Thread of Hope (The Joe Tyler Series, #1) (17 page)

Crazy probably didn’t describe it.  I remembered the feeling all too clearly and I wasn’t sure there was a word that captured it.

“I don’t have her and I don’t know where she is,” I said.  “So leave me the fuck alone.”

I started walking away.

“My gun?”  Hanley whined.  “Hey, come on, man.  That’s mine.”

I dropped it in the bag with my clothes.  “Tell Jordan to buy you a new one.”

THIRTY-THREE

As I walked back to my hotel, the urge to go look for Meredith Jordan kept poking at me.  I’d spent the last several years looking for kids exactly like her and it was as if someone had turned my switch on.

But I had no idea where to look and I needed to remember that while she may have been the key to getting Chuck free, she wasn’t the reason I returned to Coronado.  I didn’t need to be picking up random causes along the way.  My obligation was to help Chuck and I would find a way to do that without her if I had to.

I grabbed lunch on my way back to the hotel, found an iron and ironing board in the closet of my room and managed not to burn myself or the clothes as I worked the wrinkles out of my new outfit.  After a half hour of flipping channels, I dressed and headed to the high school.

Robert Stricker was the only one in the gym when I walked in.

He lifted his head in my direction.  “Coach.  You’re early.”

“Nothing else to do.”

He nodded at the stack of chairs against the wall.  “You’re in luck.  I got things for you to do.”

“This where you tell me what my salary’s gonna be?” I walked over to the chairs.

“Yep.  You’ll love it.  Gotta bunch of zeroes in it.  Unfortunately for you, it starts with a zero.”

I put my hands on a couple of the chairs.  “You don’t have a problem with me coaching tonight?”

“Kelly’s without an assistant,” he said, not looking at me.  “You're background check cleared.  She wants you to fill in.  She’s okay with it, I’m okay with it.”  He glanced at me.  “Long as you behave.”

I pulled two chairs off the wall and added them to the row that he’d begun.  “You hear anything about Meredith Jordan missing?”

He froze before he could set the next chair down.  “What are you talking about?”

“Those two...associates that escorted me out of your office?  They came to see me this morning.  Jordan’s gone off the deep end because she didn’t come home last night.”

He set the chair down.  “Hadn’t heard that.  If she wasn’t at school today, she can’t play tonight.”  He tilted his head to the side.  “And if that’s the case, you guys are seriously screwed.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because Episcopal is as good as we are.  When Meredith’s playing.  Without her, we’re gonna be hurting.”

“So you’re more worried about the game than the fact that she’s disappeared?”

His face clouded with a shot of anger and he kicked the chair into place.  “That’s not what I meant.”

“Then what did you mean?”

He folded his massive arms across his chest.  “Look, the kids here?  They aren’t like kids at other schools.  They’ve got a lot of money and when I say a lot, I mean more than you or I have ever dreamed of.  You’ve seen the cars in the lot, seen this campus.  They are living in Fantasyland.”

He was saying the same things Kelly Rundles had told me.  I grabbed two more chairs from the wall and let him continue talking

“And their parents?”  He chuckled, but there was no humor in his tone.  “They treat these kids like adults.  No rules, no discipline, no supervision.  Let them run loose like college kids on spring break.”  The humorless smile on his face hardened.  “So it’s not like a student here hasn’t disappeared for a night or three.  Maybe they should check the resorts in the Caribbean.  Or the penthouse at The W.”

He shook his head and grabbed a couple more chairs.

“But doesn’t her situation make it a little different this time?” I asked.  “With everything that’s happened to her?”

Stricker set the chairs down and unfolded them, taking a deep breath.  “I don’t know.  Maybe.  But if we called 911 every time one of them spent a night away from home, we’d wear out emergency dispatch.”

I positioned the last two chairs at the end of the row.  The seats for both teams were in place now.  “I’ve heard, though, that Meredith is a pretty good kid.  Maybe different from the others here.”

He pointed a finger across the gym to the bleachers and motioned for me to follow him.  “She is a good kid.  So, yeah, maybe it’s a little different.”

He stuck a key into a small panel on the wall.  A small whirring noise started up behind the tall wooden bleachers and they slowly began to creep outward. 

“You ever get a weird vibe from her father?” I asked.

“I get weird vibes from a lot of people.”

“I mean, anything weird going on with his daughter,” I said.

“You mean sick weird?”

I nodded.

“No,” he said, shaking his head.  “Doesn’t seem like him.  He’s got issues, but not like that.”

“What kind of issues?”

The bleachers locked into place and the whirring died.  Stricker pulled the key out of the wall and looked at his watch.  “I’m gonna go check attendance, see if she was here today.  Like I said, if she wasn’t, she’s not playing.”

“Jordan can’t control that?” I asked, thinking of parents I’d known that would skirt any rule for the sake of their child.  “If she shows up, not something he can do to get her eligible?”

Stricker’s face darkened as he headed for the exit.  “I follow the rules.  And Jordan doesn’t control me.”

THIRTY-FOUR

Kelly Rundles showed up a few minutes later, dressed sharply in a navy pant suit and carrying a giant bag of basketballs over her shoulder.

I asked her if she’d heard anything from Meredith and her mood took a nose dive.

“No.”  Her mouth puckered like she’d bit into a lemon.  “Why are you asking me that right now?”

I told her.

“Shit,” she muttered.  “We need her tonight.”

Her concern was different than mine.  I was thinking about all the things that might be going on with Meredith.  Kelly, as any coach would, was thinking about the game.

She un-puckered her lips and shrugged her shoulders.  “Oh well.  If she’s not here, she’s not here.  Nothing we can do about it.  Still gotta play the game.”

Again, she was smart.  She wasn’t going to fret over something she couldn’t control and she certainly wouldn’t show any frustration over it to the other girls.

Stricker came in through the doors at the other end of the hall, his jaw tight and his cheeks sucked in.

“Recorded as absent,” he said.  “Even if she shows, she can’t play.”

“Okay,” Kelly said.

“I’m sorry, Kelly,” Stricker said, shaking his head.  “Nothing I can do.”

She set the bag of balls down.  “Not your fault.  She knows the rules.  So do the other girls.  We’ll be fine.”

But they weren’t.

The girls were rattled in the locker room as soon as Kelly mentioned that Meredith wouldn’t be playing.  Eyes wide, they began to fidget and I could see the anxiety take hold.

Except for Megan.  She just stared at her hands and shook her head

They carried the anxiety out on the floor with them.  They were disoriented, out of sync, unable to do what they’d been prepared to do.  They missed open shots, threw the ball away, missed defensive assignments.  Kelly yelled, screamed, pleaded, all to no avail.  I sat there, helpless and mute.

Episcopal, smelling blood early, went ahead and cut open a gaping wound in the Coronado team.  They won by thirty two points.

Kelly kept her post game speech short, all of the girls hanging their heads, the collective disappointment clouding the room like the smoke after a brushfire.  There was no point in getting on them.  They knew they had come out and tanked.  Their own knowledge of the failure was far more effective than anything she could’ve told them.

She turned to me in the hallway after we’d stepped out of the locker room.  “You going to look for her?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Wouldn’t finding her help your case with Chuck?”

“I don’t know.  She won’t talk to me so far.  And it’s not like her father is a fan of mine.  Not my business.”

She perched her hands on her hips, her elbows forming sharp angles at her sides.  “I think you should look for her.”

“No offense, but I’m not here to save your program.”

She squinted at me for a moment, chewing on her bottom lip.  “That’s not what I meant.”

“Yeah, it is,” I said, not believing her.  “You didn’t ask me a single question about her well-being.  After I told you about her absence, you went right into game mode.  And you’re still in it.  You want her back so that you don’t rack up any more thirty-point losses, not because she might be in any kind of trouble.”

She stared at me for a long time, then picked up the bag of balls and slung them over her shoulder.  “Fuck you, Tyler.  It’s my job to win games, but I care about those girls, too.  My job tonight wasn’t to work them up into a frenzy over a missing friend, it was to get them to put that aside and play basketball.  What should I have done?” 

I didn't answer.

She raised both of her eyebrows.  “Tell me.  What should I have done?  Had them hold hands in a circle and talk about how much they missed Meredith?”  She let the eyebrows come down and shook her head.  “Don’t act like you understand me.  I don’t care if she ever plays again.  I said you should find her because it’s the right thing to do and you would seem to know how to do it.” 

She adjusted the bag on her shoulder.  “That’s the only reason and fuck you for thinking otherwise.”

THIRTY-FIVE

I stood in the hallway for a few minutes, thinking over Kelly’s words.

Had I been unfair with her?  She hadn’t asked if I thought Meredith was alright, hadn’t asked if I knew what might’ve happened to her and she didn’t ask any of the other girls if they knew anything.

             
She’d been focused on basketball.

             
But over the course of the week, I'd seen her demonstrate genuine concern and empathy for her players, not to mention the conversation we’d shared in the diner.  She liked Meredith and not just for her playing ability.  She hadn’t struck me as one of those win at all costs coaches.  I hadn’t seen anything to indicate that her win-loss record superseded everything else.

Until she told me she thought I should look for Meredith.