Brady had resumed ranting and screaming, even when the siren abruptly cut off. I was so busy breathing shallowly and lying still that it took me a minute to dip inside his head, which was a virtual snake pit.
Brady had lost all his insulation; that was what I’d always called the civilizing influence that kept us from hitting other people when we were angry with them, stopped us from hawking and spitting on the floor of our grandmother’s house, advised us to make an attempt to get along with coworkers. Maybe Brady had never had a lot of this insulation anyway. His mental and emotional entanglement with Sherry had stripped all this insulation away and all the wires in Brady’s brain were hopping and sparking without any impulse control.
Brady was entirely human, but if I hadn’t known better, I’d have called him a demon.
The demons I’d known had been much better behaved. My sort-of-godfather, Desmond Cataliades, was mostly demon, and he wore civilization like a coat.
With no warning, Brady kicked me. I didn’t know if he could sense an intruder in his head because he’d abandoned his semblance to a total human being, or if he simply felt like expressing his aggression. It was a huge effort to roll with the kick as if I weren’t in my body.
Then Brady fired the gun into the office, and again I had to hold on to my possum persona with all the determination I could muster. I came this close to yelling out loud as the glass of the window shattered and rained down on me and Ms. Minter. Now some of the blood smearing me was my own.
I’d always assumed that to save my own life I could endure just about anything. I was finding that wasn’t necessarily so. With Brady proving so completely unpredictable, I was fast approaching the jumping-up-and-screaming point.
If I’d been a genuine possum, my masquerade might have been easier.
He went past me again, screaming incoherently and slamming into every door he saw. I heard a door swing open, and I thought, Oh, no! But the cleaning agent smell that wafted out told me bathroom, and I let out the breath I’d taken very slowly indeed.
The crazed man continued down the hall to the left of the office, and I heard not a sound from the teachers and kids trapped in those rooms. I opened one eye. Though my angle of vision prohibited me from seeing very far down the right corridor, which I was facing, I could see that the teacher in the first room had taped construction paper over the window in her door. That was amazingly smart. In the room across the hall, apparently the kids had hidden out of sight of the window, and Brady said, “Where the hell are they?” He sounded merely puzzled. He sounded like a real person, for just a second.
I could get up and run out before he could catch me or shoot me, I thought. He had his back to me, his attention was definitely elsewhere, and if I scrambled up and leaped to the front doors, I could be down the sidewalk and behind the cover of the cars before he could get to the doors and aim.
At least, I hoped I could.
And then I wondered about the lone police officer out in front of the school. I didn’t know what kind of person he (or she) might be. He might be so shaken by the seriousness of the event that he was ready to shoot whoever came out the doors, especially a bloody stranger running directly toward the patrol car.
While I was doing my best impersonation of a dead person and listening as intently as I could to both Brady’s physical actions and his mental chaos, I kept cudgeling myself to develop a plan. If I was out of his sight for a few seconds, should I move? Was staying right here the best policy? If I hid, where could that be?
Then I did something I should have done before. I reached out for Hunter.
Hunter? You okay?
There was a long moment of silence. Aunt Sookie? Did he shoot you? We heard a gun.
He didn’t shoot me. I’m all messed up to look at, but I’m not hurt.
Who got hurt?
Ms. Minter is hurt, but I think she’s going to be okay, I told him. I hoped I wasn’t lying. She was still alive, anyway.
My cell phone is in my purse, honey, I told him. If Ms. Yarnell doesn’t have one, make sure she uses mine to call 911. There’s a police car outside, but only one.
Ms. Yarnell’s been talking to ’em.
Great! Tell her . . . I began, but then I stopped. There was no way Hunter could relay messages without revealing his secret to all his peers.
Crap.
Tell her you need to borrow the phone to talk to your aunt, Hunter. Hold it to your ear. I’ll be talking to you this way, but they’ll think it’s coming over the phone.
In a minute, he was back on the line—the telepathy line. I think she knows, he said, but he didn’t sound worried about it. What do you want me to tell her?
Tell her Ms. Minter is down, but she’s alive. I’m lying on the floor beside her. Ms. Javitts is locked in the janitor’s closet. The bad man is named Brady, he was Ms. Javitts’s boyfriend.
Why are you lying on the floor, Aunt Sookie?
I sighed, but I kept it in. This was not the best means of communication, but at least we were communicating. I’m pretending to be hurt, I explained.
You’re playing possum.
Yeah, exactly, I said, relieved.
Ms. Yarnell says she needs a straight shot at him.
I puzzled over that. Was Ms. Yarnell telling me she needed a direct field of vision to our attacker, or that she needed no one in between because she meant to literally shoot him? (I put off worrying about an armed kindergarten teacher until later.)
I’d been thinking so hard I’d forgotten to listen for Brady. His feet were right beside me all of a sudden. I closed down everything inside. I was afraid he was going to kick me again, and the anticipation of the pain was almost as bad.
He needed to move three steps back to be in a direct line of sight from the door of the Pony Room. There was no way I could make that happen without moving. I tensed my muscles in preparation.
“No, Aunt Sookie!” screamed a voice down the hall.
Oh, God, no. Brady, shocked, stepped away from my prone form and turned to look down the hall in the direction of Hunter’s voice.
Now! I said.
“Now!” Hunter said to Ms. Yarnell.
I heard a commotion in the hall. What the hell was the witch doing? I couldn’t let Brady get close to the kids! I rolled from my left side to my stomach. Brady’s back was to me, but he was about to start down the hall. I lunged across the intervening distance and grabbed his nearest ankle, the left. The minute my hands wrapped around it, I made up my mind he wasn’t going anywhere unless he dragged me behind him.
Several things happened then; the front door eased open behind me. I caught a flicker of movement and a glimpse of khaki. But I had to reserve my attention for the man with the gun.
Brady looked down at me and shook his head, as though flies were buzzing around his face. I finally saw him clearly. He was a mess; he hadn’t shaved in days and hadn’t bathed, either. The plaid western shirt was torn, his jeans spattered with old paint. His sneakers were very worn. But they were able to cause damage when he kicked me, and he was making up his mind to do that again. He balanced on the foot I had pinned, and brought his right foot back to get some momentum. I yanked at his ankle and he had to put the foot back down to catch his balance.
“Bitch!” he yelled, and raised the free foot again to stomp on one of my arms. I ducked my head down as if that would help avert the blow.
I heard a thud and an exclamation from Brady as something hit him on his shoulder.
It rolled on the floor until it came to rest in front of the janitor’s closet.
It was a big Red Delicious apple.
I could see past him. It had been thrown by Sabrina Yarnell, who was now holding out her hand to the open door of the Pony Room. One of the children tossed her another apple, a Fuji this time. That apple, too, came at Brady with deadly intent, and this time Sabrina nailed him in the hea
d.
Brady forgot he wanted to stomp me. Suddenly, he was far more interested in finding out who was attacking him.
“Who are you?” he called to Sabrina. “I ain’t here after you! Get back in that room.”
But he’d been distracted just long enough. A hoarse voice behind me said, “Brady Carver! Drop the gun!” Brady’s head whipped around at this new diversion, and though I was too anxious to keep my eyes on him to peek behind me, I figured the new entrant had to be the police officer.
Brady’s face had gone through a startling variety of expressions in the last minute: bewilderment, resentment, anger. But now he settled on hostility, and he began to raise his right hand to shoot.
“I don’t want to shoot you, Brady,” said the voice, still hoarse with tension, “but you better damn believe I will do it. I will shoot you dead.”
“Not if I get you first,” Brady sneered. I was sure I was going to be spattered with Brady’s blood, too, but the moment after, something amazing happened.
His right hand seemed to go numb. The fingers weren’t able to retain their grip. The hand relaxed completely, and the gun fell from it to clatter to the floor close to my head. To my immense relief it did not go off, and I instantly released Brady’s ankle to shove the gun across the floor in the direction of the police officer. I stayed still and low, though I sure wanted to get out of the middle of the floor and out of the line of fire. Just at the moment it seemed more important to keep the situation simple.
Sabrina was standing with her small plump hand extended in Brady’s direction. She didn’t look like a young schoolteacher at all. She looked like a ball of power and ferocity. I’d never seen a witch really look “witchy,” but I practically expected to see Sabrina’s hair stream back in an invisible wind while she kept Brady’s arm immobile.
The police officer pushed the gun a little farther away from Brady with her foot—yes, the officer was a woman, a brief glance informed me. And then she was screaming, “Down! DOWN!” with the persistence of a banshee. To my amazement, Brady Carver knelt two feet away from me, and I scrambled backward in an ungraceful sort of reverse crab walk. His arms jerked back behind him, ready for the cuffs. His face was full of astonishment, as if he could not believe he was doing this.
In short order, Brady was cuffed, useless hand and all.
Sabrina was staggering from the effort as she went back into her room in answer to an anxious chorus from the kids.
I tried to stand up. It took two attempts, and I had to lean against the wall.
A lot happened in the next few minutes.
The EMTs rushed in, and brave Principal Minter was loaded into an ambulance. Her keys were on the floor where she’d lain, and I pointed out to the police officer that Sherry needed to be released from the janitor’s closet. The secretary was an emotional mess. She was taken to the hospital, too, to get something to calm her down.
By that time the state police had arrived.
The old school had never had so many guns under its roof.
All the people in uniform seemed relieved that the human damage hadn’t been worse, though a few newbies were silently a bit disappointed that the situation had been resolved without their assistance. Brady Carver was marched out to a state trooper car to be taken off to the county lockup, one arm still flopping uselessly, and the police officer (Shirley Barr) got a lot of slaps on the back for subduing the shooter. Shirley Barr was an ex-military woman of color, and I figured that in the line of duty here in Red Ditch she didn’t get too many chances to show what she was made of. She had to concentrate on not looking happy.
The parking lot began to fill with parents who had heard that something bad was happening at the school. With the principal and her secretary absent, there was no one to take charge until the school guidance counselor stepped up, driving over from the nearby high school to do the right thing.
Once I’d turned down an ambulance ride and I’d explained to the police why I’d been on the spot, no one seemed too interested in me. I went into the principal’s bathroom, since there was no one to stop me, and I carefully wiped away all the visible blood—Ms. Minter’s, and my own from the glass. My T-shirt was a mess, so I gave it to the policeman, who seemed to want it. I rummaged in the big box labeled DONATIONS until I found a T-shirt that was way too tight but covered everything . . . just barely. It was better than being bloody.
I got a lot more attention from the state guys after I emerged in the tighter T-shirt.
But eventually I was able to walk back to the Pony Room to give Ms. Yarnell a hug. The kids were in surprisingly good spirits, which was a credit to their teacher. Hunter was just as glad to see me as he had been the first time I’d arrived that day, but he was definitely more subdued in expressing his pleasure. Ms. Yarnell had told the children that while they were waiting to find out what would happen the rest of the day, they might as well be celebrating Labor Day by partying.
A couple of the kids were too distressed, but most of them had gone along with the plan of singing the newly learned “America the Beautiful” and eating cupcakes. They’d poured out the contents of their goody bags as children ought to do. Hunter had gotten a thank-you hug from one little girl with about ten pigtails carefully composed in squares, and a big smile from a tousle-headed boy with cowboy boots. Hunter was doing his best to play a tune on his harmonica.
I hadn’t spotted Remy out front, but then the police hadn’t given me much of a chance to look. They were trying to take pictures of the lobby area and figure out the sequence of events.
They also seemed a little puzzled at some of the odder parts of the story.
They thought Sabrina had been suicidally lucky in throwing things at a shooter, and criminally irresponsible at opening the door of her room to step out into the hall. I didn’t know if she’d even keep her job in Red Ditch after this. She was well aware of that possibility. “I couldn’t let him keep on going,” she said quietly, as we stood alone behind her desk.
“It bothers me that it took a lot of us to stop him,” I confessed.
“Did any of us have a gun until the cop showed up?” she demanded. “Did he have any restraint, any of the rules of morality or society, when he broke into the school?”
I eyed her with some curiosity. Sabrina was a much more philosophical witch than my friend Amelia. “No, he was purely the devil,” I said. “He wasn’t hiding anything. That was the real Brady.”
“So we all had to show what we really were, too,” she said quietly. “And look, we brought down the bad guy. And they don’t suspect, none of them.”
The inexplicable weakness in Brady’s gun arm had been written down to some kind of heart event or even a stroke, and he would be having tests in the hospital after he’d been searched and booked at the jail. Several of the cops had even wished aloud that Brady had had a heart attack, one violent enough to kill him. They were eye-for-eye people . . . in their own, true hearts. And I didn’t think anyone who had arrived on the scene, or even the officer who’d actually witnessed the event, knew that Sabrina’s attack with the apples had been planned to make him look at her, give her magic a chance to weaken him. The police were convinced that only my grip on Brady’s ankle had kept him from charging down to the Pony Room and killing everyone in there. They would never know what Sabrina and I really were. At least Ms. Minter would get credit for her outstanding presence of mind and courage; those were her true attributes.
I looked at Sabrina and smiled. “Well, you’re right. We did our best with our own gifts. Now we’ve got to put them under wraps again. Someday, maybe, we’ll get to be what we are.”
There was so much we didn’t know in this world. But looking at the children, some of them playing at the back of the room, some of them obviously distressed and ready to reunite with their parents, I could see that there was a future, that what kids were learning in classrooms all over Americ
a was not going to stop because sometimes kids experienced terrifying or simply unfamiliar stuff. . . .
Hunter’s little friend, the boy in the cowboy boots, ran up to grab one of Ms. Yarnell’s apples and threw it squarely at another little boy, just as he’d seen her do.
Yells of anger. Tears.
Yeah, some things about school would never change.
IN THE BLUE HEREAFTER
I wrote “In the Blue Hereafter” for a sports-themed anthology edited by Toni L. P. Kelner and myself, and my source of information was my daughter, who had played most sports in high school and who had become a renowned softball player. A couple of previously introduced characters make appearances, and psychic Manfred Bernardo (a character in the Harper Connelly books and the Midnight, Texas, series) makes the acquaintance of a woman with a most uncomfortable gift—our own Sookie Stackhouse.
The final story about my telepathic waitress is set in the spring after “Playing Possum.” “In the Blue Hereafter” is told from Manfred Bernardo’s point of view, but in it he meets Sookie and a babysitter readers met in “If I Had a Hammer.”
DURING THE LONG drive of the day before, Manfred Bernardo had had plenty of time to reflect on the fact that he would stick out like a sore thumb in a small town. In fact, he’d been rather proud of that certainty. He’d argued mentally with Xylda the whole way from Tennessee to Louisiana. Since Xylda had died the previous winter, that was the only way Manfred could talk to her, but Xylda herself was not so limited. She played games with her grandson, in his dreams. Sending him to Bon Temps, Louisiana, seemed to be the opening move in a new one.
On this sunny, cool afternoon in spring, Manfred scanned the locals around him in the crowded stands, confident in his own street cred. To his chagrin, Manfred observed several people decorated with as much ink as he was, and several more who had facial piercings. Maybe none of them had gone to the same lengths as Manfred, but two or three were in the same ballpark.
The comparison made Manfred smile, because he was actually in a ballpark for a fast-pitch softball tournament. According to the schedule a buxom brunette softball mom had sold him when he was paying his entrance fee (and she’d been wearing a T-shirt that read Softball Mom!), he was sitting in the stands of Field One to watch the opening game of a two-day tournament.