Nineteen Minutes Read online

  What if Alex hadn't been late to work that morning? Might she have stayed at the kitchen table with Josie, talking about the things she imagined mothers and daughters discussed but that she never seemed to have the time to? What if she'd taken a better look at Josie when she hurried downstairs, told her to go back to bed and get some rest?

  What if she'd taken Josie on a spur-of-the-moment trip to Punta Cana, San Diego, Fiji--all the places Alex dream-surfed on her computer in chambers and thought about visiting, but never did?

  What if she'd been a prescient enough mother to keep her daughter home from school today?

  There were, of course, hundreds of other parents who'd made the same honest mistake she had. But that was shallow comfort to Alex: none of their children were Josie. None of them, surely, had as much to lose as she did.

  When this is over, Alex promised silently, we will go to the rain forest, or the pyramids, or a beach as white as bone. We will eat grapes from the vine, we will swim with sea turtles, we will walk miles on cobblestone streets. We will laugh and talk and confess. We will.

  At the same time, a small voice in her head was scheduling this paradise. After, it said. Because first, this trial will come to your courtroom.

  It was true: a case like this would be fast-tracked to the docket. Alex was the superior court judge for Grafton County, and would be for the next eight months. Although Josie had been at the scene of the crime, she wasn't technically a victim of the shooter. Had Josie been wounded, Alex would have automatically been removed from the case. But as it stood, there was no legal conflict in Alex's sitting as judge, as long as she could separate her personal feelings as the mother of a high school student from her professional feelings as a justice. This would be her first big trial as a superior court judge, the one that set a tone for the rest of her tenure on the bench.

  Not that she was really thinking about that now.

  Suddenly, Josie stirred. Alex watched consciousness pour into her, reach a high-water mark. "Where am I?"

  Alex combed her fingers through her daughter's hair. "In the hospital."

  "Why?"

  Her hand stilled. "Do you remember anything about today?"

  "Matt came over before school," Josie said, and then she pushed herself upright. "Was there, like, a car accident?"

  Alex hesitated, unsure of what she was supposed to say. Wasn't Josie better off not knowing the truth? What if this was the way her mind was protecting her from whatever she'd witnessed?

  "You're fine," Alex said carefully. "You weren't hurt."

  Josie turned to her, relieved. "What about Matt?"

  *

  Lewis was getting a lawyer. Lacy held that nugget of information to her chest like a hot stone as she rocked back and forth on Peter's bed and waited for him to come home. It's going to be all right, Lewis had promised, although she did not understand how he could make so specious a statement. Clearly this is a mistake, Lewis had said, but he hadn't been down at the high school. He hadn't seen the faces of the students, kids who would never really be kids again.

  There was a part of Lacy that wanted so badly to believe Lewis--to think that somehow, this broken thing might be fixed. But there was another part of her that remembered him waking Peter at four in the morning to go out and sit in a duck blind. Lewis had taught his son how to hunt, never expecting that Peter might find a different kind of prey. Lacy understood hunting as both a sport and an evolutionary claim; she even knew how to make an excellent venison stew and teriyaki goose and enjoyed whatever meal Lewis's hobby put on the table. But right now, she thought, It is his fault, because then it couldn't be hers.

  How could you change a boy's bedding every week and feed him breakfast and drive him to the orthodontist and not know him at all? She'd assumed that if Peter's answers were monosyllabic, it was just because of his age; that any mother would have made the same assumption. Lacy combed through her memories for some red flag, some conversation she might have misread, something overlooked, but all she could recall were a thousand ordinary moments.

  A thousand ordinary moments that some mothers would never get to have again with their own children.

  Tears sprang to her eyes; she wiped them with the back of her hand. Don't think about them, she silently scolded. Right now you have to worry about yourself.

  Had Peter been thinking that, too?

  Swallowing, Lacy walked into her son's room. It was dark, the bed neatly made just as Lacy had left it this morning, but now she saw the poster of a band called Death Wish on the wall and wondered why a boy might hang it up. She opened the closet and saw the empty bottles and electrical tape and torn rags and everything else she had missed the first time around.

  Suddenly, Lacy stopped. She could fix this herself. She could fix this for both of them. She ran downstairs to the kitchen and ripped three large black thirty-three-gallon trash bags free from their coil before hurrying back to Peter's room. She started in the closet, shoving packages of shoelaces, sugar, potassium nitrate fertilizer, and--my God, were these pipes?--into the first bag. She did not have a plan about what she would do with all these things, but she would get them out of her house.

  When the doorbell rang, Lacy sighed with relief, expecting Lewis--although, if she'd been thinking clearly, she would have realized that Lewis would have simply let himself in. She abandoned her haul and went downstairs to find a policeman holding a slim blue folder. "Mrs. Houghton?" the officer said.

  What could they possibly want? They already had her son.

  "We've got a search warrant." He handed her the paperwork and pushed past her, followed by five other policemen. "Jackson and Walhorne, you head up to the boy's room. Rodriguez, the basement. Tewes and Gilchrist, start with the first floor, and everyone, let's make sure you cover the answering machines and all computer equipment . . ." Then he noticed Lacy still standing there, stricken. "Mrs. Houghton, you'll have to leave the premises."

  The policeman escorted her to her own front hallway. Numb, Lacy followed. What would they think when they reached Peter's room and found that trash bag? Would they blame Peter? Or Lacy, for enabling him?

  Did they already?

  A rush of cold air hit Lacy in the face as the front door opened. "For how long?"

  The officer shrugged. "Till we're done," he said, and he left her out in the cold.

  *

  Jordan McAfee had been an attorney for nearly twenty years and truly believed he had seen and heard it all, until now, when he and his wife, Selena, stood in front of the television set watching CNN's coverage of the school shooting at Sterling High. "It's like Columbine," Selena said. "In our backyard."

  "Except right now," Jordan murmured, "there's someone to blame who's still alive." He glanced down at the baby in his wife's arms, a blue-eyed, coffee-colored mixture of his own WASP genes and Selena's never-ending limbs and ebony skin, and he reached for the remote to turn down the volume, just in case his son was taking any of this in subconsciously.

  Jordan knew Sterling High. It was just down the street from his barber and two blocks away from the room over the bank he rented as his law office. He had represented a few students who'd been busted with pot in their glove compartments or who got caught drinking underage at the college in town. Selena, who was not only his wife but also his investigator, had gone into the school to talk to kids from time to time about a case.

  They hadn't lived here very long. His son Thomas--the only good thing to come out of his lousy first marriage--graduated from high school in Salem Falls and was now a sophomore at Yale, where Jordan spent $40,000 a year to hear that he had narrowed down his career plans to becoming either a performance artist, an art historian, or a professional clown. Jordan had finally asked Selena to marry him, and after she'd gotten pregnant, they'd moved to Sterling--because the school district had such a good reputation.

  Go figure.

  When the telephone rang and Jordan--who didn't want to watch the coverage but couldn't tear his eyes away fro