Out of Bounds (2 page)

“My point is, this job is about making people like and want to help the Fallon Foundation. You know our business and people like you.”

Wes stared at his brother.

“I don’t understand it, either,” Deacon said. “But they do.”

“Don’t you need a marketing guy? I majored in electrical engineering.”

“And I would trust you to rewire my toaster.” His brother nodded. “I would. I would
also
trust you to show Kirkland exactly what the Fallon Foundation Center is and why they need us in their town. If we get the Hand-to-Hand partnerships going, our ability to bring changes to other communities is going to double. Help me bring that home, Wes.”

Since he ultimately owed his life to his brother, when the rare opportunity for him to help came along, he never said no. He had very little understanding of what Deacon wanted him to do, but that was beside the point.

He nodded, which sent the throbbing inside his head off the charts.

Deacon’s jaw tightened. He leaned forward as if he was going to pat Wes again or maybe hug him, but he said simply, “I’ll get the nurse.”

A few minutes later, with what felt like a very effective painkiller finally pumping through his IV, Wes started drifting off again. Deacon was on the phone, talking softly.

“He’s going to do it, Julia. I know you wanted me to wait, but I needed to get him settled.” A pause. “He said there was a dog in the street. He was trying to grab it.”

Wes closed his eyes.

Deacon’s voice was almost a whisper. Wes might have missed what he said next, but he didn’t.

“How do I know if it’s the truth? I want it to be. He’s not going to tell me and you know it. We’ll keep an eye on him. What else can we do?”

* * *

I
T
WAS
ANOTHER
THREE
DAYS
before the doctors were satisfied that he was recovered enough to discharge him. Wes didn’t tell Deacon he’d overheard him. He noticed that his brother was never out of the room long, and twice he woke up to find Deacon staring at him.

The constant scrutiny was disconcerting. Did Deacon really think he’d have tried to kill himself over the Serbia trade?

When he was awake, they went over the Hand-to-Hand center in painstaking detail. By the time he was ready to leave the hospital, Wes was pretty sure he knew more about Kirkland, N.Y., than the mayor of the town. (Jay Meacham, age forty-six. Kirkland High, class of 1980, guard on the lunchtime basketball team at the Y, scotch and soda, never married.)

In the span of a week, he’d been hit by a truck, released by his team and educated in the history and traditions of one very small town in New York in preparation for the new job he hadn’t applied for and didn’t really know how to do. Life was dragging him along again. And he felt just as impotent now as he had when he’d heard about the trade to Serbia. The situation was different, because he was helping Deacon, but somehow it felt the same.

He went back to the apartment he’d been sharing with two of his teammates and took three days to pack up his life and say his goodbyes. On the streets, he kept an eye out for the little dog, but it never showed up. On the upside, his roommates swore they hadn’t seen it dead by the side of the road, either. Maybe it had found a new home.

At the next home game, Wes’s last, the arena was packed. Wes gave a farewell speech at halftime and as he ran through the joking acknowledgments he’d written for his teammates, he looked into the stands. Was this it? The final time he’d be at center court, entertaining a crowd?

That night he made the very bad decision to go out for a tour of nightclubs with the team. He ran into Fabi, who made a big deal over his scar and then tried to drag him into a private room to make out. He thanked her for the cactus and declined the invitation.

When he woke up the next morning he quickly discovered his teammates had given him a thoughtful parting gift. His usual thick hair was gone, shorn down to patchy stubble.

He was staring at himself in the bathroom mirror and wondering if he had time to hunt down Gary Krota to make him eat his razor, when his brother called.

“We have a problem,” Deacon said. “This woman in Kirkland, Trish Jones, ran a fundraiser for us last month. All her own idea and effort, but she used our name and logo. I didn’t actually know about it until she’d been promoting the event for a few days and by then it was too late to cut her off. She got the community involved and we had to be careful because we need as much goodwill as we can muster.”

Wes turned away from his reflection and leaned back on the sink.

“What’d she do, organize a bake sale? It’s not warm enough for a car wash there, is it?”

“She wrote a blog post and put up a donation button. The Kirkland paper said she managed to rake in over sixty-five thousand dollars. In ten days.”

Wes whistled. “That’s not true.”

“Honest to God. She told them she wasn’t expecting that kind of number, but apparently some other local blogger with a much bigger audience got wind of the thing and shared the link to Trish’s fundraising site and it snowballed.”

“Seventy thousand dollars?”

“It’s going to buy a lot of basketballs. Except there’s a little problem.”

“It’s all in pennies?”

“Trish hasn’t answered her phone in the past week.”

“You think she skipped town?”

“She owns a business there,” Deacon said. “I want to believe there’s an innocent explanation, but the other blogger, Chloe Chastain, called us with her concerns. Her reputation is on the line, too. When you get to Kirkland tomorrow, Trish Jones is your number one priority. We need to know where that money is and we need it to be in our bank account, safe and accounted for as soon as possible.”

“Got it.” Wes turned back to the mirror. Gary Krota better hope he never had to make a living as a barber.

* * *

P
OSY
J
ONES
SPENT
one weekend, every other month, in her mother’s house in Kirkland, New York.

Trish cared what the other women on the Kirkland mom-and-community circuit thought about her and while Posy was often frustrated by her mom, she loved her. So she showed up and did her time and her mom had stories to tell her friends to prove that her relationship with her daughter was just as nice and perfect as she wanted it to be.

Timing the visits also capped the amount of crazy she had to deal with. Her mom had a habit of stepping into trouble and expecting Posy to bail her out, and the problems tended to snowball if she was away from Kirkland too long.

She flicked the button on the steering wheel to turn off the radio, silencing the Kirkland morning show—the same deejay team that had woken Posy up every morning in junior high school.

Before she got out of the car, she turned her phone on. Not a single missed call from her mom during the three-hour trip from Rochester.
That
never happened. She’d only spoken to her mom briefly the day before, too. When was the last time her mom had kept her on the phone longer than two minutes? Last week?

Main Street in downtown Kirkland was picturesque. As a location scout and quality control inspector for a national hotel chain, Posy was a professional at assessing the up- and downsides to communities. Kirkland was almost all upside—small, but thriving downtown full of locally owned businesses, excellent public schools, a pretty setting tucked on the shore of one of the Finger Lakes in upstate New York.

The downtown streets were lined with hanging baskets of flowers. Recycled plastic benches were spaced at friendly intervals to encourage visiting and lingering. A decent run of tourists came through in the summer for wine tours and lake camping. Another run in the fall for the foliage. Robinson University was a steady employer, and brought outlets for culture, a decent roster of small, research spin-off companies, as well as a solid but ever-changing population to fill rental units. And that bolstered the bottom line of countless Kirkland family budgets.

If she were assessing her hometown as a possible site for one of the Hotel Marie’s locations, she’d have to give Kirkland excellent marks. The year-round population was too small to support a large hotel like those in her chain, but she wouldn’t be able to fault much else.

That, however, was only the professional assessment. Personally? Posy gave Kirkland a lot more
X
marks than checks.

Posy’s parents separated when she was nine. Her dad moved to Rochester and her mom used every trick she could think of to drag the separation out and avoid divorce. When the divorce was finally official, Posy was fifteen and the family court judge allowed her to choose the custodial parent. She picked her dad, which precipitated an immediate campaign of guilt-tripping and pity parties from her mom. That campaign was still going strong thirteen years later.

As Trish never failed to mention, her dad hadn’t been willing or able to give Posy the kind of attention she’d been used to receiving from her mom. Which had been the point of Posy’s choice, but Trish would never accept that. It was a true story, but not a pretty one. And Trish would pick fantasy over harsh reality every time.

She found a parking place a few doors down from the Wonders of Christmas Shoppe, the store her mom owned on Main Street. Usually when she visited she did everything in her power to avoid Wonders, but her mom had insisted they meet there. She parked and locked her car, a habit she’d picked up when she moved to Rochester with her dad and that marked her as an outsider in Kirkland. Appropriate, because she’d never really fit in here in the first place.

The day was warm and there was a short line waiting for an outdoor table at the Lemon Drop Café. Wonders, on the other hand, had a Closed sign on the front door and the white lights that twinkled around the window display year-round were off. The brass door handle didn’t turn when she tried it. Posy knocked on the glass. She saw movement in the back of the store and waited while her mom made her way from the office.

Trish Jones turned the lock and pulled the door open with a jingle of brass bells. Posy was caught in a
cinnamon-scented hug, gently patting her mom’s back while trying to ignore the familiar awkwardness she felt whenever they touched. Posy was six feet tall, more than ten inches taller than Trish. Her frame was built on a completely different scale, broad and sturdy, quick to add muscle versus will-o’-the-wisp insubstantial. It was a size difference that, when Posy shot up past her mom early in fifth grade, had only exacerbated their constant conflicts over what Trish termed Posy’s unwillingness to fit in. She’d somehow managed to believe that Posy had willed herself into being a freakishly tall girl in middle school. Because that was exactly the fate every eleven-year-old girl longed for.

“I’m so glad you’re finally here, sweetheart,” Trish said. “I missed you.”

She released Posy, opened the door and quickly glanced up and down the street before closing and locking it again. Posy braced herself to be told that her orange T-shirt was too bright or that her freshly painted nails in their deep eggplant glory were disturbing.

“Did you see anyone out there? Chloe?”

“Anyone besides all the people walking around town on a gorgeous spring afternoon? No.” Posy squinted toward the Lemon Drop. “Chloe Chastain?”

“Never mind,” her mom said. “I’m glad you’re here.”

Two “glad you’re heres” in one minute? No critique of her outfit?

“Come back to the office,” Trish said.

Posy’s large leather purse held her iPad, iPhone, travel mug, business cards, emergency travel kit, makeup kit and was basically her life. Rather than risk maneuvering through the store with it on her shoulder, she set it on the tile near the front door.

She was about to follow her mom toward the back of the store when she heard a soft thump behind her.

Her mom’s tiny, white schnoodle, Angel, had jumped from the raised window display and now crouched on the floor near the bag. With fluffy white fur, round black eyes and a perky green plaid bow on her red leather collar, Angel looked the part of the perfect Christmas-shop accessory dog.

She eyed Angel. The dog’s tail twitched—a silent-movie villain’s mustache twirl.

Nonchalantly, Posy stretched one hand toward the bag, but she was too slow. With another quick swish of her tail, the dog shoved her face into Posy’s bag and emerged with her acid-yellow, leather business card wallet clutched between small, white teeth.

“No. Angel, drop it!”

Angel disappeared under the skirt around the table holding a model-train display with a village skating rink as the centerpiece. The tiny bell in the steeple of the chapel jingled when the dog bumped against the table leg. Posy knew from unfortunate experience that there’d be no catching Angel, and less than no chance the dog would do something as helpful as obey a command. She didn’t even bother lifting the table skirt. If Angel had a Twitter account and opposable thumbs, she’d send the #SillyHumans hash tag trending every day.

“Angel is under stress right now,” Trish said. Which was a new one. Sometimes Angel was delicate. Other times she’d eaten something that didn’t agree with her. The one true explanation for her dog’s terrible behavior—that Angel was a demon-spawned obedience-school dropout in a fluffy white fur coat—was never mentioned. “I’ll replace that...whatever it was.”

Posy lifted her bag, looking in vain for a spare inch or two on one of the tables where she could put it out of the dog’s reach. She ended up slinging it over her shoulder, holding it tight against her side with one arm.

Her mom bustled toward the back of the store. “I’m unpacking a shipment. Come on and I can tell you the news,” she said. “Watch that garland!”

Posy stooped to duck under a rope of gold, spray-painted eucalyptus leaves and pinecones. She turned sideways to edge past a display of the beautifully detailed, handcrafted papier-mâché mangers her mom commissioned from an artist in Pennsylvania.

Wonders didn’t have aisles so much as narrow alleys between displays crammed full of Christmas glitz and glitter. From the handblown ornaments hanging on color-coordinated trees, to the loops of beaded crystal garland Posy ducked through as she passed the register, the store carried everything and anything Christmas and delicate.