Ronan took a deep breath and stepped into the crawl space. It was about two feet wide. Rough wooden framework with hastily nailed drywall formed the barrier separating Marie’s room from the classroom behind it.
Not the biggest fan of small spaces, Ronan hurried down the small corridor. His eyes scanned the framework as he moved. Half a century of undisturbed dust coated the floor. Looking behind himself, Ronan could see his trail of ghostly footprints. It was obvious no one had been back here in quite some time.
The idea of a ghost room was fascinating. Ronan imagined this was the sort of place your friends would dare you to enter after telling hair-raising stories about the ghost who haunted the room and what she’d done to terrorize previous generations of teenagers who’d dared to disturb her sanctuary.
Halfway down the corridor, Ronan found what could be described as a half door, of sorts. The panel came up to the middle of his torso. There was a hinge connecting a rough rectangle of plywood to the frame. There was no handle or knob. Ronan tried to edge the panel forward with his short fingernails, but all he got for his trouble was a splinter in the tip of his finger. “Jude? Do you have your knife?”
“Yeah. I’m coming in.” Jude’s shadow blocked out the little bit of weak light filtering in from the door. “Christ, this is tight,” he panted as he edged his way toward Ronan. “Here’s the knife. What do you need it for?”
“I’m trying to get the little door open here.” Ronan took the knife and used it to pull the door away from the frame. “Here we go.” He folded the blade back into the case and handed it to Jude. With his phone flashlight held in front of him, Ronan opened the door. From where he was crouched, it looked like an ordinary classroom. He ducked through the door and motioned for Jude to follow him.
“Wow, everything is still here. Why would they leave the teacher’s desk and chairs here?” Jude turned in a slow circle, his keen eyes passing over the space.
Ronan shone his light around the room. Aside from the layer of dust coating everything, it looked like Miss Fairbanks could hold class today. At the front of the room was her metal desk. It was banged up and scratched from years of use. According to the research he’d done, Salem Elementary was opened in 1951 to keep up with the baby boom after World War II. He imagined the desk was from the opening of the school. In 1968, it would have only been seventeen years old.
On the desk were a stack of kids’ crayon drawings, a ruler, several paperclips, and pieces of chalk in varying lengths. Turning around, he could see a reading lesson written on the board. “Tommy likes ice cream,” he read aloud.
“That’s creepy,” Jude said softly. “Tommy was one of the kids who died that day in the cafeteria.”
Ronan had been thinking the same thing. “This room is like a time capsule. Everything in here is as Miss Fairbanks left it.”
“So is the chalk outline.” Jude pointed to a spot near the bricked-up window. “And the bloodstain.”
Ronan joined Jude. Thanks to the coat of dust, he’d almost missed the outline of the body. “Why the hell didn’t they clean this up?”
“Because the janitors were scared,” Everly said from behind Ronan.
Letting out a little yelp, Ronan spun around to see his daughter stepping into the room. “You scared me.” Ronan let out a nervous laugh. Scared was a gross understatement of how he felt. His heart thundered in his chest as a surge of adrenaline passed through him, making his fingertips burn.
“Sorry, Dad. I couldn’t wait any longer. I had to come in here.” Everly walked around to the front of Miss Fairbanks’s desk but didn’t join Ronan and Jude. She went up and down the aisles between the rows of desks, seeming to get the lay of the land. “Hi, Miss Marie. My name is Everly. Can you hear me?”
There was no response. Not that Ronan had expected to hear one himself. He wondered if the ghost was really here or if she was just being shy.
“Can we come in?” Ten asked from the doorway. “This corridor is creeping me out.”
“Yeah, sure, come on in.” Ronan waved them forward. One by one, Ten, Cope, Max, Wolf, and Aurora came through the door. “Where’s Fitz?”
“Maintaining a perimeter in the classroom,” Ten said. A worried look haunted his eyes.
“Oh, he’s making sure that no one—” Ronan snapped his mouth shut, not wanting the kids to hear the rest of what he’d been about to say. Fitzgibbon was guarding the door so that no one could come along and lock them in. “Making sure no one gets lost,” he said, hoping the kids hadn’t picked up on his frisson of fear.
“Everly, what were you saying about the janitors?” Jude asked.
“The janitors were scared to touch anything in this room. So was Principal Whittaker, so he decided to close up the room with everything in it so that none of the kids or teachers got container-mated.”
“Contaminated?” Ronan asked.
Everly nodded. She moved to Miss Fairbanks’s desk and seemed to be studying the contents. With a steady hand, she picked up the drawings. Dust spilled from the top of the pages. Sorting through them, she picked three out and arranged them on the desk. “This is interesting.”
“Can you take pictures of this?” Ronan pointed to the chalk outline and the bloodstain before regaining his feet and walking to the desk and his daughter. “What’s interesting?”
“The drawings are of the kids’ houses and families. I found the ones that Tommy, Katie, and Paul made. This one makes me sad.”
Ronan looked down at the fifty-year-old artwork. Tommy’s picture was of two parents and two kids. He remembered reading Tommy had an older brother, who’d been in the cafeteria the morning of the incident. What was strange about the drawing was that the father looked angry and the mother was crying. Large blue teardrops fell from her eyes. “Is there anything you can tell me about the picture?” On the one hand, Ronan hated asking Everly to peek into the Sullivan family, but on the other, any information she could give him would help move the investigation along.
“Carla cried a lot,” Everly whispered. “Especially when Robert hit her. He was mad all the time. Tommy and Mikey were scared of him.” Everly wrapped her arms around Ronan’s middle. “Why would he hurt his family?”
In that moment, Ronan felt his heart shatter into a million pieces. How the hell did he explain to a six-year-old that there were men who took their anger and frustration out on people they claimed to love the most? People who couldn’t or wouldn’t fight back. “Some men can’t control their temper,” he said, hoping Everly wouldn’t have any follow-up questions.
