The Third Victim Read Online Free PDF Page B

up the sidewalk, slammed her Olds into park, and joined the fray.
    So much noise. Walt’s old ambulance braying. Children crying
Mommy, Daddy,
parents screaming children’s names. She heard police sirens and revving engines. She heard a sharp, loud keening, as if the soul had been ripped from a mother’s heart, and her own blood went cold.
    This couldn’t be happening. Not in Bakersville. Not in her children’s school. Oh God, couldn’t someone make this all go away?
    She waded through the sea of people and cars. She didn’t know where to go. She just kept slogging toward the school, trying to get closer. Where were her children? Where was her husband? Wouldn’t someone tell her what to do?
    Up ahead, she saw a police officer in a Cabot County uniform. He seemed to be simultaneously ushering people away from the school building and asking who was in charge. No one had an answer for him. Parents just wanted to find their children.
    Sandy finally arrived at the chain-link fence that surrounded the schoolyard. She pressed herself against it, peering into the parking lot, where she could now see children stretched out on the blacktop, some holding cold compresses to their heads, others lifting scraped elbows and knees to be bandaged. Five adults were manning the makeshift first-aid station, using emergency kits and towels as fast as other people handed them in. Sandy recognized Susan Miller, Johnny’s mom and a nurse at Cabot Hospital. She saw Rachel Green, the head of the PTA and a stay-at-home mom, wrapping an eight-year-old’s wrist. She saw Dan Jensen, the town vet, hunched over a boy whose jeans were caked with blood. Sandy could just make out the hole ripped through the tough fabric. The boy had been shot in the leg.
    God, a bullet wound. The shooting was real. Everything was real. Someone had opened fire in Bakers-ville’s school.
    Sandy thought she was going to be sick.
    Vice Principal Mary Johnson raced by. Sandy snagged her arm.
    “Mary, Mary. What happened? How is everyone? Have you seen Becky or Danny?”
    Mary looked frazzled, her normally neat hair in frizzy disarray, her faced covered with a sheen of sweat. Her expression was blank for a moment; then she recognized Sandy and clasped her hand.
    “Oh Sandy, I am so sorry. We’re doing everything we can.”
    “Has something happened to my children? Where are Danny and Becky?
Where are my kids?
”
    “Shh, it’s all right. I’m sure it’s all right. I have to ask you to step away from the school. All the children were led across the street with their teachers. We put them in each yard in order of grade. So Becky’s class is in the fourth yard down. Danny’s would be four yards down from there.”
    “You’ve seen them? They’re okay?”
    Mary Johnson hesitated. Something flickered in her gaze. Sandy felt her breath catch in her throat again.
    “I don’t know,” Mary said. “There have been so many children—”
    “You haven’t seen them.”
    “We evacuated most of the children from the school. It’s just taking us a bit to get it all sorted out.”
    “Oh my God, you haven’t seen my children.”
    “Please, Sandy—”
    “Are there fatalities? Just tell me.
Are there fatalities?
”
    Mary Johnson tightened her grip on Sandy’s hand. Then Sandy saw it all in her somber gaze, the news the vice principal didn’t want to say out loud, the news they would all be struggling with for the next few days, months, years: Children had been shot and killed.
    It really was happening here.
    Sandy couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. She wanted to turn back the clock six hours, when she had been at home, pouring bowls of Cheerios for her children before kissing them on the head. She wanted to turn back the clock to ten hours before that, when she had been tucking their wiggling forms into bed and reading stories of little boy wizards and magical spells. That was what their lives were supposed to be like. They were just children, for God’s sake.