One Breath Away (4 page)

Chapter 8:
Meg

I
’m debating whether to give
Stuart’s claim that there is a gunman in the school any credence and call
dispatch when the squawk of my radio stops me short.

It’s Randall Diehl, our dispatcher. “You need to go over to the
school right now. We’ve got a lockdown.”

Maria’s school. Damn. Stuart was right.

“What’s up?” I ask. Since I’ve lived here there have only been
two lockdowns at the school, a kindergarten through twelfth-grade building. One
of the last of its kind. At the end of this school year Broken Branch’s only
school would be closed down; too expensive and outdated to maintain, the
superintendent and school board voted to consolidate with three other nearby
towns. In the future, Maria’s school district would be known as
Dalsing-Conway-Bohr-Broken Branch Consolidated Schools.

The first lockdown I was involved with was two years ago when
two inmates from the Anamosa State Penitentiary escaped and were thought to be
in our area. They weren’t. The second time was when two misguided high schoolers
called in a fake bomb threat. They hadn’t studied for their finals and thought
this would cleverly get them out of the tests. It most certainly did that. And
got them kicked out of school.

“We got a possible intruder in the school. Just head on over
there,” Randall says impatiently, which was not like him at all. “The chief will
meet you and he’ll fill you in. Communication is a mess. The 9-1-1 lines are
jammed with calls from students, teachers, frantic parents.”

“Will do,” I tell him, and flip on my windshield wipers to
clear away the snow. Interesting, Chief McKinney already at the scene. I check
the clock. Just after noon. Probably just a misunderstanding, a prank by some
kids to kick off spring vacation. Maria will be sad she missed all the
excitement.

I turn the squad car around and head up Hickory Street toward
the school and am grateful to have something to occupy my time besides the
thought of spending four whole days without Maria, which makes me feel empty, as
if my insides have been hollowed out. Tim always said he couldn’t ever imagine
me as a kid. The few pictures that I had of myself as a child showed me as a
serious, unsmiling creature with unkempt hair, wearing a pair of my brother
Travis’s old jeans.

“Did you ever have any fun?” Tim teased when he first saw the
photos.

“I had fun,” I protested, though that was pretty much a lie. My
childhood consisted of taking care of my parents, who, for reasons still
unknown, were completely defeated by life, and trying to stay out of the way of
my volatile brother. When Tim and I had Maria I was determined to make her
childhood as carefree and joy-filled as mine wasn’t. I think we did a pretty
good job of this, at least until the divorce, and even then Tim and I did our
best to protect Maria. We didn’t argue in front of her, we didn’t bad-mouth each
other, but she knew. How could she not? Even if we didn’t make a big spectacle
out of the end of our marriage, she had to have seen my red, swollen eyes, Tim’s
tight, forced laughter.

In minutes I pull up to the school and find Chief McKinney
already there along with Aaron Gritz—curious, because he isn’t on duty
today—trying to keep a small, angry-looking group away from the school’s
entrance. Chief McKinney’s deep baritone fills the air. “Go on back to your cars
or you are all going to freeze standing out here. We need to find out exactly
what’s going on and we can’t do that if we have to concern ourselves with—”

A woman steps forward, waving her cell phone, and in a
trembling voice interrupts the chief. “My son just called me from inside and he
said there was a man with a gun. Can’t you get them out of there?”

“Based on the information we have,” Chief McKinney says
patiently, “we’ve determined that the best response is to contain the area and
not send officers into the school at this time.”

“But my seventh grader called and said there were two men,”
another woman speaks up.

A man in a dress shirt and tie, no coat, rushes forward. “I
heard there’s a bomb threat. Are you evacuating?”

“This is exactly what the problem is,” Chief McKinney says to
me in a low voice, pointing first at the school and then the crowd, snowflakes
collecting on his bristly gray mustache. “We can’t begin to know what’s going on
in there if we’re chasing rumors out here.” He turns his back to the crowd and
drops his voice to a whisper. “Meg, dispatch got a call from a man who says he’s
inside the building with a gun. Said for everyone to stay out or he’ll start
shooting. I want tape and barriers set up around the entire perimeter of the
school.” He turns to Gritz. “Aaron, escort everyone about three hundred feet
back.

“Okay, folks,” the chief says in a firm but nonconfrontational
voice. “Please follow Officer Gritz’s directions now. We need to get to work
here. I promise if we have any news to share, we will let you know
immediately.”

I know what each of these parents is thinking of. The mass
shooting at Columbine. It crossed my mind, too. Columbine changed everything in
the way law enforcement responds to these situations. If we had evidence that
the perpetrator in the school had started shooting, the chief would have
immediately sent in a rapid deployment team to the source of the threat.
Thankfully that hasn’t happened in this case. Yet. Because the suspect called
dispatch and threatened the students and anyone who entered the building, we
were approaching this as a hostage situation, meaning we were going to try to
contact the intruder, find out what he wants and attempt to calmly talk our way
out of this. The second there is evidence that shooting has started, we’d be in
there. But for now, we needed more information.

“Won’t forcing the parents away from here cause a panic?” I ask
Aaron in a quiet voice so the crowd won’t hear.

“I think they are already in a panic,” Aaron responds. He is
wearing his rabbit-trimmed aviator hat with earflaps and his nose is red from
the cold.

Just after my divorce was finalized, I got the police officer
position with the Broken Branch Police Department. Aaron was on the interview
team. Aaron is fortyish, divorced with two children and very handsome. At the
interview Aaron asked me why I wanted to move to such a small community as
Broken Branch when I was used to the larger, more urban city of Waterloo. “The
fact that Broken Branch is a small, rural community is exactly why I want to
settle down here. It’s a perfect place to raise a daughter.” What I refrained
from telling the interview team was that I needed distance from Tim and our
divorce. Waterloo wasn’t such a big city. Every time I turned a corner I ran
into someone who knew my ex-husband, my parents, had been scammed by my brother.
Besides, the hours that I worked for the Waterloo Police Force were terrible for
a single mother. Broken Branch was only about an hour from Waterloo, close
enough for Tim to easily see Maria.

I fell in love with Broken Branch years earlier when Tim and I
drove through on our way to Des Moines. We stopped to buy honey from an old man
selling jars of the amber liquid out of the back of his pickup truck.

“How did Broken Branch get its name? It’s so unusual?” I
asked.

“Now, that is a great story,” the man said as he placed a large
glass jar of clover honey, slim honey sticks and homemade beeswax candles
carefully into a plastic bag and handed it to Tim. “Most people say it’s because
the poor people who first settled here discovered a huge fallen tree over fifty
feet long filled with an enormous beehive in it. Thousands and thousands of bees
were buzzing inside and around the tree. Wanting the honey inside, they called
on the help of an old woman who was known to have a way with bees. The story
goes that she walked down to that hollowed-out tree and began singing a strange
foreign song and all the bees became silent and followed her as she walked and
sang. There were bees in her hair and on her arms, but still she walked and
sang. Not one bee stung her. She led the bees to another felled tree down by the
creek and the bees created a new home there. The settlers, who were poor and
starving, gathered all that honey out of the broken branch and lived off of it
for the winter. They were so thankful to the old woman that they offered to name
the town after her, but she said that the thanks should lie with the bees and
the tree that housed them. So they respected her wishes and named the town
Broken Branch.”

I was completely enchanted by the story, and as Tim and I
explored the peaceful streets lined with modest homes and towering trees, I knew
I would return to Broken Branch. Little did I know that it would be to stay.

Fortunately, I impressed Chief McKinney, Aaron and the rest of
the interview team enough for them to offer me the job.

A few months later, I found myself sitting alone with Aaron at
a local bar after Broken Branch’s citywide softball tournament where I played
first base. I had too much sun, not enough food and two lousy beers, and in the
singular most embarrassing moment of my life, I made a halfhearted pass at
Aaron. He gently pulled me off of him and told me that he wasn’t interested.

“I’m boring, too serious, aren’t I?” I asked. He looked at me
for a very long time.

“No, Meg, you’re not boring, you’re great. It just wouldn’t be
a good idea,” he said, and left me standing there. Though a few years have
passed since that mortifying encounter, and Aaron has not brought it up once, I
still blush bright red whenever I think of that night.

As I return to my car to retrieve a roll of crime tape, once
again I feel my phone vibrate. Stuart. He just doesn’t give up. A text this
time. I decide to ignore it and begin unraveling the police tape.

I met Stuart last January when Maria and I were cross-country
skiing in Ox-eye Bluff. Maria, a novice at skiing, fell down one too many times.
The final straw was that after the umpteenth tumble Maria’s skis became tangled
in a thorny bramble of twigs at the side of the trail. By the time I freed her,
Maria had worked herself into such a snit she refused to put her skis back on or
to even walk out of the valley. We sat there for twenty minutes, Maria’s tears
freezing against her cheeks, until a skier came gliding down the trail. He
swooshed to a stop in front of us “Everything okay?” he asked.

“We’re fine,” I answered. “Just an equipment malfunction. We’re
resting up for a few minutes.”

“Your mom can’t keep up with you, can she?” the man said to
Maria, eliciting her first smile of the afternoon. “That’s what happens when you
get old.” He smiled conspiratorially at her. “People can’t maintain the vigorous
pace of us youngsters.”

“Exactly how old do you think I am?” I asked him through
narrowed eyes.

“It’s rude to comment on a lady’s age.” He sniffed and then
gave me a mischievous smile. “Why don’t you help me get her up,” he said to
Maria. “If we leave her here much longer the wolves will start circling.”

I was about to tell him I was obviously fifteen years his
junior and could drop a wild animal at two hundred yards with my eyes closed,
but to my surprise Maria quickly scrambled to her feet and held out a hand to
help me up. “Let’s go, Mom,” she said. “I think I hear howling.”

“There are no wolves in Ox-eye Bluff,” I said, reaching out my
hands for the man and Maria to pull me to my feet. “I don’t think there are any
wolves in Iowa for that matter. Coyotes, yes. Wolves, no.” The man was tall, at
least six foot, fit with a lean face and closely cut brown hair flecked with
gray.

He caught me looking and had the decency to blush. “It’s
premature.”

“Yeah, right,” I said, raising my eyebrows. Together, the three
of us skied to the end of the trail and then hiked our way out of the valley to
where my car was parked. We didn’t talk much but I did learn that the man’s name
was Stuart Moore and that he was a writer for the
Des
Moines Observer,
the largest newspaper in the state. He also worked
into the conversation how he had three grown children and was separated, the
divorce held up by his wife.

“You don’t look old enough to have three adult children,” I
said in mock disbelief.

“Well, child marriage, you know,” he answered as he clipped my
skis onto the top of my car.

“You must have been what? Like twelve?” I played along.

“Something like that.” He laughed.

“What brings you here?” I asked. “Des Moines is an hour and a
half from here.”

“I actually live just north of Des Moines, so it’s not quite
that far. I’ve skied all over Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin. Ox-eye has some of
the best trails and no one else seems to know about it. I almost always have the
trails to myself,” he explained.

“Until now,” Maria piped up.

“Until now,” Stuart agreed.

Stuart and I took it slow. At first, anyway. I was still
bruised from my divorce and Aaron’s mortifying rebuff and I had Maria to think
about. That winter we would run into each other at Ox-eye and end up
cross-country skiing, or snowshoeing. In the spring and summer we would, by some
unspoken agreement, meet up at Ox-eye to hike the trails. Sometimes with Maria,
sometimes not.

The first time Stuart and I slept together was only about two
months ago. Maria was spending the weekend at Tim’s house. There wasn’t enough
snow for skiing anymore so I invited him back to my house for the first time.
Being with Stuart, the way he touched me, the way he tucked a strand of my hair
behind my ear, made me feel safe and needed. He confided to me how his
soon-to-be ex-wife had an affair with one of his colleagues, how it tore him
apart, tore his family apart. How the divorce was finally going through. I told
him about my work as a police officer in a small town, about Tim and the slow
burn of my marriage. We drank too much wine and for three hours I didn’t think
of DUIs or meth labs or disputes over fence lines. I didn’t think of Tim or even
of Maria. I led Stuart into my bedroom and shut out the rest of the world. For a
while I thought that maybe, just possibly, Stuart and I would end up together.
How wrong I was. Within a matter of days I learned two crucial things about
Stuart: he was married and would do anything to get a story. I don’t think
Stuart had this grand plan of using me to get his big scoop. But the opportunity
presented itself and Stuart took it.