“Is the shooter still alive?” I ask the officer in front of me.
“I don’t have any information. You better get back.”
“Can you tell me if any children were shot?”
“What did I say? I don’t have anything. Now get back.”
A woman beside me screams. She has just been given some kind of news on the telephone. She begins speaking rapidly in Yiddish, telling everyone around her what she knows. A man interrupts her, they argue; everyone seems to be speaking at once, their voices getting louder and louder.
I turn to Saul and Aviva. “What are they saying?”
“The woman said her brother is inside the school and said the shooter is dead,” says Saul. “She said he came out of the trees behind the building and fired on the children in the playground. She said at least five are dead. And a teacher.”
“The man said ten dead,” says Aviva. “And he said there were two men with guns. But he did not say any names. Did he?”
“I didn’t hear one,” says Saul.
The group starts arguing again and Saul and Aviva turn to listen. A younger woman appears beside me. Everyone around is talking to other people, or talking on their phones, but she is silent, clutching a pillow with a raccoon face on it.
“Do you have a child here?” I ask.
She nods. “You?”
“No,” I say. “My name’s Rebekah, I’m from the newspaper.”
“My Avi is there.”
“How old is he?” I ask.
“He is six.”
Her wool coat is buttoned improperly. One side juts against her chin and the other reveals the shirt beneath.
“Why do they not let the children go?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” I say. And then I think: maybe that is something I can find out. I look over her head for Saul. He is on the phone, Aviva still beside him. I catch his attention and he motions me toward him.
“What’s your name?” I ask the woman.
“Henna,” she says.
“Stay here, Henna. I’ll be back.”
I push through the crowd toward Saul and Aviva, dialing Van Keller. No answer. I try again and this time he picks up. We speak over each other: “You’re okay?” I ask. “Where are you?” he asks.
“I’m here,” I say. He knows what I mean. “Has the shooting stopped?”
“Yes,” he says. “Connie Hall is dead. Sam is in custody. It looks like he might have shot Connie. But there’s a lot to sort out.”
I lower my voice “Is anyone else…?”
“Dead? At least three kids, Rebekah. And two teachers. So far. There are a lot of other people shot.”
The first thing I think is, This will be on the front page tomorrow. I don’t think of it with any kind of pleasure or excitement; it is simply a fact. They’ll use the word “Massacre,” I imagine. And “Madman.” By dinnertime, there will be hundreds of reporters in this little town. Goyim from across the globe will fill every hotel and motel room within twenty miles tomorrow night.
“Why don’t they let the kids that are okay go? People are freaking out.”
“They’re sweeping the school. I think they’re worried about timed explosives.”
Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, I remember reading, set bombs all over Columbine High-they just failed to detonate. And James Holmes-The Dark Knight Rises shooter-booby-trapped his apartment before he opened fire in a movie theater. What did Connie do?
“These people out here need some information,” I say.
“The shooter’s dead,” he says. “And the kids that that got shot were the older ones. You can tell them that.”
“Do you have any idea when they’ll let them out?”
“No,” he says.
“Can I tell my paper what you said?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Don’t use my name. Just…”
“A police source?”
“Yeah. Fine.”
“I’m glad you’re okay,” I say. “I can’t believe this is happening.”
“You know what scares me, Rebekah? I can. I really fucking can.”
He promises to call me if he gets more news. I elbow back to Henna and tell her what he told me. She nods, but my news about the older boys does little to comfort her. Her face has a strange expression on it, one I don’t know if I’ve ever seen before. It’s as if her features have shifted, been knocked sideways by a punch, and she’s trying to recover without actually moving. She does not seem to be able to focus her eyes as she speaks. The terror, I think, has altered her appearance, perhaps forever.
Saul and Aviva have stepped back from the crowd. They are standing together, his arms around her, his head on hers. Both of them have their eyes are closed. After a moment, Saul opens his. I wave and he lifts one hand, calling me over. I tell them what Van said and Aviva grabs my hand.
“Sammy did not do this,” she says. She’s not pleading this time, she is telling. “I know you do not know him. I know you do not know us. But I am telling you, he did not do this.”
I decide to believe her. At least for now. I will call in what Van gave me, but I will not call in what I know about Sam’s role. They’ll get it eventually, of course, but they won’t get it from me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The shooting at the yeshiva becomes known as “The Playground Shooting” or “Toras David” or just “Roseville,” depending on the publication. Connie Hall killed seven people that day. Four students and three adults. Fewer casualties than Oklahoma City or Virginia Tech or Newtown or Aurora or Columbine, but more than Wade Michael Page slaughtered at the Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, and the same number that One L. Goh gunned down at Oikos University in Oakland almost exactly a year before.
The children were, as Van initially told me, from one of the older classes. Their instructor was running late and they stayed on the playground while the other students were ushered inside for class. It was a nice morning, after all. Nearly fifty degrees and sunny. There were three acres of wooded land behind the school building, and that’s where Connie hid. He came out, dressed in a t-shirt that read GOD HATES FAGS beneath green Army fatigues, shooting an AR-15. He hit thirteen-year-old Mayer Klein first. Mayer, whose bar mitzvah was to be the next weekend, was hanging from the monkey bars trying to do a third pull-up when Connie shot him in the back. The tardy instructor, twenty-six-year-old father of three, Shimon Schwartz, who had just reached the school, ran to Mayer, and was killed for it. Shot once in the stomach, once in the neck. It wasn’t like Newtown, where Adam Lanza had the kids inside classrooms, like fish in a barrel. The boys of Toras David ran, and they ran fast. Four weren’t recovered for more than twelve hours; they were huddled together almost a mile away behind a self-storage warehouse, their clothing torn and mud-thick. Dovid Blau, twelve, and Aaron Siegel, thirteen, made it nearly fifty feet into the trees before Connie got them. Dovid died there, after a bullet pierced his spleen; Aaron fell with a shot to his spine, and will never walk again. Twelve-year-old Joel Silverman, the boy everyone called a hero afterward, pushed four fright-frozen friends from the playground’s mini suspension bridge as Connie came toward them. He paid for his selflessness with a shot to the side, which ripped through his liver and burst open his heart. Joel was an only child; his mother, Devorah, had suffered four miscarriages and a stillbirth before having him. When he was a year old, doctors discovered polyps on her ovaries and insisted on a hysterectomy. Three months after the shooting, she jumped in front of the M train at Marcy Avenue. Her husband never remarried.
Connie got just one of the boys Joel pushed before being shot: thirteen-year-old Zev Lowenstein. Zev took a bullet to the thigh and died at the hospital. He ran slower than his friends because of a birth defect that left one leg shorter than the other.