I take a few steps deeper inside the barn and inhale the scents of sawdust, manure, and horse. The smells are strong, even after so much time, but mold and must are mixed in with them. “Did you know Coach taught Jeremy how to ride?”
T.J. nods.
“He learned fast too.” I can almost see Jeremy riding Sugar, Mrs. McCray’s old pinto, bareback. Jeremy’s mouth is open, probably catching all kinds of bugs. His green backpack of empty jars bounces on his back. It was a miracle none of his jars ever broke that way.
I feel myself getting choked up. I have to stop it. This isn’t why I came here.
We move toward the last stall, the one Coach was found lying outside of. The whole barn feels eerie, as if ghost horses have taken the place of the former boarders.
“Whose horse was in that stall the morning …?” T.J.’s voice fades.
“Lancer, Mrs. McCray’s show horse. She boarded two horses here—Sugar, the old pinto Jeremy rode, and Lancer, a bay gelding she rode for dressage.”
We’re standing in front of the stall. For all I know, my feet are in the exact place where Coach was lying. I should have come sooner, when things were fresh, when I might have seen something. I turn on my flashlight and shine it on the floor.
“What are you looking for, Hope?”
I point the beam of light on the sawdust. There are feces now—mice, rats. I can almost hear the squeals of frightened horses, the thump of the bat, Coach’s cry.
“Hope, are you okay?” T.J. grabs me by the shoulders. “You look like you’re going to faint.”
“I’m okay,” I whisper. I try to focus on Jeremy again. “Jeremy would have been so excited—that’s why he got up early that morning. He put on his Panther uniform, like he did every game day, and wore it to the barn, even though he knew he’d be mucking out stalls. He’d have his backpack of jars too.”
“You need to hurry, Hope.” T.J. glances over his shoulder.
“I know. But I have to think it through, the whole thing. Because I can feel it. I’m missing something.” I turn back and stare at the sawdust beneath my feet. I can see the shadow of blood there, but I know it’s in my head. “Jeremy would have looked around for Coach. They said he rode Sugar that morning. Maybe when he didn’t see Coach, he decided to go for a ride.” I look over at T.J. “That makes sense, doesn’t it?”
He shifts his weight from one foot to the other.
I keep going. “Normally, Jer would never ride before he finished chores. I guess he might have wanted to ride so bad that he went ahead. Coach wouldn’t have minded.” This part of my story is shaky, and I know it. Why would he ride that morning, on a game day? Why would he ride without doing his chores? “Maybe Coach told Jeremy to go riding, and he’d clean the stalls himself.”
“Okay. Move on, Hope,” T.J. urges.
“And that’s when Caroline saw her opening,” I continue, visualizing her hobbling to the stable. “Opportunity. Means. She sees Jeremy take off on Sugar, and that is her cue. So she comes to the barn, brings her own gloves or puts on Jeremy’s, picks up the bat, and—”
“Can we go now, Hope? Please?”
But the images are running through my mind. “She hits him. She hits him with the bat. His knees buckle, and he goes down.”
“Stop it, Hope.”
But I can’t stop. Because I can see it. I can see Coach. The blood. Stuff flying from his pockets. The life going out of him.
“Please—!” T.J. begs, shaking me by the shoulders. I barely feel it.
“She drops the bat. Maybe she’s horrified at what she did. One instant. That’s all it took. And everything changed. She gets back to her house and climbs in bed, pulling the covers over her head, and shutting her eyes to block out what she’s done. Jeremy finishes his ride and returns to the barn. He looks for Coach, because he doesn’t speak so he can’t call for him. When he sees his boss, his coach, his friend, lying in a pool of blood, Jeremy runs to him. He cradles him and rocks him. But Jeremy knows he’s dead. Maybe he knows he’ll be blamed. Maybe not. Maybe he’s so shocked he picks up the bat and holds on to it until he gets home. Or maybe he sees the killer and, scared to death, runs for home. But that’s when he bumps into Sarah McCray.” I can picture all of these things as if they’re in my memory instead of my imagination.
Only why now? This is the question that pounds in my head. “Why would Caroline Johnson choose that morning to kill her husband? What happened? Did she find out something about him? Did they argue? What about? If we knew that—”
T.J. takes hold of my hand. “Hope,” he whispers, “you have to stop this.” He leads me away, up the stallway. I let him. But I can’t get the crime scene photos out of my head.
I spin around to face him. “What did Coach have on him?”
He frowns. “I—I don’t know.”
“But you heard some of the testimony. Things fell out of his pockets. What? What was lying on the ground beside him? Surely they showed that stuff in court. It’s evidence, right?”
He scratches his head. “A cell phone, I think. Keys maybe? A stub of something, like a ticket maybe?”
“A ticket to what?”
“How should I know? What are you getting at, Hope?”
“I don’t know, not yet. Just tell me. What else?”
“Gum? Or gum wrappers? What does it matter?”
I can’t answer that, but I know it matters. I just know it. I want Raymond’s picture side by side with the ones I saw at Sheriff Wells’s. Something was in one of those photos that wasn’t in the other ones. But what? What was it and where did it go?
“Come on,” T.J. says. “We’re getting out of here.”
“Not until I find what I’m looking for.”
“What are you looking for?”
“I don’t know. But I’m not leaving here until I find it.” Near the door, where T.J. has practically dragged me, there’s a little room with a glass window. I was in there once when I was looking for Jeremy. “That’s Coach’s office, isn’t it?”
“I hope you’re not thinking what I think you’re thinking.”
“T.J., we have to search that office.”
21
“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” T.J. mutters for the thirteenth time as he watches me try to work the lock to Coach’s office. “We are so getting out of here after this.”
“Fine. I want to leave as much as you do.”
“I doubt it.”
I don’t have a bobby pin or a credit card, like people use to open locks in movies, but I have a horseshoe nail I found on the stable floor. It’s flat and thin enough to poke into the lock and twist. Finally, the lock clicks. “I did it!” The knob turns, and I’m in.
“Great,” T.J. says. “Now what?”
“Now we search.”
“Search for what?”
“Clues,” I answer, stepping inside. “A divorce letter or a journal would be great. Maybe some hate notes from his wife. I don’t know.” The police must have searched Coach’s office, but it doesn’t look ransacked. I’m guessing Sheriff Wells didn’t waste his time looking into anything or anybody, except Jeremy. The only two pieces of furniture in the room, besides several chairs, are a big desk and a tall metal filing cabinet. “You take the files, and I’ll take the desk. Deal?”
“Are you sure we shouldn’t be wearing gloves?” T.J. asks, stepping over a pile of trash on the floor. “What about our fingerprints?”
“Nobody cares about our fingerprints. They’re done with this office.”
T.J. mumbles something, but I can’t make it out.
Coach’s desk looks like it hasn’t been touched in months. Even the papers on it are dusty. Mouse droppings form a trail across the glass-slab surface of the desk. There’s a framed photograph of Coach and his wife on their wedding day. I pick it up and dust it off. “They don’t look that happy to me,” I observe. “And it’s their wedding day.”
“I’ll bet she was hard to live with,” T.J. mutters.
/>
“How come?”
“You didn’t have her for English. Trust me. She was hard to take for fifty minutes a day. I can’t imagine having her twenty-four/seven.”
I shine the light on the faces in the wedding picture. Their expressions are relaxed rather than excited. “Comfortable. That’s what I’d call them. Not in love, but comfortable.”
I set down the photograph. Just above the desk are two pieces of paper pinned to the wall. Color wheels. Right away, I know they’re Jeremy’s. I would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that nobody except Rita and me ever got one of Jer’s drawings. He must have liked Coach a lot. This extra loss for Jeremy makes my throat burn—as if my brother hadn’t already lost enough.
The file cabinet rattles. “Man, look at this!” T.J. calls.
“What?” I start to go over and see.
“This whole drawer is filled with baseball trophies.”
I return to the desk. In the middle drawer, I find a photograph of Jeremy sitting on Sugar and another one of Jer grinning in his Panther uniform. It might have been taken the first day Coach let him suit up. Coach must have taken it himself. Looking at it makes me sad. I put it back.
“Find something?” T.J. asks.
“Nothing.”
Under the photos, there’s a pile of long, skinny strips of paper, like you’d use to write a grocery list. I pick them up and see they’re all printed with numbers from one to ten, with a blank after each number. I know they’re team rosters because Jeremy brought some home. I hold one of the rosters and imagine how excited Jer would have been to see his name written on there. Guys and their sports.
I open the bigger drawer on the right. There’s only one thing in it, a framed letter. I take it out and shine the flashlight on it. “T.J., you’ve got to see this.” It’s typed on New York Yankees stationery, and it’s addressed to John S. Johnson. “Is this what I think it is?”
T.J.’s already reading over my shoulder. “Wow! That’s the real deal, Hope. They were asking him to play for the Yankees. Coach never said a word about this, not to me anyway—not that that’s saying much. He might have told Chase and the others.”
“I can’t believe he didn’t talk about it all the time.” I put the letter back and close the drawer.
“Some of the guys used to ask him about when he played ball, but he’d say, ‘The past is in the past. And any man who has to live in his isn’t doing what he ought to in the present.’ ” He does a lousy imitation of Coach’s voice.
“I don’t know,” I say, thinking out loud. “It might be kind of nice to have a past you’d want to live in again.”
In the bottom desk drawer, I find a stack of old high school yearbooks. I bring them out and stick the flashlight between my teeth so I can thumb through. I flip pages and pages of kids who look too old to be in high school.
I’m leafing through the last yearbook when I see a picture of Rita in a cheerleading uniform. She’s trim, at least thirty pounds thinner than now, with the same giant boobs. No wonder every guy in the tricounty area had a thing for her. There’s some writing on the bottom of the picture. I take the flashlight and get a better look. It says: “To my Jay Jay—Hugs and kisses … and so much more! Love, Rita.”
I close the book and put it back where I found it. Rita was a tease. A flirt—that’s what Bob said. She probably wrote that in every panting guy’s yearbook.
I know we have to leave. T.J.’s on the last drawer of the file cabinet. But I haven’t checked the piles on top of the desk. I shine the flashlight around. Coach had sticky notes to remind him to do everything: “Turn off lights.” “Buy feed.” “Call Max.” But none of the notes sound threatening or suspicious.
There’s a small pile of rosters to one side of the desk. I shine the flashlight in that direction. These rosters are filled in, held together by a rubber band. I fan through them. They’re dated, and they seem to be in order too. The top one is for June eleventh, the day Coach was murdered. My stomach knots, and I take a few short breaths. It almost feels like I shouldn’t be holding this—was it one of the last things Coach touched?—but I can’t help myself.
I move the light down the row of names. They’re all familiar now, part of my suspect list. Only the top name is crossed out. I hold the roster closer, shining my flashlight directly on it. “Chase Wells” is crossed out, and “T. J. Bowers” is penned in. I check the date again. It’s definitely the right day, the right game, Wooster versus Grain at home.
“T.J.?”
“Hmmm?”
“Didn’t you say Chase was going to be the starting pitcher for that Wooster game?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Look at this.” I show him the roster with his name written in as starter. “What does it mean?”
“I don’t know. Maybe Coach came to his senses?” He laughs a little, but it’s a fake laugh. “It’s weird, though. I wonder when he did it.” He stares at the roster, at his scribbled name, as if it’s a code he’s trying to decipher. “I admit I was pretty surprised when Coach said he was going to start Chase. He’s good—I don’t mean that. He may even be a better pitcher than I am. But he can’t bat worth a hoot. Dad said he thought Chase’s dad had something to do with Chase getting to start that game.”
“Really? I thought Sheriff Wells and Coach didn’t like each other.” I remember what Chase said about Coach not appreciating the sheriff’s after-game criticism.
“You got that right. Manny—you know him, center fielder for the Panthers—he said he heard Coach and the sheriff really getting into it after practice. Maybe Sheriff Wells won the argument, but Coach changed his mind later? Who knows?” He turns away. “It doesn’t matter anymore anyway. Can we get out of here now?”
“Not yet, T.J.” I start to take the roster with me so I can show Chase. But I change my mind. What good would it do for him to know that Coach didn’t choose him after all? It sure wouldn’t help for Chase’s dad to know. At least now his dad gets to think Chase was going to pitch.
“Hope, maybe there’s something here.” T.J. is still at the files.
I tuck the roster at the bottom of the stack. Then I join T.J. at the file cabinet. “What did you find?”
“Loan applications. Some went through. Some got denied. There are a bunch of unpaid medical bills here too. Maybe Coach really did have money troubles.”
“Maybe his wife did.”
I stare at the papers in T.J.’s hands. He pulls out another file full of forms.
“T.J., we have to take these with us. I want Raymond to see them.”
“You can’t just take them,” T.J. protests. “That’s theft. Besides, they can’t be evidence unless the police find them. Tell Raymond they’re here and let him worry about it.” He shines his flashlight on his watch. “Now can we go?”
“All right. Just let me finish with the desk. One drawer left.”
“Hope,” he whines.
I pull at the tiny drawer on the left side of the desk, but it’s stuck.
“Hope?”
“One minute.” I yank hard, and it comes out. The whole drawer is filled with canceled checks. I look through them. Everything seems pretty normal—electric, gas, groceries, feed store—until I see four checks, dated December, January, February, and March, each for a thousand dollars … and all made out to Rita Long.
22
“T.J., why would Coach Johnson pay out that kind of money to Rita?” We’re walking away from the barn so fast that I’m straining to catch my breath. Our footsteps and my heavy breathing sound out of place in the stillness around us.
T.J. sticks out his arm like a school-patrol fifth grader and stops me cold. “Wait,” he whispers, looking both ways before letting us cross the open barnyard. “Okay. Now!”
We tiptoe-trot, zigzagging like we’re dodging gunfire again. When we slow down, camouflaged by the tree-branch shadows, I ask him again. “Tell me! Why would Coach give Rita so much money?”
“I don’t know, Hope. You
said Jeremy was a great stable hand.”
“Not that great! Nobody’s that great.” A dozen possible reasons for those checks fly through my head, none of them good. Was Rita having an affair with Coach Johnson? Her Jay Jay? She’d been staying out all night. Even the night before Coach’s murder, Rita hadn’t come home until after dawn.
T.J. takes my hand. “Don’t turn around, but we’re being watched.”
Immediately, I imagine that white pickup truck. I glance over my shoulder, expecting to see it, but I don’t see anything.
“I said, don’t look.” His grip tightens. It hurts a little, but I’m too scared to care.
“Is it the stalker?” I whisper, making my eyes focus straight ahead.
“It’s Caroline Johnson,” he whispers back. “We should have gotten out of there before she spotted us.”
I whirl around before he can stop me. In a lighted window of the old farmhouse, I make out the shadow of a woman in a dress, or maybe a nightgown. “She’s standing up! T.J., did you see—?”
He yanks me back around, jerks me up beside him, and keeps me there, one arm around my waist. He’s about ten times stronger than he looks. “Don’t let her see your face.”
I fall into step and do what T.J. says, but I know it’s too late. She’s seen us, and she’s seen us seeing her. She knows that we know. Everybody else believes poor Mrs. Johnson is bedridden, that she needs help getting in and out of her wheelchair. But we’ve seen her. “She can walk. Coach’s wife could have walked to the barn, T.J. She could have murdered her husband.”
“Yeah, but who’s going to believe we saw her?” he says, speeding up. His dad’s car is in sight now. “And who are we going to tell?”
“We can tell Chase. And he can tell his dad.”
“I can see that,” T.J. says, his voice filled with a sarcasm I didn’t know he had. “ ‘Dad, when Hope and T.J. were breaking into Coach’s office after ransacking the crime scene, they happened to see Caroline Johnson standing on her own two feet. So that proves she murdered her husband, right?’ I’m sure the sheriff will run straight over and arrest her—after patting us on the back for breaking and entering.”
The Silence of Murder Page 14