Timothy eased his way into sitting, wobbled a bit. “All right, all right, I’m glad you have friends, Zeke. Everyone always says you need to get laid, but in this case, I’ll take the friendship.”
“No one says I need to get laid.”
“No,” Timothy said, and reached for an open beer bottle on the coffee table. “They do. I just keep all that shit away from you because your job is to focus.”
“My job is playing a sport that I happened to be good at as a kid.”
“That makes you lucky,” Timothy said. He drained the beer. Stood, wobbled a little more. “I think you’ve forgotten in all of this that this makes you exceptionally lucky.” He found his keys by the front door. Zeke knew he should stop him from driving back to the hotel.
“I’m not lucky anymore,” he said to his agent’s back. “I’ve earned it.”
“That is true,” Timothy said, a hand on the doorframe. “You’ve earned everything. And you can be pissed at me for forcing you down here, for not calling you out five months ago when we both know you were fast enough to dodge that hit.”
Zeke’s chest rose and fell. There it was, someone said it. Someone else knew his secret too.
Timothy turned toward him. “I’m the only one here, Zeke.Those girls, women, whatever. They’re not here. Your family, they’re not here. Your teammates? As I said, they think you need to get laid, then maybe you’ll be more fun. I’m down here in Arizona for you. Be glad you have someone in your corner, someone who will burn everything down in serviceto you.”
Zeke sat with that long after he left. Not the getting-laid part and not the part about his family, because Lani probably would have punctured Timothy’s tires if she heard him speak that way to Zeke. But about how far someone would go to protect the person they loved. He’d thought he could come to Arizona and silo himself off from his life, from Sybil and Betty and the loss of Julian. What he had missed is that his attempted laser focus had partially rendered him impotent. Timothy hadn’t been wrong about everything.
A puzzle piece slid into its notch, and he jumped off the couch. He found his phone charging in the bathroom.
He went to her voice mail.
“Annabeth, uh, hey, it’s me, Zeke Rodriguez. The pitcher? Anyway, could you call me back when you have a second? I have some questions about Matthew.”
58
Night Twenty-Four
Sybil
Levi’s text wassix days old. Sybil was furious at herself for not thinking to charge the flip phone sooner, for thinking that just because it hadn’t been particularly fruitful when she and Zeke first excavated it, that it couldn’t help them down the line. Now she was a week behind chasing Levi.
I got your msg from Thanksgiving. Sorry so slow. My old phone busted. Tougher than you’d think to get a replacement with the same number paying cash. Didn’t mean to worry you. I’m fine. Hope you’re fine? Love you, Bets.
Sybil had thought of a million ways to reply to him, but none of them seemed like what Betty would say, so her thumbs hovered over the phone’s keyboard until eventually, she gave up. If she were part of one of those crime podcasts, one of her cohostswould probably prod her into texting, tell her just the right thing to convince Levi she was an ally. But without Zeke or without Julian, Sybil was, for once in her life, paralyzed with uncertainty. Worried that she would spook Levi. Worried that she would lose this thread to Betty, the only one they had, permanently.
She spent the day trying to put the pieces together—she was pretty certain he had already departed the Grand Canyon if the timeline of the postcards held steady—a move just about every four months, and the last postcard from Mount Rushmore was eight months old, which meant a stop at the Grand Canyon, next on the Fodor’s list, had likely come and gone as well. She realized that Levi may well have sent a now-outdated postcard to Betty’s old address, the one with Mallory, but she couldn’t imagine that Mallory saved her old roommate’s mail. According to Betty, she couldn’t even preserve her yogurts. So Sybil, citing logic, wrote off the Grand Canyon. This left San Francisco or Los Angeles. Technically, the contest ended at the Golden Gate Bridge. Which meant Levi should be in LA. But the postmarks also told the story of a man who didn’t entirely follow directions: He swapped the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia with the Lincoln Memorial in DC, and the four-month intervals weren’t entirely predicable—an extended stay in the French Quarter of New Orleans several years ago, a shorter stint in St. Louis, where a postcard was sent with the Arch.
Sybil tried to think of what Betty would do but realized that she didn’t have any idea. She’d spent two months trying to mother her, and here Betty was still a stranger to her. She tucked herself into bed—aspirational, no doubt—then thought of Eloise. She reached for her phone, and surprisingly, though it was past midnight, her daughter picked up on the first ring.
“I need some advice,” she said.
“Oh my god, Mom, you’re callingmefor advice?”
“It turns out that I don’t know everything,” Sybil said, and the way Eloise laughed nearly got her high. “I’m sorry for winter break.”
“Sometimes you just get tunnel vision,” Eloise said. “I know you thought I would make a great doctor. Honestly, I would have.” She laughed again. “I am my mother’s daughter.”
Tunnel vision.That felt like exactly Sybil’s problem right now.
“Can I pick your brain about Betty, the girl you met at Thanksgiving?”
“Sure?”
“Not really about her, actually, about her brother.”
“Did I meet her brother? Oh god, are you trying to set me up with her brother?”
