Final Assignment: A Promise Falls Novella (7 page)

‘No,’ I said. ‘It certainly wasn’t.’ I reached out for it. ‘May I?’

‘Sure,’ he said, handing it over.

I ran my hands along it, from one end to the other. It was perfectly smooth, even at the thick end, which usually takes a beating from being tapped on home plate while the player waits for the pitch.

‘If I didn’t know better,’ I said, ‘I’d say this has never been used.’

Malcolm took it back and made a show of studying it carefully. ‘Not very much, that’s true.’ He laughed. ‘I guess that means Chandler isn’t hitting the ball quite as often as he’d like to be.’

‘Franny told the police she stole Chandler’s bat,’ I said.

‘Hmm?’ Malcolm said, pretending not to take in the significance of what I was saying.

‘It was Chandler’s bat she took. From where your son said he’d lost it. She wanted it to have his fingerprints on it.’

Malcolm feigned puzzlement. ‘I’m not following.’

‘Did you come home the morning I met you because you’d just bought a new baseball bat and wanted to tuck it into the garage? So if and when someone asked for it, you’d be able to produce it?’

‘That’s ridiculous,’ he said. ‘Patently ridiculous.’

‘I’ll bet you were smart enough to pay for it in cash. But how many places in Promise Falls sell baseball bats? Maybe half a dozen? You think if someone were to go to all those places with your picture, and ask if anyone remembered you buying a baseball bat in the last week, they’d get lucky?’

Malcolm hesitated.

‘Buying a bat is not a crime,’ he said.

‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘But it raises an interesting question. You’d have had to buy that bat before news got out that Mike Vaughn had been killed. You bought it to help Chandler before you could have reasonably known he needed the help.’

‘You’ve totally lost me,’ he said, holding the bat with one hand, tapping it in the palm of his other.

‘That’s probably why you wiped his real bat down too. To help him. To make sure none of his fingerprints were on it. And you accomplished that. None of Chandler’s fingerprints are on the murder weapon. But what’s funny is, that’s the thing that incriminates you.’

‘You should leave,’ he said.

‘Franny wanted his fingerprints on that bat. So after she struck Mike, she would have just left the bat there. That’s where I have a hard time figuring out the rest of it. Let’s say it was you who wiped the bat clean. That means you were at the scene. But if you were at the scene, you’d have witnessed Franny hitting Mike. So why wipe down the bat?’

‘I did no such thing,’ he said.

I took a close look at some of the books, the ones related to teaching. ‘Before you got into offering financial advice, you taught, didn’t you?’

‘What? In a community college, yes. Why the hell are you asking that?’

‘A lot of educational institutions in this state, as part of the background checks on their instructors, insist on having them fingerprinted. Have you ever been fingerprinted, Malcolm?’

His eyes were wide. He muttered something.

‘What was that?’

Quietly he said, ‘Possibly.’

‘Because while they didn’t find Chandler’s prints on the bat, and none for Franny, since she was at least smart enough to wear gloves, they did find one partial print that got missed when it was wiped down. They’re searching databases now to see if it shows up anywhere. What do you think the odds are that it’s yours?’

Malcolm was starting to breathe heavily. There were droplets of sweat forming on his brow.

Greta appeared in the doorway. ‘Did you want a coffee, Mal—’

‘Get out!’ he shouted.

Stunned, she backed away. He strode over to the door and slammed it shut.

I said calmly, ‘The only way I can figure it is you came onto the scene after Franny left. But how? How did you find Mike? How did you find him, and the bat? You want to tell me that?’

‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘Why didn’t I just leave things as they were?’

‘What happened, Malcolm?’

‘I just wanted to protect my son. I just wanted to save him. I did what any father would have done.’

He’d walked over behind his desk. The bat in his hands was shaking. He gripped it more tightly to try to make it stop.

‘How did you know he was there?’ I asked again. ‘How did you find Mike after Franny killed him?’

Malcolm turned and looked out the window. ‘I heard him.’

It took a second for that to sink in. ‘Franny didn’t kill him,’ I said.

Malcolm shook his head slowly.

‘She thought she had, and then she ran,’ I said.

‘When Chandler slipped out of the house, I heard him go. Greta was asleep. I thought, what the hell is he up to now? He and Mike humiliated that boy, then he writes that damn story, and now he was sneaking out. I wanted to stop him from getting himself into anything else. So I … I followed him. But by the time I got outside, he was out of sight, so I wandered up and down the streets, and down near Clampett Park. He was walking back from there, heading toward the house. He was just walking, he wasn’t doing anything wrong that I could see, so I slipped into the woods and let him go past. And that was when I heard moaning, someone crying for help.’

I waited.

‘I went into the woods and I found Mike. I had my phone with me and was using it like a flashlight. I could see his head was bleeding, really bad. He’d been hit more than once. He was making these gurgling sounds, like maybe he was close to dying.’

‘But not dead,’ I said.

Malcolm turned away from the window, back to me.

‘He looked up at me, I think he could make out who I was, and he just said, “Why?” And I panicked. I’d read the story that got Chandler in trouble. I’d just seen him in the area. I figured there was something … something wrong in my son’s head, that maybe he wrote that piece to warn us what he was going to do. I … I wasn’t thinking clearly, but I thought Chandler’s life would be over. That when Mike told the police what he had done to him …’

‘So you picked up the bat and finished him off,’ I said. ‘So he wouldn’t be able to tell the police Chandler did it.’

Malcolm turned and looked at me. ‘I wanted to save my son.’

‘Chandler didn’t need saving. But there was still a chance to save Michael.’

‘How could I … I didn’t know that.’

‘So you finished what Franny had started, wiped down the bat, and got out of there. And the next day you bought another bat to bolster the argument that the murder weapon wasn’t Chandler’s.’

‘What would you have done?’ he asked. ‘What would you do to save your son?’

It was too late for that for me.

Suddenly he swung the bat up over his head, both hands on the grip, and brought it crashing down onto the top of his desk. It was like a thunderclap. He took another swing, this time side to side, clearing the desk of a lamp and a clock and several other items that went crashing to the floor.

Then he dropped the bat, and collapsed into his leather office chair.

The door opened and Greta stood there, dumbstruck.

‘What’s happened?’ she asked. ‘What in God’s name has happened?’

I found my way out, wondering whether Barry Duckworth was going to get tired of hearing from me.

I hate this town.

David

A
couple of hours before all hell broke loose, I was in bed, awake since five, pondering the circumstances that had returned me, at the age of forty-one, to my childhood home.

It wasn’t that the room was exactly the same as when I’d moved out almost twenty years ago. The Ferrari poster no longer hung over the blue-striped wallpaper, and the kit I built of the starship
Enterprise
—hardened amberlike droplets of glue visible on the hull—no longer sat on the dresser. But it was the same dresser. And it was the same wallpaper. And this was the same single bed.

Sure, I’d spent the night in here a few times over the years, as a visitor. But to be back here as a resident? To be
living
here? With my parents, and my son, Ethan?

God, what a fucking state of affairs. How had it come to this?

It wasn’t that I didn’t know the answer to that question. It was complicated, but I knew.

The descent had begun five years ago, after my wife, Jan, passed away. A sad story, and not one worth rehashing here. After half a decade, there were things I’d had no choice but to put behind me. I’d grown into my role of single father. I was raising Ethan, nine years old now, on my own. I’m not saying that made me a hero. I’m just trying to explain how things unfolded.

Wanting a new start for Ethan and myself, I quit my job as a reporter for the
Promise Falls Standard
—not that hard a decision, considering the lack of interest by the paper’s management in actually covering anything approaching news—and accepted an editing position on the city desk at the
Boston Globe
. The money was better, and Boston had a lot to offer Ethan: the children’s museum, the aquarium, Faneuil Hall Marketplace, the Red Sox, the Bruins. If there was a better place for a boy and his dad, I couldn’t think where it might be. But …

There’s always a
but
.

But most of my duties as an editor took place in the evening, after reporters had handed in their stories. I could see Ethan off to school, sometimes even pop by and take him to lunch, since I didn’t have to be at the paper until three or four in the afternoon. But that meant most nights I did not have dinner with my son. I wasn’t there to make sure Ethan spent more time on his homework than on video games. I wasn’t there to keep him from watching countless episodes of shows about backwoods duck hunters or airheaded wives of equally airheaded sports celebrities or whatever the latest celebration of American ignorance and/or wretched excess happened to be. But the really troubling thing was, I just wasn’t
there
. A lot of being a dad amounts to being around, being available.
Not
being at work.

Who was Ethan supposed to talk to if he had a crush on some girl—perhaps unlikely at nine, but you never knew—or needed advice on dealing with a bully, and it was eight o’clock at night? Was he supposed to ask Mrs. Tanaka? A nice woman, no doubt about it, who was happy to make money five nights a week looking after a young boy now that her husband had passed away. But Mrs. Tanaka wasn’t much help when it came to math questions. She didn’t feel like jumping up and down with Ethan when the Bruins scored in overtime. And it was pretty hard to persuade her to take up a controller and race a few laps around a virtual Grand Prix circuit in one of Ethan’s video games.

By the time I stepped wearily through the door—usually between eleven and midnight, and I
never
went out for drinks after the paper was put to bed because I knew Mrs. Tanaka wanted to return to her own apartment eventually—Ethan was usually asleep. I had to resist the temptation to wake him, ask how his day had gone, what he’d had for supper, whether he’d had any problems with his homework, what he’d watched on TV.

How often had I fallen into bed myself with an aching heart? Telling myself I was a bad father? That I’d made a stupid mistake leaving Promise Falls? Yes, the
Globe
was a better paper than the
Standard
, but any extra money I was making was more than offset by what was going into Mrs. Tanaka’s bank account, and a high monthly rent.

My parents offered to move to Boston to help out, but I wanted no part of that. My dad, Don, was in his early seventies now, and Arlene, my mother, was only a couple of years behind him. I was not going to uproot them, especially after a recent scare Dad put us all through. A minor heart attack. He was okay now, getting his strength back, taking his meds, but the man was not up to a move. Maybe one day a seniors’ residence in Promise Falls, when the house became too much for him and Mom to take care of, but moving to a big city a couple of hundred miles away—more than three hours if there was traffic—was not in the cards.

So when I heard the
Standard
was looking for a reporter, I swallowed my pride and made the call.

I felt like I’d eaten a bucket of Kentucky Fried Crow when I called the managing editor and said, “I’d like to come back.”

It was amazing there was actually a position. As newspaper revenues declined, the
Standard
, like most papers, was cutting back wherever it could. As staff left, they weren’t replaced. But the
Standard
was down to half a dozen people, a number that included reporters, editors, and photographers. (Most reporters were now “two-way,” meaning they could write stories and take pictures, although in reality, they were more like “four-way” or “six-way,” since they also filed for the online edition, did podcasts, tweeted—you name it, they did it. It wouldn’t be long before they did home delivery to the few subscribers who still wanted a print edition.) Two people had left in the same week to pursue nonjournalistic endeavors—one went to public relations, or “the dark side,” as I had once thought of it, and the other became a veterinarian’s assistant—so the paper could not provide its usual inadequate coverage of goings-on in Promise Falls. (Little wonder that many people had, for years, been referring to the paper as the
Substandard
.)