Chapter 3 What He Left on the Tap

Joey POV

I didn't go home.

I told myself I would, walking up the stairs after Holt disappeared around the corner, his voice still sitting wrong in my ears. Careful what you find in there. By the time I hit the landing, my feet had already turned the other way, back down toward the video room, like my body had made a decision my brain hadn't agreed to yet.

The door opened easy this time. No sticking, no fighting the handle. Just me, alone again, back in the chair in front of the same frozen frame I'd left an hour ago my father's face, half-turned toward home plate, caught mid-motion by a machine that didn't care what it had just shown me.

My phone buzzed. Marnie.

"You're supposed to be asleep," she said.

"I found something. I need you to look at it with me."

"It's midnight, Joey."

"I know what time it is." I hit play, then pause again three seconds later, freezing the pitch count on the corner of the screen. "I need someone who isn't me to tell me I'm not imagining this."

A long sigh crackled through the phone, the sound of someone giving up on an argument they already knew they'd lose. "Fine. Send me the timestamp. What am I looking at?"

"Fourth inning. Watch the sequence. Fastball inside, curve low, slider away, fastball up." I rewound to the earlier game, the one from three seasons back, and read off the same four calls in the same order. "Now tell me that's a coincidence."

There was quiet on her end while I pictured her pulling it up on her own laptop, blue light on her face the same way it was probably on mine. When she finally spoke, her voice had lost the sleepy edge completely.

"Okay, that's weird."

"That's what I said."

"No, I mean it's really weird. Same sequence, same order, three years apart, against two hitters with completely different scouting profiles. One of them's a lefty who crushes anything away. You don't throw slider-away to a guy who lives on outside pitches unless you're trying to get hit, or"

"Or it's not about the hitter at all," I said.

Neither of us finished that thought out loud. I didn't want to be the one to say it first, and I don't think she did either.

"Send me every game he pitched that last season," Marnie said instead. "All of it. I want to run the sequences against something bigger than two data points before either of us decides we've found a secret code in forty-year-old baseball."

"It's not forty years. It's fourteen."

"Fourteen's still a long time to keep a secret, if that's what this is."

I didn't answer that. I was already pulling the next box off the shelf, the one marked Final Season in handwriting that used to be mine, back when I was twenty-two and grieving and organizing tapes because it was easier than crying about them. I hadn't opened this box in years.

The cassettes inside were older, the labels more worn, some of them water-stained at the corners like they'd sat somewhere damp before they sat here. I pulled the one from the game two weeks before he died and slotted it into the deck, my hands moving faster than my thinking, the way they'd been doing all night.

The picture crackled to life. Different stadium, different year, same man on the mound looking tired in a way I hadn't noticed as a kid, back when I thought tired just meant it was late.

He wound up. Fastball inside. I watched the catcher's mitt pop and something in my chest popped with it, a small, sharp thing I didn't have a word ready for.

Curve low. Then, out of nowhere, my mind wasn't in the video room anymore it was in our kitchen, eight years old, watching him tape a scorecard to the fridge with a magnet shaped like a baseball, saying see this, Joey-bird, this is how you know a pitcher's telling the truth, the numbers don't lie even when the man does and then I was back in the basement, the memory gone as fast as it had come, leaving my hands cold on the desk like I'd just set something down I didn't remember picking up.

Slider away. Fastball up.

Same four pitches. Same order. Three games now, spanning three different years, against three hitters who had nothing in common except the fact that my father had thrown them the exact same sequence like it was scripture.

My phone buzzed again. Not Marnie this time. Holt.

You still awake? Just want to make sure you got home okay.

I stared at it for longer than the message deserved. Some small, stupid, hopeful part of me wanted to type back the truth no, I'm still here, I found it again, come look at this with me because some part of me had liked the way the hallway had felt smaller with him standing in it an hour ago.

But his voice was still in my head too. Some things get left in the past because somebody wanted them there. He'd said it like he already knew what I might find before I found it. And if he knew, if his family knew, then the last thing I wanted was for him to be standing over my shoulder when I figured out what it meant.

Home safe, I typed back. Thanks for the rescue.

It wasn't true. I told myself it wasn't really a lie either, just a door I was closing so I could keep working without someone else's hand on the same doorknob.

I turned back to the tape and hit rewind, meaning to check the sequence one more time before I called it a night for real, and that's when the cassette jammed not the picture, the physical case, the plastic clicking wrong as the tray tried to eject it. I pulled it free with both hands, more force than I meant to use, and the bottom panel of the case popped loose from its hinge.

Something fell out onto the desk. Not tape. Paper.

A single scrap, folded into quarters, gone soft and yellow at the creases the way paper goes when it's been folded and unfolded a hundred times by someone thinking hard about whether to keep it. I picked it up like it might dissolve if I moved too fast.

My father's handwriting again not the loose, easy scrawl from his scorecards, but small and careful, pressed hard enough into the paper that I could feel the letters on the back side too. Four columns. Numbers I didn't recognize next to letters that might have been initials, might have been something else entirely, and at the very bottom, underlined twice like he'd wanted to make sure whoever found it wouldn't skim past it:

If anyone asks, I was never here that night.

I read it three times before the room around me seemed to remember it was a room, before the hum of the old deck and the smell of dust and warm plastic came back into focus, and my hand, without my permission, had already picked up my phone to call Marnie back.

She answered on the first ring. "What."

"I found something," I said, and my voice came out smaller than I meant it to, smaller than I'd let it get in front of anyone in fourteen years. "It's not on the tape, Marnie. It's a note. In his handwriting. And it doesn't say anything about baseball at all."