Sweetheart

by Chelsea Cain

  If you breathed slow enough. If you didn’t think about your children. If you stayed relaxed.

  “I’m Detective Sheridan,” Archie said, looking past the teacher. “My daughter, Sara, where is she?”

  “I know who you are, Mr. Sheridan,” Mrs. Hardy said. She stepped aside and turned on the classroom lights and Archie could see the kids sitting in a circle in the center of the room. They were motionless, eyes on him, faces pale.

  Archie didn’t see Sara. He stepped farther into the room, toward the children. “Sara?” he called. The panic he had been fighting surged. His heart raced. He felt the heat rise under his skin. His throat constricted. He took another step toward the children.

  Stay relaxed.

  He felt Mrs. Hardy’s hand on his elbow, stopping him. “The principal came and got her,” she said. “To keep her safe.”

  Archie gasped, a strangled sigh of relief that nearly doubled him over.

  Mrs. Hardy tightened her grip on his arm. “You’re frightening the children, Mr. Sheridan,” she said.

  He saw himself then. The bulletproof vest. The weapon. The patrol cops at the door. His daughter’s classmates stared at him silently, a few lower lips starting to tremble. They weren’t scared of the lockdown. Or of Gretchen Lowell.

  They were scared of him.

  He lowered his weapon.

  “Has anyone else been here?” he asked the teacher. “A blond woman?” Archie searched for some other word to describe her and came up with nothing. “Beautiful?”

  “No,” she said.

  Archie took a step backward toward the door. “I’m sorry,” he said stupidly.

  A little boy in an Elmo sweatshirt stepped forward. He reached out his hand. “Can I hold your gun?” he asked.

  Jesus Christ, thought Archie. “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s okay, everyone. I’m sorry.”

  The patrol cops followed him back out into the hall where Archie immediately peeled off his vest and let it drop to the floor. It fell on the carpet with a thud.

  “What are you doing?” the older patrol cop asked.

  “It’s a school,” Archie said. “We’re in a fucking school, for Christ’s sake.”

  Henry came around the corner with his weapon drawn. His eyes darted, scanning the hallway; his shaved head glistened with sweat. “The principal came and got Ben,” he said.

  “Sara, too,” Archie said. “The office is this way.” Archie holstered his weapon and turned to the patrol cops. “Put your weapons away. Go door to door.” They looked at him, not understanding. “Calm. Them.”

  The older one looked at the woman. “But what if the Beauty Killer’s still here?” he said.

  “She wants me,” Archie explained. “Or my children.” He ran a hand through his hair. “Go.”

  Archie started jogging for the principal’s office, Henry a step behind him. “She’s fucking with us,” Henry said as they ran. “This whole thing. It’s not right.”

  There was a poster of a frog on the administration office door with a slogan that read LEAP INTO LEARNING. Archie slammed the heel of his fist against the frog’s face three times. “It’s the police,” he said. “I need you to unlock the door.”

  The door opened and the office secretary appeared, her eyes wide behind thick glasses.

  “Ben and Sara Sheridan?” Archie asked.

  She tilted her head toward a door marked PRINCIPAL.

  Archie reached the door just as it opened. Archie had met Principal Hill only once, at a fund-raiser. He was a black man in his mid-forties. He had a master’s degree in education. The school board had recruited him from Philadelphia, and everyone had been excited because he’d once played a year on a major league baseball team. He came to the door with a heavy wooden bat in one hand. His other arm was wrapped around Archie’s daughter’s shoulders. Ben was standing next to her.

  Archie slid to his knees and both Ben and Sara ran to him and he took them in his arms.

  “What the hell is going on?” Principal Hill asked, lowering the tip of the bat to the carpet.

  Archie held his children close, breathing in the smell of their hair, tasting their skin with his kisses. “It’s okay,” he told them. “It’s okay now. I promise.”

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw the bat fall to the carpet and looked up to see Principal Hill raise both his hands and take a half step back, his eyes focused behind Archie.

  Archie heard the gun a moment before he felt it press against the back of his neck. A single metallic click. The sound of someone turning off the safety of a semiautomatic.

  “Let go of the children,” a voice commanded. “Now.”

  CHAPTER

  24

  The sun felt good.

  It was a funny thing to notice, Susan realized, given the current situation. But that was the thing about Oregon; it rained most of the year, so when the sun came out, you noticed it. Gretchen Lowell was loose. Archie Sheridan’s children were in danger. And she was having a sun moment.

  Not that there was anything she could do. The school was surrounded by cops. Susan counted five fire trucks. What, did they think the school might burst into flames?

  Susan had lost sight of Claire. She had left Susan behind in the car as soon as they’d arrived, and Susan couldn’t get near the school without a police escort. There she was, the first reporter at the scene, and not only could she not get close to the school, she had forgotten her pen.

  So she was sitting on the hood of Claire’s Festiva scribbling notes with a stick of Chanel kohl eyeliner. It may have been the most expensive writing implement she’d ever used. The mid-morning sun was huge and egg-yolk yellow. That was nice. She wrote that in her notebook, “egg-yolk yellow.” Underlined it.

  She squinted up at the school. SWAT had rushed in five minutes before. They had been in there awhile. Five minutes, when you were watching a building, was a long time. Susan felt her stomach tighten with anxiety. She saw a heavyset man in a Hills-boro PD uniform walk by on the other side of the tape, and slid from the hood of the car with her notebook.

  “Hey!” she called. “Susan Ward. With the Herald. What’s going on in there?”

  The cop walked by her quickly without even the usual seething glance of disregard.

  The TV media had started to arrive. Charlene Wood from Channel 8 was first, bursting from the passenger seat of the Channel 8 van, and staking her claim for her live shot. She was tall and skinny with legs that looked like piano legs and black hair that she always wore parted on the side and curled under at her shoulders. Everyone loved Charlene. Ian claimed that she kissed him once at a KGW holiday party, but Susan didn’t believe him.

  A SWAT member jogged by, a walkie-talkie in each hand.

  “Susan Ward,” Susan shouted at him. “Oregon Herald. Can you tell me what’s going on in there?”

  He looked right at her and walked away toward the command center the Hillsboro PD had established directly in front of the school.

  Susan’s phone rang. She glanced at the caller ID. It was Ian. For the fourth time in ten minutes. He wasn’t going to be happy.

  “Anything?” he said. “We need an update for the Web site.”

  “SWAT arrived,” Susan said. “They’re inside the school.”

  “I know,” Ian said. “Charlene Wood is live with it on Channel 8. Anything else?”

  “You’re fucking kidding me,” Susan said, glancing over at Charlene, who was broadcasting live in front of the command center, her piano legs poked into black high heels. “She just got here.”

  “Well, she’s scooped you,” Ian said. “Find something. I want Web updates every ten minutes. We’ve got a photo team on the way.”

  “Every ten minutes?” Susan asked.

  “You can call them in. Don’t make me wait. Welcome to the information age, babe.”

  Something was going on in the school. Susan hung up the phone and pressed forward. More cops were streaming inside. Portland PD. Hillsboro PD. State cops. FBI.
How did they all get here so fast?

  Susan pressed against the thin strip of plastic crime scene tape and tried to record everything she saw. A few parents had arrived and stood sobbing next to a female patrol officer. They were young. Susan’s age. Tears streamed down one father’s face. But his wife was stoic, solid, her arm draped around the man’s shoulder. Susan felt bad for them. Their suburban lives menaced like this. She knew that losing a kid was a parent’s worst nightmare. She couldn’t relate, but their fear was so naked that it made her glad for a second that she didn’t have kids. She was safe, at least, from that kind of helplessness.

  She heard the sound of children before she saw them. Their voices floated on the air like birds. And suddenly there they were, streaming from behind the building, in rows, boy-girl, smiling at the activity. Like it was just another fire drill.

  The cops were evacuating the back of the school. That was a good sign, right? Susan searched the crowd for any sign of Archie. Nothing. She had seen pictures of his children, and didn’t see them in the crowd, either.

  Her phone rang again. Crap, she wished Ian would leave her alone. She picked it up.

  She heard her mother’s voice say, “Hi, sweetie.”

  “Bliss,” Susan said, annoyed. “I’m working.”

  “You got chocolates from Archie.”

  “What?” Susan asked, shaking her head slightly to try to make sense of her mother’s statement.

  “Chocolates. With a card from Archie Sheridan.”

  Susan giggled despite herself, lifting her hand to her mouth. “Seriously?”

  The parents she’d been watching shouted out. A single word: “Max.” A small boy looked up from the schoolyard and ran to them.

  “They’re in a heart-shaped box,” Bliss said.

  The boy got to his parents and they lifted him into their arms, both of them how crying. Ordinarily, Susan would be all over a story like that. Parents and child reunited. Herald readers loved that. Good news. Happy family. Tragedy averted.

  But Susan’s notebook had fallen from her hand and lay on the grass below.

  She tried to speak, but a knotting sensation gripped her chest. She forced herself to take a breath and then tried again. “You didn’t eat any of the chocolates, Bliss, right?”

  There was no response.

  “Mom?” Susan said.

  CHAPTER

  25

  Archie lifted his arms straight out and then bent them at the elbows and locked his fingers behind his head. Ben and Sara stepped away from him, trembling, eyes fixed behind him, terrified. A stream of urine darkened Sara’s red overalls. Her cheeks reddened.

  “I’m sorry, Daddy,” she whispered, her eyes on the ground.

  “It’s okay,” Archie said just before he was slammed facedown on the floor. He felt a large hand grind the side of his face into the carpet and a forearm press against his shoulder blades. He knew the move. It was a tactic they taught you at the academy to subdue a suspect.

  Hillsboro SWAT.

  “We’re cops,” Archie said.

  “Yeah, fuckheads,” he heard Henry say. “Notice the Kevlar?”

  A walkie-talkie crackled. Sirens wailed outside. Archie thought he could hear at least one helicopter. If Gretchen had been there, she was long gone by now.

  “Shit,” he heard another voice say.

  “Look around my neck,” Archie said. He felt the forearm on his back shift and then his neck burned as someone tugged the beaded chain that his badge hung from. Then the forearm and hand lifted and Archie sat up.

  He immediately crawled a few steps toward Ben and Sara. They didn’t run to him this time. Sara squirmed in her wet pants and Ben pulled her close to him. Archie stopped moving toward them. Principal Hill knelt behind Sara and put a protective arm around her. She flinched, still riveted by the SWAT officers.

  There were five of them in the office, all wearing black jumpsuits, gloves, thigh holsters, and head wraps, their weapons drawn. Henry was just standing up, from where they had positioned him on his knees. He grabbed the badge that hung around his own neck, over his bulletproof vest, and thrust it toward one of the SWAT officers. “What the—” Henry glanced over at Ben and Sara and faltered. “Heck?”

  “Sorry, sirs.”

  “You find her?” Henry asked. They all knew which “her” he meant.

  “No. We’ve secured most of the school. I don’t think she’s here.”

  Archie turned back to his children. He held an arm out for Sara to come to him, but Ben just pulled her toward him more tightly. Their small chests rose and fell, the sound of their breathing audible. Ben wiped his nose with the back of his wrist. “You’re scaring her,” he said.

  Archie lowered his hand, and felt his children slip farther from his grasp. Gretchen was never going to kill them. Not when she could still use them to hurt him. “Gretchen’s not here,” he said softly.

  The woman behind the front counter, the school secretary, lifted a quaking hand to her mouth. “She said she was your wife.”

  “What?” Archie asked, turning.

  The secretary was in her fifties. Her blond hair was permed and she wore a smock over a turtleneck, like an oversized kinder-gartener. She’d been the secretary there ever since Archie could remember, but he didn’t know her name. “She said she was your wife,” the woman continued. “I knew you were divorced from their mother.” She motioned vaguely at the children, one hand still held in front of her mouth. “She said that she was their stepmother. That they had forgotten their lunches. She asked to make a call from the phone, right there. I was working at the copier, so I couldn’t hear. And then in the confusion of the lockdown she disappeared.” She looked from one cop to the next, and then shrugged sadly. “She had a short brown wig on. I didn’t recognize her.” Then she lowered her hand from her mouth and leveled it until she was pointing at the far end of the counter, where two lunch boxes sat side by side like bookends.

  Archie stood up and walked over to them. They were both plastic. One had a Dora the Explorer theme. The other was Batman.

  “Should we call the bomb squad?” one of the SWAT officers asked.

  Archie ignored him, reaching for the Dora the Explorer lunchbox and opening it. When he saw what was inside his gut clenched, and he fumbled for the next lunch box and opened it. He forced himself to stay rigid, not to let his children see his reaction. He had scared the shit out of them too much already today.

  “What is it?” Henry asked.

  The two plastic boxes lay open, the dark meaty flesh inside glistening under the office’s fluorescent lights. The blood puddled and slipped on the lunch boxes’ colorful plastic interior shell. Archie could smell it, the coppery sweet tang. He knew now what had happened to the missing male deputy, the poor sap who had helped Gretchen escape, probably even bought her the fucking lunch boxes.

  Archie’s voice was steady. “It’s a human heart,” he said quietly. “I think it’s been cut in half.”

  And judging by the smell, it was fresh.

  CHAPTER

  26

  Mom?” Susan said again.

  There was a pause. “I might have eaten one.”

  Susan couldn’t breathe. “Mom,” she said, as calmly as she could. “You have to throw up.”

  “What?”

  “Listen to me,” Susan said, her voice rising. “The chocolates are poisoned. Make yourself throw up. I’m going to hang up now and call nine-one-one.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “Promise me.”

  “But I don’t feel nauseous.”

  Nauseated, Susan thought. But she didn’t say it. She opened her eyes. “Bliss, promise me.”

  “Okay,” Bliss agreed hesitantly.

  Susan hung up and dialed 911. “I think my mom’s been poisoned.” She rattled off Bliss’s address. “She ate a chocolate. I think Gretchen Lowell sent me poisoned chocolates.”

  “Yeah,” the 911 operator said. She sounded unconvinced.

  “I’m not crazy. My name’s
Susan Ward. I write for the Herald. Please send paramedics.”

  She hung up and looked around frantically. More kids were streaming out of the school now. All sorts of cops were jogging in. Something had happened in there. All hell had broken loose.

  Susan didn’t care. “I need some help,” she cried. “Someone.”

  She ducked under the tape and headed toward the school.

  “Get behind the line,” she heard someone bark.

  Susan felt the tears start to slip down her face. “Gretchen Lowell,” she cried. “She sent chocolates to my house.” She looked around frantically for someone, anyone, who could help her. But everyone was focused on the school. “My mother ate one,” she yelled. “I need help.” She looked for Archie, for Henry, for someone she knew. “I need Archie,” she screamed at a Hillsboro patrol cop. “Where’s Archie?” The cop looked back at her blankly. “Please,” Susan begged. She was running now. “Someone. Help me.”

  Claire Masland appeared. She was there in an instant, out of nowhere, her arm around Susan’s shoulders.

  “Susan?” she said. She took Susan by the shoulders, just as Susan’s knees started to buckle. “Calm down. Tell me what’s going on.”

  Susan had to take a deep breath before she could talk. “My mom just called. A heart-shaped box of chocolates came to the house addressed to me. The card said they were from Archie. She ate one. My mom ate one.” She gripped Claire’s shoulder and looked at her hard, so she’d understand. “Archie wouldn’t send me chocolates.”

  “Your mom’s at home?” Claire asked.