Tina starts feeling sick around the time Morris is strolling up the late Drew Halliday’s driveway and seeing his old pal’s car parked inside his garage. Tina hardly slept at all last night because she’s so worried about how Pete will take the news that she ratted him out. Her breakfast is sitting in her belly like a lump, and all at once, while Mrs Sloan is performing ‘Annabelle Lee’ (Mrs Sloan never just reads), that lump of undigested food starts to crawl up her throat and toward the exit.
She raises her hand. It seems to weigh at least ten pounds, but she holds it up until Mrs Sloan raises her eyes. ‘Yes, Tina, what is it?’
She sounds annoyed, but Tina doesn’t care. She’s beyond caring. ‘I feel sick. I need to go to the girls’.’
‘Then go, by all means, but hurry back.’
Tina scuttles from the room. Some of the girls are giggling – at thirteen, unscheduled bathroom visits are always amusing – but Tina is too concerned with that rising lump to feel embarrassed. Once in the hall she breaks into a run, heading for the bathroom halfway down the hall as fast as she can, but the lump is faster and she doubles over before she can get there and vomits her breakfast all over her sneakers.
Mr Haggerty, the school’s head janitor, is just coming up the stairs. He sees her stagger backward from the steaming puddle of whoopsie and trots toward her, his toolbelt jingling.
‘Hey, girl, you okay?’
Tina gropes for the wall with an arm that feels made of plastic. The world is swimming. Part of that is because she has vomited hard enough to bring tears to her eyes, but not all. She wishes with all her heart that she hadn’t let Barbara persuade her into talking to Mr Hodges, that she had left Pete alone to work out whatever was wrong. What if he never speaks to her again?
‘I’m fine,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry I made a m—’
But the swimming gets worse before she can finish. She doesn’t exactly faint, but the world pulls away from her, becomes something she’s looking at through a smudged window rather than something she’s actually in. She slides down the wall, amazed by the sight of her own knees, clad in green tights, coming up to meet her. That is when Mr Haggerty scoops her up and carries her downstairs to the school nurse’s office.
16
Andy’s little green Subaru is perfect, as far as Morris is concerned – not apt to attract a first glance, let alone a second. There are only thousands just like it. He backs down the driveway and sets off for the North Side, keeping an eye out for cops and obeying every speed limit.
At first it’s almost a replay of Friday night. He stops once more at the Bellows Avenue Mall and once more visits Home Depot. He goes to the tools section, where he picks out a screwdriver with a long blade and a chisel. Then he drives on to the square brick hulk that used to be the Birch Street Recreation Center and once more parks in the space marked RESERVED FOR REC DEPT. VEHICLES.
It’s a good spot in which to do dirty business. There’s a loading dock on one side and a high hedge on the other. He’s visible only from behind – the baseball field and crumbling basketball courts – but with school in session, those areas are deserted. Morris goes to the basement window he noticed before, squats, and rams the blade of his screwdriver into the crack at the top. It goes in easily, because the wood is rotten. He uses the chisel to widen the crack. The glass rattles in its frame but doesn’t break, because the putty is old and there’s plenty of give. The possibility that this hulk of a building has alarm protection is looking slimmer all the time.
Morris swaps the chisel for the screwdriver again. He chivvies it through the gap he’s made, catches the thumb-lock, and pushes. He looks around to make sure he’s still unobserved – it’s a good spot, yes, but breaking and entering in broad daylight is still a scary proposition – and sees nothing but a crow perched on a telephone pole. He inserts the chisel at the bottom of the window, beating it in as deep as it will go with the heel of his hand, then bears down on it. For a moment there’s nothing. Then the window slides up with a squall of wood and a shower of dirt. Bingo. He wipes sweat from his face as he peers in at the stored chairs, card tables, and boxes of junk, verifying that it will be easy to slide in and drop to the floor.
But not quite yet. Not while there’s the slightest possibility that a silent alarm is lighting up somewhere.
Morris takes his tools back to the little green Subaru, and drives away.
17
Linda Saubers is monitoring the mid-morning activity period at Northfield Elementary School when Peggy Moran comes in and tells her that her daughter has been taken sick at Dorton Middle, some three miles away.