“These reports are so far unconfirmed, I want to emphasize that. I think . . .” Lester puts a hand to his ear, listens. “Yes, okay. Chet Ondowsky, from our Pittsburgh affiliate, is on the scene. Chet, can you hear me?”

“Yes,” a voice says. “Yes, I can, Lester.”

“What can you tell us, Chet?”

The picture switches away from Lester Holt to a middle-aged guy with what Holly thinks of as a local news face: not handsome enough to be a major market anchor, but presentable. Except the knot of his tie is crooked, there’s no makeup to cover the mole beside his mouth, and his hair is mussy, as if he didn’t have time to comb it.

“What’s that he’s standing beside?” Pete asks.

“I don’t know,” Holly says. “Hush.”

“Looks sort of like a giant pine co—”

“Hush!” Holly could care less about the giant pine cone, or Chet Ondowsky’s mole and mussed-up hair; her attention is fixed on the two ambulances that go screaming past behind him, nose to tail with their lights flashing. Casualties, she thinks. Numerous casualties, many of them children.

“Lester, what I can tell you is that there are almost certainly at least seventeen dead here at Albert Macready Middle School, and many more injured. This comes from a county sheriff’s deputy who asked not to be identified by name. The explosive device may have been in the main office, or a nearby storage room. If you look over there . . .”

He points, and the camera obediently follows his finger. At first the picture is blurry, but when the cameraman steadies and zooms, Holly can see a large hole has been blown in the side of the building. Bricks scatter across the lawn in a corona. And as she’s taking this in—with millions of others, probably—a man in a yellow vest emerges from the hole with something in his arms. A small something wearing sneakers. No, one sneaker. The other has apparently been torn off in the blast.

The camera returns to the correspondent and catches him straightening his tie. “The Sheriff’s Department will undoubtedly be holding a press conference at some point, but right now informing the public is the least of their concerns. Parents have already started to gather . . . ma’am? Ma’am, can I speak to you for just a moment? Chet Ondowsky, WPEN, Channel 11.”

The woman who comes into the shot is vastly overweight. She has arrived at the school without a coat, and her flower print housedress billows around her like a caftan. Her face is dead pale except for bright spots of red on her cheeks, her hair is disarrayed enough to make Ondowsky’s mussy ’do look neat, her plump cheeks glisten with tears.

They shouldn’t be showing this, Holly thinks, and I shouldn’t be watching it. But they are, and I am.

“Ma’am, do you have a child who attends Albert Macready?”

“My son and daughter both do,” she says, and grabs Ondowsky’s arm. “Are they okay? Do you know that, sir? Irene and David Vernon. David’s in the seventh grade. Irene’s in the ninth. We call Irene Deenie. Do you know if they are okay?”

“I don’t, Mrs. Vernon,” Ondowsky says. “I think you should talk to one of the deputies, over where they’re setting up those sawhorses.”

“Thank you, sir, thank you. Pray for my kids!”

“I will,” Ondowsky says as she rushes off, a woman who will be very lucky to survive the day without having some sort of cardiac episode . . . although Holly guesses that right now her heart is the least of her concerns. Right now her heart is with David and Irene, also known as Deenie.

Ondowsky turns back to the camera. “Everyone in America will be praying for the Vernon children, and all the children who were attending Albert Macready Middle School today. According to the information I have now—it’s sketchy, and this could change—the explosion occurred at about two-fifteen, an hour ago, and was strong enough to shatter windows a mile away. The glass . . . Fred, can you get a shot of this pine cone?”

“There, I knew it was a pine cone,” Pete says. He’s leaning forward, eyes glued to the television.

Fred the camera guy moves in, and on the pine cone’s petals, or leaves, or whatever you called them, Holly can see shards of broken glass. One actually appears to have blood on it, although she can hope it’s just a passing reflection cast by the lights on one of the ambulances.

Lester Holt: “Chet, that’s horrible. Just awful.”

The camera pulls back and returns to Ondowsky. “Yes, it is. This is a horrible scene. Lester, I want to see if . . .”

A helicopter with a red cross and MERCY HOSPITAL stenciled on the side is landing in the street. Chet Ondowsky’s hair swirls in the wash of the rotors, and he raises his voice to be heard.

“I want to see if I can do anything to help! This is terrible, just a terrible tragedy! Back to you in New York!”

Lester Holt returns, looking upset. “Be safe, Chet. Folks, we’re going to return you to your regularly scheduled programming, but we’ll continue to update you on this developing situation at NBC Breaking News on your—”

Holly uses the remote and kills the TV. She has lost her taste for make-believe justice, at least for today. She keeps thinking of that limp form in the arms of the man wearing the yellow vest. One shoe off, one shoe on, she thinks. Deedle-deedle-dumpling, my son John. Will she watch the news tonight? She supposes she will. Won’t want to, but won’t be able to help herself. She’ll have to know how many casualties. And how many are children.

Pete surprises her by taking her hand. Usually she still doesn’t like to be touched, but right now his hand feels good holding hers.

“I want you to remember something,” he says.

She turns to him. Pete is grave.

“You and Bill stopped something much worse than this from happening,” he says. “That crackpot fuck Brady Hartsfield could have killed hundreds at the rock concert he tried to blow up. Maybe thousands.”

“And Jerome,” she says in a low voice. “Jerome was there, too.”

“Yep. You, Bill, and Jerome. The Three Musketeers. That you could stop. And did. But stopping this one—” Pete nods to the TV. “That was someone else’s responsibility.”

3

At seven o’clock Holly is still in the office, going over invoices that don’t really need her attention. She managed to resist turning on the office TV and watching Lester Holt at six-thirty, but she doesn’t want to go home just yet. That morning she had been looking forward to a nice veggie dinner from Mr. Chow, which she would eat while watching Pretty Poison, a vastly overlooked thriller from 1968 starring Anthony Perkins and Tuesday Weld, but tonight she doesn’t want poison, pretty or otherwise. She has been poisoned by the news from Pennsylvania, and still might not be able to resist turning on CNN. That would gift her with hours of tossing and turning until two or even three in the morning.

Like most people in the media-soaked twenty-first century, Holly has become inured to the violence men (it’s still mostly men) do to each other in the name of religion or politics—those ghosts—but what happened at that suburban middle school is too much like what almost happened at the Midwest Culture and Arts Complex, where Brady Hartsfield tried to blow up a few thousand kids, and what did happen at City Center, where he plowed a Mercedes sedan into a crowd of job-seekers, killing . . . she doesn’t remember how many. She doesn’t want to remember.