Maverick Mania

by Sigmund Brouwer

  From the soft half dribble, the ball was set up for a long kick. I drew my foot back.

  The fake worked.

  Crew Cut threw his body to the right to block the pass. In the split second while he was wrong-footed, and as my kicking foot came down, I pointed my toes downward. I cut the ball left, behind my supporting leg. The ball chipped sideways a couple of steps.

  I was ready for the misdirection of the ball.

  He wasn’t.

  I sprinted forward, leaving him a half step behind.

  But I didn’t relax. Too often, a defender will nip the ball from behind. Since he was chasing me from the right side, I used the outside of my left foot to dribble the ball ahead. As I ran, I made sure I kept my body between him and the ball.

  I could see their zone defense begin to break down, just a little. The one player still behind me left them a man short to cover the rest of our guys.

  If I could beat one more player...

  Another yellow jersey drifted toward me. A short guy with wide shoulders. It left Steve open on the left for a pass. But if I dumped the ball off to him, their zone would close, and Steve would have nowhere to go.

  Again, I thought it would be worth the risk to hold on to the ball.

  Wide Shoulders cruised toward me. I pulled my right foot back as if I were going to give Steve the push pass at a forty-five-degree angle. Instead of passing it, though, I stepped over and to the left of the ball, spun my body clockwise and cut the ball with the instep of my left foot. The ball popped to my right, catching Wide Shoulders on his wrong foot as he expected the pass on the left.

  With just enough space and time, I burst ahead. Now there were two behind me.

  Johnnie cut through the middle at full sprint and drew two yellow defenders. That left a gap up the middle.

  I burst ahead with only thirty yards between me and the goalie. And four of our blue jerseys were moving into the open.

  Johnnie stopped and ran to the side.

  One yellow stayed with him. The other hesitated, and a third yellow player ran into him.

  In the sudden confusion, I saw a chance to power forward. Now there were only two guys between me and the goalie.

  I had ten steps of open space. Taking them all, I dribbled ahead at full speed.

  I dipped my left shoulder, faked another pass and stepped into the ball with a full power instep kick to the right side of the net.

  My fake pass didn’t fool either of the last two defenders. Nor did it fool the goalie, who began to throw himself to the right corner of the goal.

  Their sweeper had also guessed correctly. He jumped right to trap the ball. It hit him on the inside of his calf, which deflected the ball left.

  It wasn’t what I had planned.

  But it wasn’t what the goalie had planned, either.

  Instead of an easy save on the right side of the net, he had to try to change direction. And he slipped, falling flat on his face.

  On his stomach, he could only watch helplessly as the ball slowly rolled into the left side of the net.

  It was my first goal of the tournament.

  And it was enough to win the game.

  chapter fifteen

  Late that afternoon, I joined Leontine in front of her computer in her bedroom. The wall behind it held posters of Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny and Big Bird. She had explained them to me once. Streaking her hair purple, orange and green and dressing in black made her a rebel against boring people like me who wanted to look normal. The cartoon posters were a way for her to rebel against people who followed each other like sheep and raved over the “in” rock bands and movie stars. I’d rather use my energy for soccer and not worry about what was cool.

  “Look at this,” she said, pointing at her computer.

  I pulled up a chair. With Bugs and Mickey staring down at me, I watched the screen as she clicked her mouse button. Colors and images flickered before us.

  “I’m online,” she said. “Hitting a website called belcher-dot-com.”

  “Hang on,” I said. “Back up. Belcher? Is it a website about burping?”

  “No, it’s someone’s name. A person who lives in Roaring River. That’s where the Riggins family came from. Remember?”

  “I’m still lost.”

  “When I went surfing this afternoon, first thing I did was search for the local library. Most towns have libraries. Most public libraries offer Internet access.”

  “I get it,” I said, waiting for the computer to download new images. “You chatted with the local librarian.”

  “No,” she said, “I didn’t have any luck. But I did have a brainstorm. If Roaring River was too small for a public library, I thought I might be able to hook up with a local elementary school. Lots of school libraries are online.”

  “So you patched into a local school?”

  “It wasn’t that easy,” she said, enjoying the fact that I couldn’t guess right. “I had to search for a North Carolina education directory. All I could find was an e-mail address.”

  As she talked, an image began to expand on the screen. It was a newspaper article with most of the headline cut off. In the center, a large black-and-white photo started to slowly paint across the screen. I listened to Leontine as I watched the photo grow line by line.

  “So I fired off a message,” she said. “Asking for someone to give me a time and location to meet in an online chat room to answer questions about the Riggins family. And I got lucky. The school principal happened to check her mailbox about an hour later.”

  “Yeah?” I said. The photo on the computer screen showed a family: a mom, a dad and a boy, maybe two years old. It was one of those Sears portraits, with a fake background. Everyone was smiling. But the mom and dad did not look like a younger version of Mr. and Mrs. Riggins. And the boy had dark curly hair, nothing like Caleb’s.

  “Her name was Lola Max,” Leontine said.

  “The lady in this photo?”

  “The school principal.”

  “Oh,” I said. I began to scan the article. It was about a car accident.

  “Anyway,” Leontine said. “Mrs. Max e-mailed me back right away. She remembered the Riggins family very well and said my request for information about them was so unusual that she wanted to talk with me. She sent her telephone number and asked me to call. Dad gave me the okay, and I called her.”

  “Go on,” I said. The article described how a cement truck with no brakes ran through a red light at the bottom of a hill.

  “When I told her I was looking for some background information on them since they had moved to Lake Havasu City, she said she would fax me a newspaper article from their local newspaper.”

  “We don’t have a fax machine,”I said.

  “Exactly, Einstein,” she answered. “So Mrs. Max took the article over to a computer-genius friend of hers with a website. Someone named Sam Belcher.”

  “Belcher-dot-com,” I said, not looking up from my reading. The cement truck had hit a car in the intersection. The whole family—all of the people in the photo—had been in that car. All of them had died.

  “Yes,” Leontine answered. “Belcherdot-com. This Sam Belcher scanned the article and posted it on his website. And now, all I have to do is print it out.”

  Leontine clicked her mouse button a few more times. The print command came up on the screen, interrupting my reading.

  “It sounds like a lot of complicated work,” I said. “What’s the big deal? Why was Mrs. Max in such a hurry to get this to you?”

  “Didn’t you read the article?” Leontine asked.

  “I was just scanning through it,” I said.

  “The family in that article was the Riggins family,” Leontine said.

  “It was a terrible accident, so I don’t want to say it’s not a big deal. But what’s the big deal that they had the same name?” I asked.

  “Read the article closely,” she said. “The mother and father are Louise and Charlie Riggins. The boy’s name was Caleb.”<
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  “But still...,” I began.

  “You don’t get it.”

  “No,” I said. I didn’t get it. I was angry that I couldn’t understand. “So enlighten me.”

  “Mrs. Max went to her school records,” Leontine explained. “We compared birth certificates over the telephone. The one we have here in Lake Havasu for Caleb Riggins is identical to the one for the Caleb Riggins who died in a car accident in Roaring River almost fourteen years ago.”

  “Identical,” I said, wanting to be sure I heard right.

  “Identical.” Leontine went to the printer and picked up the copy of the newspaper article. She waved it at me.

  “Several months after this family died in a car accident in North Carolina,” she said, “another Riggins family showed up here in Arizona.”

  I shook my head, puzzled. “Are you saying Caleb Riggins isn’t really Caleb Riggins?”

  “I don’t know what I’m saying,” she said. “All I know is that this is getting weirder all the time.”

  chapter sixteen

  Half an hour later, I was at the police station. I parked my mountain bike, locked it and ran inside. A couple of policemen nodded hello to me. I nodded back but didn’t stop to talk.

  I found Mom at her usual place, behind a desk near the front. I knew what the rest of the station looked like from a tour she had arranged for me once. In the back were the holding cells, but other than that, it looked like any office.

  “Win your game?” Mom asked with a smile. She faced a machine with a bunch of switches and wore a telephone headset.

  “Yup,” I said. “Two to one. But look at this.”

  I handed her the article that Leontine had printed. Mom read it within seconds, pushing hair out of her face as she leaned forward over it.

  “Charlie Riggins,” she read out loud. “A grocery store manager. His wife, Louise. And a son named Caleb. But the photo—”

  “Doesn’t look like the Riggins family we know,” I said. “Mom, you’re always looking for mysteries. Well, this one’s real.”

  Mom stared off into space for a few moments. A strange look crossed her face. Then she snapped her fingers and flicked a switch on the dispatch machine.

  “Captain Briscoe?” she said into the headset microphone. “It’s Michelle. Would you mind coming here for a few moments?”

  I couldn’t hear his answer, of course, but right away the sound of hard heels on a tile floor reached me. Captain Briscoe walked like a drill sergeant in the marines. He looked like one too. He had a gray crew cut, square face, thick neck and broad shoulders.

  “Hello, Matt,” he said, shaking my hand. “What brings you here?”

  Mom gave him the newspaper article. “Remember I brought you some concerns about the Riggins family? You might find this interesting.”

  “All right,” he said after reading it. “I’ll agree it’s strange to find a family with the same names.”

  Mom took a deep breath. “Captain, you know I spend a lot of time trying to learn about detective work.”

  It might have been my imagination, but I thought I saw Captain Briscoe fight the twitch of a smile. “Yes,” he said, “I do know that.”

  “I’ve learned that there’s something people can do to change their identities,” Mom said. “I’m sure you know about it. They look for people about the same age who have died. They send away for the dead person’s birth certificate and use it to apply for a driver’s license, credit cards...a new identity. No one ever cross-checks against death certificates.”

  “Yes,” Captain Briscoe admitted, “I know of that happening. But this—”

  “Is a whole family,” Mom said. “If the father and mother and son were born about the same time as those killed in the accident, think of how easy it would be to give a whole family a new identity from the dead people’s birth certificates. Especially if the family lived so far across the country from Roaring River that no one would recognize their names and connect them to the people who died in the car accident.”

  “How did you connect them?” Captain Briscoe asked.

  I explained.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “This is so farfetched. And the Charlie Riggins we know is a respectable businessperson. There are probably thousands of Charlie Rigginses across the country.”

  “But how many with a wife named Louise and a son named Caleb?” Mom asked.

  “Good point,” he said. “But why would they go to this trouble?”

  “I bet we could answer that if we knew who they were before they changed identities,” Mom said. “Maybe Charlie was a drug dealer. Or a wanted murderer. Or...”

  Mom’s eyes were beginning to have that excited mystery shine.

  “Hold on, hold on, hold on,” Captain Briscoe said. “You have to be very careful about what you say. If you’re wrong and rumors get started, Charlie Riggins could sue you for slander.”

  As he thought, Captain Briscoe rolled the article into a tube and tapped it with his right hand against the palm of his left hand.

  “This is what I’ll do,” he said. “I’ll photocopy this article. First thing tomorrow—when the records offices are open—I’ll make some phone calls to look into this.”

  He shot a warning glance at Mom. “Remember, you keep this to yourself. Last thing I need is for the department to know that I’m actually involving myself in one of your crazy mysteries.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” Mom said.

  “But...,” I said.

  They both looked at me.

  “If Mr. Riggins is some kind of criminal,” I said, “tomorrow might be too late. Caleb has been gone a day already.”

  “I don’t think we need to worry,” Captain Briscoe said after a few moments of thought. “At this point, Riggins doesn’t know we’re checking into his background. Say this does turn out to be something. Nothing will go wrong as long as Charlie Riggins thinks he is safe.”

  He directed his frown at me. “Which means you can now leave this in police hands.”

  He cleared his throat. “Right, Matt?”

  “Um, yes, sir,” I said. “Absolutely right.”

  As if I’d ever do anything crazy like my mom would.

  chapter seventeen

  In the darkness, a Tyrannosaurus rex roared as it charged toward me. I hardly noticed. I’d sat there for half of the movie that night, and I couldn’t even remember eating my popcorn.

  Who were Charlie, Louise and Caleb Riggins? Why had they moved to Lake Havasu City? Were they running from something? Where had they gone?

  The T. rex pushed a van off a cliff. Steve, slurped on his cola as he leaned forward, totally focused on the movie.

  But I couldn’t get Caleb’s note out of my mind. Over and over, questions kept repeating themselves. Where were Caleb and his parents? Why had they disappeared? I realized that without Caleb, our team might not make it to the nationally televised finals—

  “Hey!” I said out loud. People in front of me turned around to glare.

  “Sorry,” I whispered to them. I didn’t explain that I had just been hit by a lightning bolt of a thought.

  The nationally televised finals. Caleb was our star scorer. If we went to the tournament, Caleb would be seen on televisions all across the country. If Charlie Riggins and his wife and son were in hiding under a new identity, of course Charlie would do everything possible to keep Caleb off television.

  I pulled together the threads that were dangling in my mind. Caleb had only been three years old when the Riggins family moved to Lake Havasu City. Nobody remembered much about anything before they were three. Caleb wouldn’t know anything about the identity change.

  I remembered that Dad had told me about Caleb writing a story in first grade about a twin brother. What if it were true? That would explain why Charlie Riggins had gotten so mad.

  Wow. Wow. Wow.

  And what else had Dad said? Something about a golden bridge. Could that be a real place?

  A golden bridg
e! Maybe there was a way to find out who Caleb had been.

  “Steve,” I whispered, “I’ll be right back.”

  He didn’t even hear me. He was watching the dinosaurs search for more food. He didn’t know about the newspaper article and the car accident. Mom had asked me to keep that information to myself.

  I ran up the aisle. I got to a pay phone. I called Leontine at home. I told her what I was thinking and asked her to do me a favor by searching for more stuff on the Internet. She told me she’d have it ready by the time I got home after the movie. I thanked her and hung up.

  Maybe popcorn is brain food. Because as I walked back into the darkness of the movie and saw the dinosaurs trying to chomp more people, I had another thought.

  The dogs. Who was feeding the dogs?

  Caleb’s note had said they were leaving for a while. Long enough so that Caleb would miss the entire tournament?

  Who was feeding the dogs while they were gone?

  A neighbor? It would have to be a brave neighbor because those dogs were running loose. If it wasn’t a neighbor, maybe it was... As I sat down in my theater seat, I groaned at how obvious it was.

  They had taken the pontoon boat from the driveway. If Charlie Riggins wanted to keep Caleb out of town, spending the week on Lake Havasu made sense. It would look like a family spring-break vacation and keep Caleb from sneaking to any more soccer games.

  Which meant Charlie Riggins could also stay close enough to home to feed the dogs.

  I grabbed Steve’s elbow.

  “Come on,” I whispered. “We’re getting out of here.”

  “What! The movie’s not finished.”

  “Trust me,” I insisted. I had a copy of the article in my back pocket. “I’ll explain while you’re driving us back to Caleb’s house.”

  chapter eighteen

  Two hours later, we were still sitting in Steve’s mom’s minivan. We had parked in the shadows between streetlights, a half block down from the Riggins house. The front of the van faced McCulloch Boulevard, giving us plenty of time to notice if any cars or trucks turned onto the street where we waited. Steve had slouched down as far as possible behind the steering wheel. I was slouched on the passenger side.