Break Point

BREAK POINT

KATE JAIMET

ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

Copyright ©
2013
Kate Jaimet

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Jaimet, Kate, 1969-
Break point [electronic resource] / Kate Jaimet.

(Orca sports)

Electronic monograph.
Issued also in print format.
ISBN
978-1-4598-0353-4 (
PDF
).--
ISBN
978-1-4598-0354-1 (
EPUB
)

I. Title. II. Series: Orca sports (Online)
PS
8619.
A
368
B
74 2013       j
C
813'.6       
C
2012-907478-0

First published in the United States, 2013
Library of Congress Control Number:
2012952955

Summary:
When Connor and Maddy discover that their tennis club is going bankrupt, they set out to try and save it.

Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

Cover photography by Getty Images
Author photo by John Major

www.orcabook.com

16 15 14 13 • 4 3 2 1

For my husband, Mark

Contents

chapter one

chapter two

chapter three

chapter four

chapter five

chapter six

chapter seven

chapter eight

chapter nine

chapter ten

chapter eleven

chapter twelve

chapter thirteen

chapter fourteen

chapter fifteen

chapter sixteen

epilogue

Acknowledgments

chapter one

Maddy raised her hand to her mouth.

“What are we going to do, Connor?” she said. “What are we going to tell my mom?”

I looked at the wreckage in the common room. It was hard to believe this was the same place Maddy and I had spent hours organizing the night before. Vintage tennis rackets lay smashed amid a jumble of overturned chairs. Mangled mannequins were knocked to the floor, their antique tennis clothing slashed to rags. Strewn over everything were shredded bits of paper that had once been autographed photos of famous players.

“Looks like someone broke in,” I said.

“Who would do a thing like this?” said Maddy.

I picked my way toward the back of the room, where a row of windows looked out on the second-floor balcony of the clubhouse. Shards of broken glass jutted from the wooden window frames. Shattered glass lay on the floor beneath. I peered through one of the smashed windows, as though I expected to see the vandals running away across the back courts. But whoever they were, they were long gone. They must have struck in the middle of the night.

The rising sun turned the sky Easter-egg pink. Mist hung over the tennis courts, and over the river that formed the back border of the Bytowne Tennis Club property. Birds called to each other in reedy voices. It was going to be a beautiful day.

I was going to get the guys who had done this.

I turned back to face the common room. Maddy was crouched amid the pile of broken stuff, holding a smashed tennis racket. It was a Slazenger Challenge #1, a vintage racket from the 1970s. The strings hung loose from its splintered frame. Worst of all, the grip was snapped in two, destroying the autograph scrawled on the wood: Björn Borg.

Borg was one of the greatest tennis players of all time, winner of five Wimbledon trophies and seven Davis Cups. He had played with that racket in the 1974 Italian Championships, when he'd won the singles title at age seventeen, the youngest player ever to take the prize.

“We could've got at least a thousand dollars for this, Connor,” Maddy said.

“I'm calling the cops,” I answered.

I was heading for the phone when the sound of a car on the street below made me freeze. The car puttered along in low gear, then growled to a stop. The engine shut off with a sigh.

“It's my mom,” said Maddy. She turned her brown eyes toward me with a desperate look.

“I'll go down and meet her,” I said.

“Would you?” she asked. “I'll call the police.”

I nodded and headed toward the staircase. I was acting on an impulse to help Maddy. But truthfully, I didn't know what to say to her mom either. I ran down the stairs two at a time and opened the front door of the clubhouse.

The street was quiet, the houses dark with sleep. A crow flew, cawing, from a rooftop and landed in one of the big, leafy trees that lined the sidewalk. Aside from that, the only movement in the street was the door of Mrs. Sharma's Volkswagen Jetta swinging open.

“Good morning, Connor!” Mrs. Sharma called cheerily as she climbed out from behind the wheel. She waved with one hand, took a large purse out of the car with the other and shut the door with a flick of her hip. She was all glammed up in high heels, a red silk dress and gold jewelry. Her hair, long and black like Maddy's, was pinned up in a complicated style of tucks and swirls. The faint foreign lilt to her voice and the gold bangles that jingled on her bronzed arms made her seem exotic and intimidating. I waved back, feeling too dumb to speak.

It was the first time I had seen her dressed up like that. Even though she was the general manager of the club, Mrs. Sharma usually came to work in khakis and a polo shirt. Her ritzy outfit was clearly meant to impress the wealthy bidders who would be arriving at noon for the vintage tennis auction.

Except now those wealthy bidders wouldn't be arriving. Now, we would have to call the whole thing off.

“Good morning, Mrs. Sharma,” I said as she came toward me.

“Connor.” She took my hand and squeezed it. “It's so sweet of you to come early and help Madhavi and me get ready.”

She breezed past me into the clubhouse.

“Mrs. Sharma, there's a problem.” I choked the words out, speaking to the back of her fancy hairdo.

“Don't tell me the auction house wants to send that man Bismuth!” she called over her shoulder. “I told them, I want Walker! I was on the phone for an hour last night, sorting this out!”

By now Mrs. Sharma was halfway up the staircase. I ran to overtake her, but the old wooden steps were so narrow I couldn't pass without shoving her aside. I came up behind her instead. As she reached the top and stepped through the door into the common room, Mrs. Sharma stopped in her tracks.

“Oh God,” she said.

She raised her hand to her mouth. It was the same gesture Maddy had made. She staggered sideways. She was about to stumble into an overturned chair when Maddy caught her by the arm. I grabbed a chair from the heap and set it upright for her to sit on.

“It's ruined,” Mrs. Sharma said. The look in her eyes was like something inside her had just been shattered—shattered as badly as the Slazenger tennis racket. “Everything is ruined.”

chapter two

Ten minutes later the police arrived, followed by an appraisal guy from the insurance company. The two officers had a quick look around the scene. Then Maddy and I took them down to the front desk and showed them the security videotape from the night before. Meanwhile, Maddy's mom went through a list of the vandalized items with the insurance agent. We had already posted notices on the front door and on the club's website that the auction had been cancelled due to “unforeseen circumstances.”

The grainy black-and-white footage of the security video showed five people, all wearing ski masks and gloves, walking across the small parking area in front of the club. They looked like teenage guys, from the clothes they were wearing—baggy pants slung low around their hips, hoodies and sneakers with the laces undone. The guys stopped at the chain-link fence that encircled the grounds and had some kind of a discussion. Then they climbed the fence and moved out of range of the camera. It was easy to imagine them climbing the back staircase of the clubhouse to the balcony and smashing the windows to get inside.

“Doesn't look like we'll get any id from that tape,” one of the policemen said as Maddy's mom came up behind us. “We'll go through the scene to see if they left anything behind. Footprints. Fingerprints. Personal items. You never know.” The officer turned to Mrs. Sharma. “Do you have an estimate of the value of the items that were damaged?” he asked.

“I was thinking around a hundred thousand,” she said. “The insurance company estimate is…substantially lower.”

“Isn't it always,” the police officer commented.

“I wouldn't know,” said Mrs. Sharma. “I've never dealt with a situation like this before.”

“I'm sorry, ma'am,” he said. “Who did the items belong to?”

“They were donated by club members for a fundraising auction. Some of them were one of a kind, you know. There was a program from the 1931 Wimbledon. And several autographed tennis rackets. I've already had donors calling me, wanting to know why the auction's been cancelled. They're quite upset. They want compensation, some of them. They're saying they didn't donate their valuable property to see it destroyed. They think the club should have taken better care…”

Maddy took her mother's hand.

“I'm sorry we can't help you with compensation, ma'am,” said the officer. “If the items had been stolen, we might have been able to recover the goods. You'd be surprised what people will try to sell one Bay. But in this situation—”

“I don't understand,” Mrs. Sharma said. “Why would anyone do this?”

“Do you know anyone who would want to target the club?” one of the policemen asked.

“Target the club? No. I have no idea.”

“It might be a random act of vandalism, then. These things happen. Sad to say, but some people have no respect for other people's property.”

After a few more questions, Mrs. Sharma led the officers up to the common room to go through the crime scene. Maddy and I sat at the club's front desk for a while, not saying anything. I couldn't think of anything more we could do.

“Want to hit some balls?” I asked.

“I don't know. It doesn't feel right.” Maddy shrugged. “Let's go for a walk instead.”

I understood her point. If people saw us playing tennis, they would think we didn't care about the stuff that had gotten ruined. They would think we were just out there having fun. But that wasn't how I saw it.

Whenever I was stressed or angry, all I wanted to do was get on the court and hit balls. I loved the feeling of a perfect swing, the blood rushing in my ears, the racket hitting the ball. Bounce, thwack! Bounce, thwack! It made me feel as if I was beating up on my enemies or my problems. It took my mind off anything that was bothering me.

If I couldn't hit balls, though, walking with Maddy was the next-best thing. We went out the back door of the clubhouse and crossed the porch, where we could hear the footsteps of the officers on the balcony above. I couldn't help looking around for clues. Maybe one of the idiots who'd done this had dropped a credit card or a personalized cigarette lighter or something. But the porch looked the same as ever, with its old wooden planks, the water fountain against the wall beneath the club bulletin board and the wooden donation box where players put their used balls for the kids' summer camp.