Present, Fifteen (3)

The call came to Terry Ledwell at four minutes past ten, on the
county road out past the Millers Creek turn, where he had been
sitting with the window down running plates on nothing.

Sink Creek Elementary. Trouble with a classroom door.

He asked dispatch to repeat the second part.

Dispatch repeated it.

There were four cars out. Two were at the fire hall for the
election, which took a man on the door and a man in the lot from
six in the morning. Carraway was serving papers over at Bethel.
Bowman was in Asheboro at the courthouse and would be an hour.

Ledwell said he was eleven minutes out and drove it in eight.

---

He came in the front because that was where the flagpole was and
a man arriving at a school ought to be seen arriving.

The woman at the front desk stood up when he came through the
door, and a second woman came out of the hall on his left. This
one had no coat and her shoes were wet and there was dirt on the
front of her skirt at about the height of a windowsill.

"Terry Ledwell."

"Joyce Setzer. I'm the counselor."

She took him down the hall and she talked while she walked, and
she gave it to him in order, with the times, which was more than
he generally got from anybody.

At the corner she stopped.

"Across the hall there's a second-grade class with the door open,"
she said. "They've been working all morning. They don't know."

"All right."

"There are nine rooms in this hall and the next one. Nobody knows."

"All right," Ledwell said.

He went down and stood in front of Room 7.

The custodian was already there, sitting on a child's chair he had
carried out of somewhere, with his elbows on his knees.

Ledwell tried the knob.

The knob turned. The door came out of the frame about two inches
and stopped against something that did not move at all.

He put his shoulder into it, once, not hard, testing the give.
There was no give. Whatever was behind it took the load flat and
sent it back into his feet.

He got down on one knee and looked at the gap along the floor.

Then he stood up and put the flat of his hand on the door and left
it there.

He was aware of the reading being done across the hall. A woman's
voice, and then a child's, and the radiator, and Setzer standing
four feet behind him with her arms folded and her hands under
them.

Under all of that, on the other side of an inch and a half of
painted poplar, there was breathing.

Ledwell kept his hand where it was for a good while.

"Deputy."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Do you hear it."

"Yes, ma'am," he said. "I hear it."

He took his hand off the door and went outside to look at the
windows.

---

He got Bowman on the radio from the car at twenty of eleven and
gave it to him the way Setzer had given it to him. The door. The
windows covered on the inside with the room's own charts. The
custodian in that hall at seven forty with nothing on the glass.
The attendance slip at eight fifteen in the teacher's hand,
fifteen present.

He did not say the last part on the radio.

Bowman was quiet for a moment.

"They talking?"

"No, sir."

"Anybody heard her?"

"No, sir. Not since roll."

"Anybody hurt in there?"

Ledwell looked through the windshield at the north wall of the
building, at the two blank windows in the middle of a row of
ordinary ones.

"I don't know that anybody's hurt," he said.

Bowman told him not to open anything.

Bowman told him to find out who was absent.

Bowman told him he would be there by noon and to get the school
settled before he got there, and Ledwell said yes sir to all three
and put the mike back on the hook and sat for a second with both
hands on the wheel.

---

The absent children were Ronnie Tysinger and a girl named Lorraine
Beeson.

Mrs. Daughtry had both numbers on the card file and she dialed
them and handed the telephone across the counter.

The Tysinger boy had been out since Friday with a fever that had
gone into his chest. His mother put him on the telephone so Ledwell
could hear him, and the boy said hey, and coughed, and said hey
again, and his mother came back on and asked what this was
regarding and Ledwell said it was a school matter and thanked her.

The Beeson girl was at the dentist in Asheboro. Her grandmother
was at the house and said they had left at eight and would likely
eat lunch in town and had said so to the school on Friday, and
that if there was a form that needed signing she could not sign
it, she could only tell him what she had been told.

Ledwell wrote both of them down.

Two children out of a room of seventeen, on a Tuesday in November,
one of them sick and one of them at the dentist.

He looked at the two names on his pad for longer than the two
names required.

---

At eleven fifteen the decision got made about the rest of the
building, and it got made in the office with four people standing
in it and no one of them in charge.

Setzer said the children could not stay in those rooms.

Mrs. Daughtry said Mr. Talley would be back at three.

Pickard said the gym had heat in it if you ran it an hour and he
would go run it.

Ledwell said that whatever was going to happen at that end of the
building, he did not want children in the rooms on either side of
it when it happened, and that settled it, because he was the one
wearing the uniform and because nobody else in the room wanted to
be the one who had said it.

He went up the hall with Pickard and they started at the far end
and worked back, and at each door Pickard put his head in and said
that the class was going to the gym, and the teachers got them
lined up.

It went quickly. They had a fire drill every month and the
children knew the shape of it. Some of them thought it was a drill
and asked if they should get their coats.

Nobody was told anything.

The line from Room 6 came out last and went past Room 7 with the
door closed and the number card beside the frame with the blue
line drawn around it, and eighteen second graders walked past
their own hall and none of them looked at that door because there
was nothing about it to look at.

---

The first grade came down from the other hall at twenty of twelve.

Ledwell stood at the cross-corridor where he could see both ways
and let them go by.

Mrs. Prevette had them by twos. They were smaller than he
expected. He had not been in a school in nine years and he had
forgotten the size of them.

Kimberly was in the third pair, holding on to the coat of a girl
he did not know.

She saw him and stopped.

The line went on around her.

"Uncle Terry."

"Go on with your class, hon."

"Are we going home?"

The girl she had been holding on to had stopped too, and behind
them the line had folded up on itself the way a line of six-year-
olds does, and Mrs. Prevette was coming back down the side of it.

"In a little bit," Ledwell said.

Kimberly looked at him.

He had three inches of her face turned up at him and the whole
hall behind her, and Mrs. Prevette arriving, and the radio on his
belt going with traffic from the fire hall about a machine that
had jammed.

"Go on," he said.

She went.

He watched the line all the way to the end of the corridor and
around, and then he stood there a while longer after it had gone.

---

The first car came in at seven minutes to twelve.

It came into the lot fast and went across two spaces and stopped
crooked, and a woman got out of it and left the door open behind
her.

Ledwell came out through the front.

She was already halfway across and she said a name at him, a
child's name, and when he did not answer fast enough she said it
again louder and went to go around him toward the doors.

He put himself in front of her.

Not a hand on her. He stepped where she was going to be and stayed
there, and she came up short against him and had to stop, and she
stood there with her keys in her fist and her car door open across
the lot behind her and the engine still running.

"Ma'am."

"That's my boy in there."

"Yes, ma'am."

"You get out of my way."

Ledwell did not get out of her way.

Behind her, out on the county road, a second car slowed and put
on its signal.

 

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