Buzz Kill

by Beth Fantaskey

  I wanted to jump in and stake my claim, but I hadn’t exactly asked my father yet, so I kept silent.

  “I’m happy to dog sit,” Chase said. “But I won’t take any money for it.” Mrs. Boyles was obviously about to protest, but he explained, “I kind of owe Mr. Killdare a debt. I wouldn’t feel right taking money from you.”

  “Sucker,” Roy joked. At least I thought he was joking.

  “Well, thank you.” Mrs. Boyles opened the door for us. “I’ll be in touch soon about a more permanent solution. I promise.”

  The odor of manure was starting to overcome the smell of pie, and I was ready to get out of there, but I realized I’d almost forgotten something important. “By the way,” I asked. “Did Mr. Killdare have a girlfriend? Because we’d really like to talk to her if he did . . .”

  I let that question trail off because Roy was giving me a weird, suspicious look again. “Did you say this article was, like, a tribute? Because on the porch, I thought Chase said something about an ‘investigation.’”

  I wasn’t sure why I got nervous, especially since I didn’t think Roy was the killer, but I found myself mumbling, “Oh, gosh . . . Investigation, tribute—tomato, to-mah-to—”

  “It’s a little of both,” Chase cut in. He looked at Mrs. Boyles. “So, do you know if your brother was seeing anybody?”

  “Hmm . . .” Roy’s mother tapped her chin, giving that question serious consideration, and a few moments later, Chase and I walked away with something I’d desperately hoped for but hadn’t really expected to get.

  Chapter 40

  “Millie, you are way too excited about that pie,” Chase observed, glancing at me as we rode back to Honeywell. “You’ve eaten half of it—with your hands.”

  “I’ve never heard of peach rhubarb,” I said, cradling on my lap the gift that Mrs. Boyles had bestowed upon us. She hadn’t been able to tell us anything about her brother’s love life, so she’d given us a consolation prize instead. One that was at least as good as information. “You should try this,” I told Chase, who—let’s face it—probably wasn’t going to get more than a few bites. “It’s amazing!”

  “Do you want me to stop and get you a fork?” he offered, like maybe he was nervous about my sticky fingers meeting his upholstery and astronaut-worthy sleek instrument panel. “I think I noticed a diner about a half-mile back.”

  I considered that suggestion, then reluctantly pulled some crumpled plastic wrap over the carnage, licked my fingers, and tried to surreptitiously wipe them on my shorts. “Thanks, but I guess I’m good for now.”

  Chase stole one more look at the semi-demolished dessert. “I guess your mom doesn’t bake, huh?”

  He was teasing me, but I didn’t feel like laughing—or, suddenly, eating. “No, she doesn’t bake,” I said. Or do anything anymore.

  Chase must’ve caught my change in mood and quickly figured out what had gone wrong. “Hey, Millie.” He sounded miserable. “I’m really sorry. I forgot about your mother for a second. That was a stupid thing to say.”

  I shrugged, watching cars pass us in the opposite lane. “It’s okay. It’s been about eight years.”

  “Yeah, like that helps.”

  At first I didn’t understand why he sounded so bitter. Then I remembered that his mother was gone, too, in a different way. “Do you talk to your mom much?” I asked, twisting slightly in the seat. “See her on holidays and stuff?”

  His fingers flexed around the steering wheel. “No. She really disowned me after the accident. And I can’t blame her.”

  Wow. He carried a ton of guilt. Enough that he didn’t think he deserved his own mom’s love. Everybody deserved that. But before I could tell him that, Chase again asked about my family.

  “What was your mom like? Like you?” He smiled. “Would she have eaten that whole pie with her hands?”

  Normally, on the few occasions people mentioned my mother, they did their best to come across as suitably solemn. It felt nice to have somebody smile about her, because she’d been a happy person. “Yeah,” I confirmed. “She would’ve finished the pie—then made you drive back for another one.”

  I saw, in profile, that Chase was close to laughing again.

  How had he gone so long without smiling, which seemed to be coming pretty naturally to him that evening?

  Then he glanced at me again. “How about looks? Did she look like you? Have the same red hair?”

  “Yes. Her hair was exactly like mine.” I smiled, too, remembering me and my mother standing in front of a mirror together on a humid day, our crazy red curls like frizzy halos around our heads. “We both used to complain about it.”

  “I bet you like it now,” Chase guessed softly and more seriously. “I bet you feel lucky to share that with her.” He met my eyes briefly, one more time. “Especially since it really is pretty, Millie.”

  I didn’t always feel fortunate about the mess on my head. Some days I hated my hair because it was a pain in the butt and way too bright. And some days, I hated it precisely because it was so much like my mother’s. It was like a living, growing reminder of everything I’d lost when she’d died. But that compliment . . . I did appreciate that. In fact, it gave me a strange feeling in my stomach that I couldn’t attribute to just overeating, and I was glad the car was dark, because my cheeks felt a little warm, too. “Thanks, Chase.”

  Before I could decide if I should tell him that I thought his hair was phenomenal, he asked a question that I didn’t understand at first.

  “So . . . why did you ask Roy and his mom if Mr. Killdare had a girlfriend?”

  Chapter 41

  “I kind of stole something from Mr. Killdare’s house,” I admitted. “A postcard signed ‘Love, BeeBee.’” I watched Chase’s face as I asked him a question that suddenly seemed way overdue, given that he had keys to Coach Killdare’s house. “Do you know anything about him having a girlfriend?”

  And how about you? Some girl back in your home state, maybe? Or Philly?

  “Not really,” Chase answered the spoken question. “Although I sort of suspected that, because—”

  “Of the chicken clock?” I interrupted. “And the knickknacks on the shelf in his den? The foreign ones that don’t seem like they’d belong to a guy who didn’t decorate anywhere else? Except with old football awards?”

  We were almost back to Honeywell and stopped at a traffic light, so Chase could really look at me. “No. I never noticed any knickknacks, probably because I’m a guy, too. I never noticed anything but the big screen—which was pretty nice.”

  Guys and their stupid TVs!

  “Then what . . . ?”

  “I was going to say that one time, when I gave Baxter a bath—which Mr. Killdare didn’t do often enough,” Chase noted in an aside, “I noticed a can of hair spray next to the sink.” The light changed and he put the car back in gear. “Not exactly something he needed.”

  “No, I guess not.” Mr. Killdare had been as bald as the proverbial cue ball.

  Chase seemed to hesitate, then added, “There were some . . . um . . . other things in the bathroom, too. Stuff that no guy needs.”

  For a second, I didn’t get what he was talking about or why he wasn’t being direct. Did he not want to say “mascara”? Or “lipstick”? Then I realized that he was using the same tone—and halting delivery—that my dad used when he wanted to know if he should add tampons to his weekly shopping list.

  “I getcha,” I said, holding up my hand. “Say no more.” Then I quickly changed the subject. “So why do you think Mr. Killdare kept BeeBee under wraps?” I paused, peering closely at Chase. “Why would any guy do that?”

  Chase didn’t seem to realize that I was asking about him, too. He shrugged. “I have no idea.”

  I sat back, muttering, “I think she might be a key to this mystery. We need to find her identity. Assuming, of course, that Viv and Mike didn’t kill Mr. Killdare.”

  “What?” Chase sounded very surprised.

  I r
ealized I’d said more than I’d intended. “Can you keep a secret?”

  Chase gave me a strange look. “Uh . . . yes. I can,” he reminded me. “I believe that I’ve proven that beyond question.”

  Gosh, he had a nice vocabulary and way of speaking. Most jocks would’ve said, “Der, yeah!”

  “So why’d you say that about Viv and Mike?” he prompted.

  “The night I found Mr. Killdare’s body, I overheard Viv threatening Mike to keep his mouth shut about something they both knew,” I confided. “It sounded serious. Plus, I can imagine Mike blowing up at Coach about the whole quarterback thing and just going ballistic.”

  We’d pulled up in front of my house, and Chase stopped the car. “And Viv?”

  I gave him an incredulous look. “You seriously can’t imagine her committing murder? Killing the guy who was responsible for humiliating her on the entire Internet—and ESPN?”

  “Yeah, that BuzzKill video was pretty bad,” Chase agreed. “And Viv does seem somewhat . . . intense.”

  I rolled my eyes. “That’s the understatement of the year. I mean, Vivienne Fitch meets all the criteria for a complete psychopath, as described in the book The Psycho Killer Next Door.”

  Chase gave me another funny look. “Which you read because . . . ?”

  “I needed to get inside the mind of my nemesis. I can’t always hope to one-up Viv out of sheer luck.” I picked at the plastic-wrapped pie on my lap. “It’s not like some kid will drown and latch on to me every day. I need to actively combat Vivienne . . .”

  I’d started rambling and looked up to see Chase scrutinizing me with a really strange expression. “You’re a very interesting person, Millie.” He offered me yet another slightly ambiguous compliment. “Very . . . unique.”

  Talk about adjectives that could cut both ways. “Anyhow . . . I’m still trying to pursue the BeeBee angle, too,” I said. “Just in case Mike is innocent, and Viv hasn’t killed anyone, either . . . yet.”

  It seemed that we’d reached the end of our adventure, because Chase didn’t say anything more. But before I could hop out of the car, he surprised me by yanking the keys out of the ignition and dangling them in front of my face.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Inviting you to look through Mr. Killdare’s house again,” he said. “And this time, you won’t have to go in through a window. Which you left wide open.”

  I finally got that he was reminding me that he still had a key to the back door. But before I could take him up on that offer, I was distracted by a movement I saw over his shoulder, out the driver’s side window. Someone was darting out of my house and going quickly—furtively, I thought—to a vehicle I hadn’t noticed, parked around the corner. A moment later, I saw red taillights, and the car was gone.

  Dad, what are you up to?

  Chapter 42

  “Dad, who was just here?” I demanded, entering our house to find him watching CNN, his feet on the coffee table and the tie that he was still wearing askew. “Who just ran off?”

  “Oh, hey, Millie,” he greeted me—too innocently, I thought. Reaching for the remote, he turned off the set, but didn’t answer my question. “Where were you?”

  “I was hanging out with Chase Albright. We took a ride. Got a snack. Sniffed some manure.”

  I knew in my gut that it wasn’t the part about the poop that put the look of disbelief on my father’s face. I was pretty sure he’d tuned out everything after “I” and “Chase.”

  Seriously, did everybody—even my own father—have to seem so shocked by the prospect of me spending time with a hot quarterback? Was Laura the only human being who found the pairing plausible in any way, shape, or form?

  “I didn’t know you two were friends,” Dad said when he’d recovered enough to speak.

  Are Chase and I becoming friends?

  “We’re French dialogue buddies,” I fibbed, rather than try to explain whatever was developing between me and my dad’s star player. Maybe I was also worried that my father would forbid me from hanging out with Chase again—on the grounds that I might corrupt him. Lure Chase into my vaguely antiestablishment, antiauthoritarian ways and ruin him as a “team player.” “We just parler-ed together. It was no big deal.” I plopped down on the couch, too. “So . . . Who was here?”

  My father, who had a mind like a steel trap, suddenly exhibited classic signs of dementia. It was as if this simple question didn’t even register with him. “What? What do you mean?”

  I nudged a bowl of Chex Mix across the coffee table with the toe of my sneaker. “Our go-to, ‘company’ snack is in the ‘nice’ bowl. Somebody was here.”

  “Oh, yes.” Dad seemed to regain his faculties. “Municipal business. Nothing for you to worry about.”

  “Who said I was worried?”

  All at once, my father and I locked eyes, really looking at each other for the first time in a long time. And the weird thing was, I saw that he was the worried one. My dad never looked worried. Not even when my mother had been sick. He’d just “soldiered on,” to the degree that sometimes I’d wanted to slug him and tell him that he should cry or something, if only to let Mom know that he was upset. But part of me suspected that he did that, in private, and that if I made him do it in public, he’d never stop.

  That hidden, tiny, vulnerable part of Dad that I was pretty sure existed—that’s what I was glimpsing in his eyes right then. And as we sat there studying each other, I also knew that he’d just lied to me.

  Whoever’d gotten the Chex Mix treatment hadn’t just been some municipal crony.

  Something important had gone down, like maybe Detective Lohser had come around with a search warrant, looking for a weapon or evidence that would answer the question about where Dad had been a few Sundays ago.

  I was still certain that my father’d had nothing to do with Mr. Killdare’s murder. Would never doubt that. Yet he wasn’t telling me everything, either.

  “Dad,” I said softly, still searching his face. “What’s going on with you? Are you really in trouble about Mr. Killdare? Because Detective Lohser asked me where you were on September first—and told me you didn’t know.”

  In the last few days, I’d gotten Chase Albright to open up to me. But I had the opposite effect on my father. He snapped shut, repeating, “There’s nothing to worry about, Millie. Except your grades in French. I hope Chase can help you.” Then, although I was pretty sure my father knew about Chase’s delinquent background—Mr. Killdare must’ve said something when he’d recruited a new quarterback—Dad basically confirmed my suspicions that he considered me a potentially bad influence. “And don’t you fill Chase’s head with ideas about how structured education is a bad thing, because if he starts skipping classes, he’ll be ineligible to play. And we’re facing the Bulldogs next week.”

  “Too late.” I stood up, grabbing the bowl. “I’ve already convinced Chase that not only is public education a diabolical plot to shackle young minds, so we all become unthinking grist for the military-industrial complex, but that organized sports are the modern equivalent of gladiator tournaments. He now understands that you’re exploiting his body to entertain the masses, and he’ll be quitting tomorrow.”

  “Millicent Ostermeyer, you had better be joking,” I heard my father growling as I went up the stairs, taking them two at a time. “Seriously, if you’ve said anything to Chase . . .”

  I closed my bedroom door, shutting him out, because while I might’ve honestly believed, to a large degree, that stuff about structured curricula stifling the mind, I had an article due for my school’s paper. A story about Coach Killdare’s memorial service—and a sidebar about a mysterious football player who couldn’t expect to fly completely under the radar forever.

  But before I powered up my laptop, I reached for those envelopes I’d swiped from Mr. Killdare’s house. I’d sort of forgotten about them, as I’d started to believe that BeeBee and her postcard were bigger keys to the mystery, but it seemed like I should a
t least follow Laura’s hunch about the medical letters being clues, too. Tearing open three at once, I scanned the contents, which consisted of incredibly dull stuff about insurance and deductibles. However, before I gave up and tossed them on the floor with my other trash, I ripped into the one with the return address “Cavenaugh-Beecham Clinic.”

  And when I read the letter inside—a private message from a doctor—I sucked in a sharp breath and felt my heart sort of stop. Seriously, for a second, I thought I might need medical attention, and when I could finally breathe again, I muttered out loud, hearing confusion in my voice.

  “Dad, did you keep this a secret from me, too? Did you know Coach Killdare had cancer?”

  Chapter 43

  “Nice articles,” Ryan said, joining me and Laura at my locker. He held up the latest copy of the Gazette so I could see my byline atop two stories: “Hollerin’ Hank Honored at Memorial Service” and “Former Stinger Resurfaces on Manure Farm: Boyles Related to Deceased Coach.” “I always wondered what happened to Roy.”

  “Yeah, he’s not gonna like the way manure got played up in the headline.” I grabbed my books for the morning. “But I think he’s glad to have kids know he’s alive.”

  At least Roy hadn’t balked when I’d called him about revealing his whereabouts. Maybe because he’d been distracted by a video game. I’d heard stuff blowing up as he’d agreed, with a grunt, “Whatever, Ostermeyer. What do I care anymore?”

  “You actually made it seem like people really miss Mr. Killdare,” Laura noted. “Those quotes from his eulogies . . . He seemed almost popular.”

  Taking the paper from Ryan, I tossed it into my locker. “Yeah, well, it’s all stuff I remembered people saying. I mean, Hollerin’ Hank did have some good points.”

  It struck me that I was developing a soft spot for Mr. Killdare, postmortem. He’d helped Chase, secured Roy Boyles’s father solid, if hideous, employment, and nurtured my destined dog to maturity.

  “At least I was able to make my dad look like he didn’t want to kill Mr. Killdare,” I added, slipping my backpack over my shoulder. “I’m sure if Viv had written the article, it would’ve been headlined ‘Assistant Coach Hesitates at Service, Offers Lukewarm Tribute.’ With the subhead ‘Ostermeyer Still under Investigation.’”