Dead Ball

by Judith Arnold

  “No, I haven’t seen them.” Lainie realized she’d been taking detours to avoid driving past Emerson Village Estates, just in case the police were in the area, watching for her. “How long have they been there?”

  “I saw them on Sunday. I don’t know about yesterday, but I ran some errands over lunch today, and they were there again. I mean, come on. You want to save the environment, go shut down a nuclear power plant. Stage a sit-in at some smokestack factory. Clean up Boston Harbor. Don’t waste your time on a little suburban development. It’s not like those houses are going to be eyesores.”

  “Boston Harbor was cleaned up years ago,” Lainie said. A pointless remark, but for all she knew, the protesters targeting Cavanagh Homes today might have been instrumental in getting the government to restore the Charles River and Boston Harbor to their current healthy conditions. She liked the environment, and she was grateful that some people had nothing better to do than fight to protect it.

  She decided to drive her usual route home that afternoon, to pass Emerson Village Estates and see for herself whether the protesters were still there. Just as Nancy had described them, a dozen protesters stood in a line across the unpaved access road leading into the development, blocking access. One held a sign featuring a photograph of a graceful deer with a target superimposed on it and the caption, “Homes For The Wealthy = No Home For The Deer.” Another held a sign reading, “Don’t Mansion It.” A third sign included a picture of Arthur Cavanagh and the caption “Mother Nature’s Public Enemy Number One.”

  For God’s sake. The man was dead. Patty shouldn’t have to see signs like that in her own town.

  Was Detective Knapp investigating those people? Lainie wondered as she cruised slowly past the protesters. Was he searching for evidence of the death threats Arthur had supposedly received? Was he tracing those death threats back to the People for the Preservation of the Planet, or some other extremist group? Did one of the picketers have Arthur’s BlackBerry?

  She turned onto her own street and tried to figure out how she felt about the protesters. Annoyed that Patty might view them when she drove through town. Relieved that they were publicizing their hostility toward Arthur. Hopeful that Knapp would turn his attention from her to them. And from Bill Stavik to them—because . . . well, just because.

  Nearing her house, she spotted a lone figure standing in her driveway, hands on hips, staring in her direction. Closer, she recognized the boy—Sean Cavanagh. Dressed in baggy jeans, his backpack a shapeless lump on the asphalt at his feet, and an elaborate skateboard propped against the clapboards between the two garage doors, he must have come to her house straight from school.

  Suppressing her frown, she motioned through the windshield for him to move to the front walk. Once he was out of her path, she hit the button on the remote control clipped to her windshield visor to open the garage door and coasted up the driveway into the garage. Why Sean would have come to visit his former fourth-grade teacher she couldn’t fathom, but she assumed he would tell her soon enough.

  “Hi,” she called to him as she climbed out of her car. He remained outside the garage, his faint smile failing to conceal his bashfulness. He’d reached Lainie’s height but was still thin and scrawny. Her mother used to call boys who’d hit that stage—enough puberty to shoot up in height but not enough to fill out—“herrings.” If she ever met Sean, she’d probably start preparing a nice, oniony cream sauce to marinate him in.

  “Hey, Ms. Lovett,” he called from outside. Hey, as if he’d accidentally run into her somewhere.

  “Come on in.” She waved him into the garage, then unlocked the door to the mudroom. Her house had a perfectly functional front door, but she couldn’t recall the last time anyone had used it.

  He slung his backpack over his shoulder and entered the shadowy garage. His hair, though still blond, was a little darker than she’d remembered it four years ago, and it was short and spiky on top, shaped with some no doubt expensive gel. His face was still soft, only the slightest hint of fuzz on his upper lip. His eyes were clear, his posture relaxed. He didn’t look like a child in the throes of insurmountable grief.

  Actually, he looked like a child in the throes of insurmountable hunger. She remembered how ravenous Randy used to be when he’d arrived home from school. Fortunately, she’d baked chocolate chip cookies Sunday evening. She’d packed some into a foil-lined shoebox and asked Karen to mail it to Randy; the bank where Karen worked was located in the same strip mall as a post office, and ever since she’d taken the teller job, Lainie hadn’t had to set foot in the Rockford Post Office. Karen took care of all her mailing needs and didn’t dare complain, because Lainie did things like bake chocolate chip cookies.

  What was left of the batch after packing up Randy’s share was stored in a plastic tub that Lainie had felt compelled to buy at a Tupperware party Sheila had hosted a few years ago. Even if he didn’t appear grief-stricken, Sean Cavanagh would probably benefit from homemade cookies. She was sure Karen and Big Brad wouldn’t mind if she gave him a few.

  His eyes widened as she filled a plate with cookies from the tub and set it on the table. “Would you like something to drink?” she asked casually. The question she was dying to ask was, “What are you doing here?” but she knew better than to blurt it out. “I’ve got”—she swung open the refrigerator door—“apple juice, orange juice, Diet Coke, and milk. It’s skim, though.”

  “That’s okay,” he said. “My mom drinks skim milk. I’m used to it.”

  She poured him a glass of milk, then filled a glass with apple juice for herself so he would think this snack was part of her daily routine. She gestured toward the table and he sat. Taking her own seat at the table, she nudged the plate toward him. “So, how’s it going?” she asked as nonchalantly as she could.

  “Okay. All we do in school these days is prepare to move on to high school. It’s like the middle school decided they’re done with us, only school doesn’t end for another two months, so we’re all just hanging around, killing time.”

  She hadn’t expected him to discuss school. Maybe he thought that was the only subject she’d be interested in, since she’d been his teacher. But surely a boy whose father had been the victim of the first Rockford murder in memory could have interpreted “how’s it going?” a little differently.

  She waited, tapping into the same well of patience that enabled her to get through conversations with Hayden Blumenthal. Sean wasn’t a stammerer, but words weren’t exactly flowing from his lips, either.

  He munched on a cookie, washed it down with some milk, and gave her a timid smile. “I hope you don’t mind that I just came here.”

  “Of course not.”

  “It’s not too far from the middle school. Especially on my board.”

  “Are skateboards still popular?” she asked, trying to draw him out.

  “I don’t know. Skateboard competitions are, the X Games and stuff. Everybody’s got those stupid scooters these days.” He shrugged. “Even I have one. My dad gave it to me. But, like, those scooters have handles. Who needs a handle? It’s like you’re holding on because you’re scared or something. On the board, you use your feet to steer. Your feet and your balance. It’s a lot cooler.”

  “I see,” Lainie said. Her cheeks were beginning to hurt from holding her smile, but she wanted to encourage him, to relax him enough that he’d tell her the real reason he’d come to see her.

  His next statement offered something of an answer. “You were my favorite teacher, ever.”

  “Thank you.” Lainie wished she could respond that he’d been her favorite student ever, but she couldn’t. He’d been a decent student, neither profoundly gifted nor notably troublesome. His work had been solid but not outstanding. He’d indulged in minor mischief, but she couldn’t recall ever having to send him to the principal’s office. If Patty had done some of his homework fo
r him, Lainie wouldn’t have been terribly surprised.

  “So,” he said, “you’re a friend of my mom’s, right?”

  “Yes,” Lainie said.

  “It’s like . . . because my mom said you went through this, too.”

  “You mean, that my husband died? Yes, I’ve been through that.”

  “Well, the thing is . . . like . . .” He drank a little more milk. A white residue lingered on his upper lip as he lowered the glass. “It’s like I don’t really miss my dad. And I can’t tell my mom that, you know? I can’t tell anyone. But—I mean, he was a hard-ass, and he and my mom used to fight a lot, and now there’s no more fighting. Which is kind of cool.”

  And Sean was feeling guilty. Lainie doubted she could pass for a priest, but maybe it was easier to confess to a former teacher than the pastor at Our Lady of Mercy. “It’s normal to have conflicted feelings,” she assured him.

  “That’s the thing, though. I don’t have conflicted feelings. That thing I read at his funeral, about the angels and the gates of Heaven looking like those stone things at Lafayette Glen? My mom wrote that.”

  Lainie nodded. It had seemed a bit flowery and metaphorical to have spilled from a fourteen-year-old boy’s pen.

  “I don’t like those stone things. He put them on a lot of his subdivisions. It was like he was saying, ‘This is a neighborhood of snobs. When you enter here, you’re not really in Rockford anymore.’”

  “He was a businessman,” Lainie said, forced to defend Arthur even though she agreed with Sean about the pretentious stone gates at some Cavanagh Homes subdivisions. “The people who bought those houses must have liked fancy entrances to their neighborhoods. He gave them what they wanted.”

  “He was an asshole,” Sean said, then lowered the half-eaten cookie in his hand, propped his elbows on the table, and rested his chin in his cupped palms. He let out a long, dismal sigh. “He never came to my Little League games. He never let me listen to my music when he was home. He was always on my case about working harder so I’d get into a good college.”

  Arthur sounded like a lot of Rockford parents. “You know, Sean, sometimes when we lose someone, we cling to all the things we didn’t like about that person because it makes the loss easier to bear. If you thought about all your father’s positive traits, you’d miss him. It would hurt.”

  “I don’t miss him. He didn’t have positive traits.” He picked up the half-eaten cookie and popped it into his mouth, then chewed listlessly and swallowed. “My mom wanted to divorce him, I think. But whenever I asked him if they were getting a divorce, he would tell me she’d never leave him, because if she did, he’d cut her off without a cent. He said he could do that. I don’t know. Could he?”

  “It depends.” Roger hadn’t been one of the divorce experts at his firm, but he’d talked about his partners’ cases sometimes. Lainie tried to remember the legal guidelines. Massachusetts wasn’t a community property state, so in the case of a divorce, the Cavanagh wealth wouldn’t automatically be split in half. It was an “equitable distribution” state. As best Lainie could recall, that was a euphemistic way of saying the court would decide who got how much in a divorce. “If a judge ordered him to pay alimony, he’d have to do it.”

  “He said no. He said he and my mom had a deal, and he’d never have to give her a cent.”

  “A prenuptial agreement,” Lainie guessed. Patty was Arthur’s second wife, and she was a good deal younger than him. He must have made her sign a prenup. At Sean’s quizzical look, she explained, briefly and tactfully. “That’s a contract people sometimes negotiate before they get married, about what would happen if they ever split up. Sometimes a prenup is enforceable, sometimes not. Your mother’s never discussed her marriage with me, Sean, so I don’t know if that’s the deal.”

  “I don’t, either.”

  “Sean . . .” She reached across the table to squeeze his hand just as he was aiming to take another cookie. Their fingers collided above the plate, and Lainie pulled her hand back. He wasn’t ten anymore. He didn’t need a comforting hug, even from his favorite-ever teacher. “Sean, I don’t know what kind of marriage your parents had, but I believe your father loved your mother very much.” He rolled his eyes, classic adolescent style. “Someone who worked with your father told me he took his marital vows very seriously. His marriage to your mother must have meant the world to him.” A certain blond babe notwithstanding.

  “Who?” Sean asked.

  “Who what?”

  “Who told you that?”

  “A man named Bill Stavik.”

  “Oh, yeah. Him.” Sean ate the cookie, then said, “My dad hated him.”

  And he hated your dad, Lainie thought, dismayed to think Stavik might even turn up on Sean’s suspect list. “Sometimes when people work together, they disagree about things. I don’t think that’s the same thing as hate.”

  “I know the difference between disagree and hate,” Sean said, sparing her the eye-rolling but favoring her with the classic adolescent I-know-everything tone of voice. “Mr. Stavik and my dad would have screaming matches over the phone all the time. They were so loud, I could hear Mr. Stavik’s voice right through the receiver. Mr. Stavik was one of those ecology people. He was always telling my dad not to cut down so many trees. They’d swear at each other a lot.”

  “Well, it was a volatile relationship. But they continued working together. And however volatile a relationship your parents had, they stayed together, too.”

  “What’s volatile?” Sean asked, the I-know-everything tone gone.

  “Combustible,” she said. At his bewildered look, she grinned and shook her head. “You need to work on your vocabulary. Volatile means unstable, on the brink of blowing up. Combustible means on the brink of catching fire.”

  “At least I know what brink means,” he said, then grinned back at her.

  Lainie still wasn’t sure why he’d chosen to confide in her. But he seemed to be more relaxed than when he’d first entered the house.

  “Here’s the thing, Sean,” she said. “When you lose someone like your father, there’s no set of rules about how you should feel or what you should do. Grieving is a very personal process. Some people cry a lot. Some become so depressed they need therapy. Some become religious, and some reject religion altogether. And some just get on with their lives.”

  “And some say, good riddance,” he muttered.

  “Is that how you feel about your father?”

  “No.” His eyes flickered, as if he were ashamed of what he’d said. “I mean, no, of course not. It’s just, like, I feel strange about the whole thing.”

  “That’s okay. It’s quite normal.”

  “I can’t talk to my mother about this,” he added quietly.

  “That’s okay, too. If you want to talk to me, I’m always here.” She smiled. “Well, not always. Sometimes I’m at the Hopwell School.”

  “Sometimes you’re at Minuteman Field with my mother.”

  “Soccer is a great sport.”

  “Yeah, you tried to teach me that in fourth grade.” He snorted. “Baseball’s better. You can get rich playing baseball. Who gets rich playing soccer?”

  “On the other hand, soccer doesn’t ruin a manicure.”

  He glanced at her short, unpolished nails and then a flicker of recognition crossed his face. He must be aware of how important his mother’s manicures were to her. He smiled conspiratorially. “Yeah. You can’t play baseball without chipping a nail, right?”

  “So I’ve heard.” She glanced behind him at the wall clock. “You’re welcome to stay here as long as you’d like, but one of us should probably call your mother to let her know where you are. She could be worried that you didn’t come home from school.”

  “Nah, I gotta go.” He pushed away from the table and stood. “Those cookies w
ere excellent. Thanks.”

  “Any time.” No, not any time. Lainie baked only when her maternal muscle suffered a spasm—which was less and less often, the older her children grew. But if homemade chocolate chip cookies could help a kid through a difficult grieving process . . . Lainie would stock up on another bag of semisweet chips the next time she was at the supermarket, just in case.

  She walked Sean through the mudroom and the garage, and watched him sling his backpack over his shoulders and balance himself on his skateboard. A couple of quick pumps with his right foot and he coasted down the driveway, flexing his knees and ankles to tilt the board into a turn. She remained in the open garage bay until she could no longer see him, then closed the door and reentered the house.

  Thoughts avalanched down onto her, and she tried to dig her way through them. That Sean would unburden himself to her was flattering, but was it right? She wasn’t his confessor—except that he’d decided she was. He’d told her things about his parents that she was sure his parents wouldn’t want her to know.

  He was one more person on the list of people who had loathed Arthur Cavanagh, and now Arthur was dead, and Sean was obviously swamped with guilt. If he’d truly hated his father, perhaps he’d wished on occasion that the old man would drop dead. Lots of kids fantasized about that, never really meaning it. But in this case, Sean’s bitter wish had come true. Maybe he believed his animosity toward his father had somehow contributed to Arthur’s death. Maybe he felt responsible in some way.

  She wondered if he knew how to use a nail gun.

  Oh, for God’s sake. Sean hadn’t killed his father. How could she even think . . .

  The same way Detective Knapp could think she was in some way responsible.

  She carried Sean’s empty milk glass to the sink, rinsed it out, and put it in the dishwasher. Her own glass was still half full, and she helped herself to a cookie and wondered whether she ought to call the middle school to find out if the technology class—what used to be called shop, back when she’d attended what used to be called junior high—happened to teach kids how to use nail guns.