One Breath Away (2 page)

Chapter 3:
Mrs. Oliver

T
he morning the man with the gun walked into Evelyn Oliver’s classroom, she was wearing two items she had vowed during her forty-three-year career as a teacher never to wear. Denim and rhinestones. Mrs. Oliver was a firm believer that a teacher should look like a teacher. Well-groomed, blouses with collars, skirts and pantsuits crisply ironed, dress shoes polished. None of that nonsense younger teachers wore these days. Miniskirts, tennis shoes, plunging necklines. Tattoos, for goodness’ sake. For instance, Mr. Ellery, the young eighth-grade teacher, had a tattoo on his right arm. A series of bold black slashes and swoops that Mrs. Oliver recognized as Asian in origin. “It means
teacher
in Chinese,” Mr. Ellery, wearing a sleeveless T-shirt, told her after, embarrassingly, he caught her staring at his deltoid muscle one stifling-hot August afternoon during in-service week when all the teachers were preparing their classrooms for the school year. Mrs. Oliver sniffed in disapproval, but really she couldn’t help but wonder how painful it must be to have someone precisely and methodically inject ink into one’s skin.

Casual Fridays were the worst, with teachers, even the older ones, wearing denim and sweatshirts emblazoned with the school name and logo—the Broken Branch Consolidated School Hornets.

But on this unusually bitter March day, the last day school was in session before spring break, Mrs. Oliver had on the denim jumper she now knew she was going to die while wearing. Shameful, she thought, after all these years of razor-sharp pleats and itchy support hose.

Last week, after all the other third graders had left for the day, Mrs. Oliver had tentatively opened the crumpled striped pink-and-yellow gift bag handed to her by Charlotte, a skinny, disheveled eight-year-old with shoulder-length, burnished-black hair that chronically housed a persistent family of lice.

“What’s this, Charlotte?” Mrs. Oliver asked in surprise. “My birthday isn’t until this summer.”

“I know,” Charlotte answered with a gap-toothed grin. “But my mom and me thought you’d get more use out of it if I gave it to you now.”

Mrs. Oliver expected to find an apple-scented candle or homemade cookies or a hand-painted birdhouse inside, but instead pulled out a denim stone-washed jumper with rhinestones painstakingly arranged in the shape of a rainbow twinkling up at her. Charlotte looked expectantly up at Mrs. Oliver through the veil of bangs that covered her normally mischievous gray eyes.

“I Bedazzled it myself. Mostly,” Charlotte explained. “My mom helped with the rainbow.” She placed a grubby finger on the colorful arch. “Roy V. Big. Red, orange, yellow, violet, blue, indigo, green. Just like you said.” Charlotte smiled brightly, showing her small, even baby teeth, still all intact.

Mrs. Oliver didn’t have the heart to tell Charlotte that the correct mnemonic for remembering the colors in the rainbow was Roy G. Biv, but took comfort in that fact that she at least knew all the colors of the rainbow if not the proper order. “It’s lovely, Charlotte,” Mrs. Oliver said, holding the dress in front of her. “I can tell you worked hard on it.”

“I did,” Charlotte said solemnly. “For two weeks. I was going to Bedazzle a birthday cake on the front but then my mom said you might wear it more if it wasn’t so holiday-ish. I almost ran out of beads. My little brother thought they were Skittles.”

“I will certainly get a lot of wear out of it. Thank you, Charlotte.” Mrs. Oliver reached over to pat Charlotte on the shoulder and Charlotte immediately leaned in and wrapped her arms around Mrs. Oliver’s thick middle, pressing her face into the buttons of her starched white blouse. Mrs. Oliver felt a tickle beneath her iron-gray hair and resisted the urge to scratch.

It was Mrs. Oliver’s husband, Cal, who had convinced her to wear the dress. “What can it hurt?” he asked just this morning when he caught her standing in front of her open closet, looking at the jumper garishly glaring right back at her.

“I don’t wear denim to school, and I’m certainly not going to start wearing it just before I retire,” she said, not looking him in the eye, remembering how Charlotte had rushed eagerly into the classroom at the beginning of the week to see if she was wearing the dress.

“She worked on it for two weeks,” Cal reminded her at the breakfast table.

“It’s not professional,” she snapped, thinking of how on each passing day this week, Charlotte’s shoulders wilted more and more as she entered the room to find her teacher wearing her typical wool-blend slacks, blouse and cardigan.

“Her fingers
bled,
” Cal said through a mouthful of oatmeal.

“It’s supposed to be ten below outside today. It’s too cold to wear a dress,” Mrs. Oliver told her husband, miserably picturing how Charlotte wouldn’t even look her way yesterday, defiantly pursing her lips and refusing to answer any questions directed at her.

“Wear long johns and a turtleneck underneath,” her husband said mildly, coming up behind her and kissing her on the neck in the way that even after forty-five years of marriage caused her to shiver deliciously.

Because he was right—Cal was always right—she had brushed him away in irritation and told him she was going to be late for school if she didn’t get dressed right then. Wearing the jumper, she left him sitting at the kitchen table finishing his oatmeal, drinking coffee and reading the newspaper. She hadn’t told him she loved him, she hadn’t kissed his wrinkled cheek in goodbye. “Don’t forget to plug in the Crock-Pot,” she called as she stepped outside into the soft gray morning. The sun hadn’t emerged yet, but it was the warmest it would be that day, the temperature tumbling with each passing hour. As she climbed into her car to make the twenty-five-minute drive from her home in Dalsing to the school in Broken Branch, she didn’t realize it could be the last time she made that journey.

It was worth it, she supposed, after seeing Charlotte’s face transform from jaded disappointment to pure joy when she saw that Mrs. Oliver was actually wearing the dress. Of course Cal was right. Wearing the impractical, gaudy thing wouldn’t hurt anything; she’d had to suffer the raised eyebrows in the teacher’s lounge, but that was nothing new. And it obviously had meant a lot to Charlotte, who was now cowering in her desk along with fifteen other third graders, gaping up at the man with the gun. At least, Mrs. Oliver thought, shocking herself with the inappropriateness of the idea, if he shot her in the chest, she couldn’t be buried in the damn thing.

Chapter 4:
Meg

I
’m trying to figure out what I’m going to do with all my free time for the next four days as I drive idly around Broken Branch in my squad car. This will be the first year that I won’t have Maria with me for spring break. By the looks of things, spring doesn’t seem like it will be appearing any time soon, even though it officially arrived two days earlier.

By rights, Tim should be able to have Maria this vacation; she’s spent the past two with me. But I had it all planned out for tomorrow, my day off. We were going to bake Dutch letters, flaky almond-flavored cookies, the one family tradition I’ve kept from when I was young. Afterward we were going to pitch a tent and have an old-fashioned campout in the living room
.
Then we were going to take advantage of the freak snowstorm to go snowshoeing at the bottom of Ox-eye Bluff with hot chocolate and marshmallows and oyster chowder when we got home. I even persuaded Kevin Jarrow, the part-timer on our police force, to pick up my Saturday shift so I could spend it with Maria. But this time Tim insisted. He finally scored a full five days off from his job as an EMT in Waterloo, where we both grew up.

“Listen, Meg,” he said when he called me the day before yesterday. “I don’t ask for much, but I really want Maria this school break….”

“She’s not an item on your grocery list,” I said hotly. “I thought we had this all figured out.”

“
You
had it all figured out,” he said. Which was true. “I want to spend a few days with her and I don’t think there’s anything unreasonable about that.”

“Where did this suddenly come from?” I asked.

“Hey, I’ll take any minute I can get with Maria and you know it. Besides, you’ve had her the past two holidays.” He was getting angry now. I imagined him sitting in the duplex we once shared, rubbing his forehead the way he did when he was frustrated.

“I know,” I said softly. “I just had it all planned out.”

“You could always come spend some of the time with us,” he said cautiously. I sighed. I was too tired to have this conversation. “Meg, you know I never did the things you thought I did.” Here we go, I thought. Every few months Tim insists that he didn’t have the affair with his coworker, that she was an unstable liar who had wanted something more, but whom he had rebuffed. Some days I half believe him. This isn’t one of those days.

“You can pick her up on Wednesday after school,” I told him.

“I was hoping tomorrow, after I get done with work. Around noon.”

“She’ll miss her last day of school before vacation. That’s when they do all the fun things.” It sounded lame, I know, but it was all I had.

“Meg,” he said in that way he has. “Meg, please…”

“Fine,” I snapped.

So yesterday I said goodbye to my beautiful, funny, sweet, perfect seven-year-old daughter. “I’ll call you every day,” I promised her, feeling like I was saying goodbye forever. “Twice.”

“Bye, Mom,” she said, swiping a quick kiss across my cheek before climbing into Tim’s car.

“If it hasn’t all melted, we’ll go snowshoeing when you get back,” I called after her.

“So, we’ll be at my folks tomorrow night for dinner and at my sister’s on Sunday.” His face turned serious. “I ran into your mom last week.”

“Oh,” I said as if I didn’t care.

“Yeah, they’d really like to see Maria.”

“I bet they would,” I grumbled.

“Is it okay if I take her over to see them?”

I shrugged. “I guess.” My parents weren’t bad people, just not particularly good people. “Promise me you won’t leave her at the trailer, it’s a death trap. And make sure Travis isn’t hanging around when you visit.” My brother, Travis, is one of the main reasons I became a police officer. Growing up he made my parents’ lives miserable and mine pure hell. It seemed like every week a police officer was at the door of our trailer, Travis in tow. They gave him more than enough chances to get his shit together and he blew it time and time again. It wasn’t until the summer I was thirteen and Travis was sixteen, when he threatened my father with a kitchen knife, smacked my mother across the face and ripped out a chunk of my hair as I tried to pull him away from them, that the police finally got serious.

“What do you want to do?” Officer Stepanich, a frequent visitor to our home, asked wearily. His young female partner, Officer Demelo, stood by silently, taking in the broken glass, the knocked-over chairs, the bald spot on the top of my head. Welcome to our lovely home, I wanted to say, but instead my face burned with shame.

Fully expecting my parents to finally say enough is enough and have Travis’s ass arrested for assault, they once again refused to press charges.

“What do you want to do?” Officer Demelo asked, and I looked up in surprise when I realized she was talking to me and only me.

“Now, now,” Officer Stepanich said, “this is really a parent decision.”

“I don’t think that wad of hair on the floor got there by itself and I can’t imagine that Meg here pulled it out of her own head,” Officer Demelo said, her eyes never leaving mine. I was surprised she remembered my name and even more impressed that she ignored the obviously senior officer’s lead. “Let’s see what she wants to do,” Officer Demelo insisted.

Travis smirked. He was six inches taller and about eighty pounds heavier than I was, but in that moment, knowing that only an ignorant coward would beat on his family the way he did, I felt stronger, more powerful. He thought he was invincible. But in that sliver of a moment, I knew that there was a way out for our family.

“I want to press charges,” I said, speaking only to Officer Demelo, who didn’t look much older than I was, but carried herself with a confidence I wanted for myself.

“You sure that’s what you want to do?” Officer Stepanich asked.

“Yes,” I said firmly. “I do.” Officer Stepanich turned to my parents, who looked bewildered but nodded their agreement. They took Travis away in handcuffs. He came back home a few days later. I expected him to exact some kind of revenge upon me, but he kept his distance, didn’t lay a hand on me. It didn’t keep him out of trouble, though. Over the years he’s been in and out of jail, most recently for drug possession. That arrest twenty years ago didn’t change Travis, but in my mind it saved my life.

“Travis will get nowhere near Maria,” Tim promised. He looked as if he’d like to say more, then settled on, “Talk to you later, Meg.” He drove away with Maria waving happily goodbye.

My windshield wipers can barely keep up with the thick snow that is falling. Great, I think. I’ll be shoveling for hours after I end my ten-hour shift at three o’clock. I debate whether to still make the Dutch letters tomorrow and decide to ditch that idea; instead, I’ll sleep in, watch TV, pick up a pizza from Casey’s and feel sorry for myself.

I feel my phone vibrate in my coat pocket. I peek at the display thinking it might be Maria. Stuart. Shit. I stuff my phone back into my coat. Stuart, a newspaper reporter who wrote for the
Des Moines Observer
and lived about an hour and a half from Broken Branch, and I called it quits about a month ago when I found out he wasn’t actually separated from his wife like he told me. Nope, they were still living under the same roof and, at least from her perspective, happily married. Yeah, the irony isn’t lost on me. I divorced my ex for screwing around and I end up being the other woman in some poor lady’s nightmare. Stuart said all the usual crap:
I love you, it’s a loveless marriage, I’m leaving her, blah, blah, blah.
Then there was the little issue where Stuart used me to get the biggest story of his career. I told him if he didn’t shut up I was going to shoot him with my Glock. I was only half joking.

I flip open the phone. “I’m working, Stuart,” I snap.

“Wait, wait,” he says. “This is a business call.”

“All the better reason for me to hang up,” I say shortly.

“I hear you’ve got an intruder at the school,” Stuart says in his breezy, confident way. Asshole.

“Where’d you hear that?” I ask cautiously, trying not to give away the fact that this is news to me.

“It’s all over, Meg. Our phone at the paper has been ringing off the hook. Kids are posting it on their walls and tweeting all about it. What’s going on?”

“I can’t comment on any ongoing investigation,” I say firmly, my mind spinning. An intruder at the school? No. If there was something going on I would know about it.

“Maria. Is she okay?”

“That’s none of your business,” I say softly. I wasn’t the only one Stuart hurt.

“Wait,” he says before I can hang up. “Maybe I can help you.”

“How’s that?” I say suspiciously.

“I can track the media end of things, keep you informed of what we hear, give you a heads-up on anything that sounds important.”

“Stuart,” I say, shaking my head. “Honestly, nothing you have to say to me is important anymore.”