Foul (Night Fall ™) Read online

  Mostly, though, my sense of lightness has to do with what I told and learned at Nate’s house.

  Until then I’d been keeping what was going on to myself. And my secrets were heavy. The threats were weighing me down. So were the body parts in my sports bag. If whoever those body parts belonged to was still alive, she needed help. And the longer I waited to tell someone about them, the longer it would take to get her that help.

  But now I’ve told Sheriff Brady everything I know. I’ve given him the body parts. And I feel lighter because of it.

  Knowing that my father’s not a killer makes me feel lighter, too.

  We have an away game tonight in Rockville, and my whole team is lining up to get on the bus. We all see Sheriff Brady pull into the parking lot and stop behind the bus. He leaves his car idling and gets out.

  Nate’s standing in front of me in line and says, “Hey, Dad.”

  Sheriff Brady nods at him and then turns to me. “Can I talk to you a second, Ryan?”

  The words come out a little fast. He sounds excited about something.

  The two of us walk away from the bus toward his car. When we’re out of earshot, I ask, “What’s going on?”

  The sheriff hardly lets me finish my question: “I think we got the monster, Ryan.”

  “Really?” I say. “You got him? How?”

  “His fingerprints were all over the stuff you gave me,” he says. “Plus, the handwriting on the shooting tips matched his perfectly.”

  Now it’s my turn to talk fast. “This is amazing. Where is he now? Is he in your jail cell? Is he in a cop car?” I tilt my head and look through Sheriff Brady’s windshield to see if Coach Elliot is in the backseat. He’s not.

  The sheriff reaches up and puts his hand on my shoulder. “Not yet, Ryan,” he says. “We’re on our way to arrest him right now—just thought you’d want to know.”

  I take a few slow breaths to try to calm down. “Thanks, sir. For everything.”

  He claps my shoulder. “Looks like your team is waiting for you,” he says.

  I look behind me. The line is gone. Everybody but me is already on the bus. I try to pivot around to get on the bus myself, but Sheriff Brady squeezes my shoulder. “Almost forgot,” he says. “We learned one more thing about the stuff you gave me.”

  “What?”

  “It’s old. Way older than a few weeks. He cut them off way before you missed any free throws. The only reason they were even preserved like that was because they were frozen. We still have to do more research, but my guess is he got them from the cemetery.”

  He’s scratching his beard again—something he always seems to do when he’s thinking. “Do you understand what I’m telling you, Ryan?”

  “Yes, sir. You’re saying my missed free throws had nothing to do with those body parts.”

  “Exactly,” Sheriff Brady says. He claps my shoulder one more time. “Have a great game, Rhino.”

  I say thanks again and tell him that I’ll do my best. But I’m just being humble. I already know Rockville doesn’t stand a chance. This is the first time the sheriff has ever called me Rhino, but it makes sense that he did. For the first time in weeks, I feel like Rhino. I don’t mind being called Ryan off the basketball court—in fact, I even like it. Especially when it’s Cindy who’s doing the talking. But on the court? Call me Rhino.

  Better yet, chant it. At the top of your lungs.

  I can hear it now. Rhino! Rhino! Rhino!

  Like I said, Rockville doesn’t stand a chance.

  19

  By the fourth quarter we’re winning by forty-two points. I’ve had my best game of the season: fifty-four points, twenty-eight rebounds, nine blocks.

  I’ve also missed some free throws. Okay, a lot of them. Toward the end of the third quarter, Rockville started fouling me every time I touched the ball. It was the only way they could stop me from scoring. Even then it didn’t always work. They would slap at my arms and yank my shirt as I muscled my way to the basket.

  As the game continued the fouls got harder and harder. I think the other coach was mad at me for trying to embarrass his team, but that’s not what I was doing. I was just enjoying being Rhino again.

  I didn’t mind the fouls. They were good basketball strategy. And I didn’t mind missing the free throws, either. By now there was no way Rockville was coming back and, more importantly, my misses didn’t mean someone else was getting hurt.

  I spend the fourth quarter on the bench, watching our reserves finish the game. No, that’s not true. I’m not actually watching the reserves play. Instead, I divide my time between thinking about Coach Elliot getting arrested and looking at Cindy.

  She came to the game. Not as a cheerleader—they don’t come to away games— but as a fan. The first time I spotted her, she was sitting with her friends, but unlike them she was watching the game really closely. She was also cheering really loudly. She may be a cheerleader who doesn’t like cheering, but today she’s making an exception. I’d just made a hook shot with two guys pulling at my arms, and when I turned to the crowd there she was, yelling my name along with all the other Bridgewater fans.

  At some point, though, she must have decided to move, because now she’s sitting next to my parents. All three of them are biting their knuckles, even though we’re winning easily.

  After the game I walk across the court and thank her for coming. She may not be in her cheerleading outfit, but she looks plenty great in jeans, too.

  “You think I came to watch you, huh?” she says. “I told you I loved watching basketball, didn’t I?”

  “No,” I say. “I mean, yeah. I mean, I just figured . . . you know . . . that . . .”

  I’m stumbling around with my words before Cindy saves me. “You’re right,” she says. “I did come to see you play.”

  The way she says it, so straightforward, makes me study my hands in embarrassment.

  “It was cool getting to talk to your parents,” she says. “Or your adoptive parents . . . Patty and Dale . . . not your real ones . . . it’s just—”

  I bail her out. “It’s OK. You can call them my parents. The two of them haven’t missed a game since I was five, so they’ve earned the title.”

  “They volunteered to drive me home,” Cindy says. “But I asked them to drop me off at the high school instead. I told them you always brought me home. Hope that’s OK.”

  I tell her absolutely.

  “In that case,” she says, “I’ll see you soon.”

  I don’t think either of us could stop grinning even if we wanted to.

  As I drive her home, I tell Cindy what Sheriff Brady told me. My dad’s not the killer, I explain, Coach Elliot is. “He’s probably in the local jail right now,” I say.

  Cindy hugs me so hard that I almost steer us right off the road. “Sorry,” she says. But she doesn’t unclasp herself from my shoulders.

  I drive like that, with Cindy’s arms wrapped around me, for a little while. Then she releases her grip and leans back into her seat. “Does this mean you’ll finally accept my invite into my house?” she says.

  “Definitely,” I say.

  A few minutes later we pull into her driveway. Unlike usual, the lights inside the house have been turned on.

  I think Cindy’s even more surprised than I am. She does an open-mouthed double take. “My parents,” she says, “they must’ve come home early.”

  Her voice has gone quickly from shock to excitement. My car hasn’t even come to a complete stop, but she’s already unbuckling her seat belt and opening the door. All this time she’s seemed so mature to me. So adult. She’s a senior, so she’s older than I am, and she dated a college guy. Plus she seemed so cool about staying in her house alone. When I asked her last time whether she got freaked out living in an empty house, she just shrugged her shoulders and said she was used to it.

  But now she’s acting totally different. She’s acting like a kid. I babysit some of the neighbor kids sometimes, and Cindy looks like th
ey do when their parents come home after dinner or a movie.

  And honestly, as cool as she seemed when she was all mature, she seems even cooler now. As far as I’m concerned, you’re supposed to miss your parents. I think again about being five and wandering my apartment while waiting for my parents to return. They never did, of course, not until my dad showed up the other night on my front porch. And I wonder whether it sometimes seems to Cindy like her parents aren’t ever going to return, either.

  She’s out of the car already and just about to close the door when she stops. She sticks her head back in the car and says, “Sorry. I know I invited you inside, but . . .”

  “No worries,” I say. “Really. Go be with your family.”

  And like that we’re both grinning again.

  I’m almost home when I hear my cell phone vibrating in my sports bag. Keeping one hand on the wheel and my eyes on the road, I reach to the backseat, feel for the bag, and unzip it. I grab the phone and put it to my ear.

  “Hello?” I say.

  “You haven’t paid attention to a word I’ve said, have you?”

  It’s a man’s voice, low and raspy.

  “Who is this?” I ask.

  “You know who it is.”

  He’s right. I do. It’s Coach Elliot. His voice has been burned into my brain since his last call.

  I’m surprised that I’m not more afraid. “Are you calling from your jail cell?” I say. I know from TV that the police let convicts make one phone call.

  He ignores my question. “Twelve free throws,” he says. “You missed twelve free throws today.”

  “How would you know?” I say.

  He ignores this question, too. “You’re just like your father,” he says. “He never paid attention to coaching tips, either.”

  “That’s why you killed my mother? To get my father’s attention?” I think I’m screaming but I’m not sure. I turn into my driveway and tell myself to calm down. They’ve got him, I think. The police have him.

  “That’s right,” he says. “No matter what I did, he wouldn’t listen. Just like you.”

  “You’re going to have to do better than digging up body parts from the cemetery to scare me,” I say.

  “Those body parts weren’t from the cemetery,” he says. “They were from your mother.”

  My senses go numb. I look at my other hand, gripping the steering wheel. I can’t feel it, but I must be squeezing really hard because blood is draining out of it. It’s getting paler and paler.

  He’s telling the truth. I don’t need to ask Sheriff Brady to do any tests at the lab because I’m certain Coach Elliot isn’t lying. I can just feel it.

  What also seems obvious is that he’s not in any jail cell right now.

  “You’re right, though,” he continues. “My tips didn’t work. You’re just like your father. You need someone to take your girlfriend before you’ll pay attention.”

  Cindy.

  “But I just dropped her off with her parents,” I say. I’m talking to myself, but I say it loud enough for Coach Elliot to hear. “Her parents weren’t home,” he says. “I was home.”

  I hear the sound of a girl crying.

  Then nothing.

  He hung up.

  Before I know what I’m doing, I reverse out of my driveway and race back to Cindy’s house.

  20

  When I get there all the lights are out again.

  I come to a screeching, crooked stop on her driveway and run toward her front door. It’s slightly ajar. I shoulder through it and yell, “Cindy! Are you here?”

  I run through the house, flicking lights on and screaming Cindy’s name as I go. Downstairs there’s a kitchen, a living room, a dining room. They’re all empty, but there are signs of a struggle. Chairs are turned over. A wooden bowl of fake fruit has been knocked off the dining room table, the plastic fruit scattered across the floor. I scramble upstairs, still shouting, still flipping light switches. There’s a long hallway and several bedrooms—but they’re all empty too.

  I race downstairs, not even feeling the steps and almost tumbling down them, and when I find the stairs to the basement, I make it to the bottom in no more than a few strides. “Cindy! Cindy! Can you hear me?”

  But the basement is empty too. It’s then that I realize I’m still holding my phone. I must have been carrying it all this time—in the car and now in Cindy’s house—but I was too panicked to notice.

  I look at my phone and realize that I have a message. I push the proper buttons and put the phone to my ear. It’s the sheriff, telling me what I already know. They couldn’t find Coach Elliot. He must have run away. Sheriff Brady says not to worry; they’ll find him soon enough. “But in the meantime,” he says, “be careful, Ryan.”

  He should have said, “Be careful, Cindy.”

  I stare at my phone some more. Then I look up the number of my last call and press Talk.

  After one ring Coach Elliot answers. “I was hoping you’d call back.”

  “Just tell me what I need to do,” I say. “Tell me what I need to do so you won’t hurt her.”

  “Same thing as always,” he says. “Make your free throws.”

  He doesn’t say anything for a moment, and I think maybe he hung up.

  “And keep the sheriff out of this,” he says.

  Now he really does hang up.

  21

  Our next game is in two days. I’m going to spend both of them shooting free throws in my driveway. In the morning I get up like usual and eat breakfast with my parents. Or I try to. I’ve hardly slept or eaten anything since Coach Elliot called.

  “Not hungry?” Mom says. She’s at the dishwasher and must have been looking right at me as I dumped an entire bowl of cereal into the trash. I shake my head no. “tired?” she says. “There are bags under your eyes.”

  “I’m just nervous about the game,” I say.

  I’m lying because I have no choice. Coach Elliot said I shouldn’t tell the sheriff—but what he meant, I know, is that that no one should tip off the cops. The only way to guarantee that this doesn’t happen is to keep Cindy’s kidnapping to myself.

  “You’ll do great tomorrow night,” Dad says. He’s sitting at the kitchen table, talking over the newspaper. As usual, he’s reading the sports section.

  “You always do great,” Mom adds.

  “Says here you’re the leading scorer and rebounder in the state.”

  Mom’s on tiptoe, touching my shoulder. “That’s why they call you the Rhino,” she says. She gives me an encouraging smile.

  “You called me it first,” I say.

  “My claim to fame,” she says.

  I put my hand on her shoulder and stare through tired eyes at my dad. What I told Cindy last night is true. They haven’t missed a single one of my games since I was five.

  “I better get going to school,” I say.

  They tell me to have a good day as I open the front door. I get in my car and drive it three or four blocks before taking a left. I keep taking lefts until I’m back on my street. I wait and watch. When both Mom and Dad have left for work, I pull into the driveway again and take one of their places in the garage. I grab a basketball.

  I stand in front of our hoop, fifteen feet away—the same distance as the foul line on a real court.

  I think about my stats. Dad said I was the leading scorer and rebounder in the state. I wonder if the paper included a stat for free-throw shooting. Because I’m probably last in the state in that category.

  That’s why I’m out here. Practice. Tomorrow night my free throws are a matter of life and death.

  I take a shot.

  CLANG!

  I need all the practice I can get.

  22

  This is the biggest game of the season. We’re playing St. Philomena’s again, and whichever team wins takes home the conference championship. The stadium is packed with both Bridgewater and St. Philomena’s fans. Every time our student section tries to get a “Rhino!�
� chant going, the St. Philomena’s student section responds with “Sucks!”

  “Rhino!”

  “Sucks!”

  “Rhino!”

  “Sucks!”

  “RHINO!!!!”

  “SUCKS!!!!”

  Normally this is the kind of thing that would get my adrenaline going. I’d set out to prove my fans right and the other fans wrong. But today I can’t concentrate. I can’t narrow my focus until this game and this moment is all that matters to me.

  Cindy is gone. Every time I look at the cheerleaders I’m reminded of this—not that I need a reminder. I wonder if anyone else even realizes she’s missing. She’s only been gone two days, so I doubt the school has bothered to call home yet, but by now the other cheerleaders must be wondering what’s going on.

  I tell myself to get my head in the game, but the truth is that I don’t care. For the first time in my life, the outcome of a basketball game doesn’t matter to me.

  Except, of course, maybe I need to care. Maybe Coach Elliot is expecting us to win and he’s going to take his anger out on Cindy if we don’t. What I know for sure is that I have to make my free throws.

  Just before the game I thought about pretending I was sick or hurt and unable to play. If I wasn’t in the game, I couldn’t get fouled. And if I couldn’t get fouled, I couldn’t miss any free throws. But even as I was thinking this I realized it wouldn’t work. Coach Elliot would know I didn’t play. I don’t know how—I’ve looked all over the stadium and he’s not here—but he would know.

  And, anyway, that isn’t the deal. He said I had to make my free throws—and to make them, I have to take them.

  So far I’ve done both. I’ve taken six shots at the line, and I’ve made them all.

  Maybe all my practice these last two days on my driveway is paying off. Or maybe I just got lucky.