An Apple for the Creature

Playing Possum CHARLAINE HARRIS

A native of the Mississippi Delta, Charlaine Harris has lived her whole life in various southern states. Her first book, a mystery, was published in 1981. After that promising debut, her career meandered along until the success of the Sookie Stackhouse novels. Now all her books are in print, and she is a very happy camper. She is married and has three children.

I counted once. I counted twice. Yes! Twenty-three chocolate cupcakes with chocolate icing, liberally decorated with sprinkles. I put the cupcakes, one by one, into the shallow cardboard box I’d begged from the dollar store clerk. Of course I’d lined it with aluminum foil, and of course each little cake was in its own paper cup. A white sugar sprinkle rolled off, and I dropped it back onto the dark icing and gently pressed it down. I tried to ignore the siren song my bed was singing. I was up, and I had to stay up.

I’d been too tired to bake the night before. I’d gotten off work at midnight and had fallen into bed the minute I’d put on my nightshirt and brushed my teeth. Monday nights at Merlotte’s Bar are usually pretty light, and I’d assumed the night before would follow suit. Naturally, since I’d hoped to get off a little early, last night had broken the pattern. Rural northern Louisiana is not a big tourist route, so we didn’t get a whole lot of strangers in Merlotte’s—but members of a Baton Rouge bikers’ club had attended a huge motorcycle jamboree in Arkansas, and on their way home, about twenty of them had stopped to have supper and a few brews at Merlotte’s.

And they’d stayed. And stayed.

I should have appreciated their patronage, since I have a partnership in the bar-slash-restaurant. But I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about those twenty-three cupcakes I had to make, and calculating how long it would take me to mix, bake, and ice them. Then I’d figured how long it would take me to drive to Red Ditch, where my “nephew,” Hunter Savoy, would be celebrating Labor Day with his kindergarten classroom. When I’d finally trudged in my back door, I’d looked at the recipe waiting optimistically on the counter along with the mixing bowl and the dry ingredients. And I’d thought, No way.

So I’d gotten up with the larks to bake cupcakes. I’d showered and dressed and brushed my long blond hair into a ponytail. I’d recounted the little goody bags, and boxed them, too. Now I was on my way; the boxes with the cupcakes and the goody bags carefully positioned on the floorboard of the backseat.

It’s not that long a drive to Red Ditch, but it’s not that easy a drive, either; mostly parish roads through rural areas. Louisiana isn’t exactly known for its up-to-date road maintenance, and there were crumbling shoulders and potholes a-plenty. I saw two deer in time to dodge them, and as I drove slowly on a low-lying two-lane through a bayou there was a big movement in the reeds around its bank . . . big enough to signal “gator.” This would be a fairly rare sighting, so I made a mental note to check out the bank on my way home.

By the time I parked in front of Hunter’s school, I felt like it was already noon, but when I pulled my cell phone from my purse to check, I discovered the digital numbers read 10:03. I had arrived at the time Hunter’s dad, Remy Savoy, had told me the teacher had requested.

The Red Ditch school had once been a combination elementary and middle school. Since parish-wide consolidation, it was only a kindergarten for the children in the immediate area. I parked right in front of the wide sidewalk leading up to the dilapidated double doors. The yard was trimmed, but littered with pinecones and the odd bit of childish debris—a gum wrapper here, a crumpled piece of paper there. The low brown-brick building, clearly built in the sixties and not much changed since then, was quiet in the warm September sun. It was hard to believe the kindergarten was packed full of children.

I stretched, hearing my spine make some little crackling noises. Constantly being on my feet was taking its toll, and I was only in my twenties. Then I shook myself. It was not a day to think about a future of aching knees and feet. It was Hunter’s day.

I couldn’t gather my purse, the cupcakes in their broad, flat box, and the box of goody bags all at the same time. After a moment’s indecision, I decided to take in the cupcakes first, rather than leave them in the warm car. I slung my big purse over one shoulder and lifted the cupcakes with both hands. I’d gotten them this far, and they still looked great. If I could just get them into the school and into the classroom without letting them slide around . . . I made it to the front door and up two shallow steps with no incident. By holding up the box as if I were delivering a pizza, I freed a hand to turn the knob, opening the door enough to use my butt to keep the opening wide enough for me and the box. It was a relief to step inside and lower my burden until I could grasp it with both hands. The door thunked shut behind me, leaving a wide bar of light lancing across the floor. Not exactly tight-fitting.

I’d been in the school before, so I knew the layout. I stood in a sort of lobby, the walls decorated with posters advising kids to wash their hands, to cover their noses with their crooked arms when they sneezed, and to pick up litter. Directly across from the double doors lay the school office. Classroom halls began to the right and to the left of the office, six classrooms on each hall, three to each wall. At the end of these halls were doors going outside to the playground, which was fenced in.

The school office had a big window, waist-high, through which I could see a woman about my age talking on a telephone. The window gave visitors a visual cue that they should check in. This was reinforced by a big sign (ALL VISITORS MUST SIGN THE SHEET IN THE OFFICE!). I knew that the proliferation of messy divorces was responsible for this rule, and though it was a pain, it was at least a half-ass security measure.

I’d had a fantasy that the school secretary would leap up to open the heavy office door, which stood to the left of the window. That didn’t happen, and I managed it myself after a little juggling.

Then I had to stand in front of the secretary’s desk, waiting for her to acknowledge me, while she continued to listen to her caller.

I had plenty of time to observe the young woman’s curly brown hair and sharp features, somehow evened out by her almost freakishly round blue eyes. I was getting more and more impatient as she kept trying to speak into the phone, only to be steamrollered by whoever was on the other end of the line. I rolled my eyes, though I knew no one was watching; certainly not the woman, who was suppressing extreme agitation.

My flash of resentment was abruptly eclipsed when I realized that this conversation was anything but casual. All her thoughts were focused on the person she was arguing with, and she almost certainly didn’t even register the live person standing right in front of her, getting more and more impatient. The door to the principal’s office, to the left of the secretary’s desk, was resolutely shut tight, though from behind it I could hear the light click of a keyboard. Principal Minter was working on something.

Meanwhile, I had time to read her secretary’s nameplate. Sherry Javitts was having a very private conversation in a very public place. Not that it was a true conversation—the young woman was mostly listening to the diatribe pouring into her ears. She didn’t know that I could hear it as clearly as she could, or at least catch an echo of it in her thoughts.

That’s my big problem. I’m telepathic.

Sherry Javitts had a big problem of her own—an overpossessive and maybe deranged former boyfriend. She blinked and looked up at my unhappy face, finally absorbing my presence.

She interrupted the caller. “No, Brady,” she said through literally clenched teeth. “It’s over! I’m working! You have to stop calling!” And she slammed the phone back into its charger before she took a deep breath and looked up at me, making her lips curve in a ghastly smile.

“Can I help you?” Sherry said steadily enough, though I noticed her hands were shaking.

We were going to be civilized and ignore the incident. Fine by me. “Yes, I’m Hunter Savoy’s aunt, Sookie Stackhouse,” I said. “I’ve brought cupcakes for the Pony Room’s Labor Day party.”

She pushed a clipboard over to me. “Please sign in,” she said. “Date, name, and time. Purpose of visit in that space, there.”

“Sure.” I put the cupcakes on top of a filing cabinet while I filled in the required information.

“I didn’t know Hunter had an aunt,” Sherry Javitts said. In a little town like Red Ditch, everyone would know the children’s histories, even the history of relative newcomers like Remy Savoy and his little boy.

I needed to return to my car and get the box of goody bags, but I made myself give her a reassuring smile. (We were just strewing insincere smiles right and left.) “I’m not his actual aunt,” I said. “Calling me ‘aunt’ is just easier. I was first cousin to his mama.”

“Oh,” she said, looking appropriately sober. “I’m so sorry for her passing.”

“We sure miss her,” I said, which was an out-and-out lie. Hadley had been in trouble all her life. Though she’d often tried to do the right thing, somehow that had never worked out. Bless her heart.

I waited for some kind of concluding remark, but Sherry Javitts was lost in her own thoughts, which revolved around a terribly threatening person named Brady, the self-same man she’d been arguing with. She didn’t miss him.

“So,” I said, a little more sharply than I’d intended, “I can go back to Hunter’s classroom?”

“I’m sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “Got lost in a cloud, there. Sure, go ahead.”

“I’ll have to come in and out at least once,” I warned her.

“You go right ahead. Just sign out when the party is over.” She was relieved I was leaving. At least this time, she was polite enough to rise and open the office door. Sherry was surprisingly tall, and she was wearing an unremarkable pale green dress that I envied only because it was a size 2.

I sighed as I thought of the chocolate cupcake I’d already had that morning.

I edged out of the small office with the cupcakes in my hands, glancing back through the big window to see Sherry Javitts, back in her chair, bow her curly head and put her hands over her face. That was sure the only way she was going to get any privacy in that fishbowl. The inner door of the office, the one to the principal’s inner sanctum, opened even as I thought that.

I remembered meeting Ms. Minter at the spring open house. She was just as nicely dressed today in a tan pantsuit with a dark green scarf, a nice look with her warm brown skin. The appropriately clad Ms. Minter did not look happy, and I wondered if she’d overheard the furious conversation her secretary had had with Brady, whoever he was; husband, boyfriend, secret lover?

As I began walking down the corridor to the right of the office, I confess I was glad to be walking away from the fraught emotions. One of the most burdensome things about my condition is the constant bombardment of other people’s personal woes. I can only block so much out; a lot seeps around the edges of my mental walls. I would much rather not have known about the Drama of Sherry and Brady. I shook the incident off and put a smile on my face, because I’d arrived at the Pony Room, second down on the right-hand side of the hallway. I didn’t have a free hand to knock on the door, so it was lucky Ms. Yarnell spotted me through the rectangular window in the classroom door.

When I’d gone with Remy and Hunter to vet the kindergarten, we’d all liked the Pony Room the best, so I’d been relieved when Hunter had called to tell me Mrs. Gristede was going to be his teacher. Though I hardly knew her, both Hunter and I had learned telepathically that she was a nice woman who genuinely liked children. She was definitely a cut above the other teachers we’d encountered that night.

Unfortunately for everyone, two weeks before school opened Mrs. Gristede had been in a car accident, and her recovery was going to take her out for a whole half-year. Ms. Yarnell was her replacement and, according to Remy, she was working out pretty well.

While Mrs. Gristede was a short, round woman in her forties, Ms. Yarnell proved to be a short, round woman in her early twenties. Despite Ms. Yarnell’s youth, she radiated the same pleasure in teaching, the same fondness for children that had so recommended Mrs. Gristede.

The kids seemed to love her, because there were at least six apples piled on her desk. There were different varieties, and some looked a little more battered than others, but I was impressed that she’d inspired such a traditional gift.

I had time to gather this positive first impression while Ms. Yarnell was holding the door for me. All the children were vibrating with excitement at this break in their routine (which had been so recently learned). I set down the box and my purse on a low worktable right inside the door when I saw Hunter dashing toward me.

“Aunt Sookie!” Hunter yelled, and I squatted so I could catch him in my arms. It was like being wrapped in a skinny, warm boa. Hunter was dark of hair and eyes like his mother—and like her, he was an attractive person, an advantage he would need since he’d gotten the family “gift.”

I’m so glad you’re here, he said silently.

“Hey, Hunter,” I said, careful to speak out loud. I’d been trying to help Hunter learn to control his telepathy, which (sadly) meant teaching him to conceal his true nature. Children’s emotions are so much purer, undiluted. I hated having to curb his natural exuberance.

You made the cupcakes, he said happily, right into my head. I gave him a gentle squeeze to remind him. “You brought cupcakes,” he said out loud, grinning at me.

Lest you should think Hunter was a pitiful child with no one to love him—not only could Remy have followed instructions on a box of mix and opened a can of icing, but I was also certain that Remy’s girlfriend, Erin, would have been thrilled to be asked to make treats for Hunter’s first real school party. Though I didn’t know Erin well, I knew she genuinely cared for Hunter. I didn’t know why Hunter had picked me instead. Maybe he’d just wanted to see if I’d do it. Maybe, since I had to drive farther, I was the bigger challenge. Maybe he just wanted to be around someone like himself; we hadn’t gotten to spend much time together since Hunter had started school. I confess that I’d been both surprised and secretly flattered when Remy had called to tell me, in a very tentative way and not within Hunter’s hearing, that his son wanted me to attend the holiday celebration.

“Sure, I brought the cupcakes, silly. And if I can unwind you off me, I’ll go back out to the car and get the rest of the stuff,” I said. “You think Ms. Yarnell would let you help me? By the way, Ms. Yarnell, I’m Sookie Stackhouse.”

Hunter detached himself and I stood up. He looked at Ms. Yarnell, hope all over his face.

She patted him on the head, turning to me with a warm smile. “I’m Sabrina,” she said. “I’m filling in this semester for Mrs. Gristede, as I’m sure you know.” Then her smile faded as she took me in.

I tried not to look as startled as she did. I was getting a strange vibe from Hunter’s teacher, and she was getting the same sort of vibe from me. Well, well. This day was turning out to be extraordinary.

“I have a friend who’s a lot like you,” I said. “Her name’s Amelia Broadway, she lives in New Orleans. Amelia belongs to a small group of people with the same interests.” I didn’t think any of the kids would know the word coven, but I didn’t want to test that belief.

“I’ve met Amelia,” Sabrina Yarnell said. “She’s a sister under the skin. What about you?” Her voice was casual, but her eyes were not.

“Afraid not,” I said. I truly have no magical ability of my own. (The telepathy had been given to me, by way of being a baby shower present to my grandfather.) But it would be silly not to tell her what she was already guessing. “I’m like Hunter,” I said, patting him on the shoulder. His otherness could not have escaped the witch; he was too young to conceal it from a real practitioner.

“Can I go out to the car with Aunt Sookie?” Hunter asked, impatient with grown-up talk.

“Don’t interrupt, Hunter,” I said gently.

“Sorry!” Hunter squirmed, clearly worried that his bad manners might cost him a privilege.

“All right, Hunter, you go with your aunt, but you two come right back,” Sabrina Yarnell said, giving me a level look to make sure I understood I wasn’t getting permission to take Hunter to Dairy Queen for an Oreo Blizzard, or on any other unauthorized expedition. She was schoolteacher first, witch second.

“Not off school property,” I agreed, smiling. “Mind if I leave my purse in here?”

When she nodded, I moved the cupcakes to the top of a filing cabinet, too high for any depredating little fingers. I stowed my purse on Ms. Yarnell’s desk after tucking my car keys in my jeans pocket. “Come on, buddy,” I said, holding out my hand to Hunter. He waved at his classmates, delighted to be the man of the hour. Most of the children waved back as if Hunter were leaving on a trip; they were clearly revved up by the prospect of the party. Maybe later, say by January, they’d be more blasé—but kindergartners, this early in the school year? Yeah, they were excited.

Hunter and I walked up the hall together, Hunter so full of the joy of it all that he was practically bouncing off the walls. I could hear the murmur of voices in each room. I caught glimpses of teachers and children through each rectangular window. The smell and sounds of school—did they ever change?

“Are you coming to Daddy’s cookout Saturday?” Hunter asked, though he knew the answer. Since we were in a public place, he was taking care to talk out loud, which I appreciated, so I was gentle in my response.

“Hunter, you know already I have to work on Saturday. That’s the tough part of being the boss, sort of. I have to fill in when other people can’t be there.” Because of a family wedding, two of our regular servers were going to be out on Merlotte’s busiest day. “That’s one reason I’m so glad I can be here now,” I said. I wondered if I should stop at the office to explain that I had permission to take Hunter out the front door, but Ms. Minter and Ms. Javitts were having such an earnest conversation that I didn’t want to interrupt them.

In fact, they looked so worried that I felt a flash of concern, myself. But I didn’t want to involve Hunter in my anxiety, and I quickly blocked off my thoughts as I pushed open one of the front doors. “Who’s going to be at you-all’s cookout? Your daddy and Erin, I know. What about your great-uncle?”

Hunter told me about the few relatives and two distant cousins his own age who’d said they’d come grill hot dogs, too. They’d meet at the little Red Ditch park to play kickball and fly kites and throw Frisbees. He was describing his new dragon kite as I unlocked the car door and lifted out the box full of goody bags.

I’d bought the plastic bags stamped with horses (feeling proud that they fit in with the Pony Room theme!) at Wal-Mart, and I’d filled each one with candy, a tiny top, a harmonica, and a sheet of stickers on the advice of Halleigh Bellefleur, a schoolteacher friend. Maybe the twirl you had to give a top was too much for such little kids? Maybe I should have gotten something else? Oh, well, too late now. Hunter seemed pleased, which had been my goal. I let him carry the box, which he promptly tilted to one side.

“Whoops, we dropped one,” I said, bending over to pick it up. “You think you can count them again for me? Make sure we have them all?”

“One, two—” Hunter began, and suddenly our heads snapped to look in the direction of the turn into the parking lot. The screeching tires and the racing motor of an oncoming truck were telling both of us that something was wrong.

The pickup swerved into the parking lot and stopped with a spray of gravel in front of the school. We both squatted down, instinctively concealing ourselves. Luckily, there was a van parked between my car and the pickup, so Hunter and I had extra coverage. In Hunter’s mind the van provided an impenetrable wall, and he felt much safer. I was not so optimistic, simply because I was larger and therefore more visible.

Maybe I was also more realistic.

If I canted myself at a strange angle I could see the driver’s door of the pickup. It hadn’t opened. I could glimpse the man behind the wheel. He appeared to be talking to himself, though maybe he had a cell phone in his farthest hand. He was wearing a Red Ditch Oil & Lube baseball cap and a plaid western-style shirt.

I glanced sideways at my nephew, torn between trying to absorb this new development and wanting to protect him. Hunter’s eyes were wide and his face looked much older than a kindergartner’s should. I could feel his fear beating against my own mind.

The pickup had parked in the BUSES ONLY area, designated by an unmistakable sign and yellow stripes on the pavement. That was lawless enough to rile any middle-class citizen, but that wasn’t what had raised the hair on the back of my neck and made Hunter’s face go dead white.

The man in the truck was batshit crazy.

I slapped my pocket, but I knew where my cell phone was—in my purse. In the Pony Room. All I’d brought out with me was my car key.

There were fields all around the school, except here in the front, on the west side. Small houses lined the two-lane street leading from Main to the school, but of the six or so dwellings, three were clearly empty right now, the occupants at work, if the lack of vehicles was a reliable indication. One of the others had a For Sale sign in front, and two were too far away for me to assess. If I took off for one of them, I might simply be wasting valuable time.

Damn. I had to go back into the school.

Was Hunter safer out here or inside? I could ease him back into the car, tell him to stay down. I had a mental montage of the sheriff’s deputies showing up, bullets flying, Hunter hit by accident.

Okay, he had to come with me.

The people in the school had to be warned, especially Sherry Javitts. This man was surely the enraged Brady.

Sometimes I hated my telepathy. You’d think I could have gotten some talent that was useful for offense. I couldn’t stop an armed man by thinking at him. But there was a defensive way it could be helpful.

Hunter, here’s what we’re going to do, I said silently. You’re going to walk into the school with me like we don’t have a care in the world, and once we’re inside you’re going to run like a rabbit, right to the Pony Room. You’re going to tell Ms. Yarnell to lock the door, a silly man is here. “Silly” seemed inadequate, but “crazy” and “violent” and “probably armed” seemed too heavy for Hunter. I took a deep breath. You and your friends are going to lie down on the floor, where no one looking through the door window can see you. Lie flat like pancakes, you hear?

His head jerked once. You come, too, he pleaded.

I’ve got to warn the other people, I said. I’ve got to try. You get to the room, you stay down, and you don’t move, no matter what. Ms. Yarnell will take care of you all. Sabrina Yarnell was capable of taking care of a roomful of children with both hands tied behind her back, but she couldn’t stop bullets. At least, I didn’t think so.

We were still squatting beside the open car door. Now, in the slowest way possible, Hunter and I stood up. I took another deep breath as I shut the car door.

Slow and easy, I reminded Hunter, and I smiled at him. It wasn’t a good effort, but he smiled back in a very small way. We began strolling down the sidewalk to the front doors. I hoped, with the box of goody bags under my left arm, we made a convincingly casual scene. I put my free hand on Hunter’s shoulder and squeezed gently. He looked up at me, no longer able to sustain even a neutral expression. Fear looked out of his dark eyes, and I had to work hard to force away my mental image of what I’d like to do to the man who’d ruined Hunter’s happiness. With the box propped against one hip, I opened one of the old front doors. We stepped inside, and it fell shut behind us. I knelt, handed the box to Hunter. I told him, Scoot, darlin’. I’ll see you in a minute or two. Now, run!

The minute he started down the hall to the Pony Room, I stood and whirled around to look back through the window in the right front door. The crazy man was getting out of the truck, his mouth moving as he talked to himself. I knew he had a gun. I knew it, right from his head.

I spun back around to see Sherry Javitts blotting her face, the principal standing in the doorway of her own office. They were both staring out the office window at me, alerted by my odd actions and body language to the fact that something was very wrong.

“He’s out there with a gun,” I said as I pulled open the office door. “Call nine-one-one right now! Can we lock the doors?”

Without a word the principal hit a button and an almighty racket sounded throughout the school. “Lockdown alarm,” she explained, grabbing a set of keys from right inside her office and hurrying to the entrance to shoot the deadbolt that secured the double doors. She stooped to push the floor bolt that held the left door in place. Once it was pushed down, she reached for the right one; but it didn’t work.

Sherry was still gaping at me.

“Call the police,” I said, biting back the word idiot. She picked up the phone. As she punched in numbers, her thoughts weren’t coherent enough to decipher even if I’d had the time or inclination.

I didn’t have to look outside to track Brady’s progress. The turmoil in the man’s brain got closer and closer until his chaos was beating inside my own head in time with his footsteps. He reached the front doors and began pounding on them.

Though they were bowing in, the doors held under Brady’s initial assault. Ms. Minter spun on her heel and began running down the left-wing hall to lock the back doors leading to the playground. Sherry was staring at the way the doors were jumping. The phone was still in her hand. Someone on the other end was yelling.

“You need to hide,” I said urgently. “If the doors give in, you have to be out of sight.”

“But he might shoot someone else,” she said. “He just wants me.”

I didn’t have time to figure out whether that was an incredibly brave thought or simply shock-induced honesty. “He doesn’t have to get anyone,” I said. “The cops will be here soon.”

“Hardly any cops in Red Ditch,” Sherry said, “as he’s been reminding me every day for months.” I could tell from her thoughts that Sherry was resolving to sacrifice herself. She felt surprisingly good about that; she would regain her pride and finally accomplish something big. A tinge of fatalism and self-righteousness colored this decision. If I’ve learned anything from years of hearing other people’s most personal reflections, it’s that we never do anything for only one reason.

I didn’t want anyone to die today.

I spied a janitor’s closet across from the school office. (I deduced this from the fact that a sign on the outside read JANITOR.) I grabbed the secretary’s arm and hustled her over to it, opened the door, and shoved her inside. When Rachelle Minter came running back, presumably having locked the playground doors in both wings, I said, “Sherry’s in there. Lock it,” and she did it instantly. Then she stood and gasped for breath. The principal was not a runner, but she was a damn quick thinker.

I couldn’t think of anything else to do. We’d locked the doors, we’d called the police, we’d hidden the target of the violence from the dealer of the violence.

It was like waiting for a tornado to touch down.

The principal and I stood side by side, our gazes fixed on the old doors with the ominous gap between them and the missing right-hand floor latch. Each time Brady crashed into the doors they spread a little farther apart before they rebounded into place. Though there was more play between the two doors than there should have been, the broken floor bolt would be the deciding factor.

“Maintenance guy didn’t fix it,” Ms. Minter gasped. “But who knew someone would try to kick the doors in?”

Abruptly, I wondered what the hell we were doing standing there. We weren’t armed, and our mere presence would hardly be enough to deter Brady from whatever plan was in his crazy head. So far, he was absolutely bent on gaining entrance and finding Sherry.

“We better get out of the way!” I was surprised at how calmly I spoke, because my heart was racing like a motor on high. The unknown Brady had a lot of stamina. With every blow the doors bowed in more, rebounded more slowly. I grabbed Ms. Minter’s hand and began to urge her back into the office.

I should have been concentrating; or maybe it wouldn’t have made any difference, since Brady was moved by nothing more than rage and impulse. He hit the doors as hard as he could. Simultaneously, he fired twice through the gap between them. The boom of the gunfire was magnified in the little lobby. Even as I flinched, I felt a yank on my hand and I staggered.

Ms. Minter folded to the floor, still holding on to me.

Caught off balance, I sprawled to the floor with her, landing partly across her legs. I knew she’d been hit. There was shock and pain caroming from corner to corner in her brain. In a second, I could see the blood soaking her pantsuit. Her eyes were terrified.

“Oh, no,” she said. “Oh, it hurts.” Then she passed out.

I lay as still as though I were paralyzed. Had I been hit, too? I didn’t think so, but I was so stunned I couldn’t move.

I was facedown on the green linoleum, sprawled across poor Rachelle Minter’s legs. She’d landed on her right side. I could feel the wetness as her blood pooled underneath me. Brady had continued his assault on the front doors after he’d fired. I could feel the surge of triumph in the gunman’s brain. He was pretty sure we’d gone down, but I didn’t think he could see us at the moment, and he didn’t know if we were dead or not.

I could feel how wet the front of my T-shirt had become in a few seconds. Taking a big chance, I rolled over onto my side so I wasn’t putting any more pressure on Ms. Minter. I lay as close to the wounded woman as I could. She wasn’t dead yet. I could feel the life in her brain. Before I began my impersonation of a dead person, I opened my eyes a slit to look at myself. I was bloody enough to looked seriously wounded, perhaps even dead, as long as Brady didn’t try to locate an actual bullet hole.

I made myself go totally limp. I told myself over and over, as I heard the doors finally spring apart, that he could not tell I was alive as long as I thought “limp and lifeless.”

He won’t shoot me. He won’t shoot me. I begged God that Brady would not think a coup de grâce was necessary.

The school was eerily silent . . . to my ears, anyway. In my head, the panic of more than a hundred adults and children beat like an irregular drum. Clearest of all was the regret and terror of the woman in the closet only seven feet away from where I lay pretending to be dead. Sherry was almost incapable of coherent thought. I could totally understand that. At least I knew what was happening, but she was shut in that windowless tiny room, knowing that the man whose footsteps she could hear was there to kill her.

Then those footsteps were beside me. Brady was breathing harshly, rapidly; I could “hear” that he could not believe what he had done, that he knew that sometime in the future he would regret the deaths of the two women on the floor, that he was wondering where Sherry was, that bitch, she should be the one who was dead.

He screamed then, the sounded ripping from his throat as though he were being tortured. “Sherry,” he bellowed. “Where the hell are you? I’m gonna shoot you, you whore! I’m gonna spray your guts all over the walls!”

Behind the wooden door Sherry was holding her breath and praying as hard as I had that he couldn’t hear her breathe, couldn’t smell her skin, couldn’t see through the wall to where she was crouched among the cleaning products and rolls of toilet paper.

I couldn’t move so much as a fingertip. I couldn’t take a deep breath. Limp, I chanted to myself. Limp, limp, limp.

He kicked the wall about two feet away from my head, and then he cursed because he was wearing sneakers. It took every little sliver of will I could scrape together to keep myself from flinching.

I heard a siren . . . a lone siren. Though it sounded as sweet and welcome as a lover’s greeting, I was conscious of a certain amount of disappointment. I’d half expected six sirens, or a dozen. I guess I’d been watching too much television. This wasn’t Chicago or Dallas. This was Red Ditch. Some state troopers would be on their way, I was sure, but they wouldn’t be able to arrive on the site instantly.

Maybe by the time they got here, this would be all over. But I couldn’t imagine what the ending would be.

Brady stopped screaming threats and began trying doorknobs. Of course the one to the school office opened easily. He had a field day at Sherry’s desk, tossing papers, throwing the telephone, causing as much chaos as he could. Though I knew he was intent on that destruction, I still didn’t dare to move because the window overlooked the area where I lay. He might catch any slight movement of leg or arm.

Rachelle Minter was weaker now. I tried to imagine a plan that would save her; one that wouldn’t include me getting killed, as well. I simply couldn’t think of one. So I kept on playing possum.

The only thing I could do was worry. I spared a sharp moment of regret for Hunter. His day had been ruined, in the worst possible way. From now on, he’d remember his first-ever school party as an event of horror, and there was no way I could make that up to him.

I even had a second of sheer pique that the damn cupcakes were going to go to waste.

But mostly I worried about the children. If Brady started shooting into the rooms at random, sooner or later a child or a teacher would get killed. I had to think of a way to stop him.

Brady had resumed ranting and screaming, even when the siren abruptly cut off. I was so busy breathing shallowly and lying still that it took me a minute to dip inside his head, which was a virtual snake pit.

Brady had lost all his insulation; that was what I’d always called the civilizing influence that kept us from hitting other people when we were angry with them, stopped us from hawking and spitting on the floor of our grandmother’s house, advised us to make an attempt to get along with coworkers. Maybe Brady had never had a lot of this insulation anyway. His mental and emotional entanglement with Sherry had stripped all this insulation away and all the wires in Brady’s brain were hopping and sparking without any impulse control.

Brady was entirely human, but if I hadn’t known better I’d have called him a demon.

The demons I’d known had been much better behaved. My sort-of-godfather, Desmond Cataliades, was mostly demon, and he wore civilization like a coat.

With no warning, Brady kicked me. I didn’t know if he could sense an intruder in his head because he’d abandoned his semblance to a total human being, or if he simply felt like expressing his aggression. It was a huge effort to roll with the kick as if I weren’t in my body.

Then Brady fired the gun into the office, and again I had to hold on to my possum persona with all the determination I could muster. I came this close to yelling out loud as the glass of the window shattered and rained down on me and Ms. Minter. Now some of the blood smearing me was my own.

I’d always assumed that to save my own life I could endure just about anything. I was finding that wasn’t necessarily so. With Brady proving so completely unpredictable, I was fast approaching the jumping-up-and-screaming point.

If I’d been a genuine possum, my masquerade might have been easier.

He went past me again, screaming incoherently and slamming into every door he saw. I heard a door swing open, and I thought, Oh no! But the cleaning agent smell that wafted out told me bathroom, and I let out the breath I’d taken very slowly indeed.

The crazed man continued down the hall to the left of the office, and I heard not a sound from the teachers and kids trapped in those rooms. I opened one eye. Though my angle of vision prohibited me seeing very far down the right corridor, which I was facing, I could see that the teacher in the first room had taped construction paper over the window in her door. That was amazingly smart. In the room across the hall, apparently the kids had hidden out of sight of the window, and Brady said, “Where the hell are they?” He sounded merely puzzled. He sounded like a real person, for just a second.

I could get up and run out before he could catch me or shoot me, I thought. He had his back to me, his attention was definitely elsewhere, and if I scrambled up and leaped to the front doors I could be down the sidewalk and behind the cover of the cars before he could get to the doors and aim.

At least, I hoped I could.

And then I wondered about the lone police officer out in front of the school. I didn’t know what kind of person he (or she) might be. He might be so shaken by the seriousness of the event that he was ready to shoot whoever came out the doors, especially a bloody stranger running directly toward the patrol car.

While I was doing my best impersonation of a dead person and listening as intently as I could to both Brady’s physical actions and his mental chaos, I kept cudgeling myself to develop a plan. If I was out of his sight for a few seconds, should I move? Was staying right here the best policy? If I hid, where could that be?

Then I did something I should have done before. I reached out for Hunter.

Hunter? You okay?

There was a long moment of silence. Aunt Sookie? Did he shoot you? We heard a gun.

He didn’t shoot me. I’m all messed up to look at, but I’m not hurt.

Who got hurt?

Ms. Minter is hurt, but I think she’s going to be okay, I told him. I hoped I wasn’t lying. She was still alive, anyway.

My cell phone is in my purse, honey, I told him. If Ms. Yarnell doesn’t have one, make sure she uses mine to call 911. There’s a police car outside, but only one.

Ms. Yarnell’s been talking to ’em.

Great! Tell her . . . I began, but then I stopped. There was no way Hunter could relay messages without revealing his secret to all his peers.

Crap.

Tell her you need to borrow the phone to talk to your aunt, Hunter. Hold it to your ear. I’ll be talking to you this way, but they’ll think it’s coming over the phone.

In a minute, he was back on the line—the telepathy line. I think she knows, he said, but he didn’t sound worried about it. What do you want me to tell her?

Tell her Ms. Minter is down, but she’s alive. I’m lying on the floor beside her. Ms. Javitts is locked in the janitor’s closet. The bad man is named Brady, he was Ms. Javitts’s boyfriend.

Why are you lying on the floor, Aunt Sookie?

I sighed, but I kept it in. This was not the best means of communication, but at least we were communicating. I’m pretending to be hurt, I explained.

You’re playing possum.

Yeah, exactly, I said, relieved.

Ms. Yarnell says she needs a straight shot at him.

I puzzled over that. Was Ms. Yarnell telling me she needed a direct field of vision to our attacker, or that she needed no one in between because she meant to literally shoot him? (I put off worrying about an armed kindergarten teacher until later.)

I’d been thinking so hard I’d forgotten to listen for Brady. His feet were right beside me all of a sudden. I closed down everything inside. I was afraid he was going to kick me again, and the anticipation of the pain was almost as bad.

He needed to move three steps back to be in a direct line of sight from the door of the Pony Room. There was no way I could make that happen without moving. I tensed my muscles in preparation.

“No, Aunt Sookie!” screamed a voice down the hall.

Oh, God, no. Brady, shocked, stepped away from my prone form and turned to look down the hall in the direction of Hunter’s voice.

Now! I said.

“Now!” Hunter said to Ms. Yarnell.

I heard a commotion in the hall. What the hell was the witch doing? I couldn’t let Brady get close to the kids! I rolled from my left side to my stomach. Brady’s back was to me, but he was about to start down the hall. I lunged across the intervening distance and grabbed his nearest ankle, the left. The minute my hands wrapped around it, I made up my mind he wasn’t going anywhere unless he dragged me behind him.

Several things happened then; the front door eased open behind me. I caught a flicker of movement and a glimpse of khaki. But I had to reserve my attention for the man with the gun.

Brady looked down at me and shook his head, as though flies were buzzing around his face. I finally saw him clearly. He was a mess; he hadn’t shaved in days and hadn’t bathed, either. The plaid western shirt was torn, his jeans spattered with old paint. His sneakers were very worn. But they were able to cause damage when he kicked me, and he was making up his mind to do that again. He balanced on the foot I had pinned, and brought his right foot back to get some momentum. I yanked at his ankle and he had to put the foot back down to catch his balance.

“Bitch!” he yelled, and raised the free foot again to stomp on one of my arms. I ducked my head down as if that would help avert the blow.

I heard a thud and an exclamation from Brady as something hit him on his shoulder.

It rolled on the floor until it came to rest in front of the janitor’s closet.

It was a big Red Delicious apple.

I could see past him. It had been thrown by Sabrina Yarnell, who was now holding out her hand to the open door of the Pony Room. One of the children tossed her another apple, a Fuji this time. That apple, too, came at Brady with deadly intent, and this time Sabrina nailed him in the head.

Brady forgot he wanted to stomp me. Suddenly, he was far more interested in finding out who was attacking him.

“Who are you?” he called to Sabrina. “I ain’t here after you! Get back in that room.”

But he’d been distracted just long enough. A hoarse voice behind me said, “Brady Carver! Drop the gun!” Brady’s head whipped around at this new diversion, and though I was too anxious to keep my eyes on him to peek behind me, I figured the new entrant had to be the police officer.

Brady’s face had gone through a startling variety of expressions in the last minute: bewilderment, resentment, anger. But now he settled on hostility, and he began to raise his right hand to shoot.

“I don’t want to shoot you, Brady,” said the voice, still hoarse with tension, “but you better damn believe I will do it, I will shoot you dead.”

“Not if I get you first,” Brady sneered. I was sure I was going to be spattered with Brady’s blood, too, but the moment after, something amazing happened.

His right hand seemed to go numb. The fingers weren’t able to retain their grip. The hand relaxed completely, and the gun fell from it to clatter to the floor close to my head. To my immense relief it did not go off, and I instantly released Brady’s ankle to shove the gun across the floor in the direction of the police officer. I stayed still and low, though I sure wanted to get out of the middle of the floor and out of the line of fire. Just at the moment it seemed more important to keep the situation simple.

Sabrina was standing with her small plump hand extended in Brady’s direction. She didn’t look like a young schoolteacher at all. She looked like a ball of power and ferocity. I’d never seen a witch really look “witchy,” but I practically expected to see Sabrina’s hair stream back in an invisible wind while she kept Brady’s arm immobile.

The police officer pushed the gun a little farther away from Brady with her foot—yes, the officer was a woman, a brief glance informed me. And then she was screaming, “Down! DOWN!” with the persistence of a banshee. To my amazement Brady Carver knelt two feet away from me, and I scrambled backward in an ungraceful sort of reverse crab walk. His arms jerked back behind him, ready for the cuffs. His face was full of astonishment, as if he could not believe he was doing this.

In short order, Brady was cuffed, useless hand and all.

Sabrina was staggering from the effort as she went back into her room in answer to an anxious chorus from the kids.

I tried to stand up. It took two attempts, and I had to lean against the wall.

A lot happened in the next few minutes.

The EMTs rushed in, and brave Principal Minter was loaded into an ambulance. Her keys were on the floor where she’d lain, and I pointed out to the police officer that Sherry needed to be released from the janitor’s closet. The secretary was an emotional mess. She was taken to the hospital, too, to get something to calm her down.

By that time the state police had arrived.

The old school had never had so many guns under its roof.

All the people in uniform seemed relieved that the human damage hadn’t been worse, though a few newbies were silently a bit disappointed that the situation had been resolved without their assistance. Brady Carver was marched out to a state trooper car to be taken off to the county lockup, one arm still flopping uselessly, and the police officer (Shirley Barr) got a lot of slaps on the back for subduing the shooter. Shirley Barr was an ex-military woman of color, and I figured that in the line of duty here in Red Ditch she didn’t get too many chances to show what she was made of. She had to concentrate on not looking happy.

The parking lot began to fill with parents who had heard that something bad was happening at the school. With the principal and her secretary absent, there was no one to take charge until the school guidance counselor stepped up, driving over from the nearby high school to do the right thing.

Once I’d turned down an ambulance ride and I’d explained to the police why I’d been on the spot, no one seemed too interested in me. I went into the principal’s bathroom, since there was no one to stop me, and I carefully wiped away all the visible blood—Ms. Minter’s, and my own from the glass. My T-shirt was a mess, so I gave it to the policeman, who seemed to want it. I rummaged in the big box labeled “Donations” until I found a T-shirt that was way too tight but covered everything . . . just barely. It was better than being bloody.

I got a lot more attention from the state guys after I emerged in the tighter T-shirt.

But eventually I was able to walk back to the Pony Room to give Ms. Yarnell a hug. The kids were in surprisingly good spirits, which was a credit to their teacher. Hunter was just as glad to see me as he had been the first time I’d arrived that day, but he was definitely more subdued in expressing his pleasure. Ms. Yarnell had told the children that while they were waiting to find out what would happen the rest of the day, they might as well be celebrating Labor Day by partying.

A couple of the kids were too distressed, but most of them had gone along with the plan of singing the newly learned “America the Beautiful” and eating cupcakes. They’d poured out the contents of their goody bags as children ought to do. Hunter had gotten a thank-you hug from one little girl with about ten pigtails carefully composed in squares, and a big smile from a tousle-headed boy with cowboy boots. Hunter was doing his best to play a tune on his harmonica.

I hadn’t spotted Remy out front, but then the police hadn’t given me much of a chance to look. They were trying to take pictures of the lobby area and figure out the sequence of events.

They also seemed a little puzzled at some of the odder parts of the story.

They thought Sabrina had been suicidally lucky in throwing things at a shooter, and criminally irresponsible at opening the door of her room to step out into the hall. I didn’t know if she’d even keep her job in Red Ditch after this. She was well aware of that possibility. “I couldn’t let him keep on going,” she said quietly, as we stood alone behind her desk.

“It bothers me that it took a lot of us to stop him,” I confessed.

“Did any of us have a gun until the cop showed up?” she demanded. “Did he have any restraint, any of the rules of morality or society, when he broke into the school?”

I eyed her with some curiosity. Sabrina was a much more philosophical witch than my friend Amelia. “No, he was purely the devil,” I said. “He wasn’t hiding anything. That was the real Brady.”

“So we all had to show what we really were, too,” she said quietly. “And look, we brought down the bad guy. And they don’t suspect, none of them.”

The inexplicable weakness in Brady’s gun arm had been written down to some kind of heart event or even a stroke, and he would be having tests in the hospital after he’d been searched and booked at the jail. Several of the cops had even wished aloud that Brady had had a heart attack, one violent enough to kill him. They were eye-for-eye people . . . in their own, true hearts. And I didn’t think anyone who had arrived on the scene, or even the officer who’d actually witnessed the event, knew that Sabrina’s attack with the apples had been planned to make him look at her, give her magic a chance to weaken him. The police were convinced that only my grip on Brady’s ankle had kept him from charging down to the Pony Room and killing everyone in there. They would never know what Sabrina and I really were. At least Ms. Minter would get credit for her outstanding presence of mind and courage; those were her true attributes.

I looked at Sabrina and smiled. “Well, you’re right. We did our best with our own gifts. Now we’ve got to put them under wraps again. Someday, maybe, we’ll get to be what we are.”

There was so much we didn’t know in this world. But looking at the children, some of them playing at the back of the room, some of them obviously distressed and ready to reunite with their parents, I could see that there was a future, that what kids were learning in classrooms all over America was not going to stop because sometimes kids experienced terrifying or simply unfamiliar stuff. . . .

Hunter’s little friend, the boy in the cowboy boots, ran up to grab one of Ms. Yarnell’s apples and threw it squarely at another little boy, just as he’d seen her do.

Yells of anger. Tears.

Yeah, some things about school would never change.