Jeanna looked at the kid. Cheeks as red as if someone had pinched them. Eyes that creeped her out, sort of imploring and looking right through her at the same time.
“What?” she said.
“I need a drink of water.”
Apparently, she thought Jeanna was going to fetch it. “You can go to the drinking fountain if you need a drink,” she said. The kid turned away. “And come right back”—she tried to remember to smile—“sweetheart.”
The child walked in stocking feet out into the rush of foot traffic in the corridor, where the other classes were leaving to get on the buses for the field trip. Jeanna couldn’t wait for them to load up and get gone. Then it would at least be quiet. She watched until the kid dissolved into the noise.
Chapter Fifteen
The Day Of: Friday, February 7, 2020 | Peregrine Elementary
Before lunchtime, Aidon Clype pulled his truck into the back drive of the parking lot behind the school, scraping his plow over the snowpack. This was where he liked to come and watch sometimes, where he could see the playground and the fields—and his contract with the city made it easy. As long as the roads and lots on his list eventually got plowed, he could take as long as he wanted.
In past years, he’d had better luck at the end of the school day, because that’s when the kids scatter. That’s when he could find one who was by herself. But it had been such a long time, and he was tempted to take a look around right now since he was already here.
At first, he thought this day was going to be a dud because he’d seen the kids all loading onto buses, and none of the little girlies were still around. He could see all the teachers’ cars in their spots, all snowy and buried, and what a fuck of a time they were going to have digging themselves out—but no kids around, and no teachers back here either. He decided he would sneak one quick look inside the building before he plowed the rest of the lot. He nosed his truck up tight to the curb, pulled down the bill of his baseball cap, and headed for the back door and its nice wide window.
When he swiped away the frost on the glass and looked in, he couldn’t believe his luck. There was a little girlie, pretty pretty, fucking fine, right there, all alone. She bent her head over the drinking fountain and got her sweet little lips all wet, and then she wiped the drops away with the backs of her fingers. Plus she was a dawdler. Cute pink socks. He angled for a look farther down the hallway. No cameras as far as he could see. He couldn’t believe how perfect it was. He tried the door, but it was locked.
Quick as kaboom, he skipped to the cab of his pickup, grabbed his sparrows, and got his duffel. Dumped all the shit out and shook it empty. Military-size, big enough to fit that little yummy into. All the blood was rushing up him as he thought of how he would get his hands on her. He ran back to the door and brushed the snow from the keyhole. He was glad he had his uncle’s pick set, in a cool camo case, his trusty sparrows. With just a worm rake and a malice clip, the lock was open, and he was inside. He was like an Army Ranger—he was that good at this shit. He faked not looking at the girl. She turned and wandered away from him now. Wasn’t even paying him any attention. Pretty soon, he’d have all her attention.
He gathered up the heavy cloth of the duffel around the open end, and in a flash, he rushed up behind her, pulled the duffel over her head down to her feet, and hauled her over his shoulder. In two seconds, he was outside. He opened the passenger door of his truck, folded her into the footwell, and raced to the driver’s side. Just like that, he was in his truck, with the doors locked and the snow coming down like thick, white blinds. He couldn’t believe how excellent the whole operation had gone. She yowled in there, in his duffel, not making a pretty sound, and he told her to shut the fuck up or she’d be dead meat. And then all she did was sniffle a bit, and that was okay.
Chapter Sixteen
The Day Of: Friday, February 7, 2020 | Pearl Street Office Park
It was almost noon by the time Erin was set free from her interview. After she’d completed the stages of questioning, testing, and assessing, Bethany had said she planned to see more candidates and that she would let Erin know if she needed to talk to her again. Erin smiled an overly warm goodbye.
Once she was out of the building, she filled her lungs with the fresh, frosty air. Relieved to be out in the wild, feathery snowfall, she half-skated in her high heels across the icy parking lot to her car. She got in, started the engine, and turned on the heat. With a look at herself in the rearview mirror, she shook her head. She knew she was never going to be hired for that job. She loosened her hair and checked her phone.
There was a voicemail, left at 9:32. “Mrs. Fullarton,” the recording said, “this is Jeanna at Peregrine Elementary, and we have Korrie in the nurse’s office, and she’s running a temp, so you’re going to have to pick her up right away. She’s gonna lie down until you get here.”
Darn, Erin thought, that was a long time ago. She’d suspected Korrie might not be feeling well, and she wished she’d simply answered when her phone first rang. She returned the call. “Hi, Jeanna,” Erin said as she backed out of her parking spot and drove toward the street. “It’s Korrie’s mom.”
“Oh, good,” Jeanna said. “You called.”
Erin picked up a hint of sarcasm. “I’m on my way to pick her up,” she said. “I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
As Erin turned onto Broadway, she listened for Jeanna’s reply and instead heard sounds of exertion, as if Jeanna were making herself stand. “I don’t see her now,” the woman said. A rustling sound, like movement of the phone from one hand to the other, came over the connection. “Can you hold?” The line went to the sound of on-hold music without Erin having a chance to answer.
She continued along the slick streets until she came to a red light. Snowflakes fell with little crystalline splats on the windshield, and when the light changed, she carefully proceeded on toward the school. She wished she’d paid more attention earlier, when Korrie said she was having a hard morning. She recalled the time when Korrie was about eleven months old, and Erin and Zac had signed her up for a tots playgroup. They’d brought her home afterward, late in the afternoon, and she was deliriously animated, bubbling with her baby words, and then she became exhausted and grouchy and tumbled to sleep as if she’d been anesthetized. She woke early the next morning with a fever, her first.
They’d looked up what they should do in their first-time-parents book: “Do nothing for a slight fever, but give comfort and have her rest.” When the fever went up again, she and Zac gave Korrie a small dose of infant medicine, but all the baby could do was alternate between crying and nursing.
When evening came and the fever spiked higher, they rushed her to the urgent care center in town. They waited beside the tropical fish tank and squirmed in their anxiety, holding hands, rocking Korrie, pacing, trying to quell each other’s worry with phrases from the book.
At last, the nurse fetched them and led them into a curtained slot. Efficient and unruffled, she measured everything about Korrie, rushed out, snapping the curtain shut, and then came back with an ice pop and a cold compress. She squirted an orange blast of medication into Korrie’s mouth and dismissed them, ushering them out to pay their bill.
Once they were home, the fever started to diminish, and they put Korrie to bed. They both felt a little silly that they’d overreacted, but also like they’d been through something together, the three of them. And they’d sailed on and everything was fine. She and Zac joked about how inept they felt, how scary it was, that first time of not knowing what to do.
Now, on the phone, Jeanna’s voice came back over the line, sharp and high pitched. “Mrs. Fullarton, can you hold?”
“I’ve been on hold,” Erin said, but Jeanna sent her back to the music to wait some more.
Erin shook her head. She pushed on over the ice and slush, wondering what Jeanna’s problem was. She and Zac had chosen this school for Korrie because of its achievement scores and its teachers and because it was locate
d so near to NIST that Zac could drop her off in the morning on his way to work. But if Jeanna was any indication of how people ran the place …
A different woman’s voice interrupted the music. “Mrs. Fullarton?”
“Yes.” Now Erin felt her concern worsening. What was going on? Who was this person?
“My name is Orlaine Corray, and I’m the new vice principal here at Peregrine.” There was a frightening formality about her approach to Erin. “Jeanna tells me that we requested some time ago that Korrie be picked up. Is that correct?’
“Yes.” This was something serious. “What’s wrong?”
There was a pause and the sound of the handset being jostled. “We are looking for her right now, but Korrie might not be in the building.”
“What?” Erin cried. “What do you mean ‘not in the building’?”
“Mrs. Fullarton, please stay calm.” But it was the woman who sounded like someone trying to keep herself calm. “There might have been a misunderstanding about whether Korrie thought she was allowed to go on the field trip.” There was other dialogue in the background of the call. “We think if she’s not in the building, then maybe she got on one of the buses, and we’re confirming it by cell phone with the teachers who are out with the children.”
“You don’t know where she is?” Erin screeched. She accelerated through a stoplight. Her vision seemed to narrow around her.
“Keep calm, Mrs. Fullarton,” Orlaine said, “We just need to wait for word back from the teachers on the field trip.”
“I’m almost there.” Erin raced past the red-tiled buildings of the college campus, past NIST, cutting in and out between the slow-moving cars on the slippery road. It was as if an alarm had gone off in her head, drowning out the woman’s words about adherence and protocol. It affected her eyesight as the world went pale and off-kilter in front of her.
She turned onto the road where the school sat. As she charged toward the entrance to the drop-off loop, a vehicle racing the other way splattered slush and gravel across her windshield, and, blinded for a moment, she drove up onto the curb. With a sharp yank, she straightened her wheel and gunned the accelerator to get over the bump and on toward the front of the building. She abandoned her car in the drop-off loop and stormed through the doors.
In the office, Jeanna stood behind her desk. When she made eye contact with Erin, she took a step back and crossed her arms.
“Where is she?” Erin cried.
“I saw her a little while ago”—Jeanna gulped back her breath—“but not since.”
Another woman hurried out of an inner office, with a handset in her hand, and said, “Mrs. Fullarton?”
“Yes!” Erin shouted. “Where is Korrie?”
The woman’s face was creased with tension. “I’m Orlaine, Mrs. Fullarton.” She thrust out a hand for Erin to shake. Erin grasped it absently. “We’ve called the police,” Orlaine said. “They’re on the way.” She seemed to be in management mode. “We don’t believe Korrie is in the building, and she’s not out with the other students on the field trip.”
“Where is she?” Erin cried.
“We don’t know,” Orlaine said with a glance at Jeanna.
“How can you not know?” Erin shouted. She had once seen film footage of an entire shoreline city of skyscrapers ripping apart and disintegrating, and inside, she felt like that was what was happening to her. Korrie was not here. How could she possibly not be with the other children? How could these people have lost track of her? In the footage, ancient gray towers collapsed into clouds of dust, crashing into the sea. This felt like that.
In the time that followed, people kept introducing themselves to Erin. The school principal and assistant district superintendent arrived. The district’s lawyer arrived. An officer collected the surveillance tapes and took them away for analysis. Teams of officers arrived with dogs and set up a search. Erin fell apart and pulled herself together and fell apart again. People gave her drinks in paper cups and handed her tissues and patted her shoulder. And yet nobody managed to do the only thing that mattered: find Korrie.
Chapter Seventeen
11:52 AM
Sunday, June 20, 2021 | Peregrine Elementary
Erin’s boot came down on the hot, dry pavement. The green expanse of lawn, browning at the corners, stretched to the silent building, where the blaring sun glinted off rows of windows. There was no snow, no truck; there were no buses. No children. No other cars. A storm blasted alive inside her, and she just wanted to scream and scream and let the tempest out.
She ran up the sidewalk and grabbed the door’s handle. She yanked on it, but it did not give. Shading the glass with cupped hands, she peered inside. Except for shafts of daylight pouring from the upper level’s skylights, the interior was unlit.
Erin squinted in toward the office. Through the second set of glass doors, the desk—Jeanna’s desk—sat in dim shadows. Erin had not been here since The Day Of. Looking into the space again triggered queasiness, and she felt unsteady on her feet.
She rushed around the corner of the building and looked into more windows of empty classrooms—bulletin boards tacked with smiling suns and large illustrated letters, small chairs stacked on tables, rows of empty cubbies.
She ran toward the back parking lot. When she rounded the corner of the building, she hesitated. This was the spot where the police dogs had circled on The Day Of and bayed that they’d found that one one-millionth of Korrie’s scent.
Erin had been standing in the office next to Orlaine Corray. The vice principal was telling a female officer about the procedures the school had put in place and how, minute by minute, they had followed them. “To the T,” she was saying. The baying of bloodhounds interrupted her.
The officer said, “They’ve got something.”
Erin, Orlaine, and the officer ran down the hallways to the back of the building. The equipment jangled on the officer’s belt, and Orlaine’s heels clicked in time with Erin’s, like sharp little sticks on the tile floor. The hallways peeled back as they shot through them. The relief that this horrific thing was finally over flooded through Erin, and at the same time she was furious that she’d been put through this, and she just wanted to get Korrie and escape home. The three women banged through the back doors.
On the icy walkway of the teacher’s parking lot, two bloodhounds whirled, heads down, yipping and baying and sniffing at the snowpack. But no Korrie. The dogs’ handler stood in the flurrying storm and held Korrie’s lavender coat in his hand. Erin almost reached out to take it from him. Momentarily, she thought of putting it on Korrie and zipping it up. She scanned the white parking lot, cars hunched under shells of fresh-falling snow, and the motionless playground to her right.
The dogs looked up at the handler, and he gave them the command to track. The dogs put their noses down and whined. They sniffed a path to the curb at the end of the walkway and let out two piercing yips. They spun around each other and sat there on the frozen ground.
“Track,” the officer said, and he let the dogs sniff Korrie’s coat again. They wagged their tails, looked up at him, and sat back down on the same spot.
Now, in the midday heat, Erin approached that same entrance to the school and pulled on the handle, but of course this door, too, was locked. Pointless. It was summer. Getting into the building now had nothing to do with finding Korrie in winter.
And for that second, she wanted to believe that all of this was no more than a bitter delusion she’d created to cope with the day, to match its significance with a monumental breakdown. It was easier to think that thought than it was to admit she had squandered the only chance she had to intercept Clype before he took her daughter. She confirmed it with her phone. It was almost noon now. On The Day Of, she would have just called the school back and learned that no one knew where Korrie was, that she was not in the building.
The heaviness that descended over Erin felt looming and stony and smothering. She fought through it to head for the safety
of her car. She had missed the moment. There was one minute before he took her when she could have stopped him. And she’d missed it. She tottered across the grass, struggling to stay upright until she got to the car. She opened the door, collapsed onto the seat, and slammed the door behind her. Her father was right. Tears burned their way from her eyes and down her face. She drew in a ragged breath and held it inside. It was unbelievable that she had blown it. She locked the doors. Why would her heart not go silent in her chest and let it be over?
For one rogue second, she thought maybe she could go home and pretend this had never happened. Who would know? No one—not really.
Immediately after the thought arose, she threw it aside. She wiped her face dry with her sleeve. She had to find a way to see Zac. She had to tell him. But how could she do it? How could she face him now? How could she explain to him that the dead man who had killed Korrie had her in his hands again?
Chapter Eighteen
The Day Of: Friday, February 7, 2020 | Peregrine Elementary
In the school office, the minutes inched by, and Erin tracked Zac’s flight home on an app on her phone. She tried to estimate when he would come out of airplane mode and get her message that there was an emergency and he needed to call her. The longer the hours became, the more difficult it was for her to keep her thoughts straight. An amber alert was issued. Erin’s first impulse was to stop it from being broadcast, because then everyone would think of Korrie like those other children, those photos that were years old, those facts going stale, and believe that she was really missing, and it would be a false alarm once she was found, but the process was already in motion. It was minutes later when Erin realized how crazy it was to think of stopping something that could help find Korrie.
Once Again Page 7