Chapter 1 The Tape Doesn't Lie

Joey POV

The tape jammed for the third time, and I wanted to throw the whole machine through the window.

"Come on," I muttered, easing the reel back with two fingers like it was something alive. The Rivermen's video room sat in the basement of the stadium, under a hundred years of dust, and the old broadcast deck down here still ate tape if you looked at it wrong. Somewhere above me, the stadium lights were off for the night. Down here, it was just me, one lamp, and forty-year-old cassettes stacked in boxes marked with my father's handwriting.

Season 1. Halloway Rivermen. Property of Emmett Callahan.

I hadn't asked to be the one who touched his old tapes. Holt had just handed me the anniversary project like it was a compliment nobody reads game footage like you do, Callahan and I'd said sure, because saying no would have meant explaining why I didn't want to.

My phone buzzed on the desk. Marnie.

"You're still there," she said, not a question.

"Machine's fighting me."

"It's ten at night."

"I noticed."

"Go home, Joey. The reel doesn't need to be perfect. It needs to exist by Friday."

I pinched the bridge of my nose. "I found something weird in the '09 footage."

"Weird how?"

"He threw the same four pitches, in the same order, against two different teams. Fastball inside, curve low, slider away, fastball up. Three years apart. Nobody calls a game like that on purpose."

There was a pause on the line, the kind where I could hear her deciding whether to take me seriously. "Maybe it was a good sequence. Maybe he liked it."

"Maybe," I said, but my hands were already rewinding the tape again, without me telling them to. I watched my own fingers do it like they belonged to someone else.

"You're doing the thing," Marnie said.

"What thing?"

"The thing where you find one loose thread on your dad and you start pulling until your whole hand's stuck in it. Go home. Sleep. Pull the thread tomorrow when there's daylight and I can supervise."

"I'm fine."

"You're never fine at ten p.m. in a basement. That's not a insult, that's a pattern."

I almost smiled. "I'll lock up in twenty minutes."

"Liar," she said, and hung up.

She was right, and I knew it, and I hit play anyway.

The footage rolled grainy color, a crowd that looked smaller than the stadium ever felt now, my father on the mound in a uniform two sizes too big for the man I remembered. I'd seen this footage a hundred times as a kid, curled on the couch while my mother pretended not to watch it too. I knew every pitch. I knew the score. I knew he'd win this game 3 to 1.

What I didn't know was why he threw fastball-curve-slider-fastball in the fourth inning of a scoreless game, against a batter who was clearly sitting on something outside.

I leaned in close enough that the glow of the screen turned my hands blue. Fastball inside. Curve low. Slider away. Fastball up.

Four pitches. The exact same four pitches from the tape I'd watched an hour ago, from a totally different season, against a totally different team.

That wasn't a good sequence a pitcher liked. That was a pattern. Patterns meant something on purpose. And a man doesn't build something on purpose unless he's trying to say it to somebody.

I grabbed a legal pad and started writing down every pitch in the inning, my handwriting getting messier the faster my hand moved, like it was trying to keep up with a thought I hadn't finished having yet.

That's when the lights went out.

Not flickered. Not dimmed. Gone, all at once, the hum of the old deck cutting off mid-frame so the screen died with my father's face frozen half-turned toward the plate.

I sat very still.

"Building does this," I said out loud, to nobody, because saying it out loud made it sound true. The Rivermen's stadium was older than most of the people who worked there. The wiring complained. Ownership kept promising to fix it and never did. This had happened before. Probably.

I felt for my phone on the desk and found it by touch, the little glow of the screen the only light in the whole room. No new messages. No missed calls. Just me, and the dark, and the shape of boxes stacked against the wall that I suddenly couldn't remember the layout of anymore, even though I'd been down here for six hours.

I stood up too fast and knocked my knee against the desk leg. The sound felt enormous.

Then I heard it.

Footsteps. Not mine. Coming from the hallway outside the video room, slow and even, moving with the kind of care that told me whoever it was already knew exactly where the walls were and didn't need light to find them.

"Hello?" My voice came out steadier than I felt, which surprised me. "Is someone the power's out down here, if you're looking for the breaker it's around the corner"

The footsteps didn't answer. They didn't speed up. They didn't stop either. They just kept coming, unhurried, like whoever it was had all the time in the world and I was the only thing they were walking toward.

I backed toward the door on instinct, phone gripped so hard the edges bit into my palm, and reached for the handle to pull it shut and lock myself in.

It wouldn't turn.

I tried again, both hands this time, jiggling it the way you do when you're sure it's just stuck, just old, just the same building complaining the way it always complained except the footsteps were closer now, close enough that I could hear the specific sound of a shoe scuffing concrete, close enough that whoever it was had to be almost at the doorway I couldn't lock myself behind.

My thumb found the flashlight button on my phone without me deciding to move it there, and I swung the light up toward the hallway just as a shape filled the doorway completely, one hand already reaching for the frame like it meant to come inside whether I wanted that or not.