Dead Ball

by Judith Arnold

  She wondered what he would think of Stavik. She wondered what he’d think of Stavik and her.

  Not that there was any Stavik-and-her. And if she was a good girl and listened to Peter, there wouldn’t be, at least not until this whole mess was straightened out.

  Chapter Ten

  MONDAY EVENING at five thirty, Lainie drove to Minuteman Field, where the Colonielles were assembling to caravan up to Burlington for their rescheduled game. Coach Thomaston was in an even gruffer mood than usual, concerned that the team hadn’t had a practice since last Thursday and were bound to be rusty while facing a very competitive Burlington team. But Lainie refused to let the coach dampen her spirits. She was desperate to play. Kicking ball would be a good substitute for kicking butt.

  She was surprised but pleased to see that Patty Cavanagh had shown up for the game. Patty wore a flattering teal warm-up suit over her uniform, and her diamond ring shot blinding glints of light in all directions whenever she moved her hand. Her hair was beautifully streaked and frosted, making Lainie wonder whether she herself ought to surrender to the inevitable and let Marianne at Stellara do something equally attractive with her hair.

  On her, though, it wouldn’t look the same. Patty was fashionable. Lainie most definitely was not.

  The Colonielles all welcomed Patty with hugs and warm wishes. Even the coach, while not succumbing to a smile, seemed to scowl a little less as she greeted Patty. Other than a few general questions about how she was doing, no one pressed her for details about her life at the moment, the investigation into Arthur’s murder, or why she’d decided to show up for the game. Lainie knew why: because in times of grief, sometimes all a woman wanted to do was kick a ball and run.

  “I’ll drive,” Angie said as the team sorted itself into a few cars for the trip to Burlington.

  Lainie lifted her gear bag and started across the parking lot toward Angie’s car. Sheila fell into step beside her, and on a whim Lainie called to Patty, “Ride with us.”

  Patty glanced around at the rest of the team, and then shrugged and strode over to Angie’s car.

  Angie appeared to be on the verge of hugging Patty, and Lainie deftly spirited Patty into the back seat of the car before Angie could attack. She slid onto the seat beside her and exchanged a grin. “Angie loves you,” she whispered.

  “And I love her, too,” Patty said dryly.

  The five cars filled with Colonielles formed a line in the parking lot and then filed out onto Liberty Road. The evening was unseasonably warm, and Angie turned on the air conditioner. Patty leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes. She was wearing mascara, Lainie noticed.

  “How’s Sean doing?” she asked casually.

  “He’s a trooper,” Patty said without opening her eyes.

  “Brendan told me Kyle Mickelson told him his brother Tucker told him that Sean is doing great,” Sheila volunteered from the front seat.

  “Great might be overstating it a bit,” Patty said. “He’s okay, though. If he’s upset, he hasn’t mentioned it to me.”

  Lainie’s teacher antennae quivered. Just because a child didn’t reveal his sadness to his mother didn’t mean he wasn’t sad. Especially a teenage child, and a male one. Sean was at a tricky age. She assumed his teachers at the middle school knew what had happened to his father—everyone knew; this was Rockford, after all—and she hoped they’d keep an eye on him.

  “I’m so glad you came today,” she said. “Soccer is great therapy.”

  “I don’t need therapy,” Patty said bluntly. She glanced out the tinted window, then tapped her elegantly manicured fingertips together. “I just needed to get away from the paperwork for a few minutes. God, you wouldn’t believe the paperwork.”

  “Actually, I would,” Lainie said.

  Patty shot her a sheepish grin. “I guess you would. Except that on top of all the stuff you’d expect—the will, the estate, the life insurance—I’ve also got his business to deal with. Cavanagh Homes began working on Emerson Village months ago—the zoning, the surveys, the approvals, the ground breaking. They ought to finish the damned project. But I don’t know how to run Arthur’s company. He hardly ever discussed it with me.”

  “You could hire someone to run it,” Lainie suggested. “What about Bill Stavik?” Shoot. She shouldn’t be thinking about him.

  Patty’s perfectly tweezed eyebrows rose. “You know Bill Stavik?”

  “We’ve met a couple of times. He seems like a knowledgeable professional.” Not a murderer, Lainie wanted to add. “He told me Arthur was crazy about you.”

  Patty snorted. Why shouldn’t she be skeptical? Arthur had been out and about with another woman the night before he was killed, and Patty knew that because Lainie had told her. “Bill Stavik and Arthur weren’t exactly confidantes,” she said.

  “They worked together on a lot of Cavanagh Homes projects,” Lainie pointed out.

  “I guess Arthur considered him a good foreman. He also considered him a pain in the ass.”

  “Why?” Lainie asked casually, as if she were simply trying to make small talk.

  “Who knows? They argued all the time. I think deep in his heart, Stavik was deeply conflicted.”

  “Really?”

  “Not that I’m a psychologist or anything, but Stavik didn’t like cutting down trees. And give me a break—that’s what builders do. They cut down trees. They clear lots. You can’t build a house with trees growing through the foundation. You have to cut down the trees.” Patty shook her head. “If Stavik hadn’t come to the funeral, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see him standing outside the church with those crackpots.”

  “I thought those picketers showed very bad taste,” Angie observed. “I mean, come on. At a funeral?”

  “They hated my husband,” Patty said. “They wanted him dead.” She sounded less bitter than resigned.

  “Is that who the police think did it?” Lainie asked, still trying to maintain a disinterested tone.

  “Here’s what the police believe,” Patty said. “Arthur always had his BlackBerry with him. Always. The man would have slept with the damned thing if I’d allowed it. I swear, sometimes I thought he loved his BlackBerry more than me.” She paused dramatically, then said, “When they found him, his BlackBerry was missing.”

  At this revelation, Sheila twisted in her seat to gape at Patty.

  Good lord, Lainie thought, it wasn’t as if Patty had just revealed that her husband’s testicles had been cut off. His BlackBerry could have fallen out of his pocket. Or he could have left it somewhere, or stashed it in his glove compartment.

  On the other hand, the missing BlackBerry could represent good news for Lainie. She had nothing to do with his BlackBerry. She’d never seen it. Until that instant, she hadn’t known of its existence. If the police believed its disappearance was connected to his murder, they couldn’t possibly suspect her of anything.

  “So,” she probed gently, “the police think that whoever killed Arthur might have taken his BlackBerry?”

  “It’s their theory du jour.”

  Angie followed the parade of Colonielles’ cars into the parking lot at the soccer field in Burlington, and Lainie banished all thoughts of Arthur from her mind. At least she tried to. She wanted to play soccer. She wanted to trounce Burlington. Not that a trouncing was likely; the Burlington team was awfully good. But Lainie refused to let the murder investigation distract her. As the sports announcers loved to say, she’d come to play.

  And she played. She played like someone possessed. She played as if she were trying to outrun her sorrow over Roger’s death, her anger, her fury at a fate that stole the husbands of good, decent soccer-playing women. She played as if she were trying to outrun Peter’s warnings, Stavik’s attractiveness, her own fear—as if she were trying to outrun death itself. Wherever the ball rolled, where
ver her teammates needed her to be, wherever the Burlington players tried to thwart the Colonielles, that was where Lainie was.

  She ran until her calves ached, and then she ran harder, and the aches disappeared. She ran until her every breath scorched her lungs. When Coach Thomaston pulled her out and told her to drink some water, she stood poised on the sidelines, ready to race back onto the field.

  A fairly large crowd had come to watch the game—large by recreation-league old-lady soccer standards. Husbands, infants in strollers, a couple of preschool tykes who scampered up and down the sidelines, chasing spare soccer balls, and a contingent of high school kids who’d just finished their own soccer game on an adjacent field. During her few minutes on the sidelines, Lainie counted at least forty onlookers flanking the field. They rooted exclusively for the Burlington team, but she didn’t care. All she heard was a muddle of cheering. All she saw, once she’d sprinted back onto the field after her water break, was a blur of bodies.

  The players on the field weren’t a blur, though. They appeared to her in high resolution—Sheila’s wide, freckled face and her hands in position, ready to block any shot on goal; Angie’s sleek body weaving in and out among the players; Patty’s balletic moves and her dazzling diamond ring; Burlington players, young and buff and grim-faced, looming in front of her, attempting to sidestep her, standing between her and some sort of temporary haven where death and guilt didn’t exist.

  The game ended with a Colonielles win, 3-2. Of those three goals, Lainie had scored one and assisted on the other two. Coach Thomaston actually complimented her. “Nice play out there,” she growled at Lainie.

  Lainie wiped her face with the towel she kept in her gear bag. She nodded her thanks to the coach—to acknowledge the praise verbally would undoubtedly inspire Thomaston to point out all the mistakes Lainie had made during the game. But as she sipped some water, she allowed herself a smile. If she kept playing this strongly, maybe the coach would figure out a way to keep her on the team once she turned fifty. If she played like a thirty-year-old, why not?

  She lowered the bottle and pounded the lid to shut it. That was when she glimpsed the woman. Just a tumble of wavy platinum hair spilling out from beneath a pink Red Sox cap, the pale strands as brilliant as Patty’s ring, and a bosom big enough for her to rest her chin on. Lainie spotted her in a swarm of people heading for the parking lot. She saw the long legs, the shimmying hips, and that hair. Sunglasses hid the face, but . . .

  Don’t be ridiculous, she chided herself. Why would the woman Arthur Cavanagh had been drinking with at Olde Towne Olé be at a soccer game in Burlington? Whoever Lainie had spied in the crowd—and as she squinted toward the parking lot she could no longer see the woman’s shimmering metallic-blond hair—it couldn’t possibly be the same person. The world, including Burlington, Massachusetts, was full of buxom blondes. And all buxom blondes resembled one another to some extent.

  Lainie had been mistaken. She’d just imagined seeing the woman who’d been with Arthur at Olde Towne Olé. Her mind was a little tangled, as overheated as her weary body. That was all.

  As her breathing slowed, as her heart relaxed into its slow, efficient pulse, she realized that beating Burlington on the field didn’t amount to much. She may have outrun the opposing players, but she hadn’t outrun Arthur’s murder. She hadn’t outrun the night she’d seen him at Olde Towne Olé, or the morning after, when he’d been found dead, or that afternoon, when she’d foolishly decided to visit Emerson Village Estates to see for herself if such a horrible thing could have actually happened to someone she knew.

  Her team might have won a game, but life wasn’t a game, and Lainie hadn’t won. Not today.

  “M . . . MIZ LOVETT?”

  Lainie opened her eyes to discover Hayden Blumenthal looming in front of her desk. The rest of the class sat at their tables, working in groups as they diagrammed the anatomy of clams. A drone of voices churned the air as they conferred, argued, and vied for the pointiest crayons. That drone had lulled Lainie into a trance. Thank goodness she hadn’t dozed off.

  To say she hadn’t slept well last night would be inaccurate. She hadn’t slept at all. She was too troubled by thoughts about Arthur Cavanagh’s missing BlackBerry and the appearance of his blond bosom buddy at the soccer game. Logically, Lainie knew the woman she’d seen on the sidelines in Burlington couldn’t have been the same woman she’d seen in the Olde Towne Olé lounge . . . but logic seemed to have fled her. The woman seemed to have fled, too. By the time Lainie had joined Sheila and Angie at the end of the game, the well-endowed blonde had vanished into the crowd. Lainie couldn’t point Blondie out to her friends, because she herself could no longer see the woman.

  Assuming Blondie had been there. Assuming Lainie hadn’t hallucinated her. That, beyond all else, was what had kept her awake into the wee hours: the realization that she might be losing her mind.

  Impending insanity and a lack of sleep weren’t excuses for slacking on the job, however. She’d done her best to keep the class active and motivated. During morning snack time, she’d played a boisterous Dixieland jazz CD to invigorate herself as much as her students, and she’d consumed two cups of strong black coffee with her lunch, hoping she could surf the tide of caffeine through the afternoon.

  Yet while her students hunched over their worksheets and giggled about the fact that clams had feet, her thoughts had drifted back to the blond woman, to Patty, to Bill Stavik, to Peter’s warnings, and back to Bill Stavik again, despite those warnings.

  She blinked and discovered Hayden still hovering across the desk from her, thin and solemn, her naturally blond hair nearly as pale as the hair of Arthur’s lady friend. “Yes, Hayden?”

  “We need . . .” Hayden took a couple of deep breaths to propel the words from her mouth. “A ruler.”

  “You don’t have a ruler?”

  “I left mine . . .” Another long pause. Lainie could have finished the sentence for her, but she didn’t. Patience was essential. Hayden would get the words out eventually. “Home. And they . . . they . . . they . . .” She glanced over her shoulder to the three other students she’d been working with, then turned back to Lainie and took a few more deep breaths. “Don’t have rulers either.”

  “You can borrow my ruler, but I want it back when you’re done with it,” Lainie said, pulling a ruler from the center drawer of her desk. She’d had to pay for that ruler herself. These days, teachers were forced to purchase many of their supplies with their own money. The items Lainie bought—the ruler, erasers, tape, index cards—weren’t expensive, but after a while the cost added up. Besides, she wanted her students to get in the habit of returning what they borrowed.

  She handed the ruler to Hayden, whose smile seemed to flood her entire face. Amazing how children could hurl themselves into such joy, even over something as trivial as a borrowed ruler. If only Lainie could teach her students how to hang onto that ability—that joyful abandonment—she would have accomplished something worthwhile—a lot more worthwhile than informing them that the bump on the top of a clam shell was called an umbo.

  The word umbo had been a great source of hilarity for her kids. They repeated the term ad nauseum, shrieked it, and announced, “This clam has a jumbo umbo.” Three of the boys added umbo to their names and now called one another “Sumbo-Sam,” “Dumbo-Daniel,” and “Phumbo-Philip.”

  Too bad they had to grow up. In a dozen years, Hayden and Phumbo-Philip and all their classmates would be adults. Some of them would be out of college and working at jobs they hated, like Karen. Some would be in graduate or professional school, delaying the inevitable. Some would be in the military, some working at a trade. Some might be married already, starting their families. Some might find themselves at odds with the law, even if they’d always walked a straight line and done the right thing. Like her.

  She couldn’t remain in this morbid mental state
forever. It wasn’t like her. Even during Roger’s illness, she’d always remained cheerful, partly to keep his spirits up and partly because that was the kind of person she was. She’d never suffered a pain—not even Roger’s death—that couldn’t be eased by an hour or two of soccer.

  Fortunately, she’d have a couple of hours of soccer that evening at the team’s practice. She would run around like a crazed woman, with the same aggression that had fueled her during the game with Burlington yesterday, and for at least those two hours she wouldn’t be thinking about the blond woman, Officer Knapp, or whether or not she was insane.

  By the time the kids had finished their clam diagrams—“dia-clams,” Dumbo-Daniel renamed them—dismissal time was just minutes away. Lainie repeated the homework assignments for tomorrow, wondering how many of the children stuffing their backpacks and clearing off their desks would let their parents do the homework for them so they could stay on the Harvard-bound track, and sent them out the door with a smiling goodbye. Then she sagged against the blackboard and let out a sigh. Would she have enough energy to get through practice?

  She’d pulled all-nighters in college and survived. She could survive today.

  She slid the folder of “dia-clams” into her tote, lifted it and her purse, and left the classroom, flicking off the lights as she crossed the threshold. Near the exit to the faculty lot, she ran into Nancy Van Doerr, whose freshly applied lipstick made Lainie feel even drearier. “Have you seen those nature nuts?” she asked as Lainie held the door open for her.

  She shouldn’t encourage Nancy, but she couldn’t stifle her curiosity. “What nature nuts?”

  “The crazy people picketing Emerson Village. I think they’re trying to prevent work from continuing on the subdivision.”