by Lisa Regan
Unexpectedly, Josie felt tears sting the backs of her eyes remembering the look on Ray’s face when his mother gave him the jacket and said the words to him: I’m so proud of you. Their childhoods had been so full of trauma, abuse, guilt, and shame. Something as simple as hearing those words from his mother had been like winning the lottery for Ray.
Josie swallowed her emotion and continued, “She told him she was very proud of him.”
“Ray would have been the only one on the team that year to have that patch on that sleeve, then,” Gretchen said.
“Yes.”
“But the body in the morgue right now does not belong to Ray.”
“No,” Josie said, her voice coming out huskier than intended. “I buried him five years ago. I don’t know how his jacket ended up on the body of a girl buried under a house on Hempstead. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“There’s no chance that one of the other pitchers on the team saw Ray’s awesome blazing baseball patch and got one for himself?”
Josie looked at Gretchen. “And changed their number to Ray’s?”
“Okay, then what happened to the jacket? Do you remember him losing it? It getting stolen?”
Josie closed her eyes, trying to think back, but her memories from high school seemed light years away now, like someone else’s life. “I don’t know. I don’t remember. It was summertime right after they got the jackets—I remember that, because it was so hot. He wore his anyway for awhile. I guess I didn’t ask questions when he stopped wearing it because I just assumed he put it away for the summer because of the heat.”
“Do you have his old things?” Gretchen asked.
“Some of them. His mother also took some and Misty has some stuff too.”
Misty was the woman Ray had been seeing after his and Josie’s marriage fell apart.
Gretchen took out her phone and started typing in a text. “The fastest way to verify if that jacket belongs to Ray would just be to have Hummel turn the sleeve inside out and check for the tear you mentioned, don’t you think?”
“Yes,” Josie said. “But I already know that jacket belonged to Ray.”
Gretchen hit send on her text to Hummel and said, “Then we just have to figure out who that girl is and how she got Ray’s jacket. Maybe that will help us find out what happened to her. We can check yearbooks and also look into the history of owners and renters of the house she was under. But first, we both need a shower and change of clothes.”
The Denton Police headquarters was a three-story stone building with ornate molding over its many double-casement arched windows and a bell tower on one end. Thus far, it had narrowly avoided the flooding. As the water level had risen over the last few days, emergency workers and volunteers had packed sandbags and built a wall of them near the front entrance of the building, holding the water back. A portable tube barrier, which required far less work to set up, had been allocated for the front of the police building but when members of the Emergency Services Department went into their supply building to get it, they found it was missing.
The sandbags worked well enough, but no one could get in or out through the front lobby. Luckily, the water hadn’t yet reached the ground floor of the building where their holding cells were. Josie pulled into the municipal parking lot at the rear of the building and let Gretchen out, promising to return with her high school yearbook.
Josie counted herself lucky that her house, where she lived with her boyfriend and colleague, Lieutenant Noah Fraley, was in one of the neighborhoods outside of the flood zone. She knew Noah wasn’t home as he had been dispatched to South Denton to work with emergency crews there. Misty Derossi’s vehicle, however, was parked in the driveway. Misty owned a large, beautiful Victorian home in the historic district of the city which had been under water for days. Josie had invited Misty, her four-year-old son, Harris, and their chi-weiner dog, Pepper, to stay with her and Noah until the flooding passed. As Josie turned her key in the door, she heard the click of dog paws on her foyer floor and then Pepper’s high-pitched bark mingled with Trout’s deeper bark. As she opened the door, both dogs jumped on her legs. Their tongues lolled as they huffed, trying to get her attention. Trout, who was normally very friendly toward Pepper, snapped at her as she tried to get Josie’s attention. Josie scolded him and knelt to pet both of them, rubbing their sides and reminding them both that they were good dogs.
“JoJo!” Little Harris Quinn came barreling toward her from the kitchen, his arms open.
The dogs made way as he leapt into her arms. She laughed and stood up, twirling him around and planting a kiss on his blond scalp. “What’s going on?”
“Your hair is all messed up,” he observed.
“I’m in here!” Misty called from the kitchen.
Harris gave Josie a serious look. “Mommy is stress-baking.”
Josie laughed as she carried him into the kitchen. The dogs followed. “Stress-baking?”
Misty turned away from the open oven and smiled at Josie, then gave a little eye-roll. “His grandmother said it and now he won’t stop telling everyone that’s what I’m doing.”
Josie looked around the kitchen. Two pies cooled on the counter. On the kitchen table were two loaves of bread swaddled in dish towels. From the oven, Misty pulled a tray of cookies. She deposited it onto the only open space on the kitchen counter and pulled off her oven mitts.
Josie raised a brow. “Well, it is just the four of us here. I’m not sure we’ll finish all this.”
Misty shook her head. “Don’t be silly. This is for the first responders. I’m going to make baskets and drop them off at the command post.”
Both dogs sniffed the kitchen floor from one end of the room to the other, looking for any scraps Misty might have dropped. But Misty was one of the cleanest, neatest people Josie had ever known. It wasn’t the first time she and Harris had stayed with Josie. They’d formed an unusual friendship over the years. After Josie and Ray separated, Ray had begun frequenting the local strip club with his buddies where Misty was a dancer. They started dating. Josie had despised her at first, letting petty jealousy get the best of her and projecting blame for the disintegration of her marriage onto Misty. Over time, she realized that Misty had had nothing at all to do with the end of their marriage. She’d grown to accept that Ray had fallen in love with Misty before his death. After he died, Misty gave birth to Ray’s son. Josie had thought it would be difficult to even lay eyes on Ray’s child. When she and Ray were married, they had made a conscious decision not to have children of their own. Their childhoods had been so traumatic that they were terrified of bringing a child into the world together. They couldn’t escape the fear that they might make terrible parents. But the moment she saw Harris and held him in her arms, she felt a surge of love and protectiveness she had never experienced before. She had known in that moment that she would take a bullet for this child, and she’d vowed to do whatever she could to help Misty raise and care for him. Misty had moved on from dancing to working as an intake counselor at the local women’s center. She worked long hours and had no family nearby. Along with Ray’s mother, Josie was one of Harris’s primary babysitters.
“Why is your hair all yucky?” Harris asked, pulling at one of her stringy locks. “You didn’t brush it today?”
Josie set him on the floor. “I got soaked in the rain,” she told him. “I didn’t have a chance to comb it out yet.”
Harris, apparently accepting her answer, asked his mother if he could play a game on her tablet. Misty said, “For a half hour but that’s it. Go ahead; I left it in the living room.” Once he was out of the room, Misty said, “I saw you on the news. That scared the hell out of me. I thought you were going to stop doing crazy dangerous stuff.”
Josie laughed. “I never said that.”
Misty’s face turned serious. “Was it a body?”
Josie nodded.
“I’m sorry,” Misty said. “That’s terrible.”
“Misty,” Josie said.
“When Ray was alive—”
She saw Misty’s shoulders tense. Even after all these years, the topic of Ray was difficult for Misty. Josie understood why. For Josie, Ray had been her best friend, high school sweetheart, and then her husband. He had been her lifeline. Misty hadn’t known him nearly as long as Josie, but she’d fallen hard for him. Before his death, Ray had done some morally questionable things, and Josie knew that Misty struggled just as much as she did reconciling the love she had felt for him with the man he’d turned out to be. Any discussion of him always stirred up those conflicting feelings.
Misty leaned her narrow hip against the counter and folded her arms over her chest. “It’s okay,” she said. “Ask me.”
Josie pushed a mess of tangled hair behind one of her ears. “When Ray was alive, did he ever talk about high school?”
“No, not really. You two were together in high school, so it wasn’t something we talked about much. He really couldn’t talk about it without your name coming up. It was kind of awkward at the time.”
Josie gave a pained smile. Misty was right. Josie couldn’t talk about high school without talking about Ray either. So why didn’t she remember what happened to his letter jacket? “Did he ever talk about baseball?”
Misty nodded. “Oh, well, yeah. He was the starting pitcher for the state championship game in his junior year. I had to hear that story about a million times, especially after he’d had a few drinks. So almost nightly.”
Josie laughed drily. “Right. What kinds of things did he say about that time?”
Misty narrowed her eyes. “Josie, I know enough about your job by now to know that whatever it is you’re working on—whether it’s that body you found today or something else—you can’t tell me details. At least not now.” She lowered her voice and did an impression of every police officer Josie had ever seen on the news. “We can’t comment on an ongoing investigation.” Then she smiled. “So just ask me what you need to ask me.”
Josie said, “But you can’t ask any follow-up questions. You can, but I can’t answer them.”
“I know that too.”
“Did Ray ever talk about his letter jacket?”
Misty rolled her eyes, but the smile on her face was full of love and longing. “His prized letter jacket that his mom sewed up after he tore the sleeve? The one with the special patch on it? The baseball on fire? For a smoking fast pitcher?”
Josie felt a lump in her throat. She still felt uncomfortable hearing stories from Misty that had been intimately shared between herself and Ray or that she had witnessed firsthand. Misty had only known him a couple of years and yet Ray had told her things that Josie had spent a lifetime experiencing alongside him. “Yes,” she croaked. “That jacket.”
“Well, the first few times I heard the story, he said he lost it.”
“Lost it?” Josie said. “Where?”
Misty raised a hand in the air. “I didn’t believe that. The way he talked about that team and that season and that last game? That jacket meant something to him. No way would he have lost it. I asked him a few times what really happened to it.”
“What did he tell you?”
Misty shook her head. “About a half dozen different things. He gave it to you. He left it in the locker room at school and it was stolen. He lent it to someone and never got it back. He put it in storage in his mom’s attic, and when he went looking for it as an adult, it was gone. He lost it in a move. You took it when you two broke up.”
Josie’s mind worked through these possibilities. Four of them she could immediately dismiss. He never would have packed it away in his mother’s attic. He would have wanted to wear it again as soon as the weather got cool. But he hadn’t, Josie realized. She hadn’t seen him wearing the jacket after junior year. He hadn’t given it to Josie nor had she taken it when they broke up. It hadn’t been lost in a move. They had moved several times after they got married, living in a series of shitty apartments before finding a house together. But Josie had never seen the jacket during any of their moves. That left the possibilities that it had been stolen or that he had loaned it to someone who hadn’t returned it. But if it had been stolen, why wouldn’t he just say that? Why make up a bunch of other excuses for what happened to the jacket? Josie had known Ray better than anyone. Or she thought she had. He had done silly things and lied about them for no other reason than because he thought Josie would be upset or disapprove.
“I take it you don’t have the jacket,” Misty said, interrupting Josie’s thoughts.
“No, I don’t have it.”
If it hadn’t been stolen, that meant Ray had loaned it to someone. But he’d still lied to Misty about the whole thing. Why? A feeling like icy fingertips trailing up her spine gave Josie a shiver. Because the person he’d loaned it to hadn’t given it back to him? Because she’d been wearing it when she died?
Misty was staring at her intently. “But you saw the jacket,” she said. “Today. After you were in the flood.”
Josie said nothing.
Misty turned and picked up a spatula, probing the cookies on the tray. One by one, she slid the spatula beneath them and transferred them into a Tupperware container.
Josie said, “I just have to get something from the garage before I get in the shower.”
She turned to walk out of the room. From behind her, came Misty’s voice. “Ray was a lot of things—good and bad. He disappointed us. People got hurt because of what he did. Because of what he didn’t do, really. He was weak. But Josie—”
Josie looked over her shoulder. They locked eyes. Misty said, “Ray would never kill anyone.”
Five
2004
Josie pulled her jacket tighter around herself. Cold seeped from the stone beneath her. The blanket Ray had brought did nothing to make their perch warmer or more comfortable. Then again, there was nowhere particularly comfortable to sit at the Stacks. That didn’t stop teenagers from Denton East High from congregating there, though. Hidden in the woods behind the high school, it was the perfect spot for them to get away from adults. Students drank, smoked, and did other things adults wouldn’t approve of at the Stacks. The place had gotten its name from the large slabs of rock that had fallen from the mountainside, forming literal stacks of flat stone. The Stacks were more crowded than Josie had ever seen them, but that was because the Denton East Blue Jays were only one win away from the Pennsylvania state baseball championship.
“We should have gotten closer to the fire,” Josie said to Ray. “I’m freezing.”
He put down his beer can and pulled his jacket off. He wrapped it around her, tugging at the lapels and drawing her closer. After planting a soft kiss on her lips, he said, “There. That better?”
Josie smiled, resting her forehead against his. “Your letter jacket? Really?”
He pulled his head back so she could see his smile. “I want it back.”
“Of course. You’ll need it back when you get your state championship patch.”
He kissed her again. “We have one more game to go.”
Josie checked her watch. “Speaking of that, it’s getting late, Ray. How many beers have you had?”
He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “Not many,” he answered. “But you’re right. It is getting late. We’ll get going soon, okay?” He picked up his beer and slugged down what was left of it. “One more, okay?”
Josie huddled inside his jacket, grateful for its warmth. “Just one though, okay?”
“Chill, Jo,” he said.
He hopped down from the rock where they sat and sauntered over to a group of guys from the baseball team. They gathered in a knot next to the campfire, all in their letter jackets, all laughing and carrying on, some accompanied by their girlfriends. “Quinn!” one of them said as Ray approached. He handed Ray a beer. “Let’s get messed up! What do you say?”
Ray took the beer and smiled. “Can’t. We’ve got school and practice tomorrow. I don’t want to be hungover.”
A collective groan went up around the group. “Live a little, Quinn,” another boy said. His name was Harley. He was the catcher.
“Yeah,” said a third boy, Carter, one of the relief pitchers. “You don’t have to do everything your mommy says.”
Carter said the word mommy with sarcastic emphasis and a pointed look at Josie.
“Dude,” said Harley. “Don’t talk about his girl. He’ll kick your ass.”
Josie was already striding over to the group. “Ray,” she said. “Let’s go.” In the firelight, she saw a muscle in his jaw tic. “It’s not worth it,” she told him in a tone only he could hear.
“Go ahead, Quinn. Go home with your mommy,” teased Carter.
Josie turned to him. “Ever wonder why you’re so far down on the lineup, Carter? Why you’re not a starting pitcher?”
All conversation stopped. Josie felt everyone’s eyes on her. Carter glared at her, his dark eyes glittering in the flickering light. Josie leaned into him. “It’s your bad attitude,” she told him.
He shook his head. “Shut up, bi—”
“Watch it,” Ray said, pushing Carter’s shoulder, hard.
Harley stepped between them, both of his hands up. “Come on, guys. Chill out.”
Ray pushed the unopened can of beer into Harley’s chest. “I’m leaving,” he said. “I’ll see you assholes at practice tomorrow.”
He laced his fingers through Josie’s and pulled her along to the school parking lot. As they reached her grandmother’s car, Josie said, “You know, Ray, you don’t have to fight everyone who acts like a jerk.”
He smiled at her. “I do if they disrespect you.”
She peeled off his jacket and handed it to him.
“Keep it,” he said. “Won’t you be cold?”
