Chapter 7 - THE SLEET ON THE ROOF AND THE RED JACKET
"Deputy Jenkins!" I screamed, pointing toward the yellow school buses pulling out of the Oakwood loop toward the Riverbend Annex three blocks away. "Superintendent Sterling is taking the fourth and fifth grades to the Riverbend Community Annex! And look at the sky!"
All morning, a heavy Carolina October cold front had been colliding with freezing rain coming down from the Blue Ridge Mountains. For the past twenty minutes, while we had been inside the school, the temperature had dropped to twenty-nine degrees—and heavy, wet freezing sleet was now hammering down onto the flat roofs of the neighborhood, coating the power lines and tree branches in half an inch of solid glaze ice!
Wait—Sophie and Emma were right here beside me on the lawn, safe, because Maria had brought them back from the library when she saw the police cars—but across the parking lot, stepping onto the last yellow bus heading to the Riverbend Annex because her parents had just been arrested or fled, was eleven-year-old Madison Whitmore!
And along with Madison were sixty-four other fifth-graders!
If this five-story atrium is occupied, the roof will collapse in the first major ice storm, my husband had written three years ago before they murdered him.
"Wait!" handcuffed on the wet pavement beside the police cruiser, Charles Whitmore looked up at the sleet turning to solid ice on the windshield, and for the first time all morning, genuine, raw terror shattered his arrogant face. "Madison! Where is Victoria taking Madison?!"
"Your wife drove off when she saw the sheriff’s cars, Mr. Whitmore!" Brenda Vance shouted over the wind. "Madison got on Bus 4 with Superintendent Sterling heading to the Riverbend Annex!"
Charles Whitmore lunged upward against the handcuffs until two deputies slammed him back against the fender, his voice cracking into a father’s desperate scream: "Stop that bus! For the love of God, stop that bus! Sterling didn't use Grade-80 steel on the Annex gymnasium roof either! When we buried the bad girders from the plaza, we used the rest of the counterfeit batch to span the gym roof at the Annex! It won't hold two inches of ice load!"
Nobody waited another second.
Deputy Jenkins threw us into the back of his four-wheel-drive police Tahoe while the Fire Battalion Chief hit his sirens and roared out of the Oakwood driveway right behind us, radioing an emergency structural evacuation order across every emergency channel in Mecklenburg County.
"Why didn't Bus 4 answer the radio?" I cried from the backseat of the Tahoe as we fishtailed around the icy corner of Riverbend Parkway, where heavy pine branches were already snapping under the weight of the freezing rain and knocking out the streetlamps.
"Because the cell tower on Riverbend Ridge just lost power from a downed transformer!" Deputy Jenkins shouted, gripping the steering wheel as the sprawling brick-and-glass structure of the Riverbend Community Annex came into view at the bottom of the hill.
Three yellow school buses were parked outside the glass atrium entrance.
Inside the massive, flat-roofed gymnasium—whose sixty-foot steel roof trusses were already groaning under forty tons of accumulated sleet and pooling freezing rain from a clogged roof drain—sixty-five children in winter coats were sitting in rows on the hardwood basketball floor!
And standing by the rear exit doors leading to the executive parking lot was Superintendent Arthur Sterling, hurriedly loading three hard drives from the district annex safe into the trunk of his Lincoln Continental before the federal investigators from Oakwood could reach his office!
As Deputy Jenkins skidded the Tahoe to a halt beside the glass atrium doors, a terrifying, pistol-shot CRACK echoed from the steel ceiling rafters above the gymnasium.
Dust and white ceiling insulation rained down onto the basketball court as the center counterfeit iron truss sagged four inches inward!
Inside the gym, the children began screaming as the lights flickered out.
"Everybody out the front doors right now! Leave your backpacks! Run for the buses!" Deputy Jenkins and the fire crew roared, wedging the heavy glass atrium doors wide open with steel halligan bars as the teachers began herding the panicked fourth- and fifth-graders out into the sleet toward the waiting fire trucks.
I stood at the glass doorway with David Miller, pulling children two at a time down the icy steps onto the safe grass—forty kids, fifty kids, sixty kids—counting their heads as the steel roof beams above the gym gave a second, ear-splitting shriek of tearing metal!
"Is that everyone?!" the Fire Chief yelled at the physical education teacher stumbling out the door.
"Madison Whitmore!" eleven-year-old Sophie cried out from behind the police Tahoe where she and Emma were watching the doors. "Mom! Madison isn't with the fifth-grade line! Her red jacket is still inside by the bleachers!"
I spun back toward the buckling glass entrance.
Fifty feet inside the darkening gymnasium, huddled alone beneath the bottom tier of the wooden folding bleachers with her hands pressed tightly over her ears, was eleven-year-old Madison Whitmore—paralyzed with terror as chunks of acoustic tile crashed onto the basketball court ten feet in front of her!
And out at the rear exit door, Superintendent Sterling had just slammed the gym fire door shut from the outside and locked the panic bar with a security chain so nobody could follow him into the back parking lot!
"Stay with Sophie, David!" I shouted.
Before the Fire Chief could grab my coat, I sprinted back through the groaning glass doors across the polished hardwood floor.
"Mom, no!" I heard Sophie scream behind me, followed immediately by the pound of David Miller’s heavy work boots as Emma’s father charged right in behind me with a fireman’s steel pry-bar in his hands!
Above our heads, the main center girder was twisting like soft taffy—the exact counterfeit scrap iron my husband Daniel had given his life trying to expose.
I reached the wooden bleachers and dropped to my knees, reaching underneath to grab Madison’s trembling hands.
The rich girl who had terrorized the school for eleven months wasn't a monster under those bleachers; she was a terrified eleven-year-old child whose mother had abandoned her in the parking lot and whose father had built the very roof falling down on her head.
"Mrs. Bennett!" Madison sobbed, throwing her arms around my neck so hard she nearly choked me. "I’m sorry! I’m sorry I pushed Emma! My dad said if I wasn't the toughest person in the school, people would take everything we have! Please don't leave me here!"
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"I’ve got you, Madison! Hold onto my neck!" I cried, pulling her out from under the folding wood just as David Miller wedged his six-foot frame and the steel pry-bar beneath the sagging bleacher support beam that was pinning the hem of Madison’s red coat!
With one massive heave of his shoulders, David lifted the buckled steel frame two inches, freeing Madison’s coat—and the three of us sprinted forty yards across the cracking hardwood floor and dove straight through the front atrium doorway onto the sleet-covered grass two seconds before the entire center span of the gymnasium roof came thundering down in a thirty-ton roar of twisted iron and shattered glass!
