The Raven's Gift - Don Rearden [24]
He would check all the drawers more carefully, but first he had to look through the kitchen and storage rooms. If no one had cleaned the office out, there still might be food somewhere.
He stuffed the flashlight in his pocket with the gum and Aspirin and started toward the gym. He held the pistol out in front of him, still not sure what to think about the untouched school.
The kitchen would be off the side of the gym, which, as in all the village schools he’d been to, would also serve as the cafeteria, the largest, darkest part of the building, the last place, really, he wanted to enter, but the possibility of shelves loaded with canned fruits, vegetables, and even a canned chicken or two made his stomach tighten. He stopped at the heavy double doors to the gym and turned on the flashlight.
He pushed the latch to open the door, but it wouldn’t budge. He tried again. He looked around for something to pry the door with, but the empty hall offered no ideas. As he walked back to the office he poked his head into the classrooms. They too were in order. A locked gym almost made sense.
Back in the office he opened drawers, looking for keys. All he could find was a Phillips screwdriver, not enough to break the lock on the door. In a small room off the side of the main office, he sat down at what he figured was the principal’s desk, rummaged through the drawers, and then tried to think where someone might hide a master key for the school. He felt around under the desk, imagining he might find a key taped underneath. Nothing.
He sat, resting for a moment. Thinking. Then he saw the legal notepad. The black pen that had written the scrawled message sat, with the cap off, to the side of the three words:
For the children.
THE MORNING OF THEIR FLIGHT the rain came shooting sideways from the west with gale-force winds that shook the mud-covered school district Suburban delivering them to Gary Air. The vehicle pulled up to an oblong office building attached to a hangar on a road with half a dozen other small airline companies.
“Don’t suspect you’ll be flying out today,” the driver said through a full blond and grey beard that John guessed he’d been cultivating for the last decade. The driver pulled up to the door of the airline and stopped. He turned the wipers off and slipped the vehicle into Park. “If you get stuck, tell ’em to call Ross—they got his number. He’ll find you a place to stay tonight.”
“Thanks,” John said.
“Stuck?” Anna asked.
The driver turned to the back seat, where Anna sat, tightening the knot on her raincoat hood. “You can expect to be stuck or delayed at least every other time you fly around here, if’n you’re lucky. I hope you get out. But if you don’t, well, that’s how it goes. You’re stuck.”
“Thanks again,” John said, and he stepped out into the torrent.
Inside they stood at the counter, a chipped Formica construction that looked as if it had been taken from an old kitchen and slapped on a plywood frame. A Yup’ik boy, fourteen or fifteen, sat behind the counter playing a hand-held video game. He wore a black knit AND1 stocking cap pulled down tightly around his head.
“We’re flying out to Nunacuak today,” Anna said.
The boy didn’t look up from his game. “Maybe not today,” he said.
“Do you work here?”
He paused his game and looked up at them. “Not today, if the weather’s staying like this.”
“We’re supposed to leave at nine, I think?”
“I’ll get a weather update at ten. There’s coffee.”
He pointed to a coffee pot with a stack of white plastic cups sitting beside it. The phone rang. He went back to his game and picked it up on the fifth ring.
“Gary Air,” he said curtly. “Weather delay.