Chapter 4 The Man Who Forgot Too Fast

Joey POV

"Read it to me," Marnie said. "Word for word."

My hand wasn't steady enough to hold the paper still, so I set it flat on the desk and leaned over it instead. "If anyone asks, I was never here that night." I looked at the numbers again, four columns of them, letters mixed in that could have been initials. "There's more. Just numbers. I don't know what they mean yet."

"Photograph it. Now, before you do anything else, before you touch it again, before you even breathe on it wrong." Marnie's voice had gone flat and fast, the tone she used when she was scared and didn't want to sound like it. "Then put it somewhere safe. Not your bag. Not your desk."

"Marnie,"

"Joey. Somewhere safe."

I took the picture with shaking hands and slid the note into the zipper pocket of my jacket, the one I never used, the one that didn't unzip by accident when I sat down. It felt stupid and necessary at the same time.

"I'll come by tomorrow," Marnie said. "We'll look at the numbers together. Don't do anything with this alone."

I said okay. I meant it when I said it. But I didn't sleep that night, and by the time the sun came up, I'd already decided I wasn't going to wait for tomorrow.

---

Walton Meeker had been throwing batting practice at the Rivermen's stadium since before I was born, first as a player, then as a coach, then as the kind of fixture nobody questioned because he'd always just been there , steady, quiet, the guy who remembered everyone's birthday and never missed a funeral. He'd been my father's catcher for six seasons. If anyone alive knew what those four pitches meant, it was him.

I found him at the bullpen fence a little after eight, tossing balls into a bucket one at a time, unhurried, like the morning had nowhere else to be.

"Walton."

He looked up and smiled the way he always smiled at me, easy and warm, the kind of smile that made you forget he'd been alive long enough to bury half the people he loved. "Joey-bird. Early for you."

Nobody but him still called me that. It used to make me feel like a kid again in the good way. Today it just made my chest tighten.

"I want to ask you about something," I said. "From the old tapes."

"Shoot."

"There's a pitch sequence Dad used more than once. Fastball inside, curve low, slider away, fastball up. Same four, same order, at least three times across different seasons." I watched his hands as I said it, the way they kept moving toward the bucket even though there weren't any more balls left in the basket beside him. "Does that mean anything to you?"

The bucket tipped. Not far , just enough that two balls rolled out onto the grass , and he bent to pick them up so fast it looked less like an accident and more like an excuse to stop looking at me.

"Can't say it does," he said, to the grass, not to my face.

"You called every pitch he threw for six years."

"Long time ago." He straightened up, and here was the thing I noticed, the thing I filed away without wanting to: his voice had gone careful in a way it never was with me, each word placed like he was laying bricks instead of talking. "Man threw a lot of pitches, Joey. Can't remember the order of every one."

"This isn't every one. It's the exact same four, in the exact same order, against different hitters who had nothing in common. That's not memory, Walton. That's a pattern."

For one second , half a second, really, gone almost before I registered it , something crossed his face that had nothing easy in it at all. His mouth opened like he was going to say something true, and then it closed again, and when he spoke next his voice had swung all the way over into a kind of cheerfulness that didn't match a single thing his eyes were doing.

"You know what," he said, laughing, too quick, too loud for eight in the morning at an empty bullpen, "your dad used to run all kinds of little games with his pitch selection. Superstitions, lucky sequences, that sort of thing. Ballplayers are like that. Don't read too much into it."

"I'm not asking about superstition."

"I know you're not." The laugh dropped off his face like it had never been there. "I'm telling you not to look for one anyway."

That stopped me cold. Not what he said , how fast he'd said it, like the sentence had been sitting loaded behind his teeth the whole time I'd been talking, waiting for a reason to fire.

"Walton." I kept my voice low, steady, the way you'd talk to someone standing too close to an edge. "You just told me you don't remember the sequence. Now you're telling me not to look into something you don't remember."

He didn't answer that. He picked up the two balls from the grass, dropped them in the bucket, and reached for his cap off the fence post like the conversation had already ended somewhere I hadn't agreed to.

"I've got batting practice in twenty minutes," he said.

"Walton, please. If there's something you know,"

"There's nothing to know." He said it fast and final, the door-closing kind of final, and started walking toward the dugout without looking back at me even once, which was its own kind of answer, because in fourteen years of knowing this man, Walton Meeker had never once walked away from me mid-sentence.

I stood there at the fence with the morning going warm around me and my father's note sitting zipped against my ribs like something alive, and I watched the back of Walton's shirt disappear down the tunnel toward the clubhouse, and I understood, with a certainty that had nothing to do with proof and everything to do with fourteen years of knowing exactly how this man's face worked, that I had just watched somebody I trusted lie to me on purpose, in daylight, to my face, without even the decency to look at me while he did it.

My phone buzzed in my pocket. I almost didn't check it, still staring after him, still trying to make sense of the two seconds where his eyes had said one thing and his mouth had said another.

It was Marnie. Found something on the numbers already. Come to my place. Don't tell anyone we're looking at this. Not Holt. Not anyone.

I stood at that fence a moment longer, watching the tunnel where Walton had gone, and thought about how twelve hours ago the only person who'd told me to be careful was a man whose family owned this whole stadium , and now the man who'd taught my father to catch a curveball had just lied to my face and run.

Two people in one day, both telling me, in their own way, to stop looking.

Neither one of them had told me why.