stop herself. “Open your eyes!” Unable to grab the limb, Bert fell twelve feet to the hardscrabble earth below. Calmly, she told the little girl standing next to her to run as fast as she could to get help.

“You swore,” the girl breathed in disbelief.

Mrs. Oliver bent down and put her face so close to the little girl’s she could smell the peanut butter sandwich the child had eaten for lunch and said in the low, even tone that children for the next forty years would know to take seriously, “Run.” Trying not to wobble in her new high heels, Mrs. Oliver made her way as quickly as possible over to Bert, who was sprawled out on his belly, unmoving. The knot of terrified boys who surrounded Bert began unraveling at her approach. “Go stand next to the building,” she ordered, and the boys obeyed at once. Mrs. Oliver knelt down, the knees of her brand-new polyester pantsuit grinding into the dirt. Bert’s eyes were open but glazed over with pain or shock. “Not dead!” Mrs. Oliver said joyfully, and behind her the children erupted with a soft whoosh of relief. “Are you okay, Bert?” she questioned, but Bert’s mouth could only open and close soundlessly like a fish on dry land. “Got the wind knocked out of you?” she said in her smooth, low manner that the children found reassuring. Mrs. Oliver maneuvered herself onto her stomach and lay next to Bert so she could better see his pale, pinched face and where he could see her round, placid one. “It’s going to be just fine, Bert. Just lie still now until help comes,” she said soothingly.

Bert was okay, although he ended up with two broken arms and a collapsed lung. Once Bert regained the use of his hands, he wrote his teacher a lovely letter in his messy cursive, thanking her for waiting with him until the ambulance arrived. Mrs. Oliver still had that letter, now framed and hanging in the room that her grown daughter, Georgiana, called the Shrine to Mrs. Oliver. Bert Gorse was now a fifty-year-old banker who lived in Des Moines with his wife and three children. Through the years, Mrs. Oliver remained steadfast in her belief that a teacher needed to be calm and in control under any circumstance. Certainly unlike Gretchen Small, the young fifth-grade teacher, who began to hyperventilate when the fire alarm accidentally went off.

Mrs. Oliver straightened her spine, cleared her throat and willed her voice to emerge strong and clear. “What do you want?” she demanded, stepping between P.J. and the man with the gun.

Meg

I’m debating whether to give Stuart’s claim that there is a gunman in the school any credence and call dispatch when the squawk of my radio stops me short.

It’s Randall Diehl, our dispatcher. “You need to go over to the school right now. We’ve got a lockdown.”

Maria’s school. Damn. Stuart was right.

“What’s up?” I ask. Since I’ve lived here there have only been two lockdowns at the school, a kindergarten through twelfth-grade building. One of the last of its kind. At the end of this school year Broken Branch’s only school would be closed down; too expensive and outdated to maintain, the superintendent and school board voted to consolidate with three other nearby towns. In the future, Maria’s school district would be known as Dalsing-Conway-Bohr-Broken Branch Consolidated Schools.

The first lockdown I was involved with was two years ago when two inmates from the Anamosa State Penitentiary escaped and were thought to be in our area. They weren’t. The second time was when two misguided high schoolers called in a fake bomb threat. They hadn’t studied for their finals and thought this would cleverly get them out of the tests. It most certainly did that. And got them kicked out of school.

“We got a possible intruder in the school. Just head on over there,” Randall says impatiently, which was not like him at all. “The chief will meet you and he’ll fill you in. Communication is a mess. The 9-1-1 lines are jammed with calls from students, teachers, frantic parents.”

“Will do,” I tell him, and flip on my windshield wipers to clear away the snow. Interesting, Chief McKinney already at the scene. I check the clock. Just after noon. Probably just a misunderstanding, a prank by some kids to kick off spring vacation. Maria will be sad she missed all the excitement.

I turn the squad car around and head up Hickory Street toward the school and am grateful to have something to occupy my time besides the thought of spending four whole days without Maria, which makes me feel empty, as if my insides have been hollowed out. Tim always said he couldn’t ever imagine me as a kid. The few pictures that I had of myself as a child showed me as a serious, unsmiling creature with unkempt hair, wearing a pair of my brother Travis’s old jeans.

“Did you ever have any fun?” Tim teased when he first saw the photos.

“I had fun,” I protested, though that was pretty much a lie. My childhood consisted of taking care of my parents, who, for reasons still unknown, were completely defeated by life, and trying to stay out of the way of my volatile brother. When Tim and I had Maria I was determined to make her childhood as carefree and joy-filled as mine wasn’t. I think we did a pretty good job of this, at least until the divorce, and even then Tim and I did our best to protect Maria. We didn’t argue in front of her, we didn’t bad-mouth each other, but she knew. How could she not? Even if we didn’t make a big spectacle out of the end of our marriage, she had to have seen my red, swollen eyes, Tim’s tight, forced laughter.

In minutes I pull up to the school and find Chief McKinney already there along with Aaron Gritz—curious, because he isn’t on duty today—trying to keep a small, angry-looking group away from the school’s entrance. Chief McKinney’s deep baritone fills the air. “Go on back to your cars or you are all going to freeze standing out here. We need to find out exactly what’s going on and we can’t do that if we have to concern ourselves with—”

A woman steps forward, waving her cell phone, and in a trembling voice interrupts the chief. “My son just called me from inside and he said there was a man with a gun. Can’t you get them out of there?”

“Based on the information we have,” Chief McKinney says patiently, “we’ve determined that the best response is to contain the area and not send officers into the school at this time.”

“But my seventh grader called and said there were two men,” another woman speaks up.

A man in a dress shirt and tie, no coat, rushes forward. “I heard there’s a bomb threat. Are you evacuating?”

“This is exactly what the problem is,” Chief McKinney says to me in a low voice, pointing first at the school and then the crowd, snowflakes collecting on his bristly gray mustache. “We can’t begin to know what’s going on in there if we’re chasing rumors out here.” He turns his back to the crowd and drops his voice to a whisper. “Meg, dispatch got a call from a man who says he’s inside the building with a gun. Said for everyone to stay out or he’ll start shooting. I want tape and barriers set up around the entire perimeter of the school.” He turns to Gritz. “Aaron, escort everyone about three hundred feet back.

“Okay, folks,” the chief says in a firm but nonconfrontational voice. “Please follow Officer Gritz’s directions now. We need to get to work here. I promise if we have any news to share, we will let you know immediately.”

I know what each of these parents is thinking of. The mass shooting at Columbine. It crossed my mind, too. Columbine changed everything in the way law enforcement responds to these situations. If we had evidence that the perpetrator in the school had started shooting, the chief would have immediately sent in a rapid deployment team to the source of the threat. Thankfully that hasn’t happened in this case. Yet. Because the suspect called dispatch and threatened the students and anyone who entered the building, we were approaching this as a hostage situation, meaning we were going to try to contact the intruder, find out what he wants and attempt to calmly talk our way out of this. The second there is evidence that shooting has started, we’d be in there. But for now, we needed more information.

“Won’t forcing the parents away from here cause a panic?” I ask Aaron in a quiet voice so the crowd won’t hear.

“I think they are already in a panic,” Aaron responds. He is wearing his rabbit-trimmed aviator hat with earflaps and his nose is red from the cold.

Just after my divorce was finalized, I got the police officer position with the Broken Branch Police Department. Aaron was on the interview team. Aaron is fortyish, divorced with two children and very handsome. At the interview Aaron asked me why I wanted to move to such a small community as Broken Branch when I was used to the larger, more urban city of Waterloo. “The fact that Broken Branch is a small, rural community is exactly why I want to settle down here. It’s a perfect place to raise a daughter.” What I refrained from telling the interview team was that I needed distance from Tim and our divorce. Waterloo wasn’t such a big city. Every time I turned a corner I ran into someone who knew my ex-husband, my parents, had been scammed by my brother. Besides, the hours that I worked for the Waterloo Police Force were terrible for a single mother. Broken Branch was only about an hour from Waterloo, close enough for Tim to easily see Maria.

I fell in love with Broken Branch years earlier when Tim and I drove through on our way to Des Moines. We stopped to buy honey from an old man selling jars of the amber liquid out of the back of his pickup truck.

“How did Broken Branch get its name? It’s so unusual?” I asked.

“Now, that is a great story,” the man said as he placed a large glass jar of clover honey, slim honey sticks and homemade beeswax candles carefully into a plastic bag and handed it to Tim. “Most people say it’s because the poor people who first settled here discovered a huge fallen tree over fifty feet long filled with an enormous beehive in it. Thousands and thousands of bees were buzzing inside and around the tree. Wanting the honey inside, they called on the help of an old woman who was known to have a way with bees. The story goes that she walked down to that hollowed-out tree and began singing a strange foreign song and all the bees became silent and followed her as she walked and sang. There were bees in her hair and on her arms, but still she walked and sang. Not one bee stung her. She led the bees to another felled tree down by the creek and the bees created a new home there. The settlers, who were poor and starving, gathered all that honey out of the broken branch and lived off of it for the winter. They were so thankful to the old woman that they offered to name the town after her, but she said that the thanks should lie with the bees and the tree that housed them. So they respected her wishes and named the town Broken Branch.”

I was completely enchanted by the story, and as Tim and I explored the peaceful streets lined with modest homes and towering trees, I knew I would return to Broken Branch. Little did I know that it would be to stay.

Fortunately, I impressed Chief McKinney, Aaron and the rest of the interview team enough for them to offer me the job.

A few months later, I found myself sitting alone with Aaron at a local bar after Broken Branch’s citywide softball tournament where I played first base. I had too much sun, not enough food and two lousy beers, and in the singular most embarrassing moment of my life, I made a halfhearted pass at Aaron. He gently pulled me off of him and told me that he wasn’t interested.

“I’m boring, too serious, aren’t I?” I asked. He looked at me for a very long time.

“No, Meg, you’re not boring, you’re great. It just wouldn’t be a good idea,” he said, and left me standing there. Though a few years have passed since that mortifying encounter, and Aaron has not brought it up once, I still blush bright red whenever I think of that night.

As I return to my car to retrieve a roll of crime tape, once again I feel my phone vibrate. Stuart. He just doesn’t give up. A text this time. I decide to ignore it and begin unraveling the police tape.

I met Stuart last January when Maria and I were cross-country skiing in Ox-eye Bluff. Maria, a novice at skiing, fell down one too many times. The final straw was that after the umpteenth tumble Maria’s skis became tangled in a thorny bramble of twigs at the side of the trail. By the time I freed her, Maria had worked herself into such a snit she refused to put her skis back on or to even walk out of the valley. We sat there for twenty minutes, Maria’s tears freezing against her cheeks, until a skier came gliding down the trail. He swooshed to a stop in front of us “Everything okay?” he asked.

“We’re fine,” I answered. “Just an equipment malfunction. We’re resting up for a few minutes.”

“Your mom can’t keep up with you, can she?” the man said to Maria, eliciting her first smile of the afternoon. “That’s what happens when you get old.” He smiled conspiratorially at her. “People can’t maintain the vigorous pace of us youngsters.”

“Exactly how old do you think I am?” I asked him through narrowed eyes.

“It’s rude to comment on a lady’s age.” He sniffed and then gave me a mischievous smile. “Why don’t you help me get her up,” he said to Maria. “If we leave her here much longer the wolves will start circling.”

I was about to tell him I was obviously fifteen years his junior and could drop a wild animal at two hundred yards with my eyes closed, but to my surprise Maria quickly scrambled to her feet and held out a hand to help me up. “Let’s go, Mom,” she said. “I think I hear howling.”

“There are no wolves in Ox-eye Bluff,” I said, reaching out my hands for the man and Maria to pull me to my feet. “I don’t think there are any wolves in Iowa for that matter. Coyotes, yes. Wolves, no.” The man was tall, at least six foot, fit with a lean face and closely cut brown hair flecked with gray.

He caught me looking and had the decency to blush. “It’s premature.”

“Yeah, right,” I said, raising my eyebrows. Together, the three of us skied to the end of the trail and then hiked our way out of the valley to where my car was parked. We didn’t talk much but I did learn that the man’s name was Stuart Moore and that he was a writer for the Des Moines Observer, the largest newspaper in the state. He also worked into the conversation how he had three grown children and was separated, the divorce held up by his wife.

“You don’t look old enough to have three adult children,” I said in mock disbelief.

“Well, child marriage, you know,” he answered as he clipped my skis onto the top of my car.

“You must have been what? Like twelve?” I played along.

“Something like that.” He laughed.

“What brings you here?” I asked. “Des Moines is an hour and a half from here.”

“I actually live just north of Des Moines, so it’s not quite that far. I’ve skied all over Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin. Ox-eye has some of the best trails and no one else seems to know about it. I almost always have the trails to myself,” he explained.

“Until now,” Maria piped up.

“Until now,” Stuart agreed.

Stuart and I took it slow. At first, anyway. I was still bruised from my divorce and Aaron’s mortifying rebuff and I had Maria to think about. That winter we would run into each other at Ox-eye and end up cross-country skiing, or snowshoeing. In the spring and summer we would, by some unspoken agreement, meet up at Ox-eye to hike the trails. Sometimes with Maria, sometimes not.

The first time Stuart and I slept together was only about two months ago. Maria was spending the weekend at Tim’s house. There wasn’t enough snow for skiing anymore so I invited him back to my house for the first time. Being with Stuart, the way he touched me, the way he tucked a strand of my hair behind my ear, made me feel safe and needed. He confided to me how his soon-to-be ex-wife had an affair with one of his colleagues, how it tore him apart, tore his family apart. How the divorce was finally going through. I told him about my work as a police officer in a small town, about Tim and the slow burn of my marriage. We drank too much wine and for three hours I didn’t think of DUIs or meth labs or disputes over fence lines. I didn’t think of Tim or even of Maria. I led Stuart into my bedroom and shut out the rest of the world. For a while I thought that maybe, just possibly, Stuart and I would end up together. How wrong I was. Within a matter of days I learned two crucial things about Stuart: he was married and would do anything to get a story. I don’t think Stuart had this grand plan of using me to get his big scoop. But the opportunity presented itself and Stuart took it.

I finish unwinding the yellow tape, bright and almost cheerful against the whiteness of the snow, if not for the bold black words declaring Police Line Do Not Cross.

Will

That morning Will had slipped into his warmest coveralls, his seventy-year-old joints protesting loudly. He tightly laced his brown leather work boots, pulled on the black-and-yellow winter hat that Marlys knit for him years before and wiggled his thick, rough hands into his insulated pigskin gloves. He stepped outside and made his way past the steel bins filled with corn and soybeans and past the concrete silo. It was a still, quiet morning; the sun had risen as a cold, dull orb in the gray sky, emitting a weak light. He moved toward the feed lot and the heifer paddock slightly out of breath, his heart thrumming with the exertion. Once Marlys returned home, he knew she would try and get him to the doctor and he would refuse.

The Angus had approached him in anticipation, regarding him with their large, soft eyes. And when Will bent over to check the feed bunks he saw that the cattle had licked them clean. The girls were hungry. He found the same slick bunks in the steer pen and checked his watch. He was late again. He had sluggishly gone to the barn where he methodically mixed the cattle feed, a mixture of hay, corn, cornstalks and corn gluten. Good thing he had Daniel, the hired hand, who had already cleaned out the paddocks and spread fresh hay across the frozen ground.

Being irresponsible regarding the farm chores was so unlike him, but without Marlys here everything he did was a little bit off his routine, off-kilter.

It was nearing one o’clock now and Will was making his rounds, checking on all the cows preparing for birth. This he couldn’t put off; if he did, he could have some dead calves and cows on his hands.

The nightly phone calls, always at seven-thirty Iowa time, five-thirty Arizona time, were the worst. First P.J. would talk, chattering on about how much he liked the farm, the snow and sledding, his new school, until Will would gently coax the phone from his fingers and hand it to Augie, who stood by nervously chewing her fingernails.

“Hi, Mom,” Augie would say, her throat dense with tears and something else, regret, guilt maybe. Then there would be a series of yeses, noes, okays. No elaboration on her new life in Broken Branch, short, curt responses. Augie would hand the phone back to Will and rush from the farmhouse, inadequately dressed in a hooded sweatshirt and tennis shoes. Will wasn’t sure where she ran off to, but figured it was probably the old hayloft in the south barn. That’s always where her mother had hidden when she was upset.

Then it was Will’s turn to try and make conversation. “How are you?” he would ask. “Feeling better today?”

Fine, yes, Holly would answer thickly, as if her tongue was swollen or she was heavily medicated. Both were likely.

“P.J. really has taken to farm life. Who would’ve thought? He’s a big help. Asks a lot of questions.”

“Oh, well, good.”

“Augie is a real city girl. Reminds me a lot of you.” Will chuckled. No response. “They miss you, but I’m taking good care of them. No worries, now, you hear?”

“Okay.”

“You get better fast, Hol. Love you.”

“Bye.”

He wasn’t a particularly demonstrative man. Wasn’t the hugging kind. But when his children were under his roof there was not one night that went by where he didn’t tell them he loved them. He saw his share of fellow soldiers cut down in Vietnam when he served as a lieutenant. Boys who would have given anything to tell their wives, their kids, their folks, they loved them one more time. Every night Will would go to his children’s bedrooms and tell them one by one that he loved them. When they were little they would throw themselves into his arms, even Holly, pressing their scrubbed faces into his neck, inhaling the complicated, earthy smells of the farm that rose from his pores. When the boys were older they would casually toss back a Love you, too, Dad, and Will was satisfied. Those words said, he could sleep well that night. Holly, his youngest, was another story. When she was twelve something shifted. She no longer looked at him through the eyes of a little girl who adored her father, but would look at him askance, her eyes judgmental slits. Love you, Hol, he would say, coming to the doorway of her bedroom but not stepping over the threshold into her realm of bottles of nail polish and piles of clothes.

“Good night,” she would say without looking directly at him, snapping the pages of a fashion magazine in irritation.

“Love you, Holly,” he would repeat a little more loudly.

“Uh-huh,” she would answer absentmindedly, and a spark of anger would ignite low in his breastbone.

Eventually he didn’t even bother opening her bedroom door to say good-night. He would knock twice on her door. “Night, Holly. Love you,” he would call through the closed door and briskly walk away. He couldn’t bear seeing the disdain on her face, of not hearing the sweetness of those three little words in response. Now here he was, eighteen years later, saying I love you to a daughter who still couldn’t seem to find one reason to say it back.

After he finished feeding the cattle, he went to the big barn where he and Daniel had moved four expecting heifers earlier in the week. Over one hundred calves were due to be born by mid-May. Despite the shelter from the barn walls, the cold had still seeped in and Will worried that some of the new calves might perish in the bitter weather.

Will patted the sleek rump of the heifer. He would have to stay close and check on her throughout the day. He expected a calf by that evening. He looked up at the sound of a shout. Through the wide doorway, Daniel was waving and jogging toward him. Daniel Tucker was an equable, methodical man of around thirty, unmarried and thoroughly dedicated to the animals and the land. He was a great help to Will, had a calm, gentle way around the cattle, was dependable and a hard worker. In addition to helping Will out on his farm, Daniel was renting farmland from Will in order to raise crops, hoping to one day purchase his own slice of Iowa. As Daniel came closer, his normally placid face was creased in concern; Will realized something wasn’t quite right.

“The school,” Daniel said breathlessly, his cheeks red, his nose running from the biting cold. “Something is happening at the school,” he said again, swiping his arm across his nose.

“What happened?” Will felt his heartbeat gathering speed and guiltily he realized that his thoughts went immediately to P.J., Augie a beat later.

“Something about a man with a gun,” Daniel said, and pulled his stocking cap from his head. “My sister just called me, my niece and nephew go to the school—she’s frantic. Said there’s a big crowd of parents at the school trying to find out what’s going on.”

“My daughter-in-law teaches fourth grade at the school,” Will said, pulling his hat from his head. “I need to call my son. You want to go be with your sister?” Will asked, biting his lip.

“Thought you’d want to go check on P.J. and Augie,” Daniel answered, reaching into his coat pocket for a handkerchief and blowing wetly into it. “And Todd’s wife, of course.”

“I’d appreciate that, Dan,” Will answered gratefully. “Numbers 87 and 134 will give birth sometime today. Can you stay near?” Will asked, pointing toward a wide-shouldered black-baldie whose swollen flank and udders looked ready to burst.

“You betcha,” Daniel said, patting his boss on the shoulder. “If you hear anything, let me know.”

The two moved quickly but in silence back toward the house. The only sounds were the wind whistling between the outbuildings and the mild lowing of the cattle, now satiated and huddled together trying to keep warm.

“Who would do such a thing?” Daniel finally asked, stretching his stocking cap back over his ears.

Will shook his head in bewilderment. He knew just about every single person in Broken Branch, and though there were a few mean, crazy sons of bitches, he couldn’t imagine anyone walking into a school with a gun. “Don’t know, Daniel. I’ll go see what I can find out,” he assured him, and went into the house. Will didn’t bother to change out of his coveralls or his dirty work boots but paused to grab the cell phone he seldom used. Then, unaware of the streaks of muck and manure he was trailing across Marlys’s carpet, he made his way into his tiny office. He spun the lock on his Browning gun safe, pulled it open and retrieved his Mossberg 500 pump action shotgun and tucked a box of shells into his pocket. Just in case.

Augie

Mr. Ellery steps out of the room and Noah and Justin follow him to the doorway. “Go sit down. Now,” he orders, his voice so serious that even Noah knows better than to disobey him.

“What’s going on?” Beth Cragg asks nervously, chewing on her fingers. Beth is the closest thing to a friend that I have in Broken Branch. Our grandmothers are friends and had unsuccessfully tried to make our mothers into best friends when they were our age. I guess they thought this was their second chance, because ten minutes after P.J. and I arrived at the farmhouse Beth and her grandma showed up with a plate of lemon squares. But I was the one who looked like she had sucked on a lemon when I first met Beth. We seemed so different from each other. Beth is all farm girl. She wears Levi’s and John Deere sweatshirts or McGee Feed Store T-shirts every single day. Beth is one of those girls who is naturally beautiful and doesn’t even know it. She has freckled skin and pulls her shiny brown hair back into a ponytail or twists it into a braid that lies across her shoulder like a thick rope. Whenever I try to wear my hair in a braid it looks like an anorexic rattail. The boys in eighth grade love her because she is still interested in chasing toads and skipping stones across the creek and because she belongs to 4-H and raises calves that she shows at the county fair each summer. She can talk about crops and guns and goes pheasant and deer hunting with her father. All except this year, because of her parents’ divorce. In the past two months, though, we have become friends. Beth is nice and is a good listener. Plus, she was the one person, including my grandpa and P.J., who didn’t make fun of the way I dyed my hair red. Now that’s a true friend. And we do have something in common. Our parents. Mine are divorced and Beth’s mom and dad are getting a divorce. She listens to me while I bitch about having to leave Arizona to live with my grandfather and she complains about how sad her mom is and how her dad tries to make her feel guilty for taking her mother’s side.

“What’s going on?” Beth asks again, her voice shaking. I feel my stomach flip with worry and I think of P.J. Then I think of my mother back in Revelation and I want to talk to her more than anything. My cell phone is in my book bag, which is in my locker out in the hallway, and I wonder if Mr. Ellery will let me go and get it.

“We’re in lockdown,” Mr. Ellery says seriously when he comes back into the room. “Not a drill.” He runs a hand through his black hair and pulls at his goatee. He shuts the classroom door and pushes the round button, locking us in. So much for going to get my phone.

“Hey, what are you doing?” Noah asks in surprise.

“Shhh, I’m thinking.” Mr. Ellery bites his lip and looks out the small window set into the door and then turns back toward us. “Let’s all move back to that corner.” He points to the space behind his desk away from the door and windows.

“Is it someone with a gun?” Felicia asks, her eyes wide.

“Oh, my God,” someone behind me whispers.

“We don’t know that,” Mr. Ellery says quickly.

“We can’t stay in here and wait for someone to come in and blow us away,” Noah says angrily, and I realize how much of a jerk he is all over again.

“No, we stay,” Mr. Ellery says firmly. “Until we get the all clear, we stay.”

Noah looks like he is going to argue, but as one by one everyone stands and goes to the back corner of the room and begins to squeeze themselves into the space between the teacher’s desk and the wall, he decides to follow.

“The boys should sit on the outside,” Savannah says.

“Fuck that.” Noah glares at her. “I’m not going to be anyone’s shield. I want to be as close to the window as I can. I’m going to get the hell out of here first chance I get.”

“Hey, Noah, just cool it,” Mr. Ellery says in a way that makes me think he wouldn’t mind climbing out a window, too. “No one’s going to be anyone’s shield. Does anyone mind sitting on the edges?” Five hands go up, including Beth’s and Drew’s. Slowly I raise mine. “Okay, guys, thanks.” Mr. Ellery nods at us. “Everyone take a seat. No talking.” He flips the light switch and the room turns gray, matching the sky outside.

I settle onto the hard linoleum floor and rest my back against the side of Mr. Ellery’s desk. Beth sits down on one side of me, Drew on the other. Mr. Ellery first goes to the window and lowers the blinds and then goes to the phone sitting on his desk, picks it up, puts the receiver to his ear and then eventually hangs up. He pulls himself up onto the desk, his long legs not quite touching the floor. “Phone isn’t working,” he says. After a minute he reaches into his pocket for his cell phone and punches in three numbers.

After several tries he finally says, “This is Jason Ellery from the school. Something seems to be going on here.” He listens for a moment. “Yes, everyone in my class is safe and accounted for.” He listens again and then reaches for his grade book that he keeps on his desk. One by one he reads off our names in alphabetical order. My name comes last, I suppose because I joined the class midyear. “Augustine Baker,” he says, and I hear Noah snort back a laugh. “Will Thwaite’s granddaughter.” Again there is silence as he listens. “The classroom phones aren’t working, my cell is about halfway charged.” He pulls the phone from his mouth and says in a loud whisper, “Anyone have their cell phone with them?” No one says anything. We’re supposed to keep our phones in our lockers and not bring them into the classroom with us. Supposedly, some kids were using their phones to look up test answers on the internet and texting during class and the principal banned phones in the classroom. “Come on,” he says more loudly. “We don’t have time for this. Does anyone have their cell phone with them right now?” Three hands slowly go up, including Noah Plum’s. No surprise there. “Make sure they’re turned off and bring them here.”

“No way,” Noah snorts. “It’s my phone.”

“Noah, I’m not kidding around here,” Mr. Ellery says sharply. “We don’t know how long we’re going to be stuck in here. The school phones don’t work and we need to conserve the batteries on the phones we do have.”

“I want to call my mom,” Beth calls out in a soft voice. “Can I call my mom?”

“Me, too,” someone says, and there is a chorus of me, toos and I find my voice joining in. I want nothing more than to talk to my mother right now. I wouldn’t freeze her out the way I have for the past two months, answering her questions in three words or less. Okay, I guess. I don’t know. Yeah.

“I can’t stop you, but we could be here for a long time. The 9-1-1 dispatcher knows everyone is okay and will let your folks know. Someone is going to call us back when they have more info.” Mr. Ellery shrugs his shoulders and waits.

Noah immediately starts punching numbers into his phone and before I can stop myself I whisper loudly, “What an idiot.”

“Shut up, Augustine,” he snarls, but snaps the phone shut and sets it next to where Mr. Ellery is sitting. The others with phones do the same.

“Thanks, guys,” Mr. Ellery says. “You can have them back at any time. For now we just wait.” He pulls himself up onto his desk. He holds a long slim, wooden pointer that he uses to show us capitals of countries none of us will probably ever visit and I wonder if he really thinks that a simple stick can protect us from whatever is out there. But I’m still glad he’s here. Mr. Ellery won’t let anything bad happen to us.

Meg

As I move back toward the parking lot I see Dorothy Jones, the owner of Knitting and Notions, a local craft shop, and the president of the school board, walking toward me.

“Hi, Dorothy, I don’t have any info. You’ll have to move back behind the tape.”

“Please, Meg,” she begs. “I’ll just take a few minutes of your time. It’s important.” I invite her to join me in the cruiser. She walks around to the other side of the car, opens the door and climbs in.

Dorothy is fiftyish with midnight-black hair that is cut into a severe, chin-length bob and is attractive in an eclectic, trendy way. She normally wears bright red lipstick and artfully ripped jeans and Chuck Taylor tennis shoes, but now her face is bare of any makeup and she has on sweatpants and a thin spring coat. She has resided in Broken Branch for just over two years, but has accomplished much in the short time she has lived here. A single mother of two teens who attend the school, Dorothy opened Knitting and Notions, renovated an old farmhouse south of town and managed to be elected to the local school board, ousting Clement Heitzman, who had been president for the past twelve years. Dorothy has also been instrumental in the coordination of the consolidation of several area schools, which will now lead to the closing of Broken Branch’s school, sending all the high school kids to the nearby town of Conway, the middle school students to Bohr and the elementary students to Dalsing or Broken Branch, depending on where they live. The construction of Broken Branch’s new elementary school is scheduled to be completed this July, ready to open at the end of August. Many folks around town are miffed with Dorothy for closing their beloved school, as most townspeople spent the entirety of their education within the walls of that building. As somewhat of an outsider, I can understand the reasoning for closing the school. It’s a monstrosity, impossible to heat in the winter and sweltering in the warm months. Its water heater and furnace are ancient and I’m certain the ceilings are full of asbestos. Dorothy, along with the superintendent of schools, somehow convinced the rest of the board that by consolidating four area towns’ schools, the children would be well-educated and safe.

Dorothy gathers her spring jacket more tightly around herself. “I should have never put away my winter coat. That little taste of spring we had last week fooled me.” Dorothy gives me a pained smile. I try not to appear impatient, but I certainly don’t have time to talk weather with the school board president. I smile back but do not respond to her small talk. Dorothy takes a deep breath and looks at me levelly. “I can’t be sure about this, but I wanted to make sure you knew about a few things that had been going on in the school. Things that could possibly have some relevance to what’s happening.”

“What kinds of things?” I ask.

“Technically, I’m not supposed to say anything about this. The discussions we had were in a closed session of a board meeting.”

Now I am beginning to become impatient. “Dorothy,” I say, “if you have any information that will help us resolve what’s going on in there, you need to tell me.”

“I could get in big trouble for this. There are legal issues, lawyers involved.”

“Dorothy,” I say warningly.

“I know, I know.” Dorothy bites her lip. “There was a personnel issue with a teacher last year. He was charged with assaulting a student last year.”

“Yes, Rick Wilbreicht,” I recall. “I remember that. I thought he moved to Sioux City, but we’ll definitely have someone check it out. Thank you.” I pat her on the shoulder and wait for her to exit the car. She stays put.

“Dorothy, I really need to get moving here.”

“Okay.” Dorothy exhales loudly. “I’ve become aware of a situation with one of the students here. Severe bullying. Name calling, pushing, hitting.”

“Really?” I ask in surprise. Not that I’m not naive that bullying is going on in the school, but I would have thought the school administration would have reported any physical abuse to us. But still, I don’t have time for this unless it directly relates to this case. “Dorothy, is this going somewhere?”

“The student did report it to his teachers, many times. But nothing changed.”

“So you think this student is so angry, he would have gone into the school with a gun to get revenge? Was the bullying that bad?”

“He said it was constant. Things were posted online about his sexuality. A video making fun of him and showing kids pushing and shoving him is online also.” Tears begin to pool in her blue eyes and she starts to shiver, though the interior of the car is warm, hot air blasting through the vents. An electric current runs through me. We finally might be getting a break in the case.

“Dorothy, who is this boy? Does he have access to a gun?”

She shakes her head miserably. “I can’t imagine it would be too hard to get hold of one, though. Every home in the area has at least one gun safe.”

“Dorothy, tell me his name,” I say sharply.

She looks desperately at me, tears flowing down her cheeks. “I think it might be my son. I got a call from the school this morning. Blake didn’t show up. I can’t find him anywhere.”

Holly

I know when it’s eleven o’clock because that’s when my mother shows up at the door of my hospital room for the second time each day. She comes right away in the morning at eight, and then at ten she goes for coffee in the hospital cafeteria. She always returns at eleven, and knocks on the doorjamb, pokes her head through a crack in the door and calls out in a cheerful voice, “Is this a good time to visit?” For the first week I didn’t bother answering. Every movement, even forming words, was excruciating. My mother would come in, anyway, pull a chair more closely to my bedside. She brought magazines and her knitting and for the next three hours she would just sit. She didn’t utter a word unless I opened my one good eye, and when I did, the familiar voice of my childhood would settle over me like a crisp, sun-warmed sheet fresh from the clothesline.

“Remember,” my mother begins today, “the time when you were home alone and something spooked the cattle and they somehow got through the gate?” I try not to smile; the muscles in my face screamed with any twitch. I can feel the infection bubbling beneath my skin and wonder what new antibiotic they will try to fight this current setback.

Until just that moment I had forgotten that humid August day the cattle escaped. My parents, along with my brothers Wayne, Pete, Jeff and Todd, decided to make a day trip over to Linden Falls where there was a farm auction. I had no desire to spend my day looking at crappy old farm equipment so I pretended to be sick and stayed behind.

I had lain luxuriously in bed, long after they had left, when I heard the bellow right below my window. I was well accustomed to the mooing and lowing of cattle, but this sound was much too close. I scrambled from my bed, untangling myself from the sheets, and pushed aside my white linen curtains that hung heavily in the humid air. Below me two dozen or more white-faced black baldies wandered lazily in the front yard. I pulled on my barn boots and spent the next four hours trying to corral the cattle. I hollered and pushed and prodded and begged the beasts to return to the pen. Our six-month-old blue-mottled Australian cattle dog, Roo, tried to help me, but after thirty minutes she collapsed in exhaustion beneath the lone crab apple tree in our front yard.

“Oh.” My mother laughs as she also remembers that day. “When we came in the house you were sunburned, bruised and sore from your cattle wrangling, but all of the animals were back where they belonged.” My mother pauses in her knitting. “I remember your father telling everyone he knew about how responsible you were that day. ‘Regular cowgirl,’ he said. He was so proud of you.”

I remember each achy muscle, the way the heat rose from my sunburned skin, the way the ice cream that my father made a special trip into Broken Branch to get just for me felt as it slid, cold and smooth, down my throat. I feel my mother’s hand against my uninjured cheek. “What would you like to order for lunch today, Holly?” she asks me. “Ice cream sounds good, doesn’t it?”

I nod, my cheek absorbing the coolness of her skin against mine. I think of Augie and P.J. so far away, and even though I know it will slow the healing process, I begin to cry. I miss them terribly. Me, the person who could walk away from anyone without so much as a backward glance. “Home,” I manage to grunt.

My mother looks confused for a moment and for a second I know she thinks I’m asking to go back to Broken Branch, but then her eyes clear. “Your house had too much smoke and fire damage. When you get out of here, you can stay in my hotel for a few days, then you’ll come to the farm with me for a while, just until you’re back on your feet. Then we’ll find you a new house. I’ve already started looking in the newspaper.” She doesn’t quite understand what I mean but I’m too tired, the fever has addled my brain so that I can’t explain in words what I mean. And while most of my burns are healing, I know I’m not getting better. No one is even talking about the day I’m going to get out of here anymore. Sometimes home isn’t the house, I want to say, it’s the people. Augie and P.J. are my home and I miss them terribly.

Mrs. Oliver

“Sit down,” the man ordered. “Over there.” He pointed to an empty desk in the front row. Lily Reese’s desk. She was one of the students absent. The chicken pox.

“How many students are not here?” he asked.

Mrs. Oliver had felt bad that Lily and Maria Barrett were missing this last day before spring break. Now she was grateful. She wished there had been an epidemic of chicken pox, the flu, hand-foot-and-mouth disease. Anything but this. She remained silent, not wanting to reveal even the tiniest scrap of information about her students.

“How many?” he barked sharply, and Mrs. Oliver cringed.

“Now, now,” she said, holding her hands up to placate the gunman. “Two. Two students are absent,” she said in a rush, and the man’s eyes once again swept across the room, searching. “What do you want? Certainly these children have nothing to do with—”

“I said sit down,” he said sharply. Mrs. Oliver sat in Lily’s chair with a plop, surprised. She thought it was only teachers and high school football coaches who had mastered that tone of voice. The one that said I mean business.

“If you just sit quietly and do what I tell you to, no one will get hurt.”

Mrs. Oliver covered her mouth with her hand, hoping that no one could see her smile. She couldn’t help it. Those were the exact words the bad guy on Cal’s favorite police drama uttered the night before. She wondered if this man watched it, too. Maybe he sat in front of his television with a beer, a bowl of popcorn and a pad of paper, taking notes on what to say. Mrs. Oliver, despite herself, always seemed to get the giggles in the most inappropriate situations. At her cousin Bette’s funeral when the pastor sneeze-tooted she had to get up and leave, covering her red face with her Kleenex to hide her amusement. Then there was the time when Cal, while making love to her, called her Love Muffin, sending her into such a fit of laughter that Cal wouldn’t speak to her for two days.

Mrs. Oliver always looked back on these events with such shame and bewilderment. She prided herself on being the responsible, serious, respectful person of the group. Cal told her that she was incapable of handling the truly emotional situations and this was how she dealt with them, by masking them with laughter and mockery. She had responded by asking him if his eighth-grade diploma and fifty-two of years of working at the washing machine factory qualified him as a psychiatrist. He hadn’t spoken to her for four days after that one. She hadn’t meant to make fun of his educational background. In fact, Cal was one of the smartest men she had ever met. He could fix just about anything. He was good with their finances and was the one that their children went to for advice about their relationships. Not her. His job at the washing machine factory had helped pay her way through teacher’s college and provided an excellent insurance and retirement package.

He was right.

For some reason, she hadn’t quite figured out why, she couldn’t handle the emotional moments life had to offer. Or maybe it was that she handled them too well. Cal was the one who had cried at their children’s births, at their weddings, when Georgiana miscarried her first child. It wasn’t that Mrs. Oliver didn’t cry. She did. But in private, locked in the bathroom, with the water running and the fan on.

She glanced over at P. J. Thwaite, who was still enraptured with the stranger. The man appeared to be counting the number of people in the classroom or looking for someone in particular. Maybe he was here after one of her students? she wondered. The only domestic situation she was aware of was the divorce of Natalie Cragg’s parents. She hadn’t seen Mr. Cragg in years, didn’t know if she would even recognize him. Mrs. Oliver looked over at Natalie Cragg, who was looking down at her desktop, crying softly. When she looked back to P.J., his eyes hadn’t wavered from the man’s stern face.

“P.J.,” she whispered, trying to get his attention. He just continued to look at the man’s face. Not at his gun or the knapsack he carried filled with God knew what. It was his face P.J. was memorizing and this more than anything scared Mrs. Oliver. The man would notice, sooner or later, P.J.’s odd fascination with him and she was afraid that he would in turn find reason to focus his attentions on P.J. “P.J.,” she said more loudly, and P.J. reluctantly turned away from the man. P.J.’s black shock of hair, still mussed from his stocking cap, fell into his eyes, and he looked dazedly at his teacher. P.J. had told her once that he wouldn’t let anyone but his mother cut his hair and he wasn’t going to get it cut until she came to get him. “P.J., don’t stare at him,” she whispered fiercely.

“What are you saying? What are you telling him?” the man demanded, raised his gun and pointed it at Mrs. Oliver.

“I told him not to be scared,” Mrs. Oliver lied.

“I’m not scared,” P.J. piped up.

The man leveled his gaze at P.J. and Mrs. Oliver trembled. This was a cold, cruel man with dead eyes, she determined. He would kill every single one of them without a second thought. “Why aren’t you scared?” the man asked P.J.

P.J. hesitated and bit his lip before answering. “Because you said you wouldn’t hurt us. Not if we did what you said.”

“Smart kid,” he answered with a bitter smile.

Meg

I assure Dorothy that we will look into the possibility that Blake could be the one in the school and send her on her way with the order to call me if she hears anything from her son. Already I’m frustrated. We don’t have enough personnel to chase down all the leads that are forming and the weather is growing worse by the minute.

My phone buzzes again. Another text message from Stuart. I read his latest text first. Come on, Meg. For old times’ sake. Just one comment? I shake my head and snap my phone shut without reading the first message. I already know what it says. Stuart would do anything to get the inside scoop on a story, even resort to blackmail, and the intrusion at the school could be the biggest of his career. Up until the Merritt case, Stuart’s investigative reporting in Afghanistan while covering the war a few years ago was the peacock feather in his cap and earned him the Pritchard-Say Prize for Investigative Journalism. Then there was the Merritt story, which was, besides the whole married thing, the decisive nail in the coffin that was our relationship. Now Stuart is back. He can’t resist the scent of a big story and this standoff. I could see Stuart relishing the thought of a Columbine or Virginia Tech–type massacre just for the byline he would get.

By the time I’ve circled the school with the police line tape, the chief has called in our other off-duty officers and our reserve officers, townspeople who have gone through eighty hours of training and forty hours of supervised time with our small police force. The only time I remember our reserve officers being called in was a few years ago when a tornado ripped through the town of Parkersburg and we were asked to assist. The fact that the chief has requested them tells me this is the real thing.

A large crowd has gathered in the main parking lot. I fill in Chief McKinney on what Dorothy has told me and he digests the information silently.

“Any new info on your end?” I ask him.

“Nothing of use besides the man who phoned and said he is in the school and has a gun.” He shakes his head, releasing the snowflakes that had settled in his hair. “Besides that, we have lots of information that only makes things even more confusing. I swear to God, why the hell are cell phones allowed in school? You’d think that we’d get good solid information from inside, but all they’ve done is jam up the phone lines and cause otherwise sane people to go crazy.”

“No one has seen anything?” I ask in disbelief. “We don’t know why he’s in the school, what he wants?”

“From the calls we’ve got from within the school, here’s what we know.” McKinney pulls off a leather glove and ticks the points off on his fingers.

“We’ve got one gunman. We’ve got three gunmen. We’ve got a man with a machete, we’ve got someone—can’t tell if it’s a male or female—with a bomb. We’ve got shit, that’s what we’ve got.” McKinney runs his hands over his mouth and his icy mustache crunches beneath his fingers.

“We just wait it out, then? We don’t go in?” I ask, already knowing the answer.

“We do just what we’re doing right now, containing the scene and falling back. If we can communicate with the suspect we can get those kids and teachers out safely. It’s this weather I’m worried about,” McKinney says, looking up at the iron-gray sky. I do the same and instantly my vision becomes blurred as snowflakes fill my eyes. “Interstates and highways all over the state are already closed. I’ve called in all the off-duty and reserve officers and dispatchers, and asked Sheriff Hester to bring in his off-duty folks. I’ve got them covering each corner of the building.”

I look to where he’s pointing and see the sheriff’s deputies walking around with M4s slung across their backs. “You think we’re going to need a tac team?” I ask. A tactical—or tac team, as we call it—is a group of officers that comes from all over the state and are specially trained to respond to situations like this.

“Looks that way,” McKinney says. “But if it keeps snowing like this, we’re not getting one. We’re the tac team.”

I see movement through one of the main office windows and place a hand on McKinney’s arm. “Look,” I say, peering through the veil of snow and touching my sidearm like a talisman.

Augie

The cold from the floor is seeping through my pants and it feels as if we have been sitting here forever, but it’s only been like half an hour. All I can think about is that after all that’s happened, I’m not going to be able to see my mom. We’re supposed to get on a plane to Arizona tomorrow and spend the week there.

I wonder what she looks like now. The last time I saw her, her hands were all bandaged up, her hair was all frizzled and her face was bright red like she’d taken a walk in the desert without her hat. Her eyelashes were gone and the nurses had rubbed a thick, shiny lotion all over her arms. P.J. and I talk to her every night, but usually for just a minute or two. She’s too tired or drugged-up from pain medication to talk for very long, but mostly I think she just sounds sad. I know she feels terrible that P.J. and I had to go away, especially to Broken Branch, which she always told us she spent the first seventeen years of her life hoping to leave.

From somewhere outside the classroom we hear banging and a crashing sound and I’m sure he is coming our way. Next to me Beth covers her ears with her hands and begins rocking back and forth and I put my arm around her shoulders. I don’t know what’s going on with Beth. She is the tomboy of our class, the one to go four-wheeling and deer hunting, and now she’s just a mess.

“I’m getting out of here,” Noah says. He stands up and moves toward the windows.

“Sit down, Noah,” Mr. Ellery says strictly.

“No way,” Noah answers, trying to make his voice tough, like he’s some sort of badass. But the words come out so squeaky that I almost feel sorry for him.

“Noah, sit down. If someone’s out there he’ll go right on by us if we’re quiet. The door’s locked. He can’t get in.”

“Like a fricking gun can’t shoot its way through this door,” Noah snaps back, and tries to open a window that leads out to the teacher’s parking lot. Another crash echoes through the hallways and there’s the tinkle of breaking glass and far-off shouts and Noah drops to the floor. If I wasn’t just as scared as he was I would have made a crack about it. For a minute the only sound is everyone’s heavy breathing and Beth’s teeth chattering together.

“Who do you think it is?” Drew whispers in my ear. I shake my head. I can’t speak. Beth pulls on my sleeve and I look over at her.

My dad, she mouths at me, and then covers her face with her hands.

Mrs. Oliver

Mrs. Oliver kept turning around in her seat to see how her children were doing. Most were holding it together, sitting quietly, but she was especially worried about Lucy Shelton, who had some autistic tendencies and didn’t adapt well to changes in her schedule. The buses were due to arrive at one-twenty, two hours earlier than usual, marking the beginning of their spring vacation. It didn’t appear as if their captor was anywhere near done with them and one-twenty was drawing closer.

She was also concerned about Wesley, who had a bladder the size of a thimble. The closest bathrooms were just outside the doorway but it was highly doubtful that he would allow the children to leave the room. Each time she twisted in her seat to check on her charges the man snapped at her to face front. Now I know how Bobby Latham felt, she thought wryly. Bobby had the most severe case of attention deficit disorder that she had ever encountered in her forty-three years of teaching and she had seen a lot. Bobby, face the front, she repeated over and over until she finally gave up and gave him a seat in the back of the room where he could stand, turn around, do cartwheels if he had to, just as long as he didn’t distract the other students in class. This was long before ADHD medication such as Ritalin and Strattera were being prescribed like candy. Oh, she had come to appreciate the effect the medications had on her students with attention concerns, but she didn’t like the way some teachers and parents felt as if it was the perfect panacea. Drug the kid and move on. It wasn’t like that. Students like Bobby needed to learn strategies that helped them focus, tips to be more organized. The medicine just slowed down their brains long enough for their teachers to help give them those real-life skills.

Mrs. Oliver took a deep breath, trying to slow down her own brain. She often used such relaxation techniques with her students, before spelling tests or before they began the dreaded Iowa Test of Basic Skills. Now she was beginning to doubt the effectiveness of the strategy she had so emphatically pressed upon her students. She felt panic blooming in her chest, felt her heart pounding so hard that she thought the beads embroidered on her jumper were going to burst from her chest. She tried combining her deep breathing with thoughts of Cal. Cal always had a calming effect on her.

Surprisingly, Mrs. Oliver wasn’t always Mrs. Oliver as most had come to believe. For the first seventeen years of her life, of course, she was Evelyn Schnickle. Then she became Mrs. George Ford.

George was just her height, was handsome and funny and had the most beautiful green eyes. He was the first boy Evelyn had ever kissed and she decided the minute that his lips touched hers that this would be the man she would marry. They were married the weekend after they graduated high school on a rainy June afternoon. At the reception George teased her that the only reason she married him was to shed her last name. And while she agreed that Evelyn Ford sounded so much better than Evelyn Schnickle, that was certainly not the reason she married him and she glanced daringly downward, causing poor George to blush. Two months after George and Evelyn were married, George was sent off to Vietnam and Evelyn lived with George’s parents in Cedar Falls and enrolled in the teacher’s college there. Three months later, two uniformed soldiers showed up on the doorstep with the message that her new husband had died at Plei Mei along with one third of his battalion. Upon hearing the terrible news, Evelyn threw up all over one of the soldier’s shiny black shoes, which she tried to clean up with the elder Mrs. Ford’s favorite afghan. So after a mere five months of marriage, at the tender age of eighteen, Evelyn was a widow. And pregnant.

Evelyn didn’t know how to be a widow; she hadn’t even had time to figure out how to be a wife. She cried, in private, of course, for the loss of George. She couldn’t sleep thinking about him dying all alone in a steamy jungle. Her in-laws were touched by their new daughter-in-laws’s obvious heartbreak and did their best to comfort her. They told her she was welcome to stay with them as long as she needed. That was the thing, though; she thought she would go absolutely insane if she had to stay with the Fords any longer than she had to. She felt suffocated by the sadness in the house and, if she was honest with herself, terrified at the thought of becoming a mother.

All that changed when she met Cal Oliver. Now forty-five years later, she wondered if this time it would be Cal being visited by a man in uniform, a police officer, telling him that his spouse was dead. Killed by a crazy man with a gun in the middle of March in a snowstorm in a classroom in a small town in Iowa. Who would have dreamed this was the way she would go? She assumed she would die of a stroke like her father or of breast cancer like her aunts had. Not by some murderous cretin. She wondered if Cal would cry and sniffed at the thought of him being dry-eyed at her funeral. Of course he would cry, though; he was the emotional one. She wondered how he would tell their children. He was so bad on the phone. Whenever she stuck a receiver in his hand his power of speech would disappear. The man could talk for hours to someone in the same room with him, but not through a phone. “I like to see their faces when I talk to them,” he tried to explain. Evelyn just clucked her tongue at him and snatched the phone right back from him. She regretted that now, the way she could be impatient with Cal. If she got the chance she would do things differently. She would never nag at him about the way he would walk into the kitchen, reach into the cupboard and grab a box of crackers or cereal and walk away leaving the cupboard doors wide open for someone to crack their head on. She wouldn’t gripe about how fastidious he could be about keeping the garage clean and orderly but couldn’t throw away even one piece of paper without agonizing over it.

No, Mrs. Schnickle-Ford-Oliver was not going to die today. She was going to go home this afternoon, kiss her husband. Hard. Call her children and grandchildren, then change out of her rainbow-studded dress.

Will

Climbing into his pickup truck, Will wondered if he should call Marlys to let her know that something was happening at the kids’ school. He quickly nixed the idea. He had no idea what was going on, knew that Marlys would have a load of questions that he could not answer and then she would be left with the burden of whether or not to tell Holly. No, that wouldn’t be fair. There was nothing that Marlys could do way over in Revelation, Arizona, to help this situation. Her job was to take care of Holly, who just couldn’t seem to catch a break. The latest setback was an infection that somehow seeped into her bloodstream even though she had been pumped full of antibiotics the minute she arrived at the hospital. No, Will wouldn’t say a word about the goings-on at the school until he had solid information and even then he might not mention it. Marlys was exhausted, Holly needed to concentrate on getting better and worrying about P.J. and Augie wouldn’t be beneficial. Instead, he called his son Todd, whose wife was the fourth-grade teacher at the school.

“I’m already here,” Todd said when Will mentioned he was on his way and would meet him in front of the school.

Broken Branch School was a twenty-minute drive over gravel and county roads and Will made the trip in just less than twelve. As he pulled into the school parking lot he could see that a crowd had already formed. Inaudible shouts rose from the pack and were swept away by gusts of wind. Will looked down at his Mossberg on the seat next to him, trying to decide whether or not to bring it out with him. His cell phone erupted in a mind-numbing thrum of rap music that Augie programmed in as his ringtone. She thought it was hilarious whenever a torrent of curses set to music would explode from his phone in the middle of dinner or worse in public at the café or the grocery store. “Dammit, Augie,” he would say, pressing frantically at the buttons, trying to silence the phone.

“What?” Augie said innocently. “You say those words all the time.”

P.J. would nod his head gravely in agreement. “You do,” he would say.

“Hello,” Will barked into the phone.

“Will?” came the timid reply, so unlike Marlys. “Are you okay?”

“Fine, fine. How are you? How’s Holly?” Will asked, looking through the windshield at four of the Broken Branch police officers trying to manage the growing crowd.

“She still has a fever and isn’t eating,” Marlys explained in a trembling voice. “How’re the kids?”

“Fine, fine,” Will said again. “P.J. has been a big help with the calving. He’s a natural cattleman.”

“And Augie?”

“Augie’s …” Will couldn’t bring himself to say anything negative about his granddaughter when he had no idea as to her safety at this moment. “Augie is trying,” he finished. Which was true. She had even joined him and P.J. in the barn the other day where number 135, a gorgeous Hereford with a shaggy red-and-white coat, was giving birth. Augie watched in awe as the calf dropped from his mother’s uterus, slick with afterbirth but undeniably beautiful.

“Ohhh,” Augie breathed, getting caught up in the excitement, her eyes shining, a smile appearing from her normally glowering face.

Another truck pulled in next to his and Will recognized fellow farmers Neal and Ned Vinson. Will tipped his chin in greeting and saw that the brothers had also come heavily armed.

“Will?” Marlys said tentatively. “You sound funny. What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” Will said, immediately regretting the sharpness of his voice.

“Are you taking your pills?” she asked, referring to the high blood pressure medication she constantly had to remind him to take.

“Yes, yes, I’m taking my pills.” Will’s eyes followed the Vinson brothers as they moved purposefully toward the school, their shotguns nestled in the crooks of their arms.

“Then what’s going on?” Marlys said tearfully. “I can’t stand worrying about Holly and have to worry about you and the kids, too. I can’t take it.”

“Nothing to worry about.” Will tried to make his voice sound casual, light. “Augie dyed her hair red. Her head looks like a goddamn rooster’s comb. I just forgot what it’s like to have a teenager in the house.”

“I know something else is going on,” Marlys said sternly, “but I’m too tired to fight with you about it right now and I need to get back to Holly. I’m going to call you tonight and you better be straight with me, got it?”

“Okay,” Will finally answered. Any other excuses would be just lies. Marlys was going to find out what was happening at the school sooner or later. It was best if she heard it from him. Just not this minute.

“All this is so hard.” Marlys sniffled.

“I know, Marlys,” he answered in agreement, though they were talking about two completely different things.

Holly

“What day is it?” I ask my mother, whose capable fingers are flying over her knitting. The beginnings of a sweater maybe. Funny, since it’s probably sunny and eighty-eight degrees outside, just like it is almost every day here.

“It’s Thursday, March twenty-fourth.” I’ve been in the hospital for almost exactly eight weeks now. In some ways this seems like an eternity but the days have somehow melded together, one running into the next. Pain, medication, therapy, surgery. A constant cycle of healing. My mother glances up at the clock on the wall, her hands never stopping, the clicking of the needles a comforting sound that I remember from my childhood. “I called your father just a bit ago. He said everyone is doing just fine. P.J. is looking forward to helping your father with the calving.”

When my mother sat down to knit, it was her quiet, relaxing time. I had never seen a person work as hard as my mother did. In the mornings, she was up before anyone else, the smell of coffee and bacon and eggs our alarm clock. After breakfast and the dishes, my mother would go out and help our father with the cattle, feeding and watering them, checking the pasture fences for loose wires or nails that might cause injury. Then she would go back to the house to clean, do laundry, make lunch, go grocery shopping, take care of the needs of five very demanding children and one equally demanding husband, make dinner, do the dishes, help with homework and finally, finally, exhausted, she would be able to sit down for a few moments and knit. Sure, we helped our mother, but there was just so much to do, there was never enough time in the day. Watching the weariness of our mother, though she never complained, I swore that wouldn’t be my life and I knew I would get out of Broken Branch as soon as I was old enough.

“One o’clock, Iowa time,” I say. “I wonder what the kids are doing right this minute.”

Mrs. Oliver

Mrs. Oliver looked closely at the man. Getting a clear picture of him wasn’t easy. He had a gray baseball cap pulled down low over his forehead. Little tufts of curly, dark brown hair poked out around his ears. He wore a black jacket zippered up to his chin and sleek leather gloves on his fingers. By the lines that seamed the corners of his blue eyes she figured he had to be at least in his early forties. He seemed overly concerned that two of the students were absent. Lily and Maria. Was one of them his target? If so, why didn’t he just leave to go in search of them instead of remaining in the classroom? Was he in too deeply now, feel that he had nothing to lose?

P.J. was still staring unabashedly at the man and Mrs. Oliver had an inkling that P.J. might know the man, maybe had seen him before.

She wondered briefly if this could actually be Bobby Latham, her former student, forcing her to sit still for an excruciating amount of time just as she had done to him all those years ago. But no. She and Bobby liked each other. Had come to an understanding. She promised to never tell him to face front ever again as long as he didn’t use the pages of his math book to make soggy spitballs that he shot through the barrel of his ink pen at the back of Kitty Rawlings’s head. No, this wasn’t Bobby Latham. Maybe it was another former student.

In her mind she ran through the Filofax of children she had taught over the years. It couldn’t have been Walter Spanksi, the only student she had ever flunked. He would be in his fifties by now. How she had fretted over holding Walter back for another year of third grade. No matter how she had tried to help him learn his multiplication facts and how to read even the most basic of sentences, he just never caught on. She couldn’t very well send him on to fourth grade when he didn’t know a noun from a verb and consistently missed seventeen of the twenty words on the weekly spelling test. It had been her second year of teaching and she remembered vividly sitting in front of Mr. and Mrs. Spanksi, just three months pregnant with her second child, and informing them that Walter, while a very nice boy, would not move up to the fourth grade with his classmates. Mr. Spanksi held his hat in his large, earth-worn hands and pleaded with her to at least give him a chance. A lot could happen over the summer. They could work with him every day, get him a tutor. Mrs. Spanksi didn’t say a word, just cried noiselessly into her handkerchief. “I’m sorry, Mr. and Mrs. Spanksi,” Mrs. Oliver said, shaking her head. “I just cannot, in good conscience, promote Walter on to the fourth grade at his current skill level. I am confident that another year in third grade will be just the ticket to get him where he needs to be,” she said chirpily. Well, she had another year with Walter and, as it turned out, another year in third grade did him absolutely no good. Over the course of the additional nine months Mrs. Oliver had with Walter, she saw him transform from a nice boy to a very angry boy whose second shot at the third-grade curriculum showed no marked improvement. But the man with the gun was most definitely not Walter Spanksi, though she could clearly understand why he would be tempted to return to his old classroom where a twenty-three-year-old, second-year teacher had the gall to flunk him, and point a gun at her head. How very satisfying that might be. But Walter was too old to be this man.

Over the years she had caught students cheating, fighting, smoking, stealing and many other offenses, but no one hated her. She prided herself in being fair-minded and compassionate; she learned there was so much more to a student than his or her grades. They were human beings, young and certainly not fully formed yet, but that was where she came in. She learned after that horrible second year with Walter that she had the power, no, the supremacy, to make a child learn, to want to learn. And in her forty-three years of being a teacher, there was only one other student, besides Walter, for whom she felt she failed to make a positive difference. Mrs. Oliver squinted, trying to see past the hat and gloves the man was wearing, the years that had passed. It could be him, she thought. There is that possibility.

Kenny Bingley. He had been a weedy-looking child, tall with long legs and proportionally short arms. Like a sprig of big stem or turkey foot, as her mother had called the long, bland prairie grass that was abundant throughout their part of the state. It could certainly be Kenny Bingley. Right age—fortyish, brown hair, mean eyes. Kenny Bingley was perhaps the student whom she lost the most sleep over. He came to school tardy every day, if at all. A perpetual musty, wet smell clung to his pale skin as if his clothing was tossed into a corner and forgotten about until he needed to put them on. No matter the child, no matter where they came from, no matter their circumstances, Mrs. Oliver was always able to find a spark of wonder and curiosity in her students’ eyes. But in eight-year-old Kenny, above the blue smudges that shadowed his eyes, there was no flicker, no interest or amazement for the world. There was nothing. Just an eerie calm. He wasn’t disruptive in the classroom per se, but trouble seemed to follow him wherever he went. Recess football games ended in bloody noses, lunch money went missing, classroom pets died under suspicious circumstances. But there was nothing that she could actually pin specifically on Kenny. She suspected abuse at the hands of his mother; there were no bruises, no proof, just that air of detachment, his indifferent countenance.

Two things happened the week Kenny was expelled. A horned lark was found on the school steps with both its legs snapped. Once again, Mrs. Oliver had absolutely no tangible proof that Kenny was the one who had mortally wounded the beautiful bird. But she had been the one to find it there on the school steps, its twig legs unnaturally splayed; she was the only one there to hear the ragged, high-pitched chirps, or so she thought.

The second incident that occurred had to do with a pair of scissors and a very pretty third grader named Cornelia Patts. She had stepped into the hall for just a moment, wasn’t even actually all the way out of the room. The principal, Mr. Graczyk, had a question for her about some such thing or another, and had called her to the doorway. The next thing she knew, poor Cornelia was screaming and clutching at her bleeding hand. “He stabbed me,” she cried in disbelief. Mr. Graczyk ran into the classroom and yanked Kenny up out of his seat, the bloody scissors sitting on his desk in front of him. While Mrs. Oliver wrapped the wound in a clean handkerchief, the classroom was silent except for Cornelia’s soft sobs.

As Kenny was led from the classroom by Mr. Graczyk he pressed his thin, pale lips together, his shoulders slumped like a bent reed, and whistled a high, distorted tune, so much like that of the lark she found languishing on the school’s steps.

The man with the gun before her now could very possibly be Kenny Bingley. He had never returned to school after that day, was immediately expelled, and Mrs. Oliver never learned what became of him, though she often asked after him. She decided to test her theory and began whistling the dying lark’s song. Warbling and faint at first, then louder. The man, who had been sitting on the tall stool at the front of the room, the gun on his lap, looked back at her with his cold, flat eyes. “Kenny Bingley,” she said stringently. “You need to stop this nonsense right this minute.”

Meg

There are shrieks from the crowd as a chair comes crashing through a window. I, along with the other officers present, unholster our firearms and we watch in amazement as a pink-clad shape tumbles out of the window. Immediately I know this is no gunman. It’s Gail Lowell, the elderly secretary at the school. She is coatless, wearing a bright pink sweater and chunky metallic jewelry. Her necklace and bracelets jingle gleefully as she picks her way carefully through the snow, her purse dangling from her arm. As she comes toward us, voices from the crowd pellet her. What’s going on? Are the kids okay? Is there a man with a gun?

“How many intruders are there?” I ask in a low voice as she approaches. She appears to have been crying, but it’s hard to tell because of the snow. “Did you see someone with a gun? Any injuries?” Gail looks helplessly from me to Chief McKinney and then her face crumples.

“It’s all my fault,” she sobs.

“Gail, this is important. Tell us exactly what’s going on in there,” I say more sharply than I intend to.

“Now, now, Gail,” McKinney tries to soothe her. “Are you injured?” Next to them I shuffle my feet and make soft, impatient sounds until McKinney glares at me.

Gail snuffles loudly. “No, no. I’m not hurt.”

“Let’s get you warmed up and then you can tell us what’s going on.” He leads her to a squad car with an idling engine, opens the door and gently guides her into the passenger’s seat. The chief climbs into the driver’s side and I settle into the backseat. For a moment the only sound is Gail’s soft cries and shivers. Chief McKinney fiddles with the heat and a whoosh of warm air floods the car.

“Gail,” I say through the partition that separates the front and back seats, “I know how difficult this must be for you. How terrified you must be.” I look at the chief and he nods for me to continue. “We need to know just three things right now, then we can take you wherever you want to go. Okay?” She bobs her head up and down and presses her fingers to her eyelids. “First, is anyone injured inside?”

Her chin wobbles. “I don’t know,” she says in a small voice. “I don’t know. He went off down the hallway and then he was gone.”

“One intruder, Gail? Did you know him? Is that what you are saying? There was just one person? Young or old?” I ask, thinking of Dorothy Jones’s son, Blake.

Gail closes her eyes and shakes her head as if trying to conjure up an image. “I didn’t recognize him. It was a man, just one. Forties maybe,” she says in a whisper.

Chief McKinney and I look at each other in relief. At least we can assure Dorothy that her son isn’t the intruder and encourage her to get him the help he needs and fast.

“I saw him come in,” Gail cries. “Oh, God, he walked right by the office window. He had on a tool belt. I thought he was going to work on the boiler—the thing is always breaking down and it’s so cold today. I didn’t even give it a second thought. He just walked right on by. Gave me a little wave.” A fresh round of sobs erupts and the chief pats her on the knee. “I should have noticed that he wasn’t dressed like a maintenance man. He was wearing dress shoes. Not work boots.” She pulls her hands from her eyes and her fingers are smudged with mascara. “Can I call my husband? Please?”

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