He immediately crawled a few steps toward Ben and Sara. They didn’t run to him this time. Sara squirmed in her wet pants and Ben pulled her close to him. Archie stopped moving toward them. Principal Hill knelt behind Sara and put a protective arm around her. She flinched, still riveted by the SWAT officers.
There were five of them in the office, all wearing black jumpsuits, gloves, thigh holsters, and head wraps, their weapons drawn. Henry was just standing up, from where they had positioned him on his knees. He grabbed the badge that hung around his own neck, over his bulletproof vest, and thrust it toward one of the SWAT officers. “What the—” Henry glanced over at Ben and Sara and faltered. “Heck?”
“Sorry, sirs.”
“You find her?” Henry asked. They all knew which “her” he meant.
“No. We’ve secured most of the school. I don’t think she’s here.”
Archie turned back to his children. He held an arm out for Sara to come to him, but Ben just pulled her toward him more tightly. Their small chests rose and fell, the sound of their breathing audible. Ben wiped his nose with the back of his wrist. “You’re scaring her,” he said.
Archie lowered his hand, and felt his children slip farther from his grasp. Gretchen was never going to kill them. Not when she could still use them to hurt him. “Gretchen’s not here,” he said softly.
The woman behind the front counter, the school secretary, lifted a quaking hand to her mouth. “She said she was your wife.”
“What?” Archie asked, turning.
The secretary was in her fifties. Her blond hair was permed and she wore a smock over a turtleneck, like an oversized kinder-gartener. She’d been the secretary there ever since Archie could remember, but he didn’t know her name. “She said she was your wife,” the woman continued. “I knew you were divorced from their mother.” She motioned vaguely at the children, one hand still held in front of her mouth. “She said that she was their stepmother. That they had forgotten their lunches. She asked to make a call from the phone, right there. I was working at the copier, so I couldn’t hear. And then in the confusion of the lockdown she disappeared.” She looked from one cop to the next, and then shrugged sadly. “She had a short brown wig on. I didn’t recognize her.” Then she lowered her hand from her mouth and leveled it until she was pointing at the far end of the counter, where two lunch boxes sat side by side like bookends.
Archie stood up and walked over to them. They were both plastic. One had a Dora the Explorer theme. The other was Batman.
“Should we call the bomb squad?” one of the SWAT officers asked.
Archie ignored him, reaching for the Dora the Explorer lunchbox and opening it. When he saw what was inside his gut clenched, and he fumbled for the next lunch box and opened it. He forced himself to stay rigid, not to let his children see his reaction. He had scared the shit out of them too much already today.
“What is it?” Henry asked.
The two plastic boxes lay open, the dark meaty flesh inside glistening under the office’s fluorescent lights. The blood puddled and slipped on the lunch boxes’ colorful plastic interior shell. Archie could smell it, the coppery sweet tang. He knew now what had happened to the missing male deputy, the poor sap who had helped Gretchen escape, probably even bought her the fucking lunch boxes.
Archie’s voice was steady. “It’s a human heart,” he said quietly. “I think it’s been cut in half.”
And judging by the smell, it was fresh.
CHAPTER
26
Mom?” Susan said again.
There was a pause. “I might have eaten one.”
Susan couldn’t breathe. “Mom,” she said, as calmly as she could. “You have to throw up.”
“What?”
“Listen to me,” Susan said, her voice rising. “The chocolates are poisoned. Make yourself throw up. I’m going to hang up now and call nine-one-one.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “Promise me.”
“But I don’t feel nauseous.”
Nauseated, Susan thought. But she didn’t say it. She opened her eyes. “Bliss, promise me.”
“Okay,” Bliss agreed hesitantly.
Susan hung up and dialed 911. “I think my mom’s been poisoned.” She rattled off Bliss’s address. “She ate a chocolate. I think Gretchen Lowell sent me poisoned chocolates.”
“Yeah,” the 911 operator said. She sounded unconvinced.
“I’m not crazy. My name’s Susan Ward. I write for the Herald. Please send paramedics.”
She hung up and looked around frantically. More kids were streaming out of the school now. All sorts of cops were jogging in. Something had happened in there. All hell had broken loose.
Susan didn’t care. “I need some help,” she cried. “Someone.”
She ducked under the tape and headed toward the school.