Present, Fifteen (2)

The gym was not empty.

Joyce came through the double doors at eight fifty-two and there
were children on the floor in two lines doing a bending exercise
while Coach Lunsford counted.

"Four. Five. And up."

They were fourth graders. Joyce stood inside the doors until
Lunsford saw her, and he held up a finger and finished the count
before he came over.

"Are you looking for somebody?"

"Mrs. Cline's class."

"Not down here." He had a whistle on a cord and he turned it over
twice in his hand. "Second grade's Thursday."

"She takes them Tuesdays."

"Tuesdays it's fourth. Thursday's second and fifth." He looked
back at the lines, where two boys had stopped bending. "Whitt. Get
up off the floor."

Joyce said thank you.

She stood a moment longer with her hand on the push bar.

"Have you seen Ruth Ann this morning?"

Lunsford thought about it for a second in the way a man does when
he is being asked something he has no reason to have an answer
for.

"No."

---

The door at the end of the second-grade hall was chained, so she
went back through the cafeteria and out the side.

It was twenty-eight degrees. She had left her coat on the back of
her office door and she did not go back for it.

The grass along the north wall had frost on it in the shade and
her shoes went through it and came up wet. There was a strip of
gravel against the foundation where the roof dripped, and she
walked on that instead, past the windows of Room 5 and then Room 7.

Room 5 had the ordinary look of a room from outside. A wall, a
clock, part of a map. The reflection of the field behind her lay
across the bottom of the glass.

Room 7 did not.

Both windows were filled.

They had been covered on the inside with sheets of poster board,
edge to edge, with the blank sides facing out. Joyce could see the
tape at the corners. It was the wide brown tape from the workroom,
the kind that had to be wet, and it had been put on in short
pieces, four or five to a window, the way a person does it who is
working alone and cannot reach.

She went closer.

The bottom edge of the left-hand window had not been covered all
the way. There was a gap about two inches deep along the sill
where the board did not meet the frame.

Joyce put her hands on the brick and leaned in.

There was no light behind the gap.

She looked for a while. Her eyes adjusted as far as they were
going to and what she could see in the gap was another flat
surface, eight or ten inches back from the glass, running the
width of the opening.

There was something behind the board.

She stood up from the brick and her hands had gone red and she put
them under her arms.

The poster board on the right-hand window had a corner turned
where the tape had let go. It had curled toward the glass and she
could see an inch of the other side of it.

There was printing on it.

She could make out part of a letter in red, and under it a line of
smaller type, and a border of the kind they printed around the
edge of a reading chart.

The charts had come off the wall beside the windows.

Somebody had taken them down and turned them around and taped them
up facing out.

Joyce stood on the gravel with her hands under her arms and
counted the windows on that wall from the corner of the building,
because she had come around from the cafeteria side and she wanted
to be certain which room she was standing at.

Room 5. Room 7.

She counted again from the other direction.

Room 7.

---

Hollis Pickard was in the boiler room doorway with a coffee can of
screws, sorting them.

"Mr. Pickard."

"Ma'am."

"Is anybody working in Room 7?"

He put the can down on the step.

"Working how?"

"Painting. Repairs. Anything where they'd have to cover the
windows."

Pickard looked at her the way he looked at anybody who came to the
boiler room, which was as though they had got lost on the way to
somewhere.

"No."

"Nothing scheduled?"

"Nothing's scheduled in that building till Christmas." He picked
the can back up. "What's covering the windows?"

"Poster board."

"Whose poster board?"

"I think it's hers."

Pickard stood there with the can in his hand.

"I was in that hall at seven forty," he said. "I filled the
fountain and I opened the room end. Wasn't a thing on those
windows."

"You saw in."

"I didn't see in. I went past." He set the can down again. "I'd
have seen it if there was something on 'em. You see a covered
window."

Joyce said that was what she thought.

"Door won't open, either," she said.

Pickard was already reaching back into the boiler room for his
keys.

"Then let's open it."

---

He tried it the way she had tried it, and then he tried it the
way a man tries a door, with his shoulder set and his foot braced
against the jamb.

It came out of the frame perhaps two inches and took up solid.

He put his face to the gap.

"Mrs. Cline."

He waited.

"Ruth Ann. It's Hollis."

He straightened and looked at Joyce and then he put his hand flat
on the door in the middle of it, the way she had done, and held it
there.

He did not say anything about the breathing.

He took his hand off the door.

"That's not a bookcase," he said.

"No."

"A bookcase, you get purchase, it slides." He put two fingers
against the wood and pushed, and the door gave and stopped in the
same place. "That's got weight on it all the way down. That's
built."

Across the hall the reading group in Room 6 had finished and the
teacher was giving out arithmetic papers. Joyce could hear her
counting rows.

"Nine forty," Pickard said. "Where's Talley?"

"Lexington."

Pickard looked at the door for a while.

"You want me to take the hinges?"

The hinges were on the hall side. Joyce had not thought of it and
he had, and she looked at them, three of them, painted over, the
pins seated down in the barrels under eleven years of enamel.

"How long."

"Hour. Maybe better than an hour. They're painted." He was already
looking at the top one. "And then it's still got whatever's
against it holding it up, so when it comes it's coming."

Joyce thought about a door coming down into a room where she could
not see the floor.

"No," she said.

"No?"

"Not yet."

---

Mrs. Daughtry looked up when they came into the office together,
which she had not done at eight twenty-five.

"Is there something wrong?"

"Do you have Room 7's attendance?"

Mrs. Daughtry went to the tray and found it without looking
through the others, because it was in the order she had put it in.

It was the yellow slip, the one the room sends down, with the date
written across the top and the room number circled.

Cline. Rm 7. 11-8-77.

Enrolled, seventeen. Present, fifteen. Absent, two, and the two
names written out on the line beneath in a small upright hand
Joyce had seen on report cards and on notes home and on a card in
the hospital when Joyce's mother died.

"When did this come down?"

"It comes down at eight fifteen."

"Did she bring it, or did she send it?"

Mrs. Daughtry stopped.

"A child brought it. They always bring it."

"Which child?"

"I don't—" She put her hand on the edge of the desk. "It was
before the bell. There's four or five of them come at once."

Joyce put the slip down on the counter.

Fifteen children had been marked present in that room at eight
fifteen, in Cline's hand, and a child had carried the paper down
the hall and put it in the tray, and at eight forty the door would
not open and the windows were covered and there was no light in
the room at all.

Twenty-five minutes.

"Mrs. Daughtry," Joyce said. "Call the sheriff's office."

Mrs. Daughtry had her hand on the telephone and did not lift it.

"And tell them what?"

That was the question. Joyce had been working on it in the hall
for an hour and had not solved it, and she was aware that she was
the one being asked, in an office, with the custodian standing
behind her and the secretary waiting, because Talley was in
Lexington and there was nobody else in the building it could be
asked of.

"Tell them we can't get into a classroom," Joyce said. "Tell them
there's fifteen children in it."

Mrs. Daughtry picked up the telephone.

Joyce stood at the counter with the yellow slip in front of her
and listened to the dial go around, seven times, each one running
back.

 

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