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