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.