Fighting Chance

by B K Stevens

  “So what kind of ‘connection’ was there?” Berk demanded. “You think he was having sex with her? Why would he? He’s going with Carolyn Olson, for God’s sake!”

  Joseph nodded slowly. “She is lovely. But people speak often of her virtue, saying she guards it closely. It is possible Paul felt unsatisfied needs, and looked to another for relief.”

  I’d wondered about that, too. On Sunday, when Graciana wasn’t looking, Paul sneaked glances at her. Then he’d told me to date nice girls like Suzette, to stay away from Graciana. I’d gotten the feeling that, for Paul, there were two kinds of girls—popular girls people respected, like Carolyn and Suzette; and girls with bad reputations, like Nina and Graciana. You dated a popular girl publicly, and she helped you become team captain. But if she wouldn’t even kiss you until your wedding day, would you feel tempted to see another kind of girl secretly? How many problems could that lead to? How many millions of problems?

  Berk was shaking his head, still looking at Joseph. “What are you saying? You think Paul was sleeping with Nina? And then for some reason he—God! You think he picked her up and threw her off that damn bridge? You think he killed her?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m sure Joseph doesn’t think those things. Neither do I. You know how I feel about Paul. I like him more than you do, even. But now we’ve found this—this thing. We can’t ignore it. We have to look into it.”

  Joseph was frowning, drumming his fingers on the coffee table. “Most provocative. While nothing is yet definitive, a connection, probably romantic, seems more likely than not. Then, if she threatened or blackmailed or laughed, if he reacted with anger and fear, tragedy might ensue. And the next consequence? Marie told her suspicions to Mr. Colson, he spoke to Paul, and Paul again took alarm. He could not let this thing be found true, so he called Bobby Davis. Is that what you find most plausible, Matt?”

  Thanks a bunch, Joseph, I thought. I was positive Berk hadn’t thought things through that far yet. With luck, he wouldn’t, not until he’d gotten over the first shock. Now Joseph had shoved the whole thing in his face all at once.

  “Why would Paul call Davis?” Berk asked, staring at Joseph, his forehead one huge, tight scrunch. Then his eyes got wide. “No. I don’t believe it. You are not saying that.”

  Joseph sighed. But I noticed his right foot tapping rapidly in the air, like he was excited. “I would be most sorry to think so. And we do not yet know of any connection between Paul and Davis. This must be ascertained. Do you suggest, Matt, we continue to work in teams, or—”

  Berk shot to his feet. “No. I’m not listening to more of this crap. I’m sure as hell not gonna help you do anything that might hurt Paul. I didn’t think he was the best captain on the planet, but he’s on our team. That’s supposed to mean something.”

  “It means a lot,” I said. “It doesn’t mean everything. If you’d found evidence that seemed to point to me, I wouldn’t expect you to give me a pass just because I’m on the team. I’d expect you to check it out and try to clear my name. That’s what I want to do with Paul. I’m sure he’d never kill anyone, Berk. Let’s prove it.”

  Berk took two steps toward me. “I don’t need to prove it, because I’m really sure. The hell with this, Matt. Paul doesn’t have anything to do with anything. Let’s talk to that lawyer, Michael Burns, and find out who asked him to help Bobby Davis. That’s what we should’ve done in the first place.”

  “It won’t work,” Graciana said. “I told you. He won’t say anything that might implicate a client, and he might call Dr. Lombardo. It’d be a mistake, Berk.”

  Berk turned on her, eyes blazing. “Like you’re the big expert on everything. You said we’d learn a lot from doing the interviews, and all we came up with is garbage. I’ve had it with letting you tell me what to do. Matt? What do you say?”

  I lifted a hand. “I’m not comfortable with this, either, but it’s the only lead we have. We have to look into it.”

  “Fine,” Berk said. “Do your best to ruin Paul’s life, and make sure you whine about how uncomfortable it makes you. I’m done.”

  He turned his back on us and stalked out; moments later, we heard the front door slam. Graciana winced at the sound, then turned to me.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t think he’d actually walk out.”

  I tried to shrug. “I’ll talk to him tomorrow. You’re basically okay with this, Joseph?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “I too hope Paul cannot be involved, but we must consider. When people grow angry and scared, they do sometimes terrible things. I saw that too often, in my own country. I saw it the night my father died.”

  I nodded, trying to take it in. “I can almost see the part with Nina. Not that it sounds like Paul—he gets impatient sometimes, but I’ve never seen him do a mean or violent thing. But if Nina really provoked him, he might’ve lost control for one second and hit her and hurt her, and then panicked and decided he had to cover it up. I guess lots of people could do that much if they were pushed too far, and then they’d feel guilty and horrible for the rest of their lives. The part with Coach, though—that’s not losing control for a second. That’s making a decision, and making plans. That’s sitting in the gym and watching it happen and not trying to stop it. I can’t see Paul doing that.”

  “I know,” Graciana said. “But I’ve read articles saying that sometimes, when people do something wrong, they don’t feel guilty and horrible. Sometimes they feel—well, empowered. Liberated, almost. They don’t feel as bad about what they did as they would’ve expected to feel, and that makes it easier for them to do something wrong again. I’m not saying that’s what happened, only that it’s possible.”

  “I guess.” I wasn’t exactly in the mood for hearing about articles Graciana had read. “So, where do we go from here?”

  For the next half hour, we traded ideas. It wasn’t hard to think of things not to do: Don’t say anything that might start rumors about Paul and Nina, don’t go to the police without more evidence, don’t confront Paul until we know more. We could try to learn more about Nina’s death, and Graciana and I could finish our last interview, but how much would we learn from that? The only thing that really made sense right now was talking to Marie again, and I was the logical person to do it. Graciana had a newspaper staff meeting after school tomorrow, and Joseph had never spoken to Marie.

  “Since she is shy,” he said, “having a new person present might make it harder for her to speak. It seems, Matt, this task must fall to you alone.”

  “Fine,” I said, but didn’t feel fine. If Marie was wrong about everything—and that felt like a strong possibility—I’d be encouraging a mixed-up girl to indulge in delusions that couldn’t be doing her any good. If her brother found out, I’d be putting her at risk for no reason. And if Paul found out, he might see me as a false friend, as the worst kind of traitor. I’d have a hard time blaming him.

  Twenty

  “In the cemetery,” Marie said, and hurried away, a hunched-over black blur.

  That wouldn’t have been my first choice for a place to meet, but I was surprised she’d agreed to talk to me at all. And at least she seemed to be all right. I’d asked if Ted gave her a hard time after we left, and she’d said she’d told him we were working on a social studies project. I don’t know if he’d believed her. As long as he hadn’t hit her, that was good enough.

  Some other could-be-worse things had happened, too. My mother’s car was out of the shop, the windshield replaced and all other damage repaired. She hadn’t hesitated about letting me have it today, hadn’t lectured me about needing to take better care of it—of course she hadn’t, since she didn’t know the truth about why the car had been attacked. I should’ve probably felt guiltier about that, but mostly I felt good about having the car back.

  And Berk wasn’t as mad as I’d expected. When I sat down across from him before math got star
ted, he was cool and stiff at first, but he laughed when I told him about a dumb thing that’d happened during homeroom. When class ended, we walked out together, complaining about too much homework. Things felt almost normal.

  Also, during the first fifteen minutes of lunch period, Graciana and I got in a quick interview with Mr. Carver, the assistant principal. He’d been close with Coach Colson, and he was a decent guy—fair, reasonable, not too full of himself. Just about every student I knew was hoping he’d be the new principal when Dr. Lombardo retired. He didn’t have anything new to tell us, but it felt good to check off our last interview.

  As I drove to the cemetery, I felt pretty good. So far, this hadn’t been a bad day. Maybe Marie would say something that would let us rule Paul out completely, and then I could go home feeling even better.

  I parked in the gravel lot. The cemetery’s on the edge of town, a spread-out place with a tall gray stone gate and a wrought iron fence. It’s on some registry of historic sites, I guess because it’s got a section set aside for graves of Confederate soldiers. Those are toward the front; the farther back you go, the newer the graves get. Some tombstones are large and elaborate, and every so often there’s a statue of an angel, or a child hugging a lamb, or a veiled lady weeping over an urn. Tour buses stop here, and some people come for picnics. That seems weird to me, but maybe there’s something I’m not getting. The tombstones for the newer graves, toward the back, tend to be smaller and simpler.

  I found Marie standing by the newest grave, the one that didn’t have a tombstone yet. Her head was bowed—probably, she wasn’t praying, just had her head down because she almost always kept it down—but I figured I should play it safe. So I came to stand next to her but didn’t say anything, bowed my head, and waited.

  After a couple of minutes, she spoke. “Nobody’s going to remember her,” she said. “She was smart—she always got high grades, even though she ditched classes a lot—and she was funny, and she could act and write poetry. But she didn’t have time to do anything. People will forget she was ever even alive.”

  I didn’t know how to argue with that, so I didn’t try. “She sounds really special,” I said.

  Marie didn’t seem to mind how lame that sounded. “She was. Nothing scared her. Nothing. Our dad—when he got in one of his moods and came after us, I’d cry and beg, and he’d usually leave me alone. Nina never backed down, even when he started hitting her. She’d keep talking back to him, telling him what a loser he was, saying she wouldn’t let him boss her around. Maybe you think that was stupid, but it was really brave.”

  “It was definitely brave,” I said, though I could see the stupid part, too.

  Marie nodded. “And when Ted picked on me—he did that lots when we were younger, the first time he lived with us—she’d charge right up to make him leave me alone. They got into awful fights, and she’d get bruised up really bad, but she’d never let anybody hurt me. Not Ted, not Dad, nobody.”

  “I can see why you miss her so much,” I said. “Do you come out here a lot?”

  She nodded. “I walk here every day after school, to spend time with her.”

  “You walked all this way? You should’ve told me. I would’ve given you a ride.”

  She shrugged. “I like to walk. And I’m not allowed to take rides from people. You said you wanted to talk more. About what?”

  I had a list of questions in my pocket but thought it’d be crude to take it out. “For one thing, could I see those text messages again? Would I be okay if I copied them down?”

  She gave me a sideways look. “Why do you want to?”

  “Just to be sure we’ve got the wording right. Graciana thinks there might be things we’re missing, things we might figure out if we looked at the messages more carefully. Would you mind?”

  “I guess not,” she said, and got out her phone, and found the first message. Balancing my trig notebook against my left arm, I copied it onto a back page: It’s official—tomorrow night, Little Becky deflowers Captain America in a doubly shady spot! Take that, Big Brother! That might take some figuring out, all right. “Do you know what she meant by ‘a doubly shady spot’?”

  “Some place dark, I guess. Does it matter?”

  Probably not, but I couldn’t help wondering. Marie found the second text message, and I copied that, too. That one didn’t seem hard to figure out, but I could see why it felt odd to Marie. It seemed too straightforward, compared to the first message, and it felt too formal. But if Nina had been really depressed, if she’d been as stoned as everybody said she’d been, who knows how that might affect the way she wrote?

  I handed the phone back to Marie. “Thanks. On the day it happened, did you see Nina at school much? Did she seem okay?”

  Marie lifted her head long enough to give me a sour half-smile. “You mean was she high.”

  “No,” I said, blushing, cursing myself for being so obvious. “At least, not necessarily.”

  “Of course you think she was high. Everybody thinks that. Nobody at school talks to me much, but I know everybody’s always thought she was some big-time addict. She wasn’t. She smoked a little weed when she could get it, and sometimes she sneaked a glass of our mom’s wine or a shot of our dad’s bourbon. But she never did anything harder, and she never did anything at all on school days. She had a 3.94 GPA, and she took three AP exams last spring and got fives on all of them. Could she have done that if she’d been high all the time?”

  Maybe, I thought, if she was really smart. I’m not that smart, so I wouldn’t know. Anyway, it felt like time to change the subject. “You said when Nina was found, she was wearing a blouse you’d never seen before. I didn’t understand that.”

  Marie shrugged. “She wore a black tee to school that day. But when the police found her, she was wearing a silky light blue sleeveless top, really low cut. That would’ve got her sent home from school in two minutes. I told the police, but they shrugged it off, said she’d probably had the blue top in her book bag and decided to change after school. So I went to every store in town until I found this lady at a consignment shop. She remembered selling that top to Nina the Saturday before she died.”

  At this point, I had to agree with the police. “That seems strange to you?”

  She lifted her head long enough to give me an exasperated look. “Of course it’s strange. Nina always showed me the clothes she bought, but she never showed me that top. I bet she never brought it home at all. So what did she do, keep it folded up in her book bag all week? I think she was keeping it at Sherwood Forest, and she put it on that afternoon so she’d look extra-nice when she met Paul Ericson.”

  “Yeah, I want to ask you about Sherwood Forest,” I said, but that was as far as I got.

  I heard footsteps behind us, looked over my shoulder, and saw Ted Ramsey. Yesterday, he’d looked suspicious and hostile. Today, he looked furious. Marie gave a little gasp and crouched down to pick up her books.

  “What the hell, Marie?” he said, walking up to us. “I told you I don’t want you coming here any more. Talking to a corpse—that’s sick. And you.” He shifted to looking at me, put his hands on his hips. “I told you I don’t want you hanging around Marie.”

  “You said not to come to the apartment. I didn’t. Marie and I have to make plans for a social studies project, so we—”

  “Yeah, right. I asked around about you. Matt Foley, big-time jock. There’s only one reason someone like you comes sniffing around someone like my sister. Well, this ends it. If I see you anywhere near her again, I’ll make you damn sorry you ever looked at her. Get in the car, Marie. We’re going home. Then we’re gonna have a talk.”

  She was already hurrying toward the car, hunched over as usual. Ted Ramsey took a long moment to stare at me, hacked hard, and spit on Nina’s grave. Then he grinned and turned around, walking after his sister.

  Two days in a row, I thought. Tw
o days in a row I have to leave her with that guy, not knowing what he’ll do to her.

  I couldn’t stand it. “Wait, Marie,” I said, starting after them. “You don’t have to go with him. We could—”

  He spun around and punched me, landing a hard right hook under my left eye. It hurt a lot—I felt stunned by how much it hurt. I stumbled, and he grabbed my shirt and pulled me forward. The tough-guy grab, I thought. I know how to get out of this. But I was too surprised to remember.

  “You’re not the one who tells Marie what she can and can’t do,” he said, shoving his face close to mine. “I am. If you come around again, you’ll make things worse for her. And you’ll sure as hell make things worse for you.”

  He pushed me back hard and let me go, sending me sprawling. “Stay away from her,” he said, and turned around and left.

  I lay on the grass next to Nina’s grave, trying to take in what had happened. I touched my cheek. It throbbed, circles of pain pulsing out to my eye, my nose, the whole left side of my face. It made me think of a rock thrown into quiet water, of rings of ripples pushing out even after the stone sank to the bottom. I’d just taken a full-force punch to the face for the first time in my life, and I felt stunned by how much it hurt.

  And then he’d gotten me with a tough-guy grab, and I’d blanked. Damn, I thought. I definitely need to practice more.

  Twenty-one

  Wednesday started bad and kept getting worse.

  As usual, I got up early for exercise, practice, laps around the Methodist church parking lot, and a quick shower. When I came downstairs, Mom was cooking again. I bet she and Dad decided hot breakfasts would help us deal with our father being a handyman. It’d take more than eggs and bacon to do that.

  “Good morning, Matt.” Mom looked up from her frying pans. “Goodness! Your cheek!”