“Tatum! Put that down!” When she didn’t move fast enough, I grabbed it out of her hands.
“I’m so glad you like it!” She smiled at me.
“I didn’t say—I mean, thank you, but no, I don’t need any underwear.”
“That’s where we disagree. If you’re going to be screwing Knox Lynch, then you definitely need new underwear. What you have in your drawer is just…painful.” She shuddered. “So here.” Out came a shiny black scrap.
I grabbed that too, and stuffed it with its red cousin into my purse. “Why were you in my underwear drawer?”
“Daisy,” she said seriously, “why wouldn’t I be in your underwear drawer? You’re pretty much my best friend.”
“I am?” I melted. “Thanks, Tatum.”
“And best friends go through each other’s underwear,” she told me. “Here are the matching bras.” She hoisted those above the table. “There are nipple cut-outs! Super sexy!”
Right into my purse they went. “No more, please. And seriously, I’m not even thinking about Knox seeing me in my underwear. Especially something with nipple cut-outs!” I hissed. I could never. “Again, thank you. Did you keep the receipt?”
She passed me the white slip. “Don’t return them. Exchange, at least! Let me think of you having fun with that big slab of a man.”
“He’s a person, you know,” I reminded her, but my mind was on what she thought was going to happen. Knox had dropped me off at my house as Fan Day wrapped up and the players had to meet for an evening practice. He hadn’t even kissed my cheek, but I did feel like there was possibility.
“Did he say anything about why he didn’t get in touch over the summer? Maybe he lost his phone? Or he was in a coma or something?” Tatum asked.
“No, no coma. I don’t know why he didn’t talk to me,” I confessed. Her eyes narrowed, and she nodded. “Tatum…” I bit my lip. “I want to talk to you about something, but you can’t tell the other yoga girls. Promise?”
Solemnly, she crossed her finger in an X over her heart. “I promise.”
“I never…did it before. Did it before, I mean. I know you have lots of experience, and it probably sounds weird that I would be so old and so virginal, but there it is. I won’t be wearing underwear like what you bought for a long time, maybe ever.”
“It doesn’t sound weird,” Tatum disagreed. “I don’t think you should do it with someone unless you care about him. That’s how I operate.”
“What? I’ve read all your texts! I’m not criticizing—I think it’s fine to have fun with men, as long as you’re careful and use protection. You don’t have to pretend,” I told her.
“Yeah.” She swirled the ice in her glass. “I told you before that some of what I write to the yoga girls wasn’t true. And the spin girls, and the ones from Pilates, also. Some of it isn’t totally accurate.”
“You had mentioned that. How much is a lie?” I asked. “Like, what percent?”
“Maybe…” She swirled more vigorously. “Maybe seventy, seventy-five. Or eighty, eighty-five. Ninety.”
“You sound like you’re calling an auction. Is it more like one hundred percent?”
“More like that. But now it will be real for you. You’ll be fucking Knox Lynch!” she crowed.
Oh, God. Would I?
Chapter 10
“And that’s the latest from Woodsmen stadium, where the Woodsmen are not. Here, I should say, in that they’re not around, not in this place, heretofore. Per se, on the premises of Michigan,” the roving reporter told the camera. He was the one who I thought looked like a tween and he was losing the thread of things a little. He cleared his throat. “I’m Austin DeJong, Channel 67 Action News.”
“Just to sum up what Austin has been telling us, the team is not at the stadium because they’ve already left for their first preseason game this Tuesday in Albuquerque, where they’ll take on the Dukes,” the anchor in the studio explained when she came on the screen. “As always, you can watch our twenty-four hours of pre- and postgame Woodsmen coverage right here on northern Michigan’s own Channel 67. Go Woodsmen!”
I already knew that they were gone. I had gotten a voicemail early that morning from Knox, early enough that I hadn’t stirred from bed yet and hadn’t heard my phone ring out in the living room: “Hi. I’m leaving now with the team to go to New Mexico to get ready for the altitude. I’ll see you next week.” Pause. “This is Knox Lynch.”
As I if I would have thought it was anyone else. No one else spoke in that low, deep growl that kind of pulsed through your every body part. At least, it certainly pulsed through my every body part. After listening repeatedly to Knox’s message, I had spent the day messing around in my house, apologizing to Shelby for missing the party, and talking to my brother and his wife, who were living it up in New York before they went on to Europe. Julia was almost giddy with the excitement of hanging out with my brother on what was mostly an extended vacation for them, and I realized what a third-wheel I would have been if I had tagged along. Maybe I would have another chance to go places too, but for this trip, it was better for them to be alone and enjoy their time together.
In the blink of an eye, the news anchor’s face flipped from smiling and animated as she pumped her fist for the Woodsmen, to interested and curious as she moved to the teaser for the next story. “Is there a sixteenth-century art treasure sweltering down in the basement of Emelia Schaub College? After the break, Austin will be back to show us what he found earlier today in an exclusive Channel 67 investigation. Stay tuned.”
That was the story I’d been waiting and watching for. Domenico had called me, nearly hysterical, saying that a reporter named Austin DeJong from Channel 67 Action News had contacted him with questions about the Pisanello portrait. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” the professor had said, his voice high and fast. “He kept mentioning the Mafia and different kinds of pasta, which is all he seems to know of Italy. This is terrible, terrible!”
I had tried to calm him down, but if the news teaser I had just seen was any preview of what they were going to report, there were going to be a lot of errors. Pisanello painted in the 15th century, not the 16th; we were sweltering in the attics, not the basement, thank you very much. According to Domenico, after Austin DeJong had asked him a series of inane questions, he had wanted to come into the attics to get footage of the collection itself, which the professor absolutely forbid. But the reporter had gotten ahold of the president of the college too, and she saw this as great “PR.” She had called Domenico and urged his full cooperation with Channel 67.
“I won’t cooperate. I will not!” he swore to me, and I assured him that of course, I wouldn’t either. The thought of a TV camera in my face, bright lights while someone asked me questions, was not something I could entertain.
And unfortunately, Domenico’s worst fears about the news coverage were realized when the story started to roll. They first showed images of priceless, Renaissance art: some of Michelangelo’s frescos, the Pietà, and the Mona Lisa. Then, strangely, they switched to images of some modern works by Picasso and Georgia O’Keeffe. “Is one of these masterpieces down in the basement of a local college?” a voiceover intoned.
Well, no, because no one had moved the Sistine Chapel or a giant marble statue out of the Vatican, and those other works were in major museums like the Louvre, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid (I hadn’t taken those art history classes for nothing).
“Maybe!” the reporter answered himself excitedly, and showed an exterior shot of Butterfield Hall, where we did have the collection tucked away in the attics. He talked about Professor Amico, his history and his pedigree, and a little about Pisanello, which he pronounced as “Pizza-nello.” Then he discussed the family behind the portrait, the Viscontis, mentioning that they were former “kings of Italy” (false) and now were interested in “returning the portrait to its rightful place” in their family. That was hugely false, despite what
Enrico Visconti had been saying in his hundreds of faxes, and it made my blood boil. Herbert Whitaker had bought it and given it to the college. It didn’t belong to Enrico Visconti even if it was of his ancestor.
My phone started to ring almost immediately as the segment ended with Austin DeJong promising that he would keep the news anchor updated on this “exciting local mystery of priceless art, missing for almost a thousand years!” (false, again.) The call was from Domenico, freaking out more. He was about to drive over to the college because he was sure that someone was trying to break in to steal the collection even as we spoke. “Be careful!” I told him. “I’m sure the art is fine, with the new security. I worry more about you having a car accident or hitting a deer on the way.”
“I worry about the safety of that reporter, after I’m through with him!” Domenico seethed. “He was wrong about everything. Does he really think we have a Georgia O’Keeffe?”
“No one who knows anything thinks that,” I soothed him. “Call me when you get to the college so I know you’re ok. And the art is ok too,” I added, so he knew that I cared about it.
Domenico started to answer this but hung up on me while he was in the middle of a sentence, and I decided that I was going to have to drive over to the college, too, to check on him myself. I hurried out to my car and went as fast as I dared, but it still took me about an hour to make it up to the attic.
Domenico had beat me there and was stomping around, waving the binder with the catalog of the collection and letting papers from it flutter to the floor, kicking over packing stuff we hadn’t taken down to the dumpster yet, and generally making a mess. His hair stood up straight from his head and instead of a shirt, he had on an old-fashioned men’s PJ top, with his clip-on tie hanging off the collar of it.
“Daisy! I’m sure someone has been in here. If not the news people, then treasure hunters. Or Visconti’s minions. Things are out of place.” He knocked over a small table with the typewriter, which fell with a clunk, and scattered a ream of paper across the floor, mixing it with the typed pages of the catalog that he had already dropped.
I could see how things were getting out of place. “Was the alarm still on when you got here?”
“Yes,” he acknowledged.
“If it was, then there’s no way that anyone could have gotten in without knowing the code. No one can get past this system. The college said it was state of the art,” I said confidently. This was maybe not true, if someone was determined enough, but Domenico knew even less about electronic stuff than I did, so he went with it. “I’m sure that the Viscontis aren’t going to break the law, and neither will the news people. As for treasure hunters, I don’t think any will come. No one believes anything on Channel 67 since they did that whole segment on the cat who could talk, and it turned out to be the owner whispering from behind the couch. I mean, you could see her ponytail sticking out next to the cushion,” I reminded the professor.
“That was ridiculous,” he agreed. “But…”
“I’ll clean up here so that when we come in tomorrow, we’ll be all set to get back to work. If anyone calls you, tell them ‘no comment.’ Or say they should talk to the PR department of the college.”
“Is there one?” he asked.
“I’m not sure, but that will distract them for a little while.” I had a thought. “If you do want a spokesperson, you should ask Tatum. She could talk to reporters for hours and they’d have no clue what she was saying.”
“That’s an excellent idea!” he congratulated me. He kissed both my cheeks. “I don’t know what I would do without you, Daisy.”
“You don’t have to worry about that,” I told him. “Tell me about your date.”
“It was a lovely luncheon,” he said, and started to smile. I got him to sit down and I kept on straightening while he talked, but after a while, I saw him yawn.
“Domenico, you should go home. Get some sleep and don’t worry about the collection any more tonight.” He stood slowly, yawned again, and said goodnight. I went up on my tiptoes to look through the window to watch him leave the building four stories below me. He walked slowly toward the parking lot.
It was a little odd, alone in the attics with no one else in the building. It was very, very quiet, and there were a lot of strange shadows in the quad below. That was why I jumped so high when my phone rang. But then I got a huge smile as I answered. “Hi,” I said happily.
“Hi, Daisy.” Knox sounded happy, too. I could hear it in his deep voice all the way from Albuquerque. “Did I wake you?”
“No, and I’m so glad you called. How is New Mexico? Are you used to playing so high up yet?”
“I better be by tomorrow night. The Dukes look tougher this year.” He told me more about the scouting reports on the team, and more about the city when I asked him, but his knowledge of that was limited. “I never get to see too much beyond the stadiums and the team hotel,” he explained.
“Still, it’s lucky to get to go.”
“It is,” he said. “But I am sorry I’m here.”
“Is the altitude bothering you?” I asked. “Or your shoulder?”
“Not at all.” He paused. “I meant, I’d rather be there, in Michigan.”
“It is the best state, in my vast experience,” I agreed.
“You’re there,” Knox said.
“Oh.” And I could almost feel my heart lift up in my chest and expand. I couldn’t answer any more than that one word because of all the happiness swirling in my throat.
“It’s pretty late. Are you going to bed soon?”
That sounded almost intimate. “No, I’m at the college,” I told him, then I had to explain about the news story, which I insisted he try to find online to see for himself, and how Domenico had come charging up to the attics, sure that there were already cat burglars there. “I got him to go home, thank goodness. I’ll clean up a little more then I’ll go, too.”
“It’s almost midnight. Is anyone else around?” Knox asked.
I looked out the window again. “No, even the quad is empty.” It made me suddenly shiver. “You know, maybe I’ll just leave. All this can wait until the morning.”
“Stay on the phone with me and head out to your car, Daisy. Will you do that?”
It seemed like a wonderful idea. “I’m going right now. It’s pretty dark.” I heard a noise at the end of the hallway as I locked the door and turned on the alarm. “I think I hear the security guard. Hello?” I called, but no one answered. “I guess it was nothing,” I told Knox.
“Probably nothing. Can you see anyone?”
“No. I’m walking to the elevator.” The stairwell, with its dim lights, was not my favorite place at any time. The elevator wasn’t the most reliable—but the light came on when I pressed the button, and I heard movement. Knox talked to me about some issues the Woodsmen defense was having with the addition of two new starters for this season.
“Keep that to yourself,” he said.
“If Channel 67 contacts me, it will be ‘no comment’ about the art and ‘no comment’ about the Woodsmen,” I assured him. “I’m in the building lobby.”
“Still no security?” he asked.
“No. Where could those guys be?”
“It doesn’t matter, you’re fine,” Knox told me. “I’m going to stay quiet so you can pay attention to what’s around you as you walk. Go right to your car. It should take you seven minutes.”
“You timed it?” I glanced around before stepping out into the quad.
“I know your pace and I know the distance. You walking yet?”
I was going to make it in fewer than seven minutes, because my walk was more of a jog. “Mmhm.” Knox didn’t say a lot more either until I announced that I was in my car.
“Lock your doors,” he reminded me.
“Done. Thanks for staying on the phone.” I hesitated. “Why do you get a little, um, nervous about me doing things alone?”
“I’d just rather you were with someone.�
��
As would I. With him, for example.
“Send me a message when you get home, please,” he requested.
“Ok. Knox?”
“Yeah?”
Say it, Daisy! “I wish you were in Michigan, too.”
∞
“He’s on fire. Absolute fire!” Herb exclaimed.
“Going like gangbusters. Lynch is cookin’ with gas tonight, Buzz!”
I had the sound muted on the TV broadcast of the Woodsmen game so I could listen to the local radio broadcasters. They had been in the booth practically since the inception of the team and listening to them was like taking a step back in time.
And I loved how they were talking about Knox. He really was on fire, going like gangbusters with two sacks already in the first half and racking up all the defensive stats. I felt the same way as I had when my brother had swum in big meets on TV: proud out of my mind, and sick with nerves. The difference was that Dylan’s longest race lasted about four minutes, and this was an entire half of football. I was on edge until Herb and Buzz mentioned that most of the starters would rest for the second half. The Woodsmen were up by three touchdowns and the backups could hang on to take the win. I started to breathe more normally as the scene switched from Yucca Stadium to the halftime show.
The other big difference between watching Knox and watching my brother was that I was afraid the entire time he played that Knox was going to get injured. Dylan had hurt his back very badly once at a meet, but that was a freak occurrence for a swimmer. His injuries had mostly been from overuse, his body breaking down as he trained.
But in one second, Knox could have gone from standing at the line of scrimmage to having something broken, pulled, torn, and permanently damaged. I had a rush of thoughts, pictures of him lying motionless on the green field. I closed my eyes and tried to change the direction my mind was running.
“Yoohoo! Daisy, are you there?” Shelby called from my back porch. She had her nose pressed against the glass of the sliding door and she could see me pretty clearly at the kitchen table watching the TV on the wall, so I waved.
The Big Hit Page 15
