Time Bomb

***

Tuesday morning was crystalline- the kind of nose-tweaking, palate-tickling weather L.A. earns after a storm. I checked the morning paper for an update on the shooting, found nothing, and scanned the TV and the all-news radio stations.

Just rehash. I returned calls, finished a couple of child-custody reports, working until just before noon, when I took a break for a pepper beef sandwich and a beer.

Remembering Milo’s prediction, I turned the TV on again, flipped channels. Game shows. Soaps. Vocational training commercials. I was just about to switch it off when a press conference cut into one of the serials.

Lieutenant Frisk. More than ever, his tan, his teeth, and his perm made him resemble a soap opera cop, and the conference seemed like a continuation of the serial, just another scripted scene.

He straightened his tie, smiled, then proceeded to give Holly Lynn Burden her own ration of fame, enunciating her name, repeating it, spelling it, adding her birthdate, the fact that she lived in Ocean Heights, and was believed to have had psychiatric problems.

“All indications,” he said, “are that Miss Burden was working alone, and no evidence of any political affiliation or conspiracy has been found, though we’re still investigating at this time.”

“What do you have,” asked a reporter, “by way of a motive?”

“None, at this time.”

“But you said she had psychiatric problems.”

“That’s true.”

“What kinds of problems did she have?”

“We’re still looking into that,” said Frisk. “Sorry I can’t be any more specific at this time.”

“Lieutenant, was she gunning for the children, or was this an assassination attempt?”

“We’re still collecting data on that as well. That’s all, at this time, folks. Get back to you soon as we have more.”

Segue back to the soap: a cocktail party full of beautiful people, haute-coiffured and haute-cuisined, but riddled with angst.

I knotted my tie and put on my jacket. Time for school.

***

I arrived at Hale at 12:45- lunch hour but the yard was empty. A grizzled man in shabby clothes was walking up and down the sidewalk in front of the school. He carried a ten-foot cross and wore a sandwich sign proclaiming JESUS IS LORD on the front, NO HEAVEN WITHOUT REDEMPTION on the back. A middle-aged cop stood at the entrance to the gate, watching him. Blue uniform, but not LAPD. I got close enough to read the insignia on his sleeve. School police. I gave him my name, he checked it against a list on a clipboard, asked for ID verification, and unlocked the gate.

The man with the cross had shuffled halfway down the block. Now he turned and shouted, “Suffer the children!” in a hoarse voice. The school cop looked at him as if at a puddle of vomit, but made no move. The cross-man resumed his march.

I entered the yard. The storage shed was still wrapped with crime-scene tape. Despite the fine weather, a sense of desolation hung over the grounds- gloom coupled with tension, like the pause between thunderclaps. Maybe it was the emptiness, the lack of childish laughter. Or maybe just my imagination. I’d had the same feeling before… at deathbeds.

I pushed that aside and checked in with Linda Over-street’s secretary. Carla was young, tiny, and efficient. She had a punk hairdo and a smile that said life was a big joke.

I went to the first classroom. Yesterday there’d been two dozen students; today I counted nine. The teacher, a pale young woman just out of training, looked defeated. I gave her an encouraging smile, regretted not having the time to do more. As I took her place at the front of the classroom, she excused herself, sat in the back, and read a book.

The pattern of absenteeism repeated itself in every other class- at least half of the children had stayed home. Many of the ones I’d tagged as high-risk were among the missing. Therapist’s dilemma: those who need help the most, run the farthest from it.

I concentrated on the help I could offer, went to work reestablishing rapport, giving the children time to ventilate, then introducing them to their bogeywoman: telling them Holly Burden’s name, the few facts I knew about her. They were skeptical about the notion of a female sniper. Many of the youngest kids kept calling her “him.”

I had them draw her, mold her out of clay, build her out of blocks. Rip her up, smash her, bludgeon her, erase her. Kill her, again and again.

Blood and glass…

Through it all, I kept talking, kept reassuring.

It went on that way until, in one of the fourth grade classes, the mention of Holly Burden’s name made the teacher go pale. A woman in her fifties named Esme Ferguson, she was a tall, square-faced bleached blonde, heavily made-up, conservatively tailored. She left the room and didn’t return. Some time later I spotted her in the hall, caught up with her, and asked if she’d known Holly Burden.

She took a deep breath and said, “Yes, Doctor. She was from here.”

“From Ocean Heights?”

“From Hale. She was a student here. I taught her. I used to teach sixth grade. She was in my sixth grade class. Years ago.”

“What do you remember about her?”

Penciled eyebrows rose. “Nothing, really.”

“Nothing at all?”

She bit her lip. “She was… odd. The entire family’s odd.”

“Odd in what way?”

“I really can’t… This is too hard to talk about, Doctor. Too much happening all at once. Please excuse me. I have to get back to class.”

She turned her back on me. I let her go, returned to my work. To talk of the odd girl. Try to explain madness to children.

Madness, as it turned out, was something these children grasped easily. They loved the word crazy, seemed to revel in it, in graphic discussions of deranged people they’d known. Their view of mental illness was skewed toward blood and guts: wet-brained vagrants carving each other up in alleyways over a bottle of redeye; hebephrenic bag ladies walking in front of buses; drooling molesters; shrieking youths run amok on PCP and crack cocaine. Random bursts of psychotic poetry at the corner mini-market.

I sat back, listened to all of it, tried to cloak myself in the therapist’s objectivity. After a couple of hours, the world they lived in began to overwhelm me.

In the past, when working with children who’d been traumatized, I’d always taken pains to put the traumatic event in context. Isolating disaster as a freak bit of cruelty. But looking into the knowing eyes of these kids, listening to their experiences, I heard myself faltering, had to force a note of confidence into my voice.

My last class of the day was a rowdy bunch of sixth graders whose teacher hadn’t shown up. I let the frazzled substitute out on parole, and was about to begin when the door opened and a young Latina walked in. She had teased, frosted hair, wore a tight, knit scarlet dress, and had matching inch-long nails. Her smile was glossy and happy-face wide. In one hand she carried a huge briefcase; in the other, a red purse.

“Hi, kids,” she announced. “I’m Dr. Mendez! How are you all doing today?”

The children looked at her, then at me. Her gaze followed theirs.

“Hi,” she said to me. “I’m Dr. Mendez. I’m a clinical psychologist. And you must be Mr…?”

I held out my hand. “Dr. Delaware. I’m a clinical psychologist too.”

Her smile went stale.

“Um…” she said, still staring at my hand. The purse dropped from her hand.