Helpless (18 page)

“Go on,” Rainy said. She wanted Murphy to talk first. She’d tell him what she was investigating if it seemed connected.

“Well, our forensics guys have come back with some pretty interesting stuff.”

“What sort of interesting stuff?”

“Have you ever heard of a program called Leterg?”

Rainy’s whole body tensed. “I have,” she said.

“Look, normally we like to do our own homework,” Murphy said. “But we’ve had to pull in computer forensic help from the state police. They’ve taken a couple cracks at figuring out what this guy was up to, and we’ve hit a couple of roadblocks.”

“What are you asking?”

“Wondering if you might be able to spare some of your computer expert’s time to help us gather the evidence.”

“Who’s the coach?” Rainy asked, though she already knew the answer. Her head was spinning with possibilities. Connections were beginning to appear.

“The guy’s name is Hawkins. Tom Hawkins.”

“When do you need us?”

“Soon as possible. We want to move on this thing.”

“Hold on a second,” Rainy said. She covered the phone’s receiver with her hand and looked over at Carter.

“Do you have any plans tonight?” she asked.

“Yeah. I’m taking Gigi out to dinner and a movie. Why?”

“Cancel them, send your wife flowers, and grab your coat,” Rainy said. “We’re taking a drive north to Shilo.”

Chapter 26

I
n just over an hour, Tom would coach his first soccer game since the Facebook scandal broke. Tom tried his best to stay focused on the upcoming match. He anticipated this game would be a brutal and physical battle of wills. But the last practice had been a disaster, and his team was in shambles.

The Riverside bus arrived thirty minutes before game time. The Riverside girls were dressed in red jerseys and spread out across their half of the field, already doing stretches. Some kicked the ball around for warm-ups. Soon after, Vern showed up, and so did the kid with the video recorder.

Tom saw Mitchell Boyd and a bunch of his friends loitering on the hilly rise on the opposite side of the field. Mitchell had never come to a Wildcats home game before. Then again, Jill had never before been dropped off at her house by Mitchell Boyd—and hours past her normal curfew. Tom wasn’t a math whiz, but he could quickly solve this equation and didn’t much like the answer.

His daughter was potentially Mitchell Boyd’s next conquest.

Tom pushed Mitchell Boyd out of his thoughts, in the same way Boyd and his horsing-around pals were shoving each other. He returned his focus to the game at hand. The team. The win. The forty-ninth straight victory of his tenure. It was a great accomplishment, but one the girls deserved all the credit for achieving. He was just a guide. A map for them to follow. They had to walk the long and difficult trail to each “W” themselves.

Tom’s Wildcats began arriving. They were dressed in their Wildcat whites and looked ready to play. Jill led a group of girls onto the field. He noticed Jill stop and wave to Mitchell. Tom didn’t detect much oomph in Jill’s greeting to Mitchell. She didn’t look happy or the least bit enthused. Tom noticed Mitchell give a slight thumbs-up salute in return.

Cool kid,
thought Tom.

Tom flipped to the attendance sheet on his clipboard and checked the players in with a pencil mark next to their names. Vern’s girls ... Lauren Grass ... McAndrews ... Adamson ... Wells
...

He counted them. Seven in total.

Where’s the rest of the team?
Tom wondered.

He had a nagging suspicion but refused to believe it could be true. Jill came trotting over to him. Tom patted her on the shoulder. “You going to bring it to them, Jill?” Tom asked.

“Can we talk?” Jill said.

Tom’s insides went cold.

Seven players had taken the field.

“What’s going on here, Jill? Where’s the rest of the team?”

“They’re not coming,” she said. “Either they’re quitting the team or their parents won’t let them be on it anymore.”

“Why?”

“You know why. They all think the Facebook thing is true.”

“Okay. Okay,” Tom said. He was thinking. His mind started to race. But the jumble of emotions and concerns narrowed down real quick when he thought about what mattered to him most.

“Jill, honey,” he said. “You trust me on this. Right? You know it isn’t true. In your heart, you know it. Right?”

“Yeah,” she said, though it was obvious she was downtrodden. “I know it.”

Tom nodded, acknowledging to himself what he had to do next. The referees took the field. Riverside was running a commonly used shooting drill as part of their warm-ups.

“What are we going to do?” Jill asked.

Tom looked over at the glum group of Wildcats, each with a disquieted expression on her face. A referee blew a whistle to signal ten minutes until game time.

“I’ve coached a lot of matches, Jill,” Tom said. “I’ve won a bunch and lost a bunch, too. But this is the first time I’ve ever had to forfeit.”

“I’m sorry,” Jill said.

Tom put an arm around his daughter. “Not as sorry as I am, kiddo,” he replied. “Not as sorry as I am.”

Chapter 27

T
om drove Jill to Lindsey’s house.

Jill was too busy texting to talk. Tom asked who was sending her so many text messages.

“Mitchell,” Jill said, using her third spoken word of the drive.

Tom remained deeply troubled by his daughter’s new “friendship” with Roland Boyd’s son. He didn’t know any details about their burgeoning romance. It wouldn’t be an easy topic of conversation even if he and Jill were closer. Tom had felt his relationship with Jill was progressing like some of his favorite Bruce Springsteen lyrics—the song about taking one step up and two more back. One step up, five hundred steps back, it seemed.

“Persistence and patience” had become a difficult motto to follow with his reputation under heavy attack.

But the Jill-Mitchell tandem was only one check-box item on Tom’s growing list of concerns. Kip Lange had yet to be found. Kelly’s homicide investigation remained active. The police had made no progress identifying the mysterious girl who texted him her naked pictures. And they still didn’t know who had created the blog or bogus Facebook posts that razed ten years of his good works in a single swoop.

Tom pulled into the Shilo Middle School parking lot ten minutes before the school board meeting was scheduled to start. That was part of his plan. He figured the corridor outside the gymnasium would be mostly deserted by now. He knew, as did everybody else, that Millie Rubenstein’s home-baked cookies would be gone. Since Millie started baking cookies for these school board meetings, people had stopped showing up late and most had begun to come early. Better to miss out on the cookies, he decided, than be forced into chitchat with people who might consider him a rapist. Tom parked his Taurus as close to the entrance as possible. That way he could make a quick escape if need be.

It had been two days since new rumors about him spread.
Thank you, Facebook
. Two days for a town to rush to judgment. Two days for parents to pull their kids from the soccer team. Two days to bring a three-year winning streak to an abrupt and sad end.

Superintendent Angie Didomenico had called Tom after he forfeited the Riverside game to warn him of a potentially chilly reception at tonight’s meeting, not knowing that he planned to resign from the school board. Angie disagreed with his decision and went on to say that despite the unfortunate circumstances, she felt it imperative he not resign. Tom was one of the two teacher representatives on the board. His absence would be viewed with suspicion, an admission of guilt. Angie feared it would add fuel to an already fast-spinning rumor mill.

Tom had thanked Angie for her support in what both referred to as a difficult time, though he well understood the subtext of their conversation. She’d better not be making a mistake by throwing her support behind him.

Tom traded a warm summer breeze for the cool air-conditioned corridor of Shilo’s only middle school. As he expected, no people were milling about, and all that remained of Millie’s cookies was a scattering of crumbs on the long foldout table. Before Tom could make a stealthy entrance into the gymnasium, he felt a gentle tap on his shoulder. Surprised anybody could sneak up on him, Tom whirled around to see the porcelain-smooth face of Adriana Boyd smiling at him. Roland’s wife, adorned in gold jewelry, dressed in an elegant all-black pantsuit, had a Styrofoam cup of coffee in one hand and a napkin blanketing a cookie in the other.

“Good to see you, Tom,” Adriana said. She shrugged her shoulders because she could not shake Tom’s hand. She didn’t offer Tom her cookie, and he couldn’t blame her.

“Nice to see you, too, Adriana. What brings you here tonight?”

“I’m going to give feedback to the board about our PLC initiative.”

Tom nodded. PLCs (professional learning communities) were in vogue with many educators and parents these days. The big idea behind PLCs was that students should not just be taught, but rather that they needed to learn. It was a simple shift in thinking that carried profound implications. School systems with an effective PLC policy developed action plans based on intervention, not remediation, and provided systematic guidance that required that struggling students receive additional support until they mastered the concepts being taught. Opponents of PLCs feared that the policy would lead to a diminishment of teacher effectiveness and that all its benefits would accrue to a small minority of students.

Of all the PLC champions in Shilo, Adriana was the most vocal and determined advocate for change. Mitchell Boyd, along with a handful of other struggling Shilo High School students, took part in a PLC pilot program developed by Adriana herself and approved by the board only after several contentious debates.

“How did the public sessions go?” asked Tom. He knew a lot about the subject, because PLCs had been the talk of the teacher lounge.

“Very well. Thanks for asking,” Adriana said. “Mitchell should be proof enough that the PLC effort can work.”

“He’s doing better?” Tom asked.

“From a two-point-two to a three-point-four in one semester,” Adriana said, pride in her voice.

“Well, that’s all credit to you, your vision, and your perseverance,” Tom said.

“They don’t call me Black Hawk for nothing,” said Adriana.

Tom gave her a puzzled look. “Black Hawk?” he asked, because he’d never heard her called that before.

Adriana grinned. “You’ve heard of helicopter parents,” she said.

Tom nodded. “Sure. Of course.”

“Apparently, some people in town think my style of parenting is a bit ... well, extreme. I guess they think my helicopter is state of the art, fully armed, and combat ready.”

Tom laughed for what felt like the first time in days. “They’re just afraid of a good fight, that’s all,” he said.

“Maybe they don’t know the fight I’ve already had.”

In that instant, all levity was pushed aside, and Tom looked down at his feet, unsure how best to respond. “Nobody should know that kind of pain,” he said in a soft voice.

“But you understand,” Adriana said. “I can see it in the way you fight for your daughter. I can feel how much you love her. If there’s one good thing to come from what happened to Kelly, it’s that Jill will finally get the chance to know the man you really are.”

Tom felt his fears about Jill and Mitchell’s burgeoning romance lessen. The force of Adriana’s convictions made him believe Mitchell Boyd could be more than the promise of his reputation.

“We should get inside,” Tom said. “I’d hate to miss the opening gavel.” Tom gave Adriana a wry grin, nodded toward the gymnasium double doors, and took two steps in that direction.

Adriana reached out and took hold of Tom’s arm, pulling him back toward her. “Listen, Tom, I’ve been meaning to call you,” she said. “I heard about what happened at soccer practice and the game against Riverside. Everybody has by now. I want you to know that there are a lot of us who don’t believe it’s true.”

“A lot?”

“Well, some,” Adriana amended. “The Internet can be a dangerous place. We all know that.”

“You don’t have to remind me.”

“Just the other day, Roland told me about one of his employees who sent an email to his entire address book with a link to a gay porn site. He claimed he’d never been to any of those sites. Turns out it was a computer virus that sent the emails without his knowledge.”

“That’s a nasty virus.”

“Trust me, I saw the site. Very nasty.”

The two shared another quick laugh. Having Adriana in his corner felt significant. Tom needed every friend he could get.

Merle Gornick, an eleventh-grade chemistry teacher, a late arriver herself, walked past the pair and fixed Tom with a hard stare. Adriana definitely noticed.

“Around school I only get that look about half the time,” Tom said with a forced smile.

“Well, people talk, and I know there is plenty of support out there for you,” said Adriana. “Just not everybody. No matter what happens to you, you’ll come out on top. I sense that about you.”

Adriana expressed so much empathy, Tom believed it genuinely hurt her to see him suffer.

“I appreciate all your support, Adriana. I really do.”

“Roland believes in you, too. He’s traveling on business but wanted me to tell you that we’ve got your back.”

Tom laughed. “That sounds like Roland,” he said.

I’d hate to be on his bad side,
thought Tom, remembering the confrontation with Bob at the club.

Now it was Adriana who nodded toward the gymnasium doors. Tom followed, walking beside her. Inside, a dozen or so rows of small gray plastic chairs were set up. Most of the people were seated, but some noticed Tom and Adriana enter. Tom didn’t hear anybody gasp over the echoed din of voices, but he saw expressions change. Soon others began to notice him. Some stared. Some whispered. Dale Rivers, the father of one of the girls he coached, looked ready for a fight.