Foul (Night Fall ™) Read online

  I was wondering the same thing.

  Nate shrugs. “Maybe that file has some answers,” he says.

  “It’s still at your house?”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “But I’ll see what I can find.”

  14

  As he leaves the locker room, Nate takes off his hooded sweatshirt and tosses it to me. The sweatshirt has his last name—Brady— stitched onto it, and he says maybe it will trick the reporters into thinking I’m him.

  Once I put it on, though, it’s pretty clear no one’s going to be fooled for long. The sweatshirt is a little baggy on him, but it’s skintight on me. The sleeves hardly make it past my elbows.

  Still, I’ll try anything.

  I pull the hood over my head and peer out the door. To my surprise, the hallway is empty— or almost empty.

  “I told them you’d already gone home,” Cindy says. “Hope that’s OK.”

  She’s taken up her usual post across the hallway. She shrugs, palms up, pretending to actually be worried that she screwed up.

  “You’re a lifesaver,” I say.

  “Don’t be too grateful,” she says. “I only did it so you can give me a ride.”

  She’s smiling her great, unique smile—top lip showing some of her gums, bottom lip covering just a little of her upper teeth.

  “Fair enough,” I say.

  And I decide to tell her everything I just told Nate.

  “Wow,” Cindy says. She opens her mouth to say something else but can’t find the words. I don’t blame her—what’s the right response after hearing what I just told her? “Wow,” she says again.

  We’re parked in her driveway, next to her big, darkened house. Seriously, are her parents ever home? As I was talking, she took my hand from my knee and set it on her own. The car is turned off, and it’s cold enough that most of my body parts have gone numb. But my hand’s been tingling ever since she sandwiched it between her knee and palm.

  What’s cool is that I don’t think she fully realizes what she’s doing with my hand. She grabbed it like it was a totally natural thing to do. Now she’s rubbing it the same way.

  I tell her what Nate said about the file. “He’s going to call me if he finds anything.” It’s only now that I notice she’s shivering. Her teeth are chattering. “Looks like you need to get inside,” I say.

  She asks me if I want to come inside with her. “It would be a good place to hide out,” she says.

  But I tell her no. “I’m going to go home and try to get some sleep. Besides,” I say, “all those reporters actually make my house the safest place I could possibly be. No one’s going to try anything with all those cameras around.”

  As I’m walking up the steps of my front porch, though, I realize I’m wrong. This place isn’t safe.

  In the corner of the porch I can just make out the shadowy outline of a man.

  He steps forward, into the light.

  It’s my father. My real father.

  And he’s holding a knife.

  15

  I should run, I think. I should turn and run and scream until the reporters and the neighbors hear me.

  But I don’t run, and I don’t scream. Because I can’t. I’m too afraid. Fear has paralyzed my legs and my vocal cords. All I can do is look.

  Even if I hadn’t looked at his picture in the paper, I’d recognize him. I haven’t seen him in real life since I was five, but I’ve been picturing him in my head ever since. I remembered him being big—huge—and he is. All adults seem big when you’re a kid, of course, but my father really is. For the first time since I was maybe twelve, I have to look up to see someone’s face.

  His eyes are wild, as if they’re open too wide or don’t blink often enough. When he finally does blink, the lids crash into each other. His hair is lopsided. His face is unshaven.

  He strides toward me.

  The chance to run is gone. He’s too close now.

  His knife gleams in the light.

  Somehow my vocal cords start working again. “Why are you doing this?” I ask.

  His looks at me, hard, as if he’s trying to focus. His head shakes. His whole body spasms and shivers. He blinks again and lifts the knife.

  “This . . . isn’t . . . for . . . you,” he says. He can hardly get out the words. It’s like he’s battling his own mouth.

  He lowers the knife.

  What does he mean? If the knife’s not for me, who is it for?

  I look more closely at the knife and realize I recognize it. It’s big, maybe ten inches long and three or four inches wide, and it has a rust spot right in the middle of the blade. Patty has a knife that looks just like that. She uses it every time she carves meat or chops vegetables.

  I realize I recognize my father’s clothes, too. Or his sweater, anyway. His pants are orange and look like the ones convicts wear in movies. But his sweater—it’s a turtleneck that’s been torn to make room for his bulging throat.

  “Where did you get that sweater?” I ask.

  There’s another pause.

  “I . . . was . . . cold,” my father says.

  Before I know what I’m doing, I start to scream. “Dad! Dad! Dad!” But I’m not yelling at the father in front of me. I’m yelling for the father who lives in this house. I’m yelling for Dale.

  All of a sudden more lights turn on. They’re from all the reporters’ vans camped out on the street. I turn and see the headlights beaming, and by the time I turn back to the porch, my father’s gone.

  Not that I care. I don’t care about him, and I don’t care about the headlights. I open my front door and run into my house. It’s dark in here. I know every inch of this place by memory.

  I race up the stairs three or four steps at a time, and I scream, “MOM! DAD!”

  I’m in tears. This knife isn’t for you, he said. And he was carrying my mother’s knife and wearing my father’s shirt.

  “MOM! DAD!”

  I burst through my parents’ bedroom door and flip on the light.

  They’re both in there, lying on their bed, squinting through the bright light. They’re blinking and rubbing their eyes.

  They’re both fine.

  “What is it?” my mother says.

  “Everything okay?” my father asks.

  Their voices are groggy but concerned.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Everything’s OK. Sorry. False alarm.”

  Their eyes are more open now that they’ve adjusted to the light.

  “That’s the first time you’ve called us Mom and Dad,” my mother says. She’s tearing up and smiling at the same time.

  She’s right. I think it’s the first time I’ve thought of them that way.

  We’re standing there looking at each other, waiting for our hearts to slow down, when my phone starts vibrating in my pocket.

  It’s a text from Nate. Found the file, it says.

  16

  I wait until my parents’ bedroom light goes out and they fall back asleep. Then I tiptoe downstairs as quietly as a guy my size can and sneak out the front door. The vans’ headlights have been turned off. I keep mine off too as I drive away.

  Nate’s waiting for me on his front stoop when I pull up.

  He puts his finger over his mouth as I walk toward him. “My dad’s sleeping,” he whispers. “Let’s keep it that way.”

  He has a flashlight. I follow him to the back of the house to a closed door. “It’s in here,” Nate whispers.

  The door is slightly ajar. We enter, but Nate keeps the door open. “This is an old door,” he whispers. “Don’t want my dad to hear it close.”

  The beam from the flashlight is pointing right at a big white box, and I realize we’re in the laundry room. I wonder briefly if Sheriff Brady hid the file in the dryer. But then the beam swings around the room to the other corner, where there’s a filing cabinet. Nate pulls open a drawer and fingers through it.

  He pulls out a folder and whispers, “Here it is. My dad put it with his tax reports
.”

  Together, the two of us go through the contents of the folder. We read newspaper articles and official reports. They all say the same thing: my father, Ryan Danielson, missed a free throw at the end of the national championship eleven years ago. Northern California State lost the game by a single point.

  My father had a nervous breakdown. When the authorities found him, he was in his car in the parking lot of the stadium. His wife, my mother, was dead on the next seat.

  There are pictures in the file of my mother, and they aren’t pretty. She’s covered in blood. Then I notice her face. That’s when I have to look away.

  “I’m sorry, man,” Nate says. “We don’t have to look at these anymore.”

  “No,” I say, “it’s not that. It’s . . . she’s missing an eye.”

  Nate looks closer. “She’s missing a finger, too.”

  “Which means what? That my father has a thing for eyes and fingers?”

  Nate nods, closes the folder. “Probably. According to my dad, serial killers do certain things the same way whenever they kill people. It’s called their signature.”

  I think about all the times fans requested my dad’s signature. I’m just a high school star, and I get these requests constantly. He played college ball. Then I think about the word serial. My dad’s not just a killer, he’s a serial killer. They say he went crazy after missing the free throw, but maybe he was already insane. Maybe my mom’s body was just the first one they found. Maybe lots of people asked for his signature, and instead of using a marker, my father used a knife.

  I think about the finger and eyeball in my sports bag. “All this time,” I say to Nate, “I thought the worst-case scenario was that there was some woman out there who had been cut up and was either dead or alive. And that’s so awful, obviously, but now . . . if my dad isn’t stopped, there’s proof he’s going to keep doing this over and over.”

  I don’t know if Nate’s face has actually gone white or if it’s the result of the flashlight shining on it. “I’ve been meaning to ask,” he says. “Why didn’t you tell someone sooner? I mean, the finger showed up days ago.”

  I shake my head. “I should have—you’re right. It’s just that I didn’t know what was going on or who I could trust.”

  “You didn’t think you could trust me?” Nate says. “Or my dad?”

  “It was stupid. I know that. But your dad kept hanging out with that recruiter, and at the time I thought he was the most likely suspect, so—”

  Nate interrupts me. “Wait. What recruiter are you talking about?”

  “At the games,” I say. “I kept seeing them talking with each other.”

  Nate taps his teeth, and I know he must be thinking hard. The teeth glare in the flashlight. “The guy wearing the Northern California State sweatshirt,” he says.

  “Yeah,” I say, “and—”

  But he interrupts me again. “That’s not a recruiter,” he says. “It’s Bob Something-or-other. He’s the new gravedigger.”

  I don’t get it. “Why would your dad talk to him for two straight games?”

  Nate shrugs. “He’s always talking to people from the cemetery. He’s a cop. Half his job is dealing with dead bodies.”

  “That’s not the only reason,” someone else says.

  After all this time whispering back and forth, the new voice booms at us. Nate and I jerk our heads toward the laundry room entrance just as someone flicks on the light.

  17

  The rush of light is blinding, but after a second I can see well enough to recognize the man in the doorway. It’s Sheriff Brady.

  “You have no business reading that,” he says. His voice is stern, but it’s hard to be too intimidated because he’s in his boxers. I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen him without his uniform. It’s definitely the only time I’ve seen him without his sunglasses. He crosses the room and takes the file out of our hands.

  Nate doesn’t bother apologizing. “I’m the son of a police officer—what do you expect? What’s the other reason?” he says.

  “What?” Sheriff Brady asks.

  “You said there was another reason you were talking to that Bob guy. The cemetery worker.”

  The sheriff looks up from the file and stares at his son. He has a beard that’s starting to go white and that I’m pretty sure is designed to cover up some acne scarring. Nate has some acne troubles as well—maybe someday he’ll grow a beard and become a cop too. I shift my gaze from Nate back to the sheriff and discover he’s looking right at me.

  “I’m not supposed to say any of this,” he says, “but you deserve to know.” He picks through the file until he finds what he’s looking for. “The cemetery worker’s name is Robert Elliot.” He turns the open folder so it’s in front of me and points to one of the sports articles.

  Next to the article there’s a picture of my father shooting the free throw he missed to lose the game. Someone—Sheriff Brady?—has used a highlighter to circle a guy in a suit standing well behind my dad. He’s watching dad’s shot with his hands on his hips. I recognize the guy. He has hair, but other than that he looks like the recruiter.

  “Wait,” I say. “He was—”

  Sheriff Brady finishes my sentence: “Your father’s basketball coach at Northern California State. Coach Elliot was also a gambler. And, I think, a murderer.”

  The sheriff keeps talking. He tells me all about Coach Elliot. Back when he was my father’s coach he was famous for his competitive attitude and his temper. He was also suspected of betting on his teams, which is against the law. “We’re talking huge sums of money,” Sheriff Brady says. A year or so after my father missed that free throw, Coach Elliot was caught not only betting, but also threatening someone at knifepoint to lend him more money. He was sentenced to ten years in prison. “Just got out a couple weeks ago,” the sheriff tells me. “And the first thing he does is move to Bridgewater. Seemed fishy to me. That’s why I was talking to him at the game.”

  Nate’s been listening too, of course, and he has the same question as me.

  “Why do you think he’s a murderer?”

  Sheriff Brady tells us he’s found evidence that Coach Elliot had bet big-time money on the outcome of the national championship eleven years ago. “When your father missed those shots, his coach didn’t just lose the game—he lost a fortune. And he was furious about it.

  “Besides,” the sheriff continues, “serial killers don’t just strike once. They do it over and over and always in the same way.”

  “Already explained that,” Nate says. He really should be a cop.

  “I tell you too much,” his dad says. “At any rate, since I started looking into it, I’ve found evidence of other women killed in the same way as your mother.”

  “How do you know it wasn’t my dad who did those things?” I ask.

  “Several of the murders took place by casinos. That, plus Coach Elliot’s history of gambling—”

  “Well, then why wasn’t he convicted in the first place?” Nate asks. He reaches for the file so he can take a closer look, but his father pulls it away.

  “Because none of this evidence had been gathered yet,” he says. “And because it looked like an obvious case of a mental breakdown.” Sheriff Brady looks at me and sweeps his hand once through his beard. His voice goes soft, gentle. “Your father really did have a breakdown, Ryan. The only question is why— grief over missing those shots or finding his wife dead? When the authorities asked him questions, he could barely get a coherent sentence out.”

  “I know,” I say. “I saw him tonight.”

  “In that case,” the sheriff says. “I think it’s your turn to talk.”

  I do. I tell him exactly what I’ve already told Nate and Cindy and about seeing my dad. When I’m finished, Sheriff Brady walks me to my car and asks for the sock in my bag. “I’ll get this analyzed at the lab,” he says. “Maybe it’ll be enough to put this creep away for good.”

  It’s only now that it fully
hits me what I’ve just learned: my father’s not a killer. He didn’t murder my mom or anybody else. And I never would have learned this had it not been for Sheriff Brady. Until a few days ago, I didn’t even know my father was alive. But by then my positive memory of him was dead.

  In a way, Sheriff Brady just resurrected my father for me—the one I remember. The one who loved me and my mom. I want to hug the sheriff, but instead I just say, “Thank you, sir.”

  “Don’t mention it,” he says. “I know what it’s like to lose a wife and the mother of your child.”

  He’s starting to tear up, so he turns his face away and shakes his head. It’s funny how you can live with someone most of your life and not put two and two together. I’ve known Nate since I first began living with my adoptive parents, and I’ve known all along that, like me, he doesn’t have a mom. But I’ve never asked why. There’s a story to tell, and maybe someday I’ll ask to hear it. But not now. For one thing, I don’t think Sheriff Brady is in the mood to talk about it. For another, I have another question about my father.

  “But if my dad isn’t here to scare me, why’d he break out of prison? Why did he come to see me? Why did he steal a knife?”

  “One reason would be to protect you,” the sheriff says.

  “What’s another one?” I ask.

  He runs his hand through his beard again.

  “Revenge,” he says.

  18

  I feel as if I’ve dropped a huge amount of weight. Not literally, of course. I haven’t shed any pounds lately. When I look in the mirror, I’m still huge. When Cindy puts her hand in mine, practically the whole thing—her fingers and all—fits into my palm.

  Still, I feel lighter. And quicker. And happier.

  Part of it has to do with the weather. A few days ago it suddenly got warm outside. It had been winter for months, and now it’s spring. The ice has melted. There are puddles everywhere. No one has to wear jackets or boots or trudge through the snow.