Page 11 of Philly
For the first time since she walked into the Falcons’ clubhouse and saw Gabriel again, memories other than from that one awful night came flooding back. Pickup games of kickball, sneaking out to swim in the local reservoir, lazy afternoons on her grandparents’ porch drinking ice-cold sodas and eating watermelon, occasionally, a trip to see a matinee. It hadn’t been just her and Gabriel, but Matthew and Daphne, as well as Kyle Streeter and his older brother, Jacob. Sometimes, Allison and Katie Porter would join them as well. A ragtag group of kids enjoying summer.
“We were,” she said on an exhale. “I don’t actually remember when we first met. I was maybe six and Daphne eight. Gabriel was between me and Daphne and Matthew, a year younger than I.” She paused, remembering the younger Walker boy. “Matthewdied, though. Several years ago.” She hadn’t had the courage to ask Gabriel yet about what had happened with his brother.
“But it was you and Gabriel who bonded,” Lyda said. A statement, not a question.
She inclined her head as she entered passwords into each computer. “We were always close, even when I…”
“You never hated him.” Lyda pulled one of the devices in front of her as if she hadn’t just spoken one of Callie’s secrets.
Callie rolled her lips. Sometimes it had felt that way, but she knew better now. “I envied him,” she said. “He always had a smile, a joke, an easy hug. He always knew the best games to play or the perfect time to sneak out for a swim. Kids flocked to him, followed him.”
“A natural leader?”
Callie hesitated, then nodded. “Everything I was supposed to be but wasn’t.” Lyda glanced at her, then turned back to the computer. Callie sighed. “Even then, though, we were close. And as we got older…” She hadn’t thought this part of their relationship would be hard to talk about. The things she’d said to Gabriel that night? Yeah, she expected that to suck when she gave voice to them. But this? The early days of discovering thatsomethingwas changing between them? Of realizing that they shared a bond, a connection, that at thirteen, she had no way to describe. Even at thirty-five, she didn’t have the words. She remembered how it felt, though. How confused it made her. She hadn’t understood how something could be both terrifyingandrooted in her soul.
Not knowing what to do about the subtle shift in their relationship, she—and he—had ignored it. For three years, they pretended to be nothing more than friends. And for three years, their connection only deepened, like the roots of a tree digging into the earth, searching for sustenance and growing stronger in the process.
“Oh.”
Lyda’s comment pulled Callie from her memories. Leaning forward, almost curled toward the computer, Lyda had a file open, her finger tracing a line of text.
“Do you see something?” Callie asked, shifting to look over her shoulder.
“How did you find Nolan’s and Quayle’s names?” Lyda asked.
“In the first paragraph of the first file, one word has a baseball bat emoji in front of it,” Callie said. “It took me a while to make the connection?—”
“Nolan Ryan,” Lyda said. Callie nodded. “How that girl fell in love with baseball, I will never know, but she did love the game,” she said, a fond smile playing on her lips.
Callie smiled, too. Liza had been fanatical about baseball and Nolan Ryan her favorite player. She’d never actually seen him play, but admired his focus, commitment, and talent. She also liked that he persevered for twenty-seven years in a sport with an average career length of less than six.
“What about Quayle?”
Callie opened a file on her own computer, enlarged the text, then pointed. “Once I realized the importance of the baseball bat, I figured this one out.” In the second line of text, a single word had an emoji of a quail.
“That’s not a lot to go on.”
“I know,” Callie agreed. “But in the fourth file, there are dates in Roman numerals. I wasn’t able to decipher the text after the dates, but several of them coincide with events attended by Michael Quayle or one of the Nolans. It’s thin, as I’m sure a lot of other things happened on those dates, too, and maybe I only found what I went looking for…”
“But it feels right,” Lyda said, sitting back. Callie nodded. Lyda stared at the computer, then shook her head. “I owe you an apology, Callie.”
“I can’t imagine what for.”
“I sent you the thumb drive without even looking at it.”
“It had my name on it,” she replied.
“But I should have known my daughter better. Ididknow my daughter better. I was just…”Blinded by griefwent unsaid. Callie wanted to hug her but sensed it wouldn’t be welcome. A steely edge was creeping into Lyda’s spine.
“We were supposed to do this together,” she said, gesturing to the computer.
Callie frowned. “What makes you say that?”
“I can’t read it, not like it is, but I recognize it. You’re right; it is in some sort of code, and I’ll leave the cipher for you to figure out. But the language is Tewa, our native tongue. If you can decode it, I can translate it.”
7
Four days after Ava agreed to look into the Nolan family, Philly walked into Mystery Lake Hospital with a bouquet of flowers and a faint hope that Mitch wouldn’t be lurking in his wife’s room. Not that he expected Mitch to be anywhere else, not with his son safely tucked away in the private Warwick daycare center housed on the grounds of HICC. But the arson investigator was a moody bastard, and Philly wouldn’t put it past Mitch to blame him for his wife’s bed rest order. The fact that Ava had just started looking into the Nolan family when she felt contractions way earlier than she should was purely a coincidence. However, like most of the Warwick men, Mitch tended to be unreasonable when it came to his wife.
