Thread of Hope jt-1

by Jeff Shelby

After five minutes, I was gassed and covered in sweat. I’d clanked a ten-footer and been beaten badly back on defense twice.

  As I panted, trying to get my breathing under control, I marveled again at how well the girls on the team played together. They communicated constantly, yelling at one another at every opportunity. They moved the ball with ease and always seemed to know where their teammates were supposed to be.

  I was up again, a girl named Theresa on my left and Kristin, the girl whose footwork I’d corrected the day before, on my right. Meredith and Megan waited for us on the other end on defense.

  Theresa broke hard for the basket and I bounced the ball to her beneath Meredith’s hands. Theresa whipped the ball over Megan’s head to Kristin. Meredith rotated down quickly to guard Kristin, so she fired the ball back to me at the top. I buried the jumper and sprinted back to the other end.

  Meredith had the ball on the right and Megan flared out to my left as they pushed forward. Smart. Spread the floor, attack from both sides and make me choose. It was a subtle thing, but that kind of movement usually separated the better players from the rest.

  Meredith’s eyes were impassive as she approached, the ball bouncing rhythmically beneath her left hand as she came down. She quickened her pace and came right at me. I stepped up to meet her. She flicked her eyes to her left, looking for Megan. I took another step up and shaded that way to see if I could deflect the pass I thought was coming.

  But there was no pass.

  Meredith switched the ball to her right hand and accelerated past me before I could recover. She laid the ball up off the backboard and it dropped softly through the net.

  Kelly blew the whistle and yelled “Stations!” and the girls sprinted in groups of three to the side baskets.

  I stayed on the baseline, my hands clasped behind my head, waiting for my breath to come back.

  “You alright?” Kelly asked, coming up by my side, her eyes scanning the floor.

  “No,” I said. “I’m about to die.”

  “You’ll be fine.” Then she laughed. “Meredith destroyed you on that last play.”

  I nodded. “She’s good.”

  “You just wait,” she said. “That was nothing.”

  And Kelly was right. Over the next two hours, Meredith dominated the practice. If a shot needed to be made, she made it. If the defense needed to make a stop, she found a way to the ball. She out-shined all of her teammates in every drill, in every way, and when they scrimmaged for the last ten minutes, she demonstrated how superior she was to every other girl in the gym by scoring at will, and anticipating everything the opposing five wanted to do.

  And she did it all with ease and with an expression that gave away nothing.

  Kelly adjourned the practice and cornered me as the girls trickled off the floor. She handed me a piece of paper. It was the background check she'd told me about.

  “Get that back to me tomorrow,” she said. “You have a sport coat?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “A coat. You’ll have to wear a coat on the bench tomorrow night for the game,” she explained.

  “You want me on the bench?”

  “You’re a coach, aren’t you?”

  I didn’t know what I was. “You gonna clear that with Stricker?”

  Subtle contempt settled on her face. “I’ll handle Stricker.”

  I took a deep breath and my heart settled down to a manageable rhythm. “Then I’ll find a coat.”

  She nodded and walked away.

  I picked up my bag and walked out into the hallway between the gym and the lockers. Meredith came blazing out of the locker room and, like before, crashed into me.

  She backed up, not looking me in the eye. “Sorry. Sorry.”

  “It’s fine,” I said, turning to block the door. “But we need to talk.”

  “I can’t,” she said. “Not right now.”

  The bruise on her face had faded to a pale yellow.

  “Come on, Meredith,” I said. “My friend’s in the hospital, waiting to go to jail and he doesn’t deserve to be. Does he?”

  She looked up from the floor. The steely gaze from the gym was gone, replaced by the expression of a scared teenage girl.

  “I can’t,” she said. “I have to go.”

  “Is it your dad?” I asked. “Is he the one that did this to you? And now you’re scared of him?”

  Her expression shifted, somewhere closer to confusion, but I couldn’t tell if it was because I was right or wrong.

  “I have to go,” she said and pushed past me.

  I took a step after her, then stopped. Chasing her wasn’t the right thing to do. She was scared and I didn’t want to make it worse.

  She shoved open the glass doors and disappeared outside.

  THIRTY-TWO

  The next morning, I faxed the background check to the school and I walked over to Horton Plaza to find that sport coat. I was thinking that I needed to call Lauren, too. I thought maybe I’d been too harsh with her and that maybe talking some more about us and about Elizabeth might be good for both of us. I still wasn’t sure about spending the night with her, but I was wrong in saying that I didn’t owe her anything. I did owe her something. I just wasn’t sure what that was.

  I pulled my phone out of my pocket as I walked, but couldn’t get myself to dial her number. I’d been alone for a long time and I wasn’t used to sharing my thoughts with anyone. Elizabeth was always on my mind, but I kept her to myself. She wasn’t something I shared. In hotel rooms and on long walks, I would talk to her. But I rarely talked about her and the prospect of doing so, even with the one person who missed her as much as I did, wasn’t enticing.

  I shoved the phone back in my pocket and kept walking.

  Horton Plaza was much as I remembered it. Downtown’s only shopping mall, with the avant-garde design, crowds of shoppers and homeless people seemingly intermingling at the fringes of the complex.

  I found a sixty-dollar navy coat on a clearance rack in one of the department stores. Because I hadn’t packed anything other than jean, shorts, and a couple of shirts, I found a pair of dress pants, a button-down shirt and some black dress shoes to complete my coaching ensemble. I might not know what I was doing, but I’d look the part.

  As I exited the store, I glanced at the reflection in the glass doors and picked up two guys following me. Two guys I’d already met.

  I stopped, turned, and looked directly at Trevor Boyle and James Hanley, Jordan’s men.

  I held up the bag full of clothes. “Sale. Couldn’t turn it down.”

  The friendly pretense they’d carried out before was gone. Both wore decidedly unfriendly expressions on their faces.

  “Let’s go,” Hanley said, nodding toward the walkway.

  “I like it better here. And I'm not done shopping.”

  “We could carry you out,” Boyle said.

  I stared at him. He was maybe six feet tall, on the south side of two-hundred pounds. Not quite as big as me and not nearly as angry with the world.

  “You could try,” I said.

  Hanley pulled back his coat far enough so I could see the nine-millimeter tucked into his waistline. “Let’s go.”

  We started walking. We were on the west side of the mall, near the parking structure, away from the crowds. The sunlight was bright, almost blinding, after being inside in the artificial light.

  “Where is she?” Hanley asked.

  “Who?”

  Boyle moved and jabbed me in the kidney with a fist.

  I grunted and dropped my bag to the ground. He moved again and I stepped to the side, grabbing his shirt collar. I swung him around and sent him to the pavement.

  Hanley’s hand moved toward his waist. I stepped into him and grabbed his wrist, pushing it in against his body. I swept my right leg behind his knees and knocked him off balance. I threw my right elbow into the center of his chest. The air whooshed out of him as he fell back. I yanked the gun out of his pants as he fell toward the groun
d.

  Boyle was crouching, ready to jump at me. I pivoted and stuck the gun on his nose. “Don’t.”

  Boyle’s eyes narrowed to the gun. I swung my foot forward and kicked him in the balls. He fell back, clutching at his groin, his eyes rolling up in his head.

  I turned back to Hanley who was now sitting up. “Who?”

  Hanley was rubbing his chest. “What?”

  “You said ‘Where is she?’ Who is ‘she?’?”

  Hanley’s eyes dropped down to slits. “Meredith Jordan, you asshole.”

  Meredith’s name was like a hammer to my chest and it took me a moment to process it. “Meredith?”

  “She didn’t come home last night,” Hanley said, still massaging his sternum. “We need to find her.”

  “And Jordan sent you after me?” I asked.

  Hanley nodded.

  “Did he report her missing?”

  “I don’t know. He just told us to find you.”

  “Why didn’t he send Gina?” I asked.

  He frowned. “I have no clue, man. We work for Mr. Jordan. We don’t ask questions. We do what he tells us.”

  The color was coming back in Boyle’s face now, but his hands were still glued to his crotch. He wasn’t in any condition to come at me.

  “Jordan really thinks I took his daughter?” I asked, not believing even he was that stupid.

  Hanley shrugged. “I don’t know. But he’s pretty crazy right now. She didn’t come home from school and he can’t find her.”

  Crazy probably didn’t describe it. I remembered the feeling all too clearly and I wasn’t sure there was a word that captured it.

  “I don’t have her and I don’t know where she is,” I said. “So leave me the fuck alone.”

  I started walking away.

  “My gun?” Hanley whined. “Hey, come on, man. That’s mine.”

  I dropped it in the bag with my clothes. “Tell Jordan to buy you a new one.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  As I walked back to my hotel, the urge to go look for Meredith Jordan kept poking at me. I’d spent the last several years looking for kids exactly like her and it was as if someone had turned my switch on.

  But I had no idea where to look and I needed to remember that while she may have been the key to getting Chuck free, she wasn’t the reason I returned to Coronado. I didn’t need to be picking up random causes along the way. My obligation was to help Chuck and I would find a way to do that without her if I had to.

  I grabbed lunch on my way back to the hotel, found an iron and ironing board in the closet of my room and managed not to burn myself or the clothes as I worked the wrinkles out of my new outfit. After a half hour of flipping channels, I dressed and headed to the high school.

  Robert Stricker was the only one in the gym when I walked in.

  He lifted his head in my direction. “Coach. You’re early.”

  “Nothing else to do.”

  He nodded at the stack of chairs against the wall. “You’re in luck. I got things for you to do.”

  “This where you tell me what my salary’s gonna be?” I walked over to the chairs.

  “Yep. You’ll love it. Gotta bunch of zeroes in it. Unfortunately for you, it starts with a zero.”

  I put my hands on a couple of the chairs. “You don’t have a problem with me coaching tonight?”

  “Kelly’s without an assistant,” he said, not looking at me. “You're background check cleared. She wants you to fill in. She’s okay with it, I’m okay with it.” He glanced at me. “Long as you behave.”

  I pulled two chairs off the wall and added them to the row that he’d begun. “You hear anything about Meredith Jordan missing?”

  He froze before he could set the next chair down. “What are you talking about?”

  “Those two…associates that escorted me out of your office? They came to see me this morning. Jordan’s gone off the deep end because she didn’t come home last night.”

  He set the chair down. “Hadn’t heard that. If she wasn’t at school today, she can’t play tonight.” He tilted his head to the side. “And if that’s the case, you guys are seriously screwed.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because Episcopal is as good as we are. When Meredith’s playing. Without her, we’re gonna be hurting.”

  “So you’re more worried about the game than the fact that she’s disappeared?”

  His face clouded with a shot of anger and he kicked the chair into place. “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Then what did you mean?”

  He folded his massive arms across his chest. “Look, the kids here? They aren’t like kids at other schools. They’ve got a lot of money and when I say a lot, I mean more than you or I have ever dreamed of. You’ve seen the cars in the lot, seen this campus. They are living in Fantasyland.”

  He was saying the same things Kelly Rundles had told me. I grabbed two more chairs from the wall and let him continue talking

  “And their parents?” He chuckled, but there was no humor in his tone. “They treat these kids like adults. No rules, no discipline, no supervision. Let them run loose like college kids on spring break.” The humorless smile on his face hardened. “So it’s not like a student here hasn’t disappeared for a night or three. Maybe they should check the resorts in the Caribbean. Or the penthouse at The W.”

  He shook his head and grabbed a couple more chairs.

  “But doesn’t her situation make it a little different this time?” I asked. “With everything that’s happened to her?”

  Stricker set the chairs down and unfolded them, taking a deep breath. “I don’t know. Maybe. But if we called 911 every time one of them spent a night away from home, we’d wear out emergency dispatch.”

  I positioned the last two chairs at the end of the row. The seats for both teams were in place now. “I’ve heard, though, that Meredith is a pretty good kid. Maybe different from the others here.”

  He pointed a finger across the gym to the bleachers and motioned for me to follow him. “She is a good kid. So, yeah, maybe it’s a little different.”

  He stuck a key into a small panel on the wall. A small whirring noise started up behind the tall wooden bleachers and they slowly began to creep outward.

  “You ever get a weird vibe from her father?” I asked.

  “I get weird vibes from a lot of people.”

  “I mean, anything weird going on with his daughter,” I said.

  “You mean sick weird?”

  I nodded.

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “Doesn’t seem like him. He’s got issues, but not like that.”

  “What kind of issues?”

  The bleachers locked into place and the whirring died. Stricker pulled the key out of the wall and looked at his watch. “I’m gonna go check attendance, see if she was here today. Like I said, if she wasn’t, she’s not playing.”

  “Jordan can’t control that?” I asked, thinking of parents I’d known that would skirt any rule for the sake of their child. “If she shows up, not something he can do to get her eligible?”

  Stricker’s face darkened as he headed for the exit. “I follow the rules. And Jordan doesn’t control me.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Kelly Rundles showed up a few minutes later, dressed sharply in a navy pant suit and carrying a giant bag of basketballs over her shoulder.

  I asked her if she’d heard anything from Meredith and her mood took a nose dive.

  “No.” Her mouth puckered like she’d bit into a lemon. “Why are you asking me that right now?”

  I told her.

  “Shit,” she muttered. “We need her tonight.”

  Her concern was different than mine. I was thinking about all the things that might be going on with Meredith. Kelly, as any coach would, was thinking about the game.

  She un-puckered her lips and shrugged her shoulders. “Oh well. If she’s not here, she’s not here. Nothing we can do about it. Still gotta play the game.
”

  Again, she was smart. She wasn’t going to fret over something she couldn’t control and she certainly wouldn’t show any frustration over it to the other girls.

  Stricker came in through the doors at the other end of the hall, his jaw tight and his cheeks sucked in.

  “Recorded as absent,” he said. “Even if she shows, she can’t play.”

  “Okay,” Kelly said.

  “I’m sorry, Kelly,” Stricker said, shaking his head. “Nothing I can do.”

  She set the bag of balls down. “Not your fault. She knows the rules. So do the other girls. We’ll be fine.”

  But they weren’t.

  The girls were rattled in the locker room as soon as Kelly mentioned that Meredith wouldn’t be playing. Eyes wide, they began to fidget and I could see the anxiety take hold.

  Except for Megan. She just stared at her hands and shook her head

  They carried the anxiety out on the floor with them. They were disoriented, out of sync, unable to do what they’d been prepared to do. They missed open shots, threw the ball away, missed defensive assignments. Kelly yelled, screamed, pleaded, all to no avail. I sat there, helpless and mute.

  Episcopal, smelling blood early, went ahead and cut open a gaping wound in the Coronado team. They won by thirty two points.

  Kelly kept her post game speech short, all of the girls hanging their heads, the collective disappointment clouding the room like the smoke after a brushfire. There was no point in getting on them. They knew they had come out and tanked. Their own knowledge of the failure was far more effective than anything she could’ve told them.

  She turned to me in the hallway after we’d stepped out of the locker room. “You going to look for her?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Wouldn’t finding her help your case with Chuck?”

  “I don’t know. She won’t talk to me so far. And it’s not like her father is a fan of mine. Not my business.”

  She perched her hands on her hips, her elbows forming sharp angles at her sides. “I think you should look for her.”

  “No offense, but I’m not here to save your program.”