Die Job (16 page)

“Come,” Coach Peet called in a gruff voice.

I pushed open the door. His metal desk was relatively bare of papers, but football trophies of varying heights stood along two sides of the desk’s top, like soldiers on guard. Three
folding metal chairs sat in front of the desk, and a pile of what looked like lost-and-found stuff—shoes, jerseys, an umbrella, some books—cluttered one corner. “Do you have a moment?” I asked.

He looked down at me over the condor nose. “Who are you?”

“I’m—”

“Oh, you were at the ghost hunt. What do you want?”

His tone and manner were less than welcoming, but I plowed ahead. “It’s about what happened—”

He scraped back his chair and stood, revealing a yellow and white St. Elizabeth Sabertooths jersey and basketball shorts over hairy legs. A whistle hung midway down his chest. “I don’t have time,” he said, scooping up a basketball from under his desk. “Got a class to teach.”

“I’ll walk with you,” I said, backing up so he could get past me into the hall.

“Unh,” he grunted.

I took that as permission and walked beside him as he strode toward the gym. “I just want to know more about Braden McCullers. Was he a good student? A good football player? Did he get along well with the other guys on the team?”

Peet shot me a sideways glance. “You went to school here, didn’t you? Eight or ten years back? Played volleyball, right?”

It was more like twelve years ago, but I just said, “Right.”

“What the hell’s in this for you?”

I gave him a puzzled look. “In it? Nothing. But there are some ugly rumors going around about Rachel Whitley and I want to dispel them.”

He worked his lips in and out. “Whitley. Don’t know the name. She’s not an athlete.”

So that made her a second-class citizen? Or worse, a suitable murder suspect? I tamped down my rising irritation. “Being an athlete isn’t everything.”

He gave a crack of laughter, the sound Columbus must have heard when he announced the world wasn’t flat. “Okay. McCullers. Outstanding wide receiver. Recruited by Notre Dame and LSU but hadn’t committed yet. He was considering MIT.”

His tone said what he thought of that choice. “Good student. At least, I never had to go to bat for him, try to get teachers to bump his grades up so he’d stay eligible. Wish I could say that for a few more of my players.” Rubbing a hand across his jaw, he pinched his lower lip between his thumb and forefinger. “A bit too much of a straight arrow, though. You know what I mean—turning in teammates who might have had a coupla beers before driving home after a game, testifying against a buddy who was up on vandalism charges—”

“And that’s a bad thing?” Keeping drunk drivers off the street was a darn good thing, in my opinion. Ditto for vandals.

He frowned at me. “Hell, yeah. Undermines the teamwork. Makes players doubt your commitment. Hard to win unless all the guys on the field trust each other.”

Ye gods. I let that one pass without comment because Coach Peet was pushing through the gym door and a straggly line of high schoolers in gym clothes quieted as he came in. From the smell, I was betting some of these kids hadn’t run their tee shirts through the wash in at least a couple of weeks.

The coach turned to face me, putting his back to the students, and spoke in an undertone. “You want my opinion, it was suicide. He threw himself down the stairs at Rothmere. That bit about a werewolf smothering him at the hospital”—he shook his head sharply—“that reeks of cover-up. Maybe he managed to smother himself and the hospital’s afraid of being sued. Or maybe one of his folks did it if the docs told ’em he was going to be a vegetable. I think he did himself in. Ever since he got into that study—the one testing the new antidepressant—he’s been real unpredictable with his moods.”

The coach’s words left me with my mouth agape. Was it even possible to smother yourself? I didn’t know.

“Where were you Sunday night?”

His eyebrows crinkled his brow. “None of your—Oh, what the hell. Home. Reviewing film from last week’s game. Happy?”

He was half turned away from me when I got in my final question. “Who gets Braden’s spot on the roster?” I asked.

“Farber.” And the coach blew his whistle, either to signal the end of our conversation or the start of gym class.

I left to the sound of basketballs dribbling on the slick floor. Walking back toward Mom’s, I thought about what I’d learned. Braden was a good student and, apparently, an honorable kid. Too honorable for the coach’s taste, and probably for his teammates’ taste. He was participating in a study for an antidepressant drug. How could I find out more about that? I thought I’d read somewhere that antidepressant meds could, paradoxically, increase the chance of suicide, especially in teens. Was it possible that Coach Peet’s speculations were right? No way. A
hospital wouldn’t make up a story like that to avoid a lawsuit . . . would they? I wished I could talk to Braden’s parents again, but they’d gone out of town.

Mark Crenshaw was supposedly Braden’s best buddy. Maybe he’d know something. Maybe he’d even know what was bothering Braden the week before he died, what Braden was talking about when he told Rachel he might need to “intervene” in something. And Lonnie Farber would probably be worth talking to as well. How badly did he want to be a starter? He’d certainly done everything he could to confuse things at Rothmere. Had there been more intent behind his pranks than just stirring the pot?

Arriving back at the salon, I took a moment to look at the line of clouds bearing down from the east. The puffy harbingers from earlier had clearly invited their friends and relatives to join the party. The sky was a hazier blue and the sounds of a weather forecast greeted me as I entered Violetta’s. Mom had brought down the twelve-inch television from her bedroom and balanced it atop a stack of fashion magazines on the counter. A weatherman with a grim face was pointing to a swirling mass in the Atlantic north of the Bahamas. Rachel, Mom, and Althea gathered around the TV.

“Where’s Stella?” I asked.

“Darryl came by and picked her up,” Mom said. “I guess he’s decided that they’re going inland for a couple of days. He said something about having a reservation at a Red Roof Inn outside Macon.”

“Oh. Well, it doesn’t look like her customers will miss her,” I said, looking around at the customer-free salon. “Maybe we should think about evacuating,” I added as the weatherman started talking about Horatio becoming a category three storm and about winds and storm surges.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Grace,” Mom said shortly. “This house has withstood a century and a half of storms. It’s not about to collapse on us now.”

“What about you, Althea?” She lived much closer to the beach than we did in a cottage she and William had bought for a pittance when they wed and which was worth a quarter million or more now.

“Vi’s offered to put me up for a couple of days, and I’m going to bring my stuff over early tomorrow, if it still looks like Horatio is headed toward us. Personally, I think it’s just playing chicken with us and it’ll make landfall way north of here.”

I didn’t ask Althea when she’d had time to pick up her meteorology degree, knowing I’d only get blasted for sassing her.

“I want to go down to the beach,” Rachel announced. “I’ll bet the waves are, like, awesome.”

“I’ll drive you down,” I said, earning disapproving looks from Mom and Althea. “We won’t go in the water,” I reassured them.

“Cool!” Rachel said. She looked much better than earlier, with the smeared mascara scrubbed off her face and a grin replacing her woebegone look. What had Mom said a couple of days ago about youth being resilient? Here was proof.

The waves didn’t achieve the heights of those on Hawaii’s north shore or anything, but they rolled onto the beach with tremendous crashes, sending up a spray that misted Rachel and me as we walked along the beach a couple of miles south of St. Elizabeth. I loved the briny smell that filled the air, the smell of salt and water and seaweed
and something mysterious dredged up from miles beneath the surface. Surprisingly, we weren’t the only ones out there; a couple walked a golden retriever who was busy keeping the gulls off the sand, and a lunatic in a wetsuit rode a surfboard in almost to the beach before paddling back out to catch another wave.

“I wish I could do that,” Rachel said, watching the surfer.

“You have a death wish? We’ll be hearing about that guy on the news tonight,” I said.

“You sound like my mom.”

This was apparently not a compliment. Stifling the thought that I might be getting stodgy, I said, “Your mom just wants to keep you alive long enough to spend all her savings on college tuition.”

Rachel grinned at that and took off running down the sand toward the water. I fought the urge to call her back. She was barefoot and let the surf just lick her toes before running back toward me as another series of waves boomed on the beach.

I pulled my white cardigan around me against a chill that came from the wind rather than the air temperature. My feet were bare, too, and I worked them into the sand, searching for yesterday’s sunny warmth stored somewhere beneath the top layer. “I need you to tell me about the kids who were on the ghost hunt, especially those who might have wanted to harm Braden,” I said.

“Nobody would want to hurt Braden,” she protested automatically, then made a moue of disgust. “Like, I sound really stupid, since obviously someone did hurt Braden.”

I pulled my feet out of the sand and we walked, Rachel scanning the ground for shells. “Start with Mark,” I suggested, when she didn’t say anything.

“Mark is—was—his best friend,” she said, tucking a strand of black hair behind her ear. “They do everything together—football, classes, even dating. Braden and I double-dated with Mark and Lindsay a few times; in fact, I think Braden may have dated Lindsay a couple years back, before she and Mark got together.”

That was interesting—could there be some unresolved jealousies or a teen love triangle at work? “Do you like Mark?”

Rachel shrugged. “Sure. He’s okay. A bit . . . intense, but that might be because his folks, like, put so much pressure on him.”

“What do you mean?”

“To hear Lindsay tell it, they’re always after him about his grades and being involved in the ‘right’ clubs and doing volunteer stuff and taking on leadership roles so he can get into the Naval Academy and carry on the family tradition. His dad is really keen on him being in the navy.”

“You mean his stepdad?”

“I guess.” She hesitated, kicking up some sand, which the wind promptly blew back at us. “Sorry. You know . . .”

“What?”

“Lindsay told me once that she thinks maybe his dad . . . Mark’s dad hits him,” she said in a rush.

“Did Mark tell her that?”

“Oh, no.” She shook her head violently. “He told her that she was crazy, that he got his bruises playing football.”

“Plausible.” But not necessarily the truth. I thought of the bruise on Joy Crenshaw’s wrist. “Did Lindsay tell anyone, like her folks or a teacher?”

“I don’t think so. I’m sure not. I mean, it’s not like she was sure or anything.”

Shoot. What was I supposed to do with this information, if anything?
Lindsay was a teenager; it was understandable that she would feel uncomfortable making an issue out of possible abuse, especially if her boyfriend denied it. I, however, was an adult who might be expected to do something, although I only had secondhand hearsay plus my observation of Mark’s bruised face. Surely, I argued with myself, his teachers would have noticed if there were a problem. Pushing the dilemma aside to deal with later, I tried to return to my original line of thought. “What about the others—Lonnie, Tyler, Lindsay, the other kids who were at Rothmere? How did they get along with Braden?”

“Lonnie had, like, issues with him,” Rachel said, bending to pick up an interesting shell. Turning it over in her hand once or twice, she rejected it and let it fall. “Braden testified or talked to the police or something about Lonnie’s brother being the one who vandalized those cars at the high school last year. His brother got sent to juvie and Lonnie was really pissed about it. They got into a fight in gym, but Coach Peet broke it up. Lonnie broke Braden’s nose, though.”

“Lovely. Did he get suspended?”

Rachel shook her head. “Nope. Coach said Braden, like, had it coming and didn’t tell the principal. Coach said now they were even and could go back to being teammates. Go Sabertooths!” she finished with an ironic fist pump.

We turned around to head back toward where I’d parked my Ford Fiesta. The wind at our backs grabbed at my ponytail and flicked it into my face. It pulled Rachel’s black hair over her eyes until she looked like Cousin Itt. She pushed her bangs back with one hand, then made a visor of it, scanning the ocean. The surfer was up again, a mostly black splotch atop a green and yellow board that stood out against the heavy gray green of the waves. He carved a path along
the inside of the wave, trailing his hand in the water, and Rachel clapped, laughing delightedly. “I’m going to learn to surf,” she announced, turning to me.

“Lindsay?” I prompted.

“She’s amazing,” Rachel said. “She set a school record for kills last year when she was a junior. She and Mark are, like, the perfect couple.”

“Are you and Lindsay close?”

She waggled her hand. “You know. Not, like, BFFs, but not enemies or anything. They run with a different crowd.” She didn’t sound jealous or bitter about not being part of the popular crowd. I’d never minded, either. I’d been happy with my semi-nerdy friends in chorus and my best friend, Vonda.

“What do you know about Braden taking part in a drug study?” I asked.

“Look!” Rachel pointed toward the water. The surfer was up again, zipping toward the beach, when suddenly the front end of his surfboard flipped up and seemed to hit him. He toppled into the water, disappearing from sight. After a moment, the brightly colored board popped to the surface, but there was no sign of the surfer. Both of us scanned the waves and shore anxiously for thirty seconds. I willed the man to appear. Nothing. I looked up and down the beach, but the couple with the dog were gone.