Restless Spirits

by Michelle Scott

  Not locker doors, Margaret numbly realized. Gunshots. The dark, whispery feeling that had been nagging her all morning suddenly grew as keen as a buzz saw’s whine, and she knew as plainly as she knew her own name who had pulled the trigger. Jonathan hadn’t gotten better. On the contrary, he’d gotten much worse.

  As if summoned by her thoughts, Jonathan walked into the hallway. Though he had lived across the street from Margaret his entire life, she hardly recognized him now. The animated spark in his blue eyes and his shy grin had been replaced with a blank-eyed, slack jawed expression. Blood, like war paint, covered his face and matted his blond hair. He carried a shotgun at his side. He was the grim reaper. The angel of death in jeans and Nikes.

  Dear God, she thought, what did we do to him?

  A whimper forced its way up her throat, and she clamped her hands over her mouth to silence it. He hadn’t seen her yet, but she knew that when he did, her life would be over.

  Margaret stumbled backwards into the classroom, pulling the door shut. The voices of her students were garbled and meaningless as if she were listening to them from the bottom of a swimming pool. “We have to get out,” she said. And when they continued to babble, she screamed it, “We have to get OUT!”

  She floundered across the room to the windows and yanked hard on the handles. But they only opened a few inches. They were made for letting in a breath of fresh air, not for letting out terrified students.

  The gun sounded once more, closer this time, throwing the room into panic. Several girls backed into a far corner of the room and huddled on the floor. An ox of a boy, a farmer’s son with hands like shovels, picked up a desk and at Margaret’s tight nod, heaved it through the window. Another boy cleared away the jagged glass with a textbook, and moments later students began wiggling through the narrow space and falling to the ground.

  Only half of the class had escaped when the door exploded inward so forcefully that the hinges bent with a metallic shriek. Jonathan, blood covered and panting, loomed in the doorway. His eyes fixed directly on Margaret.

  He raised his gun. The farmer’s son grabbed his shoulder, but Jonathan pushed him aside as easily as a child brushes away a gnat, throwing the other boy into a desk where he hit his head and lay still on the floor.

  Margaret’s knees refused to support her any longer, and she sank to the floor. She tried to speak, but her voice hitched unsteadily. Jonathan towered above her like an angry god, his eyes as hard and merciless as the gun’s bore he had pointed at her face. This was some other boy, she thought, it had to be. Her Jonathan could never do this. “Please,” she begged. The word bubbled through the mucus clogging her throat. “Please, Jonathan.”

  He wagged his head from side to side as if thrashing against the dark thoughts polluting his mind. “Shut up, shut up, SHUT UP!!!” He cried so hard that his shoulders shook. Tears mixed with the blood on his face.

  “Don’t do this. You’ll be better soon, I promise, and it will be over.” She was babbling, she knew, tumbling out words unthinkingly, desperate to say anything that might return this monster to the boy she knew. “We can help you. Evander and I, we can help you through this.”

  Jonathan’s hands trembled. “So help me!” he screamed at her. “Help me!!”

  Margaret thought of what she might possibly say to make him drop that gun. But all she could think of was to tell him that she was sorry. She opened her mouth.

  The bullet, however, was quicker than she was and, with a deafening explosion, it killed both Margaret Wechsler and her unspoken apology.

  Chapter One

  In just two weeks, everything about Twin Rivers High had changed. Ernie had always thought that the school with its uninspired architecture – two boxy stories slapped one on top of the other, each with a perfectly symmetrical line of windows – looked like a prison, but this morning the police cars parked along the street, and the state troopers patrolling the wooded lawn added to the effect. The faculty parking lot was now guarded by a uniformed security guard who had asked to see Ernie’s ID even though the two of them had known each other since kindergarten, and the staff entrance that Ernie normally used was now locked. Instead, he was routed to the main doors where he had to wait in the rain with a few other early arrivals before he could pass through a metal detector. By the time he was finally allowed inside, he already felt worn-out and ready to go home.

  Mary DeGrooter, the French teacher, stood in the lobby shaking rain off her flowered umbrella.

  “There are prisons that don’t use this much security,” he complained. “I was expecting Dale out there to be wearing latex gloves so he could tell me to drop my pants and bend over.”

  Mary’s lips twitched, but it was a parody of a smile; she still looked nervous. “I wasn’t sure that they would allow me to bring my umbrella inside,” she said, folding it and tucking it under her arm. “I think it might be on the list of potential weapons.”

  “Potential weapon? If you’re the Penguin, maybe.”

  She frowned. “Penguin? Oh, right, like Danny Devito in ‘Batman’.”

  Ah, youth, Ernie thought wryly. “I was thinking of Burgess Meredith, but we can go with that.”

  The two of them walked down the hall together. This time of morning, it was mostly empty, and without students it was harder to ignore the decrepitude. When Ernie had attended school here, the building hadn’t been in such bad shape. But now, twenty years later, it possessed a shabbiness that couldn’t be hidden by the bright red paint on the lockers or the glass cases of gleaming trophies. The floors were covered with scuffed linoleum, the walls were dingy with handprints, and many of the ceiling tiles bore yellowed water marks from old leaks. A pair of dilapidated drinking fountains, their white ceramic basins cracked and stained, were chained together like prisoners in a work gang. A placard hanging between them read: OUT OF ORDER.

  “Seriously, though,” Mary said as they climbed the stairs to the second floor, “Don’t you feel safer with the police and the metal detectors?” The pucker of worry in her forehead made her look years older.

  He shrugged. “I think it’s a classic case of shutting the barn door after the horse has left.”

  “So you don’t think it will happen again?”

  What he wanted to say was, ‘How the hell should I know? I’d never thought it would happen in the first place.’ But she didn’t deserve to be the target of his ill temper. So instead he said, “Of course it won’t happen again. Because now that Smalley’s foolproof plan is in place, nothing can go wrong.”

  He was finally granted a genuine smile. “Mr. Smalligan has a knack for making things complicated, doesn’t he?” Mary said. “I would have thought that a principal’s job was to make his teachers’ lives easier, not harder. Let’s see…” She frowned, thinking, “How does it go again?”

  Ernie tried to remember. “If we hear the announcement over the intercom: ‘Mrs. Redbud, come down to the office,’ we’re suppose to duck and cover because a maniac is in the building. And if they say, ‘Mr. Bluecoat, you have a telephone call,’ then the coast is clear.”

  “I thought it was Mrs. Blueguard and Mr. Redhill,” Mary said, confused. “And that blue was the warning signal and red meant that everything was okay.”

  Leave it to Smalley to put the ‘fool’ back in ‘foolproof’, Ernie thought. “Maybe it would better if he got on the intercom and just said, “Put your head between your legs and kiss your ass good-bye.”

  Mary didn’t laugh. Instead, she fiddled with the gold cross that hung around her neck. “It doesn’t matter anyway, does it? A code wouldn’t have done a thing to stop what happened.” They’d reached her classroom, and she stood with her hand on the doorknob as if she couldn’t make up her mind to go in or not. “Gene didn’t want me to come to school today, but I told him that I had to be here for the kids.”

  “Are you going to be all right?” Ernie asked.

  “Yes. No. Possibly.” She shrugged and looked away. “How about you? Have
you talked to anyone?”

  “You. Just now.” When she rolled her eyes at him, he grinned. “I’m fine. Really.”

  “That’s just it. You’re too fine.”

  He gave her a sly look and ran his fingers through his hair. “That’s what all the ladies tell me.”

  Her frown deepened. “Seriously, Ernie, don’t joke. After what happened to you…”

  “Not to me. To one of my students, but not to me. I was the lucky one.” Though since that day, he didn’t feel lucky. Not one bit.

  “After what happened to you,” she continued as if he hadn’t interrupted, “I don’t think it’s good to simply go on as if nothing has changed.”

  “Nothing has changed. By the end of the week, it will be business as usual. And by the end of the year, all we’ll be able to talk about is how many kids aren’t showing up for class and should we fail them or not.”

  Her expression didn’t lighten. In a surprisingly intimate gesture, she put her hand on his arm and squeezed it. “Talk to someone. Please.” She dropped her hand. “Call me if you like.”

  “And have Gene the Machine beat the living daylights out of me for harassing his wife? No, thanks.”

  “Don’t call him that; he hates it.” But this time she did smile. Then she swatted him gently with her umbrella before going into her room.

  Ernie’s room was three doors down. He lingered outside it for a moment, getting up his courage, before entering and flipping on the lights. It was the first time he’d stepped through the door since the shootings.

  There was, of course, no evidence of the violence that had taken place here. No blood or bone chips or flaps of skin littering the floor. No gray matter smeared across the window panes or Rorschach of blood on the bulletin boards. The cleaning company had done its job well.

  But as Ernie surveyed the room, he felt that the cleaning company had done an excessively good job. This wasn’t his room; it looked too clean. Too shiny. The floor and been stripped and re-waxed. New bulletin boards replaced the old ones, and the walls were freshly painted. Even the desks had been scrubbed down. It was as if the entire room was screaming, ‘Look at me, I’m clean!’. But what Ernie wanted was for his room to be grubby and disgusting, the way it had been before the shooting. He wanted everything to be the way it had been before the shooting, back when his only worries revolved around the fact that his students didn’t know the central idea of “Bartleby the Scrivener” no matter how many times he’d covered it in class.

  That’s what he’d been doing on the day of the shootings: trying to get the kids to understand the central idea in “Bartleby”. It had been unseasonably hot that October morning; the breathless, muggy kind of hot from which there was no relief. Ernie’s shirt had been soaked with sweat from the moment he’d walked into his classroom. The electric fan at the front of the room blew a tepid breeze across the first row of desks, but did nothing for the back of the room. Most of the students were yawning, and a few dozed. Even the flies buzzing around the windows were sluggish.

  Ernie’s mind hadn’t been on the lesson, either. Instead, he was fretting about the delivery of record albums that he’d recently won on e-Bay. The UPS man was bound to set the package on his front porch where the afternoon sun would warp them. So unless he could get a hold of his father and convince him to rescue the box, his purchase would be ruined.

  As he contemplated his dilemma, a shout out in the hall interrupted him.

  “Help!! Help!!”

  At the cry – a shriek of pure terror – his heart had jump started, suddenly pumping at full speed. He ran out into the hall, nearly colliding with the student who had screamed. She clutched his arms so tightly that he cried out in pain, but even as he tried to pry the girl away from him, he heard the gunshots.

  There were two of them, sharp reports that brought to mind the .30 – 30 rifle he used for hunting. He shoved the girl inside the classroom and looked down the hall. Seeing nothing, he ran back inside, closing the door behind him. “Take cover,” he told his wide-eyed students. He was about to try the defective telephone on his desk when the classroom door swung open with a bang that made several kids yelp in alarm.

  And then Jonathan appeared in the doorway.

  The hero fantasies Ernie had indulged in over the years – himself as Bruce Willis, maybe, taking on a group of terrorists in an office building or Russell Crowe facing down an entire South American guerrilla army – immediately faded into black. When faced with the reality of that blood-spattered boy toting the rifle, all of his superhuman notions vanished in a heartbeat.

  Instead, Ernie made a weak remonstration, as if Jonathan were trying to enter class late without a tardy slip. “Hey, you can’t…” was all he managed to utter before Jonathan pegged his target, put the rifle to his shoulder, and pulled the trigger. Then, as calmly as a hall monitor delivering a message from the office, the killer turned and left the classroom.

  Somehow Ernie had made it out of the building. Somehow he found himself out on the football field with hundreds of screaming, crying, shell-shocked students and faculty. There was vomit on the front of his shirt as well as a great deal of his student’s blood. Afterwards, several people claimed that he had tried to help the victim, and that he had refused to leave the classroom until all of his students were safe. He, for one, couldn’t remember doing any of it.

  When he had finally gotten home and had found that the box of records was sitting on his front porch just as he had predicted, he stared at it in amazement. While he’d been at school facing his worst nightmare, life had gone on as normal. A man in a brown uniform had delivered his package to his home. The records had warped in the hot afternoon sun, just as he’d predicted. His seventy dollar investment was gone. That these things had even mattered to him at one time was the grimmest kind of comedy.

  Now, as Ernie stood in his hyper-sanitized classroom, the memory of the shooting left him feeling weak and slightly sick. With sudden shame, he realized how thin his veneer of bravado was. He’d come to school this morning prepared to be the life of the party, ready to put on a courageous front for the other teachers. What a sham. In reality, he’d hadn’t slept at all the night before knowing he’d have to walk these hallways today. Just pulling into the parking lot that morning had brought a wave of anxiety so intense that he’d nearly turned around and gone home. He was as frail and weak as anyone and, what was worse, he was too frail and weak to admit it.

  Not able to bear another moment in this empty, far-too-clean room, he decided to get a cup of coffee. He still had a few minutes before the first bell rang. He greeted the students who were now filling the halls and went into the teachers’ lounge. Luckily, a pot of coffee had just finished brewing. Ernie filled his cup – a travel mug the size of a small thermos – to the very top, nearly emptying the carafe.

  The only other person in the teachers’ lounge was Dave Miller who was buried in his sports section. Ernie took a seat across the table from him. “Not up for conversation this morning?”

  Dave grunted and looked up for a moment giving Ernie a chance to glimpse the dark circles under his eyes. Usually, the coach was a bulldog on the verge of a snarl, but today he exhibited a weariness that Ernie had never seen before. His was the face of a man going through the motions.

  Concerned, Ernie gentled his tone. “How’s the team taking this?”

  Dave shrugged. “It’s tough.” He stared thoughtfully down at the sports section. “The sad thing is that Vandyke was shaping up to be a good player. He’d put on some muscle over the summer and was packing attitude when he showed up for the first practice. He was really getting into it; playing like he was ready to single-handedly take on the Lions at Thanksgiving.” The coach’s eyes grew distant. “He was showing promise.”

  Ernie had been nodding sympathetically and sipping his coffee, but he suddenly stopped. He didn’t like the sound of this at all. Extra muscle was one thing, but the aggression was a red flag. He’d had Jonathan as a student th
e previous year and knew that the kid was as easy going and affable as they come. Had someone asked Ernie to make a list of students who might potentially shoot up the school, Jonathan would have been dead last. “That doesn’t sound like him at all,” Ernie told the coach. “I mean, weren’t you surprised when he showed up at practice and acted like he wanted to take on the Lions?”

  Dave evaded his eyes. “Not really. I’ve seen it happen before.”

  Ernie’s stomach tightened. When Dave had been hired two years before, Ernie had heard rumors that the coach had turned a blind eye to steroid use among players at his previous school. Though the accusations hadn’t been proven, Ernie had always wondered why a class AA coach would leave his job to come out to a class C school in the country. “Seen it before? Like with steroids, right?”

  Dave’s face hardened into the take-no-prisoners expression he used during the games. “Look, he had buffed up a lot since last year. Maybe more than a kid usually would. But I heard that he was working over at the Calhoun farm last summer, and I thought that all that hay bailing and woodcutting or whatever had put some muscle on him.”

  Ernie felt a sick twist in his gut. “He was working for Evander Calhoun? Are you sure?” Suddenly his concerns over steroid abuse disappeared.

  “The guys ragged on him quite a bit about it. They were all looking for details, you know? Wondering what the old guy was like.” Dave picked up the sports section and opened to a new page. “I guess there’s all kinds of rumors about him.”

  While the coach went back to reading his paper, Ernie retreated into stunned silence. Ten minutes ago, he wouldn’t have thought that anything could have made him feel worse than facing his classroom.

  He knew from firsthand experience that Evander Calhoun’s reputation was not built on rumor alone. Though Ernie never liked to think of it, the summer he’d turned thirteen he’d also spent some time working for Evander. The old coot had been cunning in singling him out for the job. Like everyone in town, he’d known that Ernie’s mother had just died, that his father was deep in the bottle, and that Ernie himself was isolated and lonely, desperate for a guiding hand to help him through the tragedy. In short, Evander knew a victim when he saw one.