Michael Walsh - Hostile Intent

In the life of a man, his time is but a moment, his being an incessant flux, his soul an unquiet eddy, his fortune dark, and his fame doubtful.

M ARCUS A URELIUS , Meditations , Book II

E DWARDSVILLE , I LLINOIS

The morning school bell was clattering in the distance as Hope Gardner sandwiched her Volvo station wagon between Mrs. Moscones Escalade and Janey Eagletons Prius. She only nicked the Priuss bumper, or rather the plastic piece of junk that passed for a bumper these days, and the gentle thump went unnoticed by her two children in the backseat of her car. She wished she had the guts to ding the Escalade a little, just to make it fair, but the Cadillac belonged to Mrs. Moscone, and nobody wanted Mrs. Moscone mad at them. Her husband was from The Hill in St. Louis, the kind of neighborhood where The Sopranos was considered a documentary.

She wondered briefly whether she should leave a note, but that notion flew out of her head as the back door rocketed open.

Bye, Mom! shouted Emma, her twelve-year-old. Emma was blond, green-eyed, and filling out with a rapidity that surprised Hope, even though she had gone through the same transformation herself when she was her daughters age. One moment a skinny kid, the nextAnd if she noticed, how much more quickly the boys noticed too.

More than anything, Emma wanted to grow up to be Gwyneth Paltrow, win an Oscar, and marry a rock star, more or less in that order. Hope didnt have the heart to tell her that the odds were several million to one against any of those things happening. But childhood was for dreaming; Emma would learn about the harsh realities of life soon enough.

Emma was halfway across the schoolyard as Hope turned to Rory. Rory was different. Small for his age, he was skittish, unsure, easily alarmed, especially for a ten-year-old. And right now his nose was running too. Come on, honey, said Hope, wiping his face with a clean handkerchief and pulling his zipper up tight. You dont want to be late.

The first snarl of winter had come early to southern Illinois, and there was a stiff, chill breeze blowing into Edwardsville from the Mississippi, just a few miles to the west. Edwardsville was an exurb of St. Louis, but the big city across the river might as well be in a different country, not just another state. Edwardsville still had an old-fashioned, midwestern small-town feel to it, and thats the way folks liked it.

Nothing ever happened in Edwardsville.

Rory snuffled again and wiped his nose on his sleeve; she could never get him to stop doing that. In the distance, they could both hear the school bell ringing, this time longer and louder.

Hope got out of the car and held out her arms to her son. Okay, big guy, she said. Time to go.

I dont want to go, Mama, Rory said plaintively, not budging.

At times like this, Hope wondered if her son needed some kind of special-ed program. She had talked about it with her husband, Jack, but Jack was a no-nonsense, no-excuses kind of guy, dead set against it. His tech-consulting business did a lot of work with the military all over the Midwest, some of it highly classified, and as far as he was concerned, special-ed programs were for sissies and slackers, and his son was neither. The same went for conditions like attention deficit disorder and diseases with no physiological symptoms. Nothing that cant be cured by self-control or a good whack on the ass, Jack would say.

Hope wasnt sure she agreed with him, but there it was. And so Rory sat through class after class, his mind wandering, his grades mediocre, his teachers frustrated.

Oh well, not much could be done about that at the moment. And anyway, Jack was supposed to leave on a business trip to Minneapolis today, so further discussion would have to wait until he got back.

Hope reached in and took her sons hand. It was cold to the touch, clammy, sweaty despite the weather.

Reluctantly, Rory let himself be hoisted up and out of the car. Cant I stay home today, Mom? he asked.

In the distance, by the schoolhouse door, Hope could see a man waving at them, telling them to hurry. Later, she would recall that the man was unfamiliar, someone she had never seen before. Ever since Columbine and the other shootings, schools had become much more concerned with security, and strange adults were not allowed to roam the halls. But this manwhite, blond, strongly builtwas well turned-out in a coat and tie.

Must be a new teacher, Hope thought. Strange, in the middle of the term. She herself was a substitute teacher at the school, and she thought she knew everybody. In fact, she had a class to teach at noon; well, shed ask the principal when she saw him.

The bell rang sharply, one last time. No other kids in sighteveryone was in the building. Except Rory, who was still holding on to her hand.

Before she could answer, his hand slipped from hers and he suddenly broke away. Its okay, he said. I can handle it.

Hope watched him dash across the dead grass and the new teacher waved him home, like an airplane coming in for a landing. She waved once at Rorys back, but he didnt see her, ducking under the mans arm and through the door just as the bell struck 8:00 A.M.

A brisk gust of wind blew through her, giving her the chills, and it was starting to snow a little. She shook herself to get warm, then walked back toward the car. She made a short detour around the Prius, to see if its bumper was perhaps worse than shed thought and was surprised to see that it wasnt Janey Eagletons all, but one with Missouri plates. Now she didnt feel so guilty.

It was not until she was halfway home that she remembered thinking it was odd they were lowering the iron bars on the school windows just as instruction was starting.

E DWARDSVILLE J EFFERSON M IDDLE S CHOOL

Mrs. Bravermans fourth grade arithmetic class opened each school day with a moment of silence. It wasnt exactly a prayer, which the children all knew would be illegal, but neither was it a chance to sneak in a few more winks of sleep before the day began in earnest. Mrs. Braverman saw to that as she patrolled the aisles between the desks.

Rory offered up some quick thoughts in favor of his parents, his dad going away on business, his mom always rushing around in the Volvo, which she treated more like a ferryboat than a car, locked in an eternal game of Cannibals and Missionaries.

Which was, in fact, one of Rorys favorite pastimes: trying to figure out how to get various odd numbers of cannibals and missionaries across a river without ever leaving more man-eaters than men of the cloth on either side. It was a frequent subject of his doodles, but on this morning he tried very hard to visualize the scene: scary dark men with bones in their noses looking hungrily upon pale-faced creatures wearing what seemed to him to be full-length black dresses. You didnt see many holy men around Edwardsville these days, and even though the Gardners were more or less Lutherans, their minister usually wore jeans.

Rory had gotten several moves into his game of mental gymnastics when Mrs. Bravermans midwestern caw brought him out of his reverie and back to attention. He glanced at the clock on the wall and saw that, as usual, only two minutes had passed. Rory didnt like math, and of course wasnt very good at it, but he already had a firm grip on Einsteins theory of relativity: the forty-five minutes between 8:05 and 8:50 A.M. were the Methuselahs of minutes.