He waited, expecting to hear Assistant Principal Lundt’s voice come through.
When she didn’t, he walked to the intercom. Before Max could press the call button, a gravelly, child’s voice came through the speaker.
“Help…,” the voice croaked. “Help her.”
Max froze, hand halfway to the button, his abdomen cramping as if he’d eaten bad Chinese food and his body might spit it out all at once.
He stared at the intercom, transfixed by the voice of Melanie Dunlop.
“Message for you,” Mrs. Lundt announced, popping her head into Max’s classroom.
Max gasped, and stumbled back into the desk behind him. He almost fell right over it.
Mrs. Lundt rushed in, grabbing his arm and helping to right him.
“Heavens to betsy,” she exclaimed. “I didn’t mean to startle you, Mr. Wolf. We called on the speaker, but you must have stepped out.”
Max took the sheet of paper, unable to still his trembling hand.
She patted his back.
“It’s devastating,” she said. “Little Simon Frank and now Warren too. We’re all rather skittish.”
Max glanced at the intercom and then forced his eyes down to the note Mrs. Lundt had given him.
Please call Kim - urgent, he read.
“Thanks, Mrs. Lundt,” he told her.
“Okay, then. If you need me…” She gestured at the speaker, and Max shuddered.
What had she said? Help? Help me. It had sounded like help her, which didn’t make a whole lot of sense.
He barked a hysterical laugh at the thought of making sense of haunted messages through a school intercom.
Two days before, Jake had implied he was losing it. Max wondered if he was right.
He offered the speaker a final, weary glance and then returned to his desk.
“Reading list for seventh grade and I’m done,” he promised the empty room.
The reading list for seventh turned into the reading list for eighth, and by the time he left the school, the sun had shifted into the western part of the sky. It would still be light out for hours, but the afternoon stillness had settled over the town.
As he drove to pick up Kim, he remembered her note. “Shoot,” he mumbled.
He had intended to call her before he sat down to finish the reading lists, but he had completely forgotten.
As Max turned onto Sycamore Road, he saw flashing red and blue lights. A police car, parked at an angle, blocked motorists. A line of cars sat along the road.
As his eyes adjusted to the scene, Max realized more cars filled the parking lot at Safe Haven, the vet clinic where Kim worked. Six cop cars and an ambulance crowded the lot. People stood outside.
On the dark concrete, a white sheet concealed something bulky.
He climbed from his bike, forgetting the kickstand and allowing it to crash to the pavement. He barely noticed, moving from a walk to a run as he sprinted past the parked cars and onlookers.
His shoe caught on the curb and he sprawled forward on his hands and knees. He felt the asphalt scrape the skin through his jeans. Beside him a muted voice, screaming, met his ears. He turned and there, in the back of a police car, was Denny Watts. Denny’s mouth was twisted in a furious scowl. He howled and leaned back in the seat, kicking the plastic barrier separating him from the front of the police car.
“Stop now, or I’m going to use force,” an officer told him, pulling open the back door of the car.
Denny lunged sideways, landing half out of the car, his face less than three feet from Max’s own as he stood frozen.
His gaze swiveled away from the bellowing man back to the white sheet, and he saw it was not entirely white. One part of the sheet was bright red, as if soaked in…
“Blood,” Max rasped.
No one was providing aid to the person beneath it.
Max searched for Kim’s face in the small crowd huddled by the door. He saw the veterinarian, Dr. Patterson. Two other women stood near him, both wearing cheery green Safe Haven t-shirts.
One of the women was crying, black rivulets of mascara streaking down her cheeks. The other woman looked as pale as a sack of flour. Her made up eyes and lips were clown colors against her stricken face.
Max managed to stand, but the world had gone silent. He saw Denny’s mouth stretched wide. He saw the officer’s mouths opening and closing. They were talking, yelling, barking orders. As he pushed through a stream of yellow caution tape, an officer grabbed him by the shoulder. The man’s lips moved but still no sound.
“Kim,” Max croaked, but he couldn’t hear his own voice.
He shoved the cop out of the way and ran, reaching the sheet and snatching the corner.
The officer caught up to him and grabbed him from behind. As he jerked him back, the sheet pulled away.
Kim lay crumpled on the pavement in the fetal position. Though her hands were near her head, they had not been able to block the bullet that took off the right side of her skull. A mass of gray and red leaked through her auburn hair.
Max fell to his knees.
The officer held him for another moment and then released him.
The scene unfolded in slow motion. The humid breeze ruffled her hair. Dark blood oozed into the cracks of the pavement. The neckline of her green shirt was black with blood.
“Max, Max,” a voice somehow broke through the silence, and Max looked up to see Detective Welch, the man he’d argued with weeks before. He held out his hand.
Max shifted back to Kim. A paramedic had begun to replace the sheet over her.
The sheet blotted out her green Safe Haven shirt, her pale neck where he knew the three hearts intertwined lay against her unmoving chest. The sheet drew up over her neck and then over her chin, the eye that was still left in her face, and finally her head.
The detective took ahold of Max’s hands, and he pulled him to his feet.
Max tried to make his mouth work, but managed only to open and close it a few times.
The detective walked him to an unmarked car. He opened the passenger door.
“You’re in shock, Max. I’ll send one of the paramedics over.”
Max sat heavily on the seat, legs splayed on the pavement.
The world of sound had returned, and it filled his head like a swarm of bees: sirens, people shouting, the low throbbing of someone’s sobs.
Beneath it all, he heard Denny’s voice muffled by the car, but not silenced.
“She asked for it,” he screamed.
Max put his hands over his ears and closed his eyes.
He didn’t know when Detective Welch returned to the car, but suddenly he was there, lifting Max’s legs into the car as if he were paralyzed, and he was.
The detective climbed behind the wheel and pulled away from the curb.
“I spoke with your father, Max. He knows we’re coming.”
MAX HAD NEVER BEEN a big drinker. Something to do with the lack of control he’d experienced the handful of times in college when his buddies had talked him into getting inebriated. Not to mention the humiliation of worshiping the porcelain god at some frat house while guys traipsed in and peed in the bathtub or the sink and snickered from above.
As he sipped his bourbon, he tried to remember those days. They weren’t fond memories, but anything was better than the white sheet with the patch of red soaking through. He swallowed the last of the drink and made eye contact with the bartender, holding up a finger to signal ‘one more.’ Though he doubted one more would do the trick. Five more maybe, and then he’d stumble the five blocks home and collapse on the couch.
Maria and Herman Wolfenstein had tried to make him stay. He could sleep in his old room, they insisted.
But no, he couldn’t. He couldn’t get sloppy drunk at his parents’ house. He needed strangers for that.