by Karen Young
“Do I have to? I’d rather s-stay and look for him.”
He ruffled her hair. “Aren’t you working on that perfect-attendance award? All it takes is one absence to ruin it. You wouldn’t want that, would you?”
“I guess.”
Watching, Nick wondered how Cam knew about Kendy’s obsession with that goofy award. He knew their dad didn’t have a clue about anything he or his little sister did in school. “We gotta go, Kendy.”
“Okay.” With a sniff, she took the paper towel from Cam and wiped her eyes, but she was still distressed. Her mouth was all wobbly and she looked pitiful. But she stuck her hand in Cam’s when he offered his.
“Where did you find the collar, Kendy?” he asked, falling into step with them.
“It was all the way around at the front door. I always let him in at the back and when he wasn’t there, I went to the front.”
“Was it buckled or unbuckled?” He saw Cam’s narrow-eyed look and wished he’d waited until they got in the car to ask.
“Unbuckled.”
“There you are! I was just coming to get you both.” His mom, looking flustered and pretty, flashed a smile at Cam. “Good morning. Sorry to disturb you so early, but Kendy—”
“Is very worried about Graham,” Cam said, giving Rachel a slow smile. “You look good enough to…hug.”
Nick flicked a glance at them, then looked quickly away. If that scene on the couch hadn’t given him a hint, the way Cam was looking at his mom now definitely did.
Rachel’s smile died when she saw that Kendall had been crying. “Oh, honey, don’t cry. I’ve told Gran to be on the lookout for Graham. We’ll find him.”
Another sniff, but Kendy’s face was still sad as anything. It made Nick wish he could stick around and try to find that stupid cat for her.
“Cam’s gonna look while I’m at school,” she said.
Rachel gave him a soft look. “Thank you. We appreciate it. If I didn’t have such a packed calendar, I’d stay home myself to search for him. My mother is calling the Animal Rescue people.”
“No! They’ll put him to sleep,” Kendy cried.
Cam squatted on the ground and put his hand on her back. “No, they won’t. Even if they do pick him up today, they never put animals to sleep so soon. And that’s another place I’ll check for you.”
“Come inside and let’s change your shoes, honey,” Rachel said. “Nick, be ready to leave in three minutes.” And with another flushed and flustered look at Cam, she mouthed a silent thank-you and took Kendall inside.
“She looked like she wanted to kiss you,” Nick said to Cam after they were gone.
“Kendy? Well, Graham means a lot to her.”
“No, I meant my mom looked like she wanted to kiss you,” Nick said with a grin, and got a kick out of the fact that Cam definitely turned red, pretty much the same way as his mom had a minute ago.
“Would you have a problem with that, Nick?”
Nick gave him a sideways look as if considering it, but he’d already decided. He grinned. “No, so long as you respect her in the morning.”
Cam dropped his head, laughed softly. Then, after a beat, he reached out and grabbed Nick’s neck in a choke hold, but stopped short when he let out a yelp. “What? That hurt?” Cam said, looking concerned. “Where?”
Nick gave an offhand laugh. “Nothing, just a twinge in my shoulder. Took a dive on my bike yesterday.”
“Your mom mentioned it,” Cam said, giving him a shrewd look. When his gaze settled on the bruise at Nick’s temple, his frown deepened. “That’s a pretty nasty bump on your head. Sure you didn’t tangle with a bus?” He watched as Nick raked a hand through his hair, forgetting it would expose the scrapes on his palms. And before Nick had a chance to react, Cam had a grip on both his wrists, turning his hands palm up.
“Jesus, Nick. That was a joke about the bus. Are you hurt anywhere else?”
“Hey, it’s nothing. It looks worse than it is. I’m okay. I didn’t just crash the bike, I went ass-end over the handlebars down into a ditch that was almost a ravine. Got pretty banged up. I didn’t show Mom all this stuff. She’d just worry.”
It was a half lie, but Nick hadn’t figured out what to do or who to tell about what really happened. He didn’t see how he could without harm coming to Kendy or somebody else in his family. But Cam didn’t seem to be buying his story a hundred percent. He was giving Nick that cool study that he did real well. “Did your mom talk to you about keeping low for a couple of days, Nick? Hang close to home. And don’t quit the team, if you’re thinking about doing that. Pete needs a little time to strengthen his case against Tyson.”
“I’m cool, okay? It’s not a problem ’cause, except for school and sports, I’m grounded, so I wasn’t gonna be having much of a social life, anyway. And we’ve got a game tonight and I’m starting at first base for junior varsity. I wouldn’t want to let the team down. Plus if I made noises about quitting, it’s bound to make Coach suspicious, don’t you think?”
“Probably. But your mom and I will be in the stands keeping an eye on you, anyway. Just be careful, Nick. Don’t put yourself in a position where there’s nobody else around. Remember that.” Cam tilted his head, giving Nick another sharp once-over, as if he might read something more in his face than Nick had told. “Nothing you want to tell me, Nick?”
There was plenty he wanted to tell, such as what Big Guy said just before he shoved Nick out of the pickup yesterday. “Bad things can happen. You don’t want to wind up like Jack Ford.” At the time he said it, Nick was still dazed and didn’t remember it, but later it came back to him. You didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what it meant. Cam was right all along in not believing his son committed suicide. But would he feel any better about it knowing he was killed to keep him quiet?
Just then, to his relief, his mom honked the horn as she backed out of the drive. “Look, I’ve gotta go, Cam. I’ll see you later.” And by the time the day was done, he hoped he would have formulated some kind of plan about how to handle this situation. The way it stood now, nothing short of Coach dropping dead could fix it.
It was while he was sitting in Biology that the idea came to him. It was all he could do to sit through the rest of that period, then when the bell rang he was the first one out the door. He found a place beneath the stairs and whipped out his cell phone. Thanks to Ward, he had the number. He needed to call Jimbo Rivers.
Twenty-Five
Rachel arrived at her office that morning distracted and uneasy. The disappearance of Kendy’s cat bothered her in a way that she couldn’t quite pin down. Cats disappeared all the time, as she’d told Kendy, especially tomcats. Graham, although neutered, might simply have had the urge to prowl and he’d come home in a day or two. She was grateful that Cam offered to look for him, which was just one more mark in his favor to endear him to Kendy.
And to Rachel. There were several reasons she could name that had made her fall in love with Cam, and his thoughtfulness to her children and her mother were at the top. She wasn’t certain when her feelings for Cam had changed. Only a few months ago, she’d been certain that Cam could never get beyond his bitterness over her failure to recognize that something was pushing Jack to the breaking point. Rachel herself had trouble coming to terms with the fact that she’d failed to save Jack. Now it seemed they’d come full circle, both of them. It was hard to believe where they were today. Incredible, really.
At her desk now, she put thoughts of Cam and Kendy and Graham out of her mind and booted up her computer. In minutes, she was scanning files. It was impossible to believe that Tyson could have been abusing boys for five years and leave no trail. There had to be one or two red flags, maybe more. Her search was confined to athletes—especially the gifted ones—going back to the time Monk Tyson first arrived at Rose Hill.
Two hours later, she sat back and rubbed her eyes. There were some athletes whose grades had slipped or who had dropped out of school. Several had g
otten involved in drugs. But over a five-year period, there didn’t appear to be an alarming increase in troubling behavior, at least, no more than was in the general enrollment. She glanced at the printout of the dozen or so student files she’d pulled. They were athletes who were still in school and she planned to call them in, one by one. It might be a waste of time, but it was worth a try. The most troubled student appeared to be Jason Pate, or rather, Jason was the only one who had revealed his angst.
There were no other suicides, only Jack Ford’s.
She admitted with disappointment that she’d really wanted to find something specific, a pattern of troubled behavior or excessive dropouts—just something—that she could take back to Cam to prove that Jack’s death was more than just a simple depression-induced teen tragedy.
It was there. She just had to find it.
Nick managed to make it through most of Monday without a personal encounter with anybody who’d been at the house party on the lake. He wasn’t sure how it would go down when he came face-to-face with any of those guys. But, heck, what could they do, kill him? Somebody already tried that and it wasn’t even anybody he knew.
He should have known it would be Ferdy Jordan who took the first shot. Nick was at his locker when he looked up into Ferdy’s face on one side of him and B. J. Folsom on the other. A stream of students milled around them, but nobody seemed to notice he was being strong-armed except a couple more players who’d been at the party. No help there. “What the hell happened to you Friday night, Forrester? You get lost in the woods?”
“Yeah, something like that.” Nick tossed in his math text and, with his head deep in the locker, pretended to look for a biology notebook. That way, he wouldn’t even see what weapon they used to kill him, he thought with dark humor.
“We thought you drowned or something.” Ferdy again.
Out of the locker now, Nick shrugged and kept his mouth shut.
B.J. moved in front of him, so that anybody watching wouldn’t see his face. “That was a friggin’ stupid thing to do, you know that?”
“It seemed a good idea at the time,” he said cautiously.
Ferdy crossed his big arms and nudged him, so that Nick was pinned against the locker. “That was a very select group, Forrester. You won’t get a second chance.”
He didn’t want a second chance. In fact, he’d already primed himself to drop sports altogether, but that might screw up the official investigation. Meanwhile, there were two games tonight. He’d have to show up. Junior varsity played first, and then the team was required to sit on the bench when the seniors played. After talking to Jimbo, he’d come up with a plan. It bothered him to go against what his mom and Cam had warned, but they didn’t know they were in jeopardy. What the heck was he supposed to do?
Nick held up his notebook in a valiant attempt not to appear scared shitless. “Gotta go, guys.”
“Not yet, you don’t.” Ferdy again.
Together, Ferdy and B.J. made four-hundred-plus pounds of muscle. They could crush him like a bug, but they could hardly do it now. And even without Cam and his mom’s warnings, he wouldn’t be dumb enough to be caught alone again like he was Saturday. Nick took a deep breath. “Look, the party wasn’t what I expected. So I decided to split. No, problem, right?”
Ferdy stood looking at him long enough for Nick to start sweating. “What’s going on with your mom?”
“Huh?” He blinked.
“Your old lady,” B.J. said. “She’s been calling us in all day.”
Nick was genuinely baffled. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. She called all who in today?”
Ferdy leaned one beefy shoulder against the lockers. “Me and B.J., Robbie, Kyle. We’re not sure who all else. And the day’s not over. We each go in and have a chat with her and you say you didn’t know anything about it? Nothing happened at the party that you wanted to share with your mama?”
“No. Not a word. And I don’t have a clue what she’s doing.” He shrugged, but inside he was chilled to the bone. “It must be something—”
“Forrester,” Ferdy said softly, “let me give you a little piece of advice to pass on to your mama. And this is coming not just from me and B.J. here, but from the team. She needs to stay out of Coach Tyson’s house. You got that?”
He got it.
It was midafternoon when Rachel stood up, rubbing her aching back, and thought of going to the break room to get a cold drink. The interviews had been a bust. If there was anything going on and the players were aware of it, they were not going to tell it to her. Maybe when Pete’s investigation began to heat up, he’d have more luck getting them to talk. So, all she’d managed to do today was to put off work that would have to be sandwiched into tomorrow’s schedule. Somehow.
“I know a great massage technique to fix that.”
It was Cam. She smiled in surprise. “Hi, what are you doing here?”
“Couple of things.” He came inside, closing the door behind him, and headed for her desk. Or so she thought. Instead, he came around it. “First this…” He caught her up and kissed her. Caught off guard, it took a moment before she grabbed hold of his shirtfront and kissed him back. It would have been nice to do more than simply enjoy such a new and heady feeling, but she was in her workplace and had a famous open-door policy. A student might walk in at any moment.
Pushing at him gently, she moved out of his arms. “As nice as that was, I don’t think it would do me any good professionally if a student walked in.”
“I know.” He touched her face and then moved back to the front of her desk. “I’m on my way to see Pete and I thought you’d probably want to go with me when you hear what happened.”
She glanced around at the files strewn over her desk, on the credenza behind her and at her feet on the floor. “I can’t go anywhere. I’ve spent the day scanning files and being stonewalled by jocks. If I don’t want to have a horrendous day tomorrow, I need to stay here and catch up.” She gestured to a chair. “But tell me what happened.”
He didn’t sit down. “Jimbo Rivers told me he had a call from Nick. Apparently, after he got to school, he used his cell phone. Nick didn’t just have an accident on his bike yesterday, Rachel. He was deliberately run off the road by two thugs who threatened his family, you, Kendy and Dinah.”
Before he’d finished, Rachel had sunk back into her chair, her face pale.
“That’s the reason he slipped into the house after going to the grocery store,” Cam added. “He knew after one look at him we’d guess it was more than just a tumble on his bike.
“There’s more, Rachel.” Cam rubbed the side of his neck. “We’re not the only ones suspicious about Jack’s death now. Nick has it in his head that Jack was murdered.”
Rachel sat trying to take it in. “Why did he call Jimbo about this?”
“He thought Jimbo might be able to shed light on who Tyson would send to do the deed, I presume.”
She put a hand on her throat. “We told him we’d take care of it. He has to stay out of this, Cam. He promised he’d let us—and Pete—handle it.”
“I think he believes a threat to his family trumps that promise.”
“He has a game tonight. I don’t want him playing.”
“I’m on my way to talk to Pete right now. I want to hear what he thinks we should do, but I don’t see how Nick can be harmed playing baseball with the stands full of people watching him. You and I will be there. I told him that this morning.”
She was on her feet again, pulling her purse out of a desk drawer. “You’re right. I want to go with you. Just let me check if Marta can drive Nick home after school. I don’t want him hitching a ride with Kristin or anybody else. I would speak to him directly, but this is the hour he’s at the gym. He’ll be dressed out on the field. If I pull him out to talk to him, Monk might get suspicious.”
“He might.” Cam went to the door and opened it. “Let’s go. Pete’s expecting us.”
Pete ushered Cam and Ra
chel into his office and waited for Angela to distribute coffee all around. She politely served Rachel and the chief, then finally Cam, bestowing a brilliant smile on him as she did so. Ignoring Pete’s amused look and Rachel’s more interested one, Cam thanked her and launched into the reason he came.
The chief listened intently until Cam got to the part where Nick’s suspicions coincided with his own regarding Jack’s death. Pete sputtered in his coffee. “How in hell did he figure it out?”
“I’ll find out more when I get a chance to talk to him, but here’s what Jimbo told me. Nick asked for names of athletes who were in Tyson’s program five years ago when Jimbo and Jack were there. When asked why, Nick told him he’d been threatened after getting run down on his bike.”
Pete looked thoughtful. “We knew he’d stumbled into some mean territory, but I’m trying to figure how he was led to suspect Jack was murdered.”
Rachel spoke up. “Nick told Jimbo that Tyson set the thugs on him to keep him from talking. He wanted to know which of Monk’s former athletes that might be.”
“Jimbo was in the sports program a full four years, three years after Jack died,” Cam said, “so Nick was right in thinking he was a good source of information. It was only after Jimbo had given him the names, thinking that Nick would come to me for help, that Nick revealed his theory about how Jack died.”
“Are these names the same thugs I’m checking out now?” Pete asked.
“Yeah.” Cam shoved pages torn from the notebook across the desk. “And after I told Jimbo you were taking a look at a few people he’d mentioned, he said he’d done some more serious thinking. After giving me the names, he said he’d be happy to answer any questions you might have now.”
“I think in hindsight, he’s worried about Ward,” Rachel said. “We probably planted that seed in our visit to him, don’t you think so, Cam?”
“Probably. But whatever the reason, we’ve got names now. He’s narrowed it down to six players he thinks might have been persuaded to do Tyson’s bidding back then.”