The listing began.
For Brooke, the number sixty-three suddenly sat much closer to infinity than it ever had before as the reading continued. Tension built with every passing bequest, as Brooke silently dreaded hearing her name called. Not yet, please. Twenty items floated past, all to dispassionate response. To Brooke’s surprise, no beneficiaries reacted much when named— not until number fifty, the Lladro. Then, a little old lady gasped and began crying.
“I knew he’d remember our trip to Spain when we were young,” she said, sniffling.
Fawn waited until the outburst calmed before continuing.
Brooke still hadn’t been named. Sarge LaBarge looked smug, like a toad who’d swallowed a gallon Ziploc full of flies. He’d been named as recipient of both the Italian sports car and a legacy box seat at Yankee Stadium.
A fan. Huh. Aunt Ruth considered all Yankees fans bosom friends, unexamined, but Brooke bristled under his slimy gaze when he turned it on her. If only he’d received the timeshare in New Zealand. He could go and overstay his two weeks’ vacation indefinitely.
But then it occurred to her— some people were receiving more than one item.
LaBarge could be in line for the Called Shot Ball.
The thought sickened her. First Miss Virginia. Then Ames Crosby. If he were to also finagle the Called Shot Ball away from her when she had it in her grasp, it would be a killing blow.
Numbers forty, fifty, sixty passed. Brooke’s face started getting hot with the anticipation. “Maybe it’s a mistake,” she whispered to Dane. “I got the letter in error. I’m not really in the will.”
“That’s not generally what happens.”
Fine. She’d just sit here letting her heart pound out of her chest for the duration, take a heaping tablespoon of disappointment and go home empty-handed.
Or with a nice set of sterling silver flatware at number sixty-two. That was all that stood between her and the explosion of possibility for Left Field if the Bambino’s ball ended up in her hands.
“Thank you for your patience. This is the final item.”
She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t even blink. Speak, Fawn. Put me out of my misery.
Fawn shushed the crowd and went on. “And now, item sixty-three, a 1932 A. G. Spalding and Brothers baseball, stamped ‘Official National League,’ along with all documents of authenticity and provenance.” A reverence fell over the room as she said those words. So far it all sounded legit. The year of that fated World Series game was right, as was the brand name— pre-Spalding.
If, like the picture, it had both red and blue stitching…
Oh, if this item was real, her whole day just skidded sideways and slid into home plate with leg extended, a fraction of a second before the tagging catcher caught the ball.
Because even Trae Earnshaw couldn’t deny this item was enough to warrant fully funding the opening of Left Field.
Across the room, Sarge LaBarge got up, rubbed his palms down the front of his stomach and acted as though he was ready to give everyone a beatific wave of triumph. He thinks he’s getting it.
Brooke’s heart plummeted to the basement.
“Perhaps some of you in this room are familiar with the original Jarman will. For those close to the case, it is probably not standard procedure for me to divulge this information, but it might be best as an explanation.”
A cold quiet settled over the room’s occupants who had been lightly murmuring before as the long event wound down. All eyes were glued on Fawn.
“Mr. Jarman’s original will was altered last Christmas, with a holographic addendum regarding this final item— sixty-three in your printout.”
“Altered!” The word snaked through the assembled group, with “Holographic!” following close behind.
“What’s holographic?” Brooke asked, suddenly aware she had Dane’s information at her disposal and grateful for it. All she could picture was a vague image of a pop singer and some hologram friends or a Star Trek special effect.
“Hand-written by the benefactor.”
“Is it more or less valid than a typed will? I assume those are notarized.” Brooke didn’t know much about any type law, but she’d learned a bit about contracts while trying to get Left Field up and running. She and her notary public were on a first name basis nowadays.
“More valid. Nothing is more valid than a handwritten document. That is, if the handwriting in that addendum is verified to be authentic.” He frowned. “That will be the crux for whoever is lucky enough to get your precious Called Shot Ball, or whatever they’re calling it.”
Brooke shot a glance at Sarge LaBarge. Smugness had fled, apoplexy taking its place. His head might pop off, red as it had gotten and swollen with steaming rage. He’d clearly thought the ball was his— before this twist.
Fawn called the room to attention again with a tap on her microphone. All quieted down.
“Item sixty-three, as of last year’s addendum, is bequeathed to Brooke Chadwick of 125 Water Street, Maddox, Virginia.”
Brooke’s adrenaline spiked. She must have misheard. Hope infinite had played a trick on her ears.
“Me?” she eked out.
Polite clapping followed, and all heads craned around looking for the unexpected winner. “Me,” she whispered, petrifaction setting in to all her muscles.
“Hey, that’s pretty cool.” Dane gave her a squeeze.
“Please come and claim your inheritances from the secure area, ladies and gentlemen. Be prepared to show ID again,” Fawn directed.
Brooke couldn’t react. This had to be an elaborate prank. But then she knew it wasn’t when over all the din of people’s chairs sliding on the tile floor, a singular howl rose, like that of a trapped and wounded animal.
“Zimmerman! Zimmerman!” Shoving his way through the crowd toward the front chugged Sarge LaBarge. “Hang you if you don’t get Zimmerman out here this instant. I demand to know what is the meaning of this. How could such a thing be allowed—”
Security pounced on him, but he protested. “I’m not called Sergeant LaBarge for nothing. I’m sarge in charge of this county, and I’ll be answered— now!”
“That lunatic is a pressure cooker about to blow.” Dane took Brooke’s hand and moved them toward the secure area with the bequests Fawn had indicated earlier.
That lunatic was Ames Crosby’s father-in-law. For the first time, Brooke felt a twinge of pity for Ames.
Sarge LaBarge spun around, his eyes stabbing at the crowd. “This gross error will be repaired, and the Called Shot Ball will be in the hands of its rightful owner. And by that, I mean— me.” A wide circular berth formed around LaBarge. His words were a bellowing howl. His fat, red lips drizzled with spittle. “Brooke Chadwick. I know you’re here. Believe me, I know where you live.”
Brooke slid behind Dane’s tall frame and broad shoulders.
“Let’s go,” he said. “Better grab your loot and get out of here.”
__________
Dane had no idea what the Called Shot Ball meant, but clearly Brooke valued it almost as much as that fruitcake with the red lips did. Sarge LaBarge. Dane, like everyone else with a pulse in the Chesapeake area, had been bombarded with his political signs and ads and bluster. Boy, howdy, did that guy dig that ball. Enough to threaten Brooke over it. He knew where she lived? Dane’s protectiveness skyrocketed to Quirt levels.
“Now, don’t go playing catch with it,” the man had said when he signed the paperwork and gave her the lacquer box containing the famous ball.
“No, sir.” Brooke had clutched it to her heart. Then she handed it to Dane while she put away her ID. It was sweet how much her face beamed with a joy he hadn’t seen there since before the accident.
The second they had the ball in hand, Dane pulled Brooke from the building, his pinky finger hooked through hers. He practically tugged her down the sandstone steps of the fancy Fawn & Zimmerman offices. “It’s not safe for you in there. Here.” He handed her the lacquer box, which sh
e clutched to her chest again. No one could take it from her. Not now. Not even the sarge in charge of this county.
Brooke’s breath came fast as they charged across the plaza toward the parking structure. “Seriously, their initial letter shouldn’t have recommended legal counsel— it should have suggested a bodyguard.” She kept pace with his long strides and looked up at him, her brown eyes alight. “Thanks, Dane. I’m glad you were there.”
Hero. The word resurfaced. She needed him. At least for that moment.
“You’re glad about that ball, I take it.”
“Glad!” A radiant glow emanated from her countenance. In that moment, Brooke Chadwick was the most beautiful, holy thing he’d ever seen. It stirred a place inside him he’d forgotten existed, if he ever knew it in the first place, a desire to be more, to be his best— for her.
Man, what a contrast to any other woman he’d ever met. Particularly that hideous encounter he’d endured the other night. How could anything so disgusting even exist in the same universe as Brooke Chadwick?
“Well, the ball is yours now,” he said. “Maybe we should defy orders and play catch with it after little league practice tomorrow.” At her look of abject horror, he softened the joke. “Kidding, kidding. Geez. I can see it’s a big deal.”
“The biggest.”
Still, he didn’t get it. “I mean, yeah. Babe Ruth— I get that. But from the quick glimpse I got, it isn’t even signed.”
“It doesn’t need to be. It’s far better if it’s not, actually.”
“Okay… That LaBarge character sure blew his top over it. What a buffoon.” Dane wanted to downplay how dangerous LaBarge might seem, just to keep her from being afraid. But the jury was still out. LaBarge might be a maniac. He sounded like one. Dane should tell Quirt— right about the time he thanked Quirt for giving Dane his big break. Quirt wouldn’t like it, but Dane sure didn’t mind the view here, Brooke Chadwick’s hair swirling beside her neck in the spring breeze, her face brilliantly happy, her lips looking so hungry to be kissed by her hero.
“Buffoon is right.”
“So help me understand why this Called Shot Ball is the most important artifact in baseball history. That’s a pretty big claim, when you consider all the possible moments in baseball history. Surely you’re forgetting the moment the Maddox Mustangs’ brilliant catcher-pitcher team made a triple play to defeat the Cove Pirates?” He aimed his best smoldering look at her.
“Quirt’s and your little pennant win doesn’t count.” She quenched the smolder with an eye-roll, but he deserved it. They got to the parking lot, where his truck sat parked beside her car.
“Fine.” They arrived at his truck. “Tell me on the drive to Maddox.” If only he’d vacuumed out the Dodge anytime in the last year or so. Sheesh. There might be a hundred fast food wrappers composting on the passenger seat.
“I’m fine to drive home.”
“Maybe, but not with that expensive thing,” he said, holding the door for her. “Not alone.” No telling what might happen to her en route. She looked up at him, a little shaken.
“Um—”
“Get in. We’ll figure out what to do with your fancy prize. It needs to be somewhere safe.” He cleared away some debris and she got in.
“Like a museum? Because I know just the place.”
“Uh, more like Fort Knox. Or at least a safety deposit box. That brand of Sarge-LaBarge-crazy wasn’t the passive aggressive kind. You saw it yourself.” LaBarge wasn’t the most powerful man in Naughton for nothing. While Dane hadn’t personally tangled with LaBarge’s shenanigans, he’d heard tales of them at Tweed Law. Like when LaBarge went after a Naughton retirement home for landscaping violations, shutting the thing down; then took personal possession of the building and opened a bar there with a liquor license that materialized out of thin air.
Stuff like that.
A few miles down the road back to Maddox, he said, “Tell me about this here ball.” He tapped its box with a knuckle.
“I can’t believe you don’t already know, but,” Brooke got dreamy-voiced, “Yankees versus Cubs at Wrigley Field in Chicago. 1932. Babe Ruth was sick of getting heckled by the Cubbies fans and said a few choice words to the Cubs’ pitcher, then allegedly aimed his bat at center field right before knocking a home run to exactly that place on the next pitch. It propelled the Yankees to a big win and the Cubs to another loss in their eighty-eight-year dry spell before they won the Series.”
She was gorgeous when she was talking baseball, the way her voice sparkled and her energy spiked, but something bothered him. He flexed his fingers on the steering wheel.
“You’re telling me you think it could possibly be authentic? The actual ball from that series? The one that went over the stands?”
“I’ve seen a lot of fakes in my day. Trust me. Aunt Ruth and I have been down that road getting the museum ready.” Her brows knit with worry. “Almost had the tires of our lives punctured on it with a fake Mickey Mantle jersey Aunt Ruth invested far too heavily in last fall. We got our hopes but, but then its authenticity got blasted and we skidded off the road for a while. Some might describe me as cynical, but I prefer cautious.”
“Trust, but tie up your camel. Gotcha.”
Dane remembered hearing through the grapevine about their efforts to get a museum going. It was a gargantuan dream, a Herculean effort. But worth it, as he knew how much it would please Quirt’s Aunt Ruth to honor her father’s collection. She’d talked about nothing else when he was a kid.
“My instinct is always to suspect a phony first.” Brooke cracked the box open half an inch. “It’s probably a fake.”
Dane processed the possibilities as they sped through the curved, wooded roads that soon opened up with a view of the shore near Maddox.
“Yeah. Maybe,” Dane reluctantly agreed.
“Because…how could it be real?” Brooke was clearly trying to dial down her expectations. “Something this important, it couldn’t be hidden all this time. Word would have gotten out. Even the recipe for Kentucky Fried Chicken has been leaked.”
“It has?” Dane suddenly craved fried chicken. “You mean the Original Recipe?”
“That’s beside the point.” Brooke clipped the box shut again. “Nothing this important could be kept secret for nearly a century. Some person, somewhere in that family, would tell.”
“So it has to be a fake. Or it would have been common knowledge.” He repeated her reasoning, letting it distill. “Proof?”
“Proof.”
They rode along in silence for a mile. Brooke’s energy seemed flag and she sat back against the seat, her fingertip caressing the top of the box.
“I don’t know,” Dane said after a while. “I mean, I’m a lawyer. My training makes me question everything, take nothing at face value, but—”
“But?” Hope resurged in her voice, like she’d been waiting for him to counter her argument.
“But if it was fake, why the uproar?”
“Oh. LaBarge’s meltdown.” She nodded. “Right? That was epic.”
“It was Three Mile Island.”
She pressed a hand to the center of her belly, as if to quell a quaking there. “Dane. If it’s real, I want it more than anything else on earth.”
Dane let those words sink in. “Well, it’s yours.”
“Only if I can keep it.”
Reality hit him like a cold splash of water. She was exactly right. Brooke may have possession of the ball, but in order to keep it— against the likes of Sergeant Faro LaBarge— she was going to need a bodyguard. Because, as Sarge said, he knew where she lived. And no way would that red-lipped weirdo let today’s legal proceedings go unchallenged.
Brooke needed a lawyer.
A heroic one.
Dane Rockwell intended to be that guy.
__________
They shut away the ball in a safety deposit box at the Maddox First National Bank. Brooke hated watching the ball slide into its morgue-like chamber, like a de
ath had occurred. At least Aunt Ruth should be able to see it.
“But,” Dane explained, “you— and the ball— are a whole helluva lot safer if the ball is somewhere out of your direct possession.”
“At least until Left Field gets its security measures up to snuff,” she said, knowing at this point they were in no way able to adequately protect something as valuable as the Called Shot Ball.
What was the value of something like that? Tens of thousands? Hundreds?
“And let’s not forget Aunt Ruth.” Dane raised a knowing eyebrow as they headed into the fast food place on the corner.
“What about her?” Nobody criticized Aunt Ruth on Brooke’s watch. Not even Dane Rockwell. “She’s perfect.”
“But she’s not perfect when it comes to secrecy.”
“Oh.” True. “If you want everyone in Maddox to know something, tell Aunt Ruth it’s a closely held secret. She’s perfectly consistent in that way.”
“I’ll give you that.”
Dane knew her family and their quirks, and he sometimes recognized them even better than she did.
But— her resolve. When things went so far sideways last year, after that awful ordeal with Ames and the kiss on the giant screen that had half the town talking, and then Dane’s kiss at church that catalyzed the other half, she’d made some decisions about her life. Did Dane Rockwell stir some innermost part of her? Absolutely. She’d be the lyingest liar in all the Chesapeake Bay area if she denied that. But could she trust that anything he did was sincere? After what Ames Crosby did to detonate her trust in basically all mankind for a while, she hadn’t necessarily applied that lack of trust in guys to Dane Rockwell.
“This way you give Aunt Ruth protection,” he said over a shared Dr. Pepper, “in the form of plausible deniability.”
“You mean, if she doesn’t actually know where it is, she can’t tell everyone and their cat at the Bob and Weave?”
“Precisely.”
Wills & Trust (Legally in Love Collection Book 3) Page 10