The Bus Camera Told the Whole Truth
His chin shook. Then he put his forehead on my shoulder, and I held him with his glasses crooked.
Nate stood on the bottom step in his socks. I don’t know how long he’d been there. He crossed the kitchen and put a hand on the back of Keith’s head, the way you’d steady a kitten.
“Hey, bud. It’s okay. You did good.”
“I didn’t tell,” Keith hiccuped. “I just wrote it.”
“I know. That’s better.”
Before they left, Keith took his paper back. He said it was the only one, and I let him, once I had copied it word for word on the back of an overdue notice.
Friday at eight, the conference room off the main office had a laptop open on the table. Bud Flynn sat at the end of it with a thermos. Pat Dowd was in the corner chair, holding her cap in both hands. Dorothea Lambert stood in the doorway in a gray cardigan, not looking at Mr. Dornan. Doyle waited in the hall, with his cap on his knee, studying a bulletin board about the Fall Book Fair as if it were a map of Normandy.
Mr. Dornan sat with his tie straight and his face gone a very still color. Bud had called him Thursday to schedule it, as the policy required, and Mr. Dornan knew what upstairs meant. Upstairs was the superintendent, Mr. Ackley.
“Mrs. Voss,” he said. “I’m willing to review this. If there’s information I don’t have, I want to have it.”
It sounded rehearsed. It was also an honorable sort of sentence, and I gave him credit for it.
“I’d like the hallway first,” Dorothea said from the doorway. Everyone looked at her. “Wednesday morning, Bud.”
The screen showed the main hall from high up, in the flat bright color of security video. At 8:27 a small figure in a Cardinals sweatshirt came along the wall and stopped outside the glass of the front office. He stood with his back to the cinder block and a folded paper in his fist, and every few seconds he rose on his toes to look through the glass. At 8:31 a woman and a boy in a hooded sweatshirt went in. At 8:46 the boy came out alone, head down, and Keith took one step toward him and stopped, because Nate was not looking at anyone. Keith turned and put his forehead against the wall.
At 8:47 Dorothea came out. There was no sound, but you did not need it to see a woman bend and say something kind and brisk and tuck a child’s hair behind his ear and point down the hall. Keith went with his shoulders curled forward, the way a child carries something too heavy to hold. At the corner he looked back once.