A cruiser was dispatched at 9:24 P.M.
At 9:27, a call came in from the Leonard house; by noon the next day, the phone call had been replayed on every newscast in the country:
“This is Francis Paymer. My wife and I called you a couple of minutes ago. I’m standing in the... the kitchen of the Leonard house... that’s One-eighty-two Merchant Street... and I’ve got somebody’s brains stuck to the bottom of my shoe.
“There’s been a shooting here. A little girl’s hanging in the hallway, and there’s blood all over the walls and the floors and I can’t tell where one person’s body ends and the next one begins because everybody’s dead. I can still smell the gunpowder and smoke.
“Is that good enough for you to do something? C-could you maybe please if it’s not too much trouble send someone out here NOW? It might be a good idea, because the crazy BASTARD WHO DID THIS ISN’T HERE—
“— and I think he might’ve took a baby with him.”
By 9:30 P.M., Merchant Street was clogged with police cruisers.
And Andy Leonard was halfway to Moundbuilder’s Park, where the Second Presbyterian Church was sponsoring Parish Family Night. More than one hundred people had been gathered at the park since five in the afternoon, picnicking, tossing Frisbees, playing checkers, or flying kites. A little before nine, the president of the Parish Council had arrived with a truckload of folding chairs that were set up in a clearing at the south end of the park.
By the time Francis Paymer made his famous phone call, one hundred seven parish members were seated in twelve neat little rows watching the fireworks display.
Between leaving his Merchant Street house and arriving at Moundbuilder’s Park, Andy Leonard shot and killed six more people as he drove past them. Two were in a car; the other four had been sitting out on their lawns watching the fireworks. In every case, Andy simply kept one hand on the steering wheel while shooting with the other through an open window.
At 9:40 P.M., just as the fireworks kicked into high gear for the grand finale, Andy drove his father’s pickup truck at eighty miles per hour through the wooden gate at the northeast side of the park, barreled across the picnic grounds, over the grassy mound that marked the south border, and went straight down into the middle of the spectators.
Three people were killed and eight others injured as the truck plowed into the back row of chairs. Then Andy threw open the door, leaped from the truck, and opened fire with the HK53. The parishioners scrambled in panic, many of them falling over chairs. Of the dead and wounded at the park, none was able to get farther than ten yards away before being shot.
Andy stopped only long enough to yank the pistols from the truck. The first barrage with the rifle was to disable; the second, with the pistols, was to finish off anyone who might still be alive.
At 9:45 P.M., Andy Leonard crawled up onto the roof of his father’s pickup truck and watched the fireworks’ grand finale. The truck’s radio was tuned in to WLCB. The bombastic finish of The 1812 Overture erupted along with the fiery colors in the dark heaven above.
The music and the fireworks ended.
Whirling police lights could be seen approaching the park. The howl of sirens hung in the air like a protracted musical chord.
Andy Leonard shoved the barrel of the rifle into his mouth and blew most of his head off. His nearly decapitated body slammed backward onto the roof, then slid slowly down to the hood, smearing a long trail of gore over the center of the windshield.
Twenty minutes later, just as Russell Brennert and Mary Alice Hubert turned onto Merchant Street to find it blocked by police cars and ambulances, one of the officers on the scene at the park heard what he thought was the sound of a baby crying. Moments later, he discovered Joseph Hamilton, still alive and still in his safety seat, on the passenger-side floor of the pickup. The infant was clutching a bottle of formula that had been taken from his mother’s baby bag.
6
I stopped at this point and took a deep breath, surprised to find that my hands were shaking. I looked to the ghosts, and they whispered, Courage.
I swallowed once, nodded my head, then said to my students, “That baby was me.
“I have no idea why Andy didn’t kill me. I was taken away and placed in the care of Cedar Hill Children’s Services.” I opened my briefcase and removed a file filled with photocopies of old newspaper articles and began passing them around the room. I’d brought some of my research along in case I’d needed it to prompt discussion. “The details of how I came to be adopted by the Conover family of Waynesboro, Virginia, are written in these articles. Suffice it to say that I was perhaps the most famous baby in the country for the next several weeks.”
One student held up a copy of an article and said, “It says here that the Conovers took you back to Cedar Hill six months after the killings. Says you were treated like a celebrity.”
I looked at the photo accompanying the article and shook my head. “I have no memory of that at all. At home, in a box I keep in my filing cabinet, are hundreds of cards I received from people who lived in Cedar Hill at that time. Most of them are now either dead or have moved away. When I went back I could only find a few of them.
“It’s odd to think that, somewhere out there, there are dozens, maybe even hundreds, of people who prayed for me when I was a baby, people I never knew and never will know. For a while I was at the center of their thoughts. I like to believe these people still think of me from time to time. I like to believe it’s those thoughts and prayers that keep me safe from harm.
“But as I said in the beginning, this story isn’t really about me. If there’s any great truth here, I’m not the one to say what it might be. The moment that officer found that squalling baby on the floor of that truck, I ceased to be a part of the story. But it’s never stopped being a part of me.”
7
Details were too sketchy for the 11:00 P.M. news to offer anything concrete about the massacre, but by the time the local network affiliates broadcast their news-at-sunrise programs, the tally was in. Counting himself, Andy Leonard had murdered thirty-two people and wounded thirty-six others, making his spree the largest single mass shooting to date. (Some argued that since the shootings took place in two different locations they should be treated as two separate incidents, while others insisted that since Andy had continuously fired his weapons up until the moment of his death, including the trail of shootings between his house and the park, it was all one single incident. What could not be argued was the body count, which made the rest of it more than a bit superfluous.)
Those victims were what the specter of my uncle was thinking about as Jackson Davies and Pete Cooper walked through him.
Andy’s ghost hung its head and sighed, then took one half-step to the right and vanished back into the ages where it would relive its murderous rampage in perpetuity, always coming back to the moment it stood outside the house and watched as two men passed through it on their way toward a police officer.
8
Russell Brennert looked at the two other janitors who’d come along tonight and knew without asking that neither one of them wanted him to be here. Of course not, he had known the crazy fucker, he had been Andy Leonard’s best friend, his presence made it all just a bit more real than they wanted it to be. Did they think that some part of what had driven Andy to kill all of those people had rubbed off on him as well? Probably — at least that would explain why they hadn’t told him their names.