The Redhead and the Preacher: A Loveswept Historical Romance (42 page)

Then, at approximately his one-hundred-twenty-fifth step, the old gentleman would turn his face slightly, his dark eyes meeting Laura’s hazel ones. Although he was nearly seventy, he was still a handsome man, and he knew it, she could tell. He’d nod at her and touch the brim of his hat. She’d smile and nod back.

“He’s got the hots for you,” Herschel, one of the other teachers, had once said.

“Rich, old—and with the hots for me?” Laura had replied with a rueful smile. “I should be so lucky.”

But the elderly gentleman’s glance almost did seem to convey sexual interest, and she admired him for harboring youthful thoughts, even felt a certain affection for him, although they’d never spoken.

She was still young—twenty-eight—and knew she was fairly attractive, but New York was full of women who were younger and far more beautiful. She didn’t care; she
wasn’t hunting for another husband. She’d had one, and he had been more than enough.

Her only vanity was her richly colored auburn hair, which was thick and waving; she wore it long. She used little makeup and let her freckles show. She always had freckles, even in winter.

This afternoon, the wind was cold and brisk, so she’d used her plaid muffler as a scarf, covering her ears and tying it under her chin. She stood a few yards from the twins, watching them, her hands deep in her pockets. Behind her came the shouts of other children playing.

The gray sky had started to spit needles of sleet. Laura would be grateful to see the old gentleman round the corner, for that meant recess was almost half over, and soon she would be back in the warmth of the classroom.

The twins, as usual, clutched the fence rails, ignoring the other children, watching for the man. Their winter jackets and gloves were alike in all but color. As usual, Trace wore blue and Rickie red. The boys were so identical that many people could tell them apart only by this color coding. They seemed even to breathe in unison, their breath rising in synchronized plumes toward the sky.

Their hands tightened on the fence when they saw the man coming. The air was so cold that his ears were red and his usually controlled face looked almost pained. His white muffler was wound around his neck, and his coat collar was turned up. He seemed to exhale smoke as he walked, as if he were an elderly and benign dragon.

Perhaps because of the cold, he walked a bit more swiftly than usual, and Trace frowned, trying to keep count of the man’s steps. When the old man passed the boys, he lifted his hat, just barely.

“Good
afternoon,” he said, not looking at them, striding on.
“Good
afternoon.”

They saluted stiffly, their eyes following him.
“Good
afternoon,” they echoed.
“Good
afternoon.”

He kept moving briskly. One of the other children, Janine, ran up to Laura, asking for help in retying her shoe. “Of course,” Laura said, putting her hand on the girl’s shoulder. But she waited, first, to exchange her usual silent greeting with the old gentleman.

His dark eyes met hers. He raised his gloved hand to his hat. He nodded.

Then a long staccato burst of noise split the winter air, and the side of the old gentleman’s face exploded into blood. His remaining eye rolled upward, his shattered jaw fell, as if to cry out, but no sound emerged.

Blood blossomed on his chest like red carnations sprouting in full bloom, and blood spurted from his legs, which danced, sinking beneath him. He lurched like a broken puppet toward the street and fell in a ruined heap. His wounds steamed like little mouths exhaling into the cold.

The children screamed, the teachers on the playground screamed, pedestrians screamed, and one woman with a Lord & Taylor shopping bag sat on the sidewalk, screaming as blood poured down her face.

Laura moved on sheer instinct. She wrestled Janine to the ground before the old gentleman hit the sidewalk, and she held her there, her body thrown over the girl’s.
Shooting
, Laura thought in horror, ducking her head,
somebody’s shooting at us
.

A bullet ricocheted shrilly off the pavement of the playground, and one of the children—William, perhaps?—screamed even more loudly.

Her face hidden, she heard Herschel’s agonized cry. “He’s hit! He’s hit!”

Then the shooting stopped and she heard the squeal of tires. Without the shots, the air seemed to ring with silence—except for the screams, of course, but they hardly registered on Laura’s consciousness any longer.

“He’s hit! He’s hit!” Herschel’s voice was broken. She looked over her shoulder, biting her lip. Herschel knelt above William, who flailed and writhed, holding his arm.

The other children were crying as teachers tried to drag them back inside the safety of the school.

Numbly Laura clutched the sobbing Janine closer to her chest. She forced herself to look at the old gentleman again. He lay motionless on the sidewalk in the welter of his blood.

His beautiful overcoat is ruined
, she thought illogically. And just as illogically, a line from
Macbeth
ran
through her head:
“Who’d have thought the old man to have so much blood in him?”

So much blood
.

Then, with a shock, she realized that Trace and Rickie still hung onto the fence as if hypnotized, staring at the corpse. They alone of all the children were not crying or shrieking.

They regarded the dead man, the dark pool of blood, the screaming wounded woman, with wooden faces. Their hands still gripped the fence bars, and a slow, thin stream of scarlet ran down Trace’s cheek, dropping to stain the bright blue of his coat.

Oh, God, he’s shot
, Laura thought in panic. She rose and stumbled to the boys although Janine screamed out for her to stay.

Quickly she examined Trace’s cheek. It bled profusely, but he didn’t seem to notice. He acted irritated that she had pulled him away from the fence.

Janine got to her feet and lurched toward Laura, hysterical. She grasped her around the waist and wouldn’t let go. “Shh, shh,” Laura told the girl, her voice shaking. “We’ll go inside. We’ll be fine inside.”

Rickie, too, was annoyed to be pulled away from the fence rails and clung to them more tightly. “Shots,” he said. “Shots. The man got shooted on the hundred-and-twenty-ninth step.”

“Yes, yes,” she said impatiently, wrenching him from the fence. She was terrified that whoever had opened fire would return and shoot again.

She wrapped one arm around the bleeding Trace, the other around Rickie. Janine still hung onto her waist, wailing hysterically.

In the distance, sirens shrilled. “The police are coming,” she told the children, struggling to herd them inside. “The police will be here, and we’ll be safe.”

“The car come by,” Rickie said, frowning studiously. “The car shot. Hit the man.”

Trace touched his own cheek, then regarded his bloodied glove impassively. He nodded. “The car shot. Hit the man.”

A drive-by shooting. Here—in front of our own
school, in front of these poor children
, Laura thought.
The world’s gone crazy. The world’s mad
.

Somehow, Laura maneuvered her little brood inside the school. Shelley Simmons, the speech therapist, had collapsed onto the hall floor and leaned against a wall, holding one of the younger children, his face hidden against her chest. Both wept uncontrollably.

“I’ve called nine-one-one,” Mrs. Marcuse, the school’s director, said, struggling to exert control. “The police will be here. An ambulance will be here.” She held up her hands as if beseeching them for peace, but there was none.

Jilly, the oldest student, crouched in a corner, hugging herself, her expression full of terror. She covered her eyes with her hands, as if she could block out what she had witnessed.

Oh, my God, that they should see this
—Laura thought, still in shock—
that children should see such a thing
.

Fanny Mayberry, the cook, appeared, staring at the chaos without comprehension. Herschel had William’s thin body stretched on the floor, and was using his own jacket as a compress to stop the bleeding of the boy’s arm.

“Fanny, take Janine,” Laura said, trying to thrust the clinging girl to the other woman. “There’s been a drive-by shooting. Trace is hurt, too.”

“My Lord, my Lord,” Fanny said, folding Janine in her arms. “What a world! You come to Fanny, honey, you be fine.”

Laura knelt before Trace. She snatched off her muffler and dabbed it against his cheek. “Does it hurt?” she asked.

He ignored her question. He frowned at the door. “Car shot thirty times,” he said, jutting his lower lip out petulantly. “Hit the man nineteen. The man didn’t finish the walk. Got to finish the walk.”

“He can’t finish his walk. Trace, look at me. Tell me if you’re hit any place else. Do you hurt anywhere else?”

Stolid, he didn’t answer. He stared at the door instead, and Laura thought that maybe the wound in his cheek was only superficial. She kept her muffler pressed against it, willing her hand not to shake.

“I saw the license,” Rickie said quietly. “It was MPZ one oh four eight one nine.”

Trace nodded. “MPZ one oh four eight one nine. The man should finish the walk.”

The hall was overwarm, almost stifling, but Laura suddenly went cold. Once more a peculiar silence enclosed her, blocking the riot of sound.

“What?” She clutched Trace’s jacket by the lapel. “Say that to me again.”

He frowned more irritably. “MPZ one oh four eight one nine. The man should finish the walk.”

Her heart beat painfully hard as she turned to Rickie. “You saw the license number?”

“MPZ one oh four eight one nine,” he said.

My God
, she thought with a rush of adrenaline.
They both got the license number. Of course. Of course
.

The knowledge gave her a numbed comfort. The police would be pleased. They would find the monster who had gunned down the kindly, dignified, harmless old man, wounded the woman on the sidewalk, hurt William and Trace. They would catch the gunman, lock him away, make the world safe again.

But when the police came, they were not pleased.

“N
ow calm down, calm down,” ordered the officer in charge. His name was Detective Valentine, and Valentine was an unlikely name for him. He was a tall, disheveled, heavy man who needed a shave and gave off an aura of sweat and cynicism. He had gathered them in the school cafeteria.

But few of the children calmed down, and Shelley Simmons still could not stop crying. When an officer tried to comfort her, she slapped at him and cried harder because he wore a gun. The medics should have given her a sedative, but in the confusion, nobody had thought of it.

The woman on the sidewalk had been critically wounded, and the bone in William’s upper arm had been nicked. Both the woman and the child had been strapped onto gurneys and loaded into ambulances that sped screaming away. The school had been bedlam.

Trace’s cheek had been cleaned and patched, and now Laura sat beside him, trying to keep him from scratching at his bandage. He muttered to himself, his dark brows drawn together. Rickie sat on Laura’s other side, humming.

“Listen!” ordered Valentine, eyeing his weepy audience with disgust. “Did anybody see the whole thing? Just answer me that.”

Nobody replied. Janine set up a fresh wail, and Herschel leaned his elbows on the table and put his face in his hands.

“I
said,”
Valentine repeated, his lip curling, “did
anybody
see the whole thing?”

Laura waited, her heart hammering, to see if any of the other adults had witnessed the shooting, but nobody spoke.

“We did,” she said so quietly nobody seemed to hear her. “We did,” she said again. She had her arm around Trace, the better to restrain him from scratching at his cheek.

Trace didn’t want to be touched and tried to squirm free. His brother stared impassively at the detective and kept humming.

Valentine had dark, bulging eyes that reminded Laura of a bulldog’s. He trained them on her with no friendliness. “All three of you?”

“Yes.” She nodded. “They got the license number. They saw the gunman clearly.”

The room suddenly became quieter. Valentine stared at Trace and Rickie. They ignored him. Trace muttered. Rickie hummed.

“They seem calm enough,” Valentine said, almost grudgingly. “Will they talk?”

“Yes. I—think so.”

He nodded. He looked askance at Janine blubbering in Fanny’s embrace, at Jilly huddled in the farthest corner, at Shelley Simmons still openly weeping.

“Where can we talk?” Valentine’s voice wasn’t kind.

“In my office. Down the hall,” Laura said. “Room One-E.”

“Room One-E,”. said Rickie.

“Room One-E,” Trace repeated, trying to shake off Laura’s hand.

One of the children, Fergus, began to make a strange, mournful yipping noise. “I want my room!” Fergus cried. “I want my bed! My room! My bed!” He yelped again, more stridently and unhappily than before.

Valentine sighed. “Let’s go to One-E,” he said. Weariness mingled with contempt in his voice. “Eagan, take over here. Oliphant, come with me.”

He and Oliphant, a slim young black officer in uniform, accompanied Laura and the twins to her office. Trace muttered, frustrated that he couldn’t scratch at his bandage. Rickie kept humming.

Laura’s office was small but cheerfully decorated. Looking down from the walls were framed posters of Mr. Spock of
Star Trek
, Ariel the Little Mermaid, and Simba the Lion King. In the corner stood a small work table with a child’s colorful, simple puzzle on it. Four shelves were crammed with books, both adults’ and children’s.

Tacked on one bulletin board were children’s drawings and snapshots of the students and staff. On another bulletin board, student charts displayed gold stars. Some charts had many gold stars. Some had few.

Valentine lumbered to Laura’s desk and, without asking, sat down heavily in her chair. She didn’t like that. The uniformed officer, Oliphant, pushed aside a pile of her papers and sat on the corner of her desk. She didn’t like that, either.