Chapter 5 The Empty Locker

Joey POV

Marnie's apartment smelled like burnt coffee and printer ink, and her kitchen table was already covered in graph paper by the time I got there, the note's photograph blown up big on her laptop screen between two mugs she hadn't touched.

"He lied to me," I said, before she could even say hello. "Walton. This morning. Straight to my face."

She looked up fast. "About what?"

"The sequence. I asked him if it meant anything and he said he couldn't remember, and then two seconds later he told me not to look into it. You don't warn someone off a thing you don't remember."

"No," she said slowly. "You don't." She turned the laptop toward me. "Look what I found on the numbers, though. I think some of them line up with dates. Not calendar dates , game dates. Season, month, game number."

I leaned over the table, and for a while the note took up the whole world again, four columns turning into something almost readable under Marnie's neat little annotations, and I let myself forget about Walton's face for exactly as long as it took to trace one column down to a date I recognized without wanting to.

The night before he died.

My phone buzzed against the table. Holt.

Hope the reel's coming along. Let me know if you need anything from the archive.

I looked at it longer than a message like that should take. It would have been so easy to type back everything , the note, the sequence, Walton's face going careful and wrong at the fence. Some small, dumb part of me wanted him to already know, wanted to hand him half the weight of it just so I wasn't the only one carrying it around.

I didn't. I typed all good, thanks instead, and put the phone face-down on the table, and told myself it was because I didn't trust the timing yet, not because some part of me was already scared of what his face might do if I said my father's name and his grandfather's in the same sentence.

"You're doing the thing again," Marnie said, watching me over the screen.

"What thing?"

"The thing where you decide protecting someone means not telling them anything." She said it without heat, just tired and honest, the way only she got to say things to me. "You can't investigate a murder , or whatever this is , completely alone, Joey."

"I'm not alone. I have you."

"That's not the same as having everyone who might actually help." She didn't push it further. She knew better than to push me twice in one sitting. "Go talk to Walton again tomorrow. Somewhere he can't just walk away from you this time."

---

I got to the clubhouse a little after seven, early enough that the hallway still smelled like floor cleaner instead of sweat. Walton's usual spot by the bullpen fence was empty, bucket and all, which had never once happened in three years of me showing up at this hour.

I found the clubhouse manager instead, a kid barely older than the interns, restocking a cooler with sports drinks like his life depended on getting the labels facing the same way.

"Have you seen Walton?"

"Called in sick." He didn't look up. "Said his knee's acting up. Might be out a few days."

Walton's knee had been "acting up" exactly once in the entire time I'd known him, and that was the year he actually tore something sliding into second base at a charity game, an injury he still bragged about at every holiday party. This didn't sound like that kind of sick.

I texted him. Hope you feel better. Can we talk when you're up for it? No response by lunch. None by the end of the day either, which for a man who answered texts inside of ten minutes even during batting practice, felt less like an accident and more like a decision.

The next day I tried again, showing up at the clubhouse a different way, through the side door near the equipment room where I knew he sometimes came in early to avoid the crowd of players getting there at once. His locker was there, same as always, name plate and all.

Empty. Not cleared-out empty , his gear was still hanging there, his cap still on the hook , just empty of him, the way a chair looks wrong when the person who always sits in it hasn't shown up.

"He's not coming in this week," a voice said behind me, and I turned to find one of the assistant coaches, a woman named Priya who ran the bullpen when Walton wasn't around, giving me a look that was more curious than helpful. "Family thing, I heard. You need something from his locker?"

"No. No, I just wanted to talk to him."

"Try again next week, maybe." She shrugged like it was nothing, like men who never missed a single day in fourteen years just up and vanished for family reasons all the time, and walked off toward the field before I could ask her which family, which emergency, why nobody seemed to know any actual details about a man everyone claimed to love.

I called him again that night. Straight to voicemail this time, the automated kind that meant his phone was off completely, not just silenced.

I found his address through an old team directory Marnie still had access to from a project two years back, and I told myself I was just going to drive by, just going to see if his car was there, not going to knock on anything, not going to make this weirder than it already was.

His driveway was empty. The house was dark, no lights on anywhere, no car in the carport where I'd seen his old truck parked a hundred times before at team barbecues. A single newspaper sat on the front step, still rolled up in its plastic sleeve, collecting a light film of dew that told me it had been sitting there at least since the morning.

I stood on his lawn in the dark for longer than I should have, staring at that rolled-up newspaper like it was going to tell me something if I looked at it hard enough, my mind circling uselessly around the smallest, stupidest detail in the whole scene , the exact angle the paper had landed at, half off the step, like whoever normally picked it up hadn't been there to catch it before it fell.

A man doesn't disappear this cleanly by accident. Not a man who'd worked the same job for fourteen years, who lived alone two blocks from the stadium, who I'd just accused, without saying the word out loud, of lying to protect a secret he'd been keeping since before I was old enough to understand what a secret was.

I called his number one more time, standing there in the dark with his empty house in front of me, and this time it didn't even ring. Just three flat tones and a recording telling me the number I was trying to reach was no longer in service