“It’ll never be right.” But his fingers curled around hers. Cheryl gripped the edges of her chair, which was not the same.
They held on, and awaited judgment.
“She never liked him, you could tell. I don’t think she liked babies at all. There was always something in her eyes when she looked at him. Something… crazy.” Grace had played an ear of corn in her first-grade class play, The Bounty of Kansas. The stage fright had been so bad she’d thrown up all over Jarrod Heinman, who’d been very proud of his Kiowa costume until it was covered in puke. The show had gone on; Grace had been called Corn Puke for the next two years (the name conveniently referencing both her costume and her stomach contents, and ending her acting career before it began). But now, despite the sea of faces in the audience, her gut was steady and her lies spilled out with more conviction than she’d ever been able to muster for the true facts of corn harvesting.
“We were supposed to watch a movie together, but she sent me to bed early, for no reason. She was always doing that. She really hated kids. I don’t know why she was a babysitter. Maybe just so she could have a chance to…”
The events she was describing seemed to bear no relation to anything that had actually happened in her life. And not just because she was tweaking the truth a bit to serve her purposes. The facts themselves had been drained of their horror. As she spoke the words – describing the way a noise had woken her in the night, not Owen’s cry, not his normal one at least, but something muffled and in pain, telling the rapt audience of her flight down the hallway, all at once consumed by a vague panic, as if the bond between her and her beloved little brother was such that she could sense his fear, share his pain, experience, even, the moment that his tiny soul departed the earthly plane – she felt nothing.
There was the rage, of course, but that was always with her now, and had somehow become unmoored from cause and context. It was the sole source of light in Grace’s ever-present fog, a bright line connecting her to Cass, the only two remaining points in the universe. There was Grace, there was Cass, there was the unfulfilled promise that lay between them, and beyond that there was… nothing.
She didn’t think about her parents anymore, except to consider the difficulties that might arise if they returned before she could do what needed to be done. She didn’t think about Owen anymore, either. Not even now, when talking about him, and his little broken body. There was no remaining guilt or grief. The rage had blotted it all out.
There was probably something wrong with her, she thought on those late nights when she scraped at the last peanut butter jars and scrounged for a few remaining potato chip crumbs to quiet her gnawing hunger, and curled up under Owen’s overturned crib, where she now habitually slept. But that didn’t bother her much, either. That was the beauty of it. As long as she played dutiful servant to her master rage, nothing did.
“I saw her kill him,” she told the town, and tried her best to look sad about it. She tried to look like a different person, young and sweet and broken. Like Gracie. “He wasn’t even crying or making trouble or anything. She walked into that room for no reason, she murdered my brother, and then she jumped out the window. She wanted to die. But instead, they gave her some fancy lawyer and stuck her in the hospital and now here she is again, back in our town, like nothing ever happened. Like you can just kill someone and not pay for it. And I don’t think that’s right.”
If she said anything after that, no one heard over the thunder of the crowd. Grace wiped her eyes. No one but the mayor and the deacon was close enough to notice she wasn’t actually crying.
“I don’t remember,” Cass said.
“Nothing?” the deacon said. “Absolutely nothing?”
“Nothing.”
“This is your claim.”
“It’s not a claim, it’s true.”
“It would give a great many people a great deal of peace to know why you did what you did.”
“I’m one of them. But I don’t know. I don’t!”
“You stated that you’re sorry for what you’ve done.”
“Of course I am.”
“And yet you claim you don’t remember doing it.”
“I don’t.”
“How can you be truly sorry for something you claim you don’t remember doing? How can you repent?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“I’m afraid I don’t know, either.”
The term for it, Ellie knew, was giving her enough rope with which to hang herself.
“Before a sentence is handed down, Ellie King would like to say something on behalf of the defendant,” the deacon said, patting the air to quiet the angry crowd. They hated her, she could tell. Maybe as much as they’d loved her just a couple of days before. Somehow, the deacon had gotten the word out that they’d all been fooled, and seeing her reminded them of their gullibility. For a moment, Ellie was sympathetic to their obvious desire that she vanish.
“Remember, your choice,” the deacon whispered as she stepped forward.
It was as if he’d even gone to the trouble of making the noose for her – all she had to do was slip her head through.
“I’m not saying that Cassandra Porter isn’t guilty,” she said. The judgment had been delivered by general acclamation. It was all over now, except the lynching. Somewhere, at the very back of the crowd, she thought she spotted Jule Prevette, and for some reason, focusing on that face loosened her lungs and her clenched stomach. “And I’m not saying we have no right to judge her sins. But…”
Was there a but?
A baby had died – surely that demanded payment.
A life for a life.
I could tell them all, she thought. Open my mouth and say it. What I’ve done. Who I am.
Unclean.
Unrepentant.
Unforgiven.
“We’ve all sinned.” That was as close as she could bring herself to get. The crowd was rumbling again. Someone fired an apple at her with dead aim, hitting her solidly in the shoulder. “We’re not perfect, any of us. We fight our temptations and sometimes we win. Sometimes…” She would not give in to the past. This wasn’t about her. “Not everyone’s strong enough to win. Should we hate them for being weak? Or should we help them? Shouldn’t we lend them our strength, give them a chance to do better, to make up for their mistakes? People can change. People who do bad things can do good things, too. Cass can do good things. She can spend the rest of her life making up for what she did, if we let her. It won’t erase what happened, not for us, not for her. I guess I think maybe it’s still a punishment, maybe it’s a worse punishment, to let her live. Let her remember what she did and have to choose what to do next. She took a life. That life is gone. But her life… what good does it do any of us to throw that away, too? When there’s still good it could do? Sometimes mercy is justice, I really believe that. I believe that’s what He would want.”
“He tell you that himself?” someone shouted from the crowd.
“He told us all,” she said. “In the Bible, in the Gospels, in church every Sunday. There’s nothing special about me – I never said there was. God talks to all of us. We just have to listen.”
The words flowed easily. They were true enough, but they weren’t the truth, not the hard one. Not that it mattered. The town didn’t want to hear. They hadn’t stopped booing or shouting or throwing things since she’d begun, and now that she’d finished, the jumble of noise merged into a single desperate, pounding chant.
“Burn her.”
“Burn her.”
“Burn her.”
The deacon had his men toss Ellie offstage and out of the gym. “You are no longer a part of this,” he told her quietly, and whether he meant the trial, the church, or the town, she saw it to be true. Even when they closed the doors to her, she could hear them chanting. It began with words; soon it would be action.
The time for words was done.
“The defendant is sentenced to death,” the deacon intoned.
“Sentence to be carried out immediately.”
And the crowd, as they say, went wild.
There was an Oleander tradition, at homecoming games, of rushing the field. Win or lose, the fans poured off the bleachers and into the dirt, swarming the Bulldogs’ end zone, uprooting the goalpost, and, like an army of ants bearing bread crumbs three times their size, spiriting it away. In the unlikely event of a win, they charged with added frenzy.
This had been a big win.
The town scrambled onto the stage, shouting and spitting and pressing as close as they could to the baby killer, as if grabbing a tuft of her hair or landing a loogie on her cheek would be an achievement they could someday tell their grandchildren about. The Watchdogs formed a protective barrier around Cass. They’d been given strict orders that, no matter what, she was to make it to the pyre intact. The plan was to parade her down the street, in hopes of keeping the crowd at peak frenzy, before binding her to the stake and sending her screaming to hell. West positioned himself immediately beside her, doing his best to keep the vultures away, but could do nothing about Baz, who’d clamped down on her other side. The quarterback was, West knew, doggedly determined to keep Cass safe for as long as it took to make sure he got to watch her burn. Baz had once, in fifth grade, set a dog on fire, simply for the entertainment of his friends. They’d been suitably horrified to shame Baz into putting the fire out, and pretending the whole thing had been a joke that had accidentally gone too far. He’d even cried the next day, telling them how his father had put the dog out of its misery with a .20-caliber bullet, and then beat the living crap out of his psychopathic son. Even then, West suspected the tears were fake: Baz had been plainly exhilarated by the flames, and more so by the dog’s agonized howls. He looked now, with his meaty hands on Cass, the way he’d looked then, holding that lighter: purely, recklessly happy.
As they inched toward the exit, West spotted a wild-eyed Daniel Ghent forcing his way into the heart of the crowd. West caught his eye and tried to give him a look that communicated they were on the same side – for whatever good that would do. Cass wasn’t getting out of this alive. Anyone stupid enough to help her would probably suffer the same fate. But at this point, West wasn’t sure that was a good enough reason not to try.
He was tired of being afraid.
Ellie had not broken the rules in three years, when the consequences of delinquency had finally proved too great to bear. But these were man-made rules, she reminded herself, and she served a higher power.
The voice told her she couldn’t do it – would fail before she began. Had failed long ago. She ignored it. She prayed. She asked God to tell her whether this was right, but didn’t wait for an answer, because the answer would be no use to her if it wasn’t yes.
It wasn’t faith that gave her the courage she needed, and it wasn’t prayer that made her take a deep breath, shield her face, and kick in the glass door of the chem lab. It was the thought of Cass, on the stage, in her cell… in Owen Tuck’s bedroom all alone, defenseless against the devil’s incursion. It was the memory of a bloody Reverend Willet, approaching the cross with a lighter in hand, and the sound of screams as she’d run away.
Not this time. Cass needed her. Not her kind words or her sufferance or her assurances that life would be easier on the other side, but her. Ellie King. Who could do more than smile and nod along and let the town believe she was whoever they wanted her to be.
She couldn’t know that this was the right thing, that the deacon was wrong and she knew better, that this was the path the Lord would have chosen. She couldn’t know, not for sure. But she was good at faith.
So she did it anyway.
It was chaos. No longer a collection of rational individuals, but one beast with a thousand heads and a single thought: Burn her. Daniel cursed himself for not moving sooner, when he might have stormed the stage and swept Cass away before anyone had time to react. Now? To fight his way to the center of this, then fight his way out again? You might as well pull a gun on a tornado.
He was about to try it anyway – because it was that or follow the procession down the street and wait for the children of Oleander to toast marshmallows on her corpse – when the building rattled with a thunderous boom. Smoke billowed into the room, and someone let loose a piercing, stampede-inducing shriek: “Boooooomb!”
Statistics suggest that crowds panic far less frequently than most people believe. Usually, even in emergency situations, large masses of people will behave rationally, helping one another, working together to save themselves, looking out for the weakest among them. Even when they’re trapped with no hope of escape, most people will accept their fate with some degree of calm. There are two exceptions to this: when people think they might be trapped, with one slim chance of escape, or when they have trouble breathing. Then all rationality burns away. Panic takes over.
The Eisenhower gym, with smoke pouring in, flames licking the walls, and one narrow exit at the back of the very large room, managed a two-for-one. Everyone went nuts. What had been chaos became pandemonium. The crowd reversed itself, pressing outward rather than in, flinging itself toward the back of the room. Apparently not trusting his safety to Providence, the deacon forced his way through and was one of the first out the door.
“Prevettes!” Daniel heard West shouting. “By the east side. I’ll take the prisoner. You guys, go!”
Other than Jule, there were no Prevettes in the building, and surely if the explosion had been a bomb set by Scott’s militants, they wouldn’t have been dumb enough to stick around and watch. He’d interpreted West’s strange look correctly, he realized. The football player was trying to help.
“Now!” he told Jule, who was already on the move, threading through the knots of shrieking people to where West and a couple of the other Watchdogs were pulling Cass back up onto the stage, into the wings.
By the time Daniel caught up with Jule, she had a gun trained on Baz Demming and two sophomore football players, while a dumbfounded Cass sagged in West’s arms.
“You can’t shoot us all, bitch,” Baz said.
Out of nowhere, West pulled a gun of his own. “She won’t have to.”
Baz reared back. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Get out of here,” Jule said, and the Watchdogs sprinted. Baz was left with no choice but to follow.
“I’ll kill you,” he screamed over his shoulder. “But first I’ll fuck you. I’ll fuck you to death!”
Daniel heard a madness in that voice that scared him far more than the flames.
Which were getting closer.
The cowardly doctor scuttled toward them, happy to rejoin the rescue squad now that the rescue was done.
“What happened?” Cass murmured. “What’s happening?”
West held her with one hand, and with the other, trained a gun on a figure lurking in the shadows. “You following me?” he asked.
Jason Green, a junior Daniel barely knew, stepped into the light. “Following him,” he mumbled, jerking his head in the direction Baz had run. “Does it matter? The building’s on fire.”
“I know a place,” Jule said, and they followed her, all of them somehow now in this – whatever it was – together. They ran away from the fire and away from the crowds, into the depths of the school, where they ran into a paper-white Ellie King, hysterically babbling something about having blown up the school. They absorbed her and ran faster, across the school, out the other end, past the overflow trailers, past the construction equipment that had collected dust since the expansion budget had run out, and ducked into a rusting construction trailer Daniel hadn’t realized was there. Something about the possessive way Jule tapped the KEEP OUT sign as she climbed inside made him wonder if she’d made it herself.
They piled into the trailer and slammed the door shut behind them. It was a double-wide, with space for all seven of them: Daniel, West, Jule, Cass, the cowardly doctor, the sputtering saint, and the inexplicable junior. It was far from the fire; it w
as hidden; it was, for the moment, safe. Which meant, for the moment, so were they. Daniel drew in a long, shaky breath. Somehow, they’d actually done it.
“Take a breath,” Jule told Ellie. “Then just say it. What did you do?”
Ellie took a deep breath. Then another. Then, in a wobbling voice, said, “I broke into the chem lab, I stole some fireworks and set them off, and then I came looking for Cass.”
Daniel couldn’t have been more surprised if she’d admitted to planting an actual bomb.
“I’m pretty sure there’s a sin in there somewhere,” Jule said.
A laugh spurted out of him as he realized the implications. “You set the school on fire, Ellie.” Now he was laughing so hard he could barely catch his breath. Which, he was aware, probably had less to do with the humor of the situation than it did with his surging adrenaline and suppressed panic – but it felt good to laugh. And why not? A hundred yards away, their high school was burning down and their town was going nuts, and they’d just publicly aligned themselves with Oleander’s Most Wanted. They were totally screwed. Why not enjoy victory while it lasted? “You blew up the freaking school!”