The number 6 bus let Brooke Garvey off at the corner of Cordell and Fifth at 2:41 in the afternoon, the way it had every school day since the middle of January, and she stood for a second on the curb while it pulled away in a breath of diesel and hot brakes, and she smelled her own hands.
It was a habit she had picked up at the linen plant and could not seem to drop.
Seven and a half hours of feeding hospital sheets into the flatwork ironer at Tri-County Linen left a smell on the skin that no soap took off entirely, a hot, starchy, faintly chlorine smell like the inside of a clothes dryer, and she checked for it the way other people checked for their keys.
It was there.
It was always there. She wiped her palms on the thighs of her work pants anyway and started up the hill.
Ludlow Run, Ohio, was a river town that had forgotten which river it was supposed to be on. The Hocking was eleven miles east and the Scioto was twenty miles west and the town itself sat on a creek that flooded every third spring and otherwise behaved itself, a creek that the founders had apparently mistaken for something with a future. There was a courthouse with a green copper dome and a statue of a Union soldier who had lost his rifle barrel to a teenager with a hacksaw in 1974.
There was a Kroger and a Tractor Supply and two Dollar Generals that faced each other across Route 33 like rival gunslingers. There were brick streets downtown that rattled the teeth of anyone driving over them faster than fifteen miles an hour, and on the hill above downtown there were the old frame houses where the pottery managers had lived when there was a pottery, and on the top of the hill, behind a chain-link fence and a row of sugar maples that were just beginning to go orange at the tips, was Cordell Street Elementary School.
It was a long, low building of tan brick with a newer wing of red brick stuck onto one end, like a patch on the elbow of a sweater. The playground was on the east side, between the building and the fence, and the fence ran along Cordell Street for a block and a half, broken in the middle by a double gate where the walkers came out at dismissal. Brooke did not go to the gate. She went past it, forty steps past it, to the third fence post after the big maple at the corner, and she stopped there, and she put two fingers through the chain link the way she always did, and she looked up at the building.
Third window from the left on the second floor. Room 214. Ms. Oduya's third grade.