One Breath Away Read Online Free PDF

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