The Underdogs (18 page)

According to Patrick, Annabel got physical and started screaming about how you can never trust anyone, that people are never what they seem. He'd grabbed her arm to calm her down, he said. Harmony had come in and been utterly confused; then Lucky arrived and told Patrick to let her go. Annabel had run out crying, and no one had seen her the rest of the night. Ashlock, I could tell, was only partly on board with their story. But Lucky's corroboration that Annabel was the flailer and Patrick the flailee didn't hurt.

For a second, there was total silence—we heard not a whisper or a movement. Then Ashlock hit our pal with a whole new bombshell. “Let's say I believe you,” he said. “I want to know about the note you left for Annabel. Why did you do it? And how did you get into her locker?”

Evie leaned even closer to the door and almost had her ear to the metal. That's when my mom put down her
People
and shook her head. “Wait a minute. I should've known.”

We played innocent and ignored her. “You're not hanging out,” Mom said, getting a tone. “You're
eavesdropping
.” She hopped off her stool. We kept our ears to the door. She stood over us and whispered, “Scootch over.”

She didn't bother to sit down. She boldly leaned over and put her ear to the door. So Evie and I got up and did the same. Anyone walking by would have thought we were three lunatics leaning on that door. Then we learned a few things about how obsessed Patrick had been with Annabel.

 

Before

Man, Evie was bad at tennis. I cringed and shut my eyes. Maybe we'd been wrong about her. Dead wrong. She'd just thwapped another sinker in the bottom of the net while attempting a forehand during her very first tennis lesson ever. Will fed her a backhand, which she proceeded to shank into the wild yonder. The ball ricocheted off her racket frame and flew clear over two courts.

It was a beautiful morning, steamy but not too hot yet at seven thirty. There was the slightest chill left over from the night, but the thick air let you know you wouldn't be spared the gloopy, hot New England summer soup later on. Evie had been at the club since six a.m. Harmony was her only chance of getting here on time in the mornings, and he'd agreed to pick her up on the way to open the pool bright and early on those days he worked the morning shift. Lucky, of course, was out of the question. For starters, he could barely make it here for nine a.m. on his best day. So Evie had told her father she was coming here early to get a head start on helping with the camp lunch.

“I can't hit and I can't run,” Evie cried after sending another ball shooting into outer space. “I stink at this stupid game. I'm too heavy. This isn't going to work.
I'm. Too. Fat
.”

She stomped to the baseline and faced the netting. I could see her heaving, either crying or trying not to. I couldn't quite tell from the sidelines. I wanted to run to her, but I thought better of it. Maybe I'd give old Will a chance to show if he
got
Evie. Will seemed to pick up on my desire to go comfort her. He crossed his arms on his chest, showing off those big biceps again, and pointed at me with his racket. The tennis dudes love doing that.

“Stay where you are, Chelsea,” he said. “This is part of the training. She needs to learn how to take the bad with the good.” Lucky for him, I'd already decided to let these two work it out without me.

Then he boomed to Evie, “Come here.”

I thought she was going to stay put, but his tone must have jarred her and she slowly turned and walked back to the net with her head down.

“Evie,” he said, “you're not fat.” This was said so matter-of-factly as to make even
me
believe it. “But you
are
losing your focus. You can't expect instant results. It takes work. Even great champions were beginners once. Serena Williams. Caroline Wozniacki. They're going to be legends, but they had to start out making mistakes just like you will. You're not so special that you get to skip the training part. You're going to have to toughen up. What if Steffi Graf had given up during her first lesson?”

He regarded her for a moment. She was still huffing and puffing a bit and red-faced from the exertion of this gentle lesson. “You need to forget about skinny or fat. We need to turn you into an athlete, and that's the only thing I want you to be thinking about.” He paused. “And there can't be any more talk of giving up.”

He walked around the net to Evie's side of the court, his own racket tucked under his arm. “Let me see your grip,” he said, putting his hand around Evie's on her racket.

He'd been talking about grip all morning, and how it was why she couldn't hit the ball in the right spot, and I could see now that this seemed to be the root of Evie's problems. Will was having her hold her racket a totally different way than she was used to, in a weird upside-down-wrist position that made her look like a circus contortionist with every shot. Nothing natural about it, if you asked me.

“The Western grip is going to feel weird for a while,” Will told her.

So
that's
what this weird grip was. It sure was odd looking.

This was Will's life, teaching and studying the game and trying new things to create champions. He was one of the club's top players back when he was a teen, but he was a rare elite who'd avoided the pro circuit. He'd decided early on he wanted to teach, to be around tennis the rest of his life. Will had gone straight from playing for his college team to teaching, and never looked back.

Now he was adjusting Evie's hand, still wrapped tightly around the leather handle, so the racket face was hovering over the ground, not directed at the net, which looked ridiculous. He held the grip with her and brought her through the motion: racket back, wrist twists downward, elbow up, wrist twists the other way so the racket gets under the ball, and then a quick upward motion to whip the ball with both power and extreme topspin.

Evie nodded and said, “I think I've got it.”

She was calmer, focused, and determined. I smiled. I'd known it all along, that she had it in her.

“Good,” Will said, and went back to his side. He winked at me, then grabbed a handful of balls from his basket. “Get to the baseline. Let's go.”

Evie continued to suck for the next thirty minutes, but I figured Will knew what he was doing. Maybe things had to get worse before they could get better when it came to tennis, too.

 

Before

“What the heck is that?” Will Temple squinted at Evie across the net. It was their third lesson, and this issue was only now coming up. I had no idea what Evie was going to do about it.

“What's what?” she replied with just the slightest tinge of attitude.

I had to chuckle to myself. Talking back! A week ago she wouldn't have said boo to a goose; the girl had been apt to burst into tears at one stern word from someone like Will Temple. He beckoned Evie over, and when she reached him on the other side, he took her racket in his hand like a hammer.

“What is
this
?”

“It's from the bin at the front desk.” She brushed her bangs out of her eyes.

“It” was, in fact, a banged-up old Slazenger from the nineties, with an unfashionably small head, that happened to be the best one left in the loaner pile that morning. Evie had had the choice of that or a warped Wilson with a broken string. Will pressed two fingers hard into the racket's sweet spot and the strings succumbed like a tiny trampoline.

“These are way too loose, and the grip is the wrong size for you. How long have you been a six-foot-four man?” He squeezed the handle, getting the feel of the thing, barely wrapping his own hand around the shabby leather. He handed it back to her.

“You need to get your own racket,” he said, squinting some more. Will wasn't wearing his glasses today. He looked pretty dashing in his spectacles, but if it was too humid or he was playing a practice match, or maybe if he was in a certain mood, he didn't wear them. I guess his contacts were the wrong prescription because whenever he had to rely on them, frequent squinting ensued. “Tell your father I said so. With his connections, he'll be able to get a decent one for a good price.”

Evie nodded.
Right, sure
. She'd get right on that. She was still fighting with Lucky to get some new underwear without holes in it. The tennis racket battle would have to wait. Especially considering Lucky hadn't a clue Evie even knew how to swing a racket, let alone that she'd caught the eye of the elites' top coach and was training with him. Lucky had been easily convinced that his daughter was working early mornings preparing the camp lunch while he snoozed, which was preposterous because it didn't take six hours to put out some cold cuts. I think it made Lucky's life easier to believe her. So I didn't know what Evie was going to do. This was going to be interesting.

 

After

There was a long pause in the coaches' office, and finally Patrick spilled to Ashlock as Lucky listened quietly. “I was mad, okay? I thought Annabel liked me, but it became clear she had her eye on someone else. It took a while before I realized it was my best friend.” He paused. “So when that note fell out of her pocket one day, I picked it up. That's all. I never went through her things or anything.”

Ashlock cleared his throat. “So you found this note, and you thought it would be appropriate to write cruel taunts on it for Annabel, who you say you cared about?”

Patrick insisted, “I only added a few things. Look, I'm not proud of it. But someone else loathed her—not me. The original note was much worse. I don't remember exactly what it said, but it was typed out and it said stuff like, ‘Everybody hates you,' ‘No one wants you here,' stuff like that.”

My mother knew nothing about any of this. She said in the loudest stage whisper ever, “What in the world is going on?” and we shushed her.

“Were there any threats in this note?”

“I don't know,” Patrick said. “The whole thing was a threat. It was harsh, you know? But did someone threaten to kill her or something? No.”

Ashlock said calmly, “How did the note get into her locker?”

That was an easy one. Gene had put in these shiny, smooth, wooden lockers that were mostly about appearance. They weren't exactly bank vaults. “I waited until after hours and slipped it under the locker door,” Patrick said, sounding more relaxed now that he'd unburdened himself. “What's going to happen to me?” he asked.

“That depends,” Ashlock replied. “There's something you're not telling me. Annabel Harper was not someone who would let a few insults destroy her.
What was in the note?
”

Patrick heard Ashlock's tone and told the whole truth. “The note was anonymous, and typed.” He was talking fast now. “There were more, too. Annabel had talked about ‘notes,' plural. They were meant to make Annabel think Goran was a creep who was seeing all these girls at his school in Lexington, and even one in Connecticut from the tennis circuit.”

Ah, the “rumors”! This was all ringing true for once.

“Do you think it's possible that night at the party was the first time she got one of those notes?” Ashlock asked.

Patrick thought for a second. “Yes,” he said. “That would make sense.”

“Was anything in those notes actually true?” Long, long pause.

“No,” Patrick said quietly.

“But you let Annabel continue to believe that about Goran?”

“Yes,” said Patrick. “I mean, the girls love that whole international-man-of-mystery thing he has going on—so there were always rumors about who he was dating. But he'd only had one steady girlfriend at school since he moved here, and they broke up last year. A few months after that, he set his sights on Annabel.”

“Okay,” Ashlock said. “Okay, Patrick.”

We heard nothing for a moment and my mom jerked her thumb toward the desk. We had to get outta there. We scrambled away from the door, then quickly settled down to walk our separate ways, acting normal. I followed Evie toward the lobby, and as I looked back to check on my mom, I saw her watching me oddly.
Uh-oh.
She was seeing something I didn't want her to
.
I kept moving and acted like everything was hunky-dory.
Nothing to see here
.
No problem, Mom. Really.

Evie collapsed on a sofa and I followed suit. She sighed, deflated, and shook her head.
I know, I know
. It was really draining. Even with the drama and overwrought confessing that had gone on around the club lately, we were no closer to finding out who had killed Annabel.

Evie looked up again, past me, out at the courts full of scrambling tennis players.

“Something's been nagging at me,” she said. “About this whole thing.”

No kidding. It was a terrible burden to have hanging over us.

“Think about this: What's happening with this missing mystery item? I mean, except for the day it was revealed in the
Bee
and everyone freaked out, we've heard nothing.”

I had to agree. It was an intriguing facet of the investigation.

“I can't stop thinking about it. I feel like there's something out there I'm not seeing,” Evie said, shaking her head and watching those courts like they held all the answers. “Something's just not right. And I'm going to try to find out what it is, because Detective Ashlock doesn't seem to be any closer to finding out who did this.”

 

Before

When tennis lesson number four came along on a cloudy morning out on Court 9, Evie was on edge. She'd desperately hunted around the club for a nice graphite Head or maybe a Prince that was at least from our generation, but the good loaner rackets were gone, and she was left with another dreadful selection. Evie figured she couldn't use the Slazenger again because it had annoyed her coach, so she made a judgment call and chose a ludicrous kids' racket. I'd watched Will for a while now, and while he wasn't a jerk, he had his moods and he took life, and sometimes himself, very seriously.