Nineteen Minutes (8 page)

“Let me get this straight, Mrs. Calloway,” Alex said. “You are charged with driving recklessly and causing serious bodily injury while reaching down to aid a fish?”

The defendant, a fifty-four-year-old woman sporting a bad perm and an even worse pantsuit, nodded. “That’s correct, Your Honor.”

Alex leaned her elbows on the bench. “I’ve got to hear this.”

The woman looked at her attorney. “Mrs. Calloway was coming home from the pet store with a silver arowana,” the lawyer said.

“That’s a fifty-five-dollar tropical fish, Judge,” the defendant interjected.

“The plastic bag rolled off the passenger seat and popped. Mrs. Calloway reached down for the fish and that’s when…the unfortunate incident occurred.”

“By unfortunate incident,” Alex clarified, looking at her file, “you mean hitting a pedestrian.”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

Alex turned to the defendant. “How’s the fish?”

Mrs. Calloway smiled. “Wonderful,” she said. “I named it Crash.”

From the corner of her eye, Alex saw a bailiff enter the courtroom and whisper to the clerk, who looked at Alex and nodded. He scrawled something on a piece of paper, and the bailiff walked it up to the bench.

Shots fired at Sterling High, she read.

Alex went still as stone. Josie. “Court’s adjourned,” she whispered, and then she ran.

John Eberhard gritted his teeth and concentrated on moving just one more inch forward. He could not see, with all the blood running down his face, and his left side was completely useless. He couldn’t hear, either-his ears still rang with the blast of the gun. Still, he had managed to crawl from the upstairs hallway where Peter Houghton had shot him into an art supply room.

He thought about the practices where Coach made them skate from goal line to goal line, faster and then faster still, until the players were gasping for breath and spitting onto the ice. He thought about how, when you felt you had nothing left to give, you’d find just one iota more. He dragged himself another foot, digging his elbow against the floor.

When John reached the metal shelving that held clay and paint and beads and wire, he tried to push himself upright, but a blinding pain speared his head. Minutes later-or was it hours?-he regained consciousness. He didn’t know if it was safe to check outside the closet yet. He was flat on his back, and something cold was drifting across his face. Wind. Coming through a crack in the seal of the window.

A window.

John thought of Courtney Ignatio: how she’d been sitting across from him at the cafeteria table when the glass wall behind her burst; how suddenly there had been a flower blooming in the middle of her chest, bright as a poppy. He thought of how a hundred screams, all at once, had braided into a rope of sound. He remembered teachers poking their heads out of their classrooms like gophers, and the looks on their faces when they heard the shots.

John pulled himself up on the shelves, one-handed, fighting the black buzz that told him he was going to faint again. By the time he was upright, leaning against the metal frame, he was shuddering. His vision was so blurred that when he took a can of paint and hurled it, he had to choose between two windows.

The glass shattered. Jackknifed on the ledge, he could see fire trucks and ambulances. Reporters and parents pushing at police tape. Clusters of sobbing students. Broken bodies, spaced like railroad ties on the snow. EMTs bringing out more of them.

Help, John Eberhard tried to scream, but he couldn’t form the word. He couldn’t form any words-not Look, not Stop, not even his own name.

“Hey,” someone called. “There’s a kid up there!”

Sobbing by now, John tried to wave, but his arm wouldn’t work.

People were starting to point. “Stay put,” a fireman yelled, and John tried to nod. But his body no longer belonged to him, and before he realized what had happened, that small movement pitched him out the window to land on the concrete two stories below.

Diana Leven, who had left her job as an assistant attorney general in Boston two years ago to join a department that was a little kinder and gentler, walked into the Sterling High gym and stopped beside the body of a boy who had fallen directly on the three-point line after being shot in the neck. The shoes of the crime scene techs squeaked on the shellacked floor as they took photographs and picked up shell casings, zipping them into plastic evidence bags. Directing them was Patrick Ducharme.

Diana looked around at the sheer volume of evidence-clothing, guns, blood spatter, spent rounds, dropped bookbags, lost sneakers-and realized that she was not the only one with a massive job ahead of her. “What do you know so far?”

“We think it’s a sole shooter. He’s in custody,” Patrick said. “We don’t know for sure whether anyone else was involved. The building’s secure.”

“How many dead?”

“Ten confirmed.”

Diana nodded. “Wounded?”

“Don’t know yet. We’ve got every ambulance in northern New Hampshire here.”

“What can I do?”

Patrick turned to her. “Put on a show and get rid of the cameras.”

She started to walk off, but Patrick grabbed her arm. “You want me to talk to him?”

“The shooter?”

Patrick nodded.

“It may be the only chance we have to get to him before he has a lawyer. If you think you can get away from here, do it.” Diana hurried out of the gymnasium and downstairs, careful to skirt the work of the policemen and the medics. The minute she walked outside, the media attached themselves to her, their questions stinging like bees. How many victims? What are the names of the dead? Who is the shooter?

Why?

Diana took a deep breath and smoothed her dark hair back from her face. This was her least favorite part of the job-being the spokeswoman on camera. Although more vans would arrive as the day went on, right now it was only local New Hampshire media-affiliates for CBS and ABC and FOX. She might as well enjoy the hometown advantage while she could. “My name is Diana Leven, and I’m with the attorney general’s office. We can’t release any information now because there’s an investigation still pending, but we promise to give you details as soon as we can. What I can tell you right now is that this morning, there was a school shooting at Sterling High. It’s unclear as to who the perpetrator or perpetrators were. One person has been remanded into custody. There are no formal charges yet.”

A reporter pushed her way to the front of the pack. “How many kids are dead?”

“We don’t have that information yet.”

“How many were hit?”

“We don’t have that information yet,” Diana repeated. “We’ll keep you posted.”

“When are charges going to be filed?” another journalist shouted.

“What can you tell the parents who want to know if their kids are okay?”

Diana pressed her mouth into a firm line and prepared to run the gauntlet. “Thank you very much,” she said, not an answer at all.

Lacy had to park six blocks away from the school; that’s how crowded it had become. She took off at a dead run, holding the blankets that the local radio announcers had urged people to bring for the shock victims. I’ve already lost one son, she thought. I can’t lose another.

The last conversation she had had with Peter had been an argument. It was before he went to bed the previous night, before she’d been called into a delivery. I asked you to take out the trash, she had said. Yesterday. Don’t you hear me when I talk to you, Peter?

Peter had glanced up at her over his computer screen. What?

What if that turned out to be the final exchange between them?

Nothing Lacy had seen in nursing school or in her work at a hospital prepared her for the sight she faced when she turned the corner. She processed it in pieces: shattered glass, fire engines, smoke. Blood, sobbing, sirens. She dropped the blankets near an ambulance and swam into a sea of confusion, bobbing along with the other parents in the hope that she might catch her lost child drifting before being overwhelmed by the tide.

There were children running across the muddy courtyard. None of them had coats on. Lacy watched one lucky mother find her daughter, and she scanned the crowd wildly, looking for Peter, aware that she didn’t even know what he was wearing today.

Snippets of sound floated toward her:

…didn’t see him

……Mr. McCabe got shot…

…haven’t found her yet…

…I thought I’d never…

…lost my cell phone when…

…Peter Houghton was…

Lacy spun around, her eyes focusing on the girl who was speaking-the one who’d been reunited with her mother. “Excuse me,” Lacy said. “My son…I’m trying to find him. I heard you mention his name-Peter Houghton?”

The girl’s eyes rounded, and she sidled closer to her mother. “He’s the one who’s shooting.”

Everything around Lacy slowed-the pulse of the ambulances, the pace of the running students, the round sounds that fell from the lips of this girl. Maybe she had misheard.

She glanced up at the girl again, and immediately wished she hadn’t. The girl was sobbing. Over her shoulder her mother stared at Lacy with horror, and then carefully pivoted to shield her daughter from view, as if Lacy were a basilisk-as if her very stare could turn you to stone.

There must be some mistake, please let there be a mistake, she thought, even as she looked around at the carnage and felt Peter’s name swell like a sob in her throat.

Woodenly, she approached the closest policeman. “I’m looking for my son,” Lacy said.

“Lady, you’re not the only one. We’re doing our best to-”

Lacy took a deep breath, aware that from this moment on, everything would be different. “His name,” she said, “is Peter Houghton.”

Alex’s high heel twisted in a crack in the sidewalk, and she went down hard on one knee. Struggling upright again, she grabbed at the arm of a mother who was running past her. “The names of the wounded…where are they?”

“Posted at the hockey rink.”

Alex hurried across the street, which had been blocked off to cars and was now a triage area for the medical personnel loading students into ambulances. When her shoes slowed her down-they were designed for an indoor courthouse, not running around outside-she reached down and stepped out of them, running in her stockings down the wet pavement.

The hockey rink, which was shared by both the Sterling High School team and the college players, was a five-minute walk from the school. Alex reached it in two minutes and found herself being pushed forward by a throng of parents all determined to see the handwritten lists that had been taped to the door panels, lists of the children who’d been taken to area hospitals. There was no indication of how badly they’d been hurt…or worse. Alex read the first three names: Whitaker Obermeyer. Kaitlyn Harvey. Matthew Royston.

Matt?

“No,” a woman beside her said. She was petite, with the dark darting eyes of a bird and a froth of red hair. “No,” she repeated, but this time, the tears had already begun.

Alex stared at her, unable to offer comfort, out of fear that grief might be contagious. She was suddenly shoved hard from the left and found herself now standing in front of the list of wounded who’d been taken to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center.

Alexis, Emma.

Horuka, Min.

Pryce, Brady.

Cormier, Josephine.

Alex would have fallen if not for the press of anxious parents on either side of her. “Excuse me,” she murmured, giving up her place to another frantic mother. She struggled through the growing crowd. “Excuse me,” Alex said again, words that were no longer polite discourse, but a plea for absolution.

“Captain,” a desk sergeant said as Patrick walked into the station, and he slid his eyes toward the woman who was waiting across the room, coiled tight with purpose. “That’s her.”

Patrick turned. Peter Houghton’s mother was tiny and looked nothing like her son. She had a pile of dark curls twisted on top of her head and secured with a pen. She wore scrubs and a pair of Merrell clogs. He wondered, briefly, if she was a doctor. He thought about the irony of that: First, do no harm.

She didn’t look like a person who’d created a monster, although Patrick realized she might have been caught just as unaware by her son’s actions as the rest of the community. “Mrs. Houghton?”

“I want to see my son.”

“Unfortunately, you can’t,” Patrick replied. “He’s being held in custody.”

“He has a lawyer.”

“Your son is seventeen-legally, an adult. That means that Peter’s going to have to invoke his right to an attorney himself.”

“But he might not know…” she said, her voice breaking. “He might not know that’s what he needs to do.”

Patrick knew that, in a different way, this woman was a victim of her son’s actions, too. He had interrogated enough parents of minors to know that the last thing you ever wanted to do was burn a bridge. “Ma’am, we’re doing our best to understand what happened today. And honestly, I hope you’ll be willing to talk to me later-to help me figure out what Peter was thinking.” He hesitated, and then added, “I’m very sorry.”

He let himself into the inner sanctum of the police station with his keys and jogged up the stairs to the booking room with its adjacent lockup. Peter Houghton sat on the floor with his back to the bars, rocking slowly.

“Peter,” Patrick said. “You all right?”

Slowly, the boy turned his head. He stared at Patrick.

“You remember me?”

Peter nodded.

“How’d you like a cup of coffee or something?”

A hesitation, and then Peter nodded again.

Patrick summoned the sergeant to open Peter’s cell and led him to the kitchen. He’d already arranged to have a camcorder running, so that if it came down to it, he could get Peter’s verbal consent to his rights on tape and then get him to talk. Inside, he invited Peter to take a seat at the scarred table, and he poured two cups of coffee. He didn’t ask Peter how he liked it-just added sugar and milk and set it in front of the boy.

Patrick sat down, too. He hadn’t gotten a good look at the boy before-adrenaline will do that to your vision-but now he stared. Peter Houghton was slight, pale, with wire-rimmed glasses and freckles. One of his front teeth was crooked, and his Adam’s apple looked fist-sized. His knuckles were knotty and chapped. He was crying quietly, and it might have been enough to engender sympathy had he not been wearing a T-shirt splattered with the blood of other students.