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  I called the police desk on the car radio and asked to be patched through to Captain Wilkes. “The subject would like an immediate appointment with Nemo,” I said. “Can you arrange?”

  There was a pause, and I knew Randie wasn’t any happier about this prima donna demand than I was. I also knew she would come through, and she did.

  “Ten-four,” she said tersely.

  I headed for the country club. “You’ll be on the massage table in half an hour,” I said.

  “Good.”

  I took another look in the rear view mirror. Alie was stretching, her arms reaching for the roof and pulling that short T-shirt up to display her taut midsection. Her back arched, and her nipples became silhouetted against the light fabric. It was sexy as hell.

  Then I saw her eyes watching me in the mirror. She had found me out, for sure. Her features melted into a self-satisfied smile that had nothing to do with me.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Kotter.”

  “What’s your first name?”

  “Officer Kotter.”

  “All right, be like that. You can call me Ms. de Ville.”

  “I wouldn’t have it any other way, ma’am.”

  Alie sighed in disgust. “Officer Kotter. How old are you?”

  “Twenty-four. I’ve been on the force three years.”

  “Well, I’m twenty. I’ve been on the pro tour four years.”

  “I’d have to be a hermit in a cave not to know that.”

  “Usually when I get to a new town, the police escort is a male musclehead.”

  “Maybe we do better detective work here.”

  She giggled. “It’s hard to believe people don’t know, but they never seem to.”

  “Maybe they got the wrong impression from that cover on Sports Illustrated.”

  She giggled again. “That was supposed to be a candid picture, but they made me stand in front of a fan for about a million shots.”

  “How come you’re traveling alone? I thought tennis pros had a whole army supporting them.”

  “We do. I do. Coach, trainer, father, friends, security guard, sometimes even a cook, you name it. But after six weeks in Europe, I was sick of everything. I just wanted to be by myself for a little while and chill out.”

  We were driving through what passed for Hillsboro’s downtown district—typical for a college town. There were a couple of coffee shops and ice cream parlors, bars with live music, pizza places and T-shirt stores, as well as the usual mix of drug stores, hardware store, clothing shops, movie house, real estate and doctors’ offices and one dentist’s place with a faulty alarm system that drove the police force crazy. It all looked fairly quaint, actually, because most of the storefronts hadn’t been changed in decades. You could live here, all right, but if you wanted some variety, you’d have to drive to a bigger city for a mall.

  Alie yawned. “What do people do for fun in this place? It looks pretty dead.”

  “Well, we don’t have Broadway or the Eiffel Tower here, but there’s enough to do if you know where to look.”

  “And you do?”

  “I’m a cop. Of course, I do.”

  “So you’ll take me there?”

  “Negative. The drinking age is twenty-one in this state.”

  “So?”

  “So you’re not going.”

  “We’ll see about that,” Alie said darkly. The nasty screech in her voice sounded like a witch’s curse, and I found myself shrugging, as if to ward it off. This babe was not to be trifled with.

  I wheeled into the grand entrance of the Buena Vista Country Club, marked by two pretentious white pillars with lion statues roaring on the top of them. A canopy of broad, leafy tree limbs overhung the roadway, which rolled through manicured grounds. Alie perked up as we entered. Obviously she was at home in a place like this.

  I eased the cruiser into a no-parking zone near the doorway of the clubhouse and killed the engine. Being a cop meant never having to worry about parking.

  I got out of the car and waited a moment, giving Alie the time to figure out she was in a back seat with no door handles—a little gimmick for foiling escapes. She couldn’t leave unless I let her.

  Eventually she looked at me through the back door window and gave a little smile of surrender. I had seen it before—on television after she lost a dogged, take-no-prisoners tennis match to Steffi Graf. I wished I could see it in bed.

  I let her out. “Cute,” she said.

  “I bet you say that to all the girls.”

  Alie laughed. “You know, you’re pretty funny for a cop.”

  “Ah, you’re just used to the muscleheads.”

  She waited for me to open the clubhouse door for her. Naturally I did. She breezed by me without a word of thanks. The queen was in her element.

  I waved to the receptionist and guided Alie through the lobby, which offered half-paneling to appeal to the men, multiple floral arrangements for the women and the sort of furniture found in the best hotels. We were on moneyed ground here.

  Julie Nemo’s quarters were toward the end of a long hallway, near the fitness center and racquetball courts. We entered her anteroom, where she was seated at her desk, waiting for us.

  She stood up and gave me an affectionate hug. “Kotter! How’s it going?”

  “Good, Julie. Thanks for seeing us.” I turned toward Alie to do the introductions, but she was looking stunned. Obviously she wasn’t used to anybody else being greeted before she was gushed over.

  I gave her the cop’s grin. She gave me hooded eyes.

  “Julie, this is Ms. de Ville,” I said, knowing perfectly well that protocol required me to present Julie to Alie, not Alie to Julie. I didn’t care. I was playing for keeps.

  “A pleasure,” Julie murmured, her voice as decorous as a lady in waiting. I loved the contrast to Alie’s.

  Julie sent Alie into the back to get ready for her massage. “She’s a looker, isn’t she?”

  “You bet. Sorry to bust in on you with such short notice. Was it a problem?”

  “A little. I had to reschedule Mrs. Bentley, the wife of the country club’s treasurer. I’ll probably be giving her free massages till Christmas to make sure she’s pacified. Fortunately she’s a tennis fan.” Julie Smiled. “She acted a little put out, but she’ll be bragging to all her friends she was bumped from the massage table by Alie de Ville.”

  “Thanks, Julie.”

  “Don’t mention it. What are friends for? Well, I better get ready for her. Make yourself comfortable, Kotter. I’ve got coffee, juice, sodas and muffins if you want any. The muffins are low-fat, by the way.”

  I picked up one of the women’s beauty and fitness magazines that Julie kept around and paged trough it for the pictures of women doing athletic activities in skimpy clothing. This was my idea of cheesecake.

  I was memorizing the curve of the hip of a rollerblader when I heard the door to the back open. I looked up. There stood Alie, wearing nothing but a thick green and gold towel. She had it wrapped around herself in such a low, immodest way that it exposed her breasts above her nipples. I took as long a look as I dared, which was not nearly long enough. I stood up awkwardly, assuming she had come out because she wanted me to do something.

  “Oh! Wrong door,” she said sweetly. She stood there another moment, wearing a brazen smile to go with the towel, and then she was gone.

  Wrong door, hell. Alie knew just what she was doing. If she thought she could get to me that way, she was damn right.

  Chapter Three

  The massage took the edge off Alie. In fact, it took so much off that she folded herself into some sort of personal cocoon and didn’t say another word to me. If I felt like a servant before, I felt like furniture now.

  This babe had two speeds: stop and go. I wasn’t sure which one was more infuriating.

  Alie oozed into the back seat of the patrol car and looked vacantly out the window. I drove her to the College Inn and let her out. She sl
inked inside without looking back, her hips pumping against those white shorts, and left the doorman and me to deal with her luggage. So what else was new?

  I resisted the temptation to peel out of the inn’s sedate grounds as I returned to the police station. From one look at the Beer Belly Polka sitting smugly at the desk, I knew that word of Alie’s antics was already spreading.

  “Hey, Kotter, can you fix me up for a massage?” Cranshaw tweaked me.

  “Negative, Sarge. But if you’ve got a hose, I can probably arrange for a mud bath.”

  “Kotter, you’ve got a bad attitude! You know that?”

  I slammed into Randie’s office. “This was supposed to be a plum assignment,” I yelped.

  Randie chuckled. “You ought to be careful what you wish for. Sometimes you get it.”

  “She’s a brat.”

  Randie put a cool hand on the back of my neck and steered me toward the wall. I knew where we were going, and I didn’t want to be there.

  She put me in front of a photograph of a championship softball team. There I was, the shortest player, kneeling in the first row—the only one in this happy crew refusing to smile for the camera.

  “You know a little something about brats, don’t you?” Randie said.

  “Yes, Captain.”

  The fight was draining from me. I looked at her, and she looked at me, both of us remembering.

  ***

  I grew up in Hillsboro because both of my parents worked at the college. Mother was a physics professor. Father was the vice president of finance—which meant he had slightly less regard for people than an agent from the Internal Revenue Service. Children ranked even lower.

  I was a grave disappointment to them. I was their only child, and they wanted a scholar, but there was something in me that did not love books. I was only happy outside. I loved the wild winds around me and the sky above, the grass and the dirt when they smelled of springtime, a rain so cold it left me shivering, and the dark night that made me feel invisible.

  My parents and I simply did not get along. They were creatures of the earth, and I was of the air. They liked long and civilized evenings that began after dark, and I craved the mornings when the early sun created new, pastel colors every day. They thrived on measured conversations, and I preferred a churn of quick smiles, dancing eyes and a staccato of incautious words.

  My father’s name was Wendell Tyler Kotter. My mother’s was Lynn Catherine Ives. They named me Wendy Lynn Kotter, as if I were the miniature personification of both.

  They called me, formally, “Wendy Lynn” when they spoke to me, but they said I was free to use “Wendy” or “Lynn,” whichever I preferred. They said it as though they were bestowing a great gift on me, but it was a phony academic freedom. They didn’t want me to be me. They wanted me to be them.

  Well, I didn’t want to call myself Wendy because it reminded me of him, and I didn’t want to call myself Lynn because it reminded me of her. Fortunately I had one of those last names that everybody used anyway.

  I liked being called “Kotter.” It was a name they hadn’t chosen, and it made me feel like myself.

  By the time I reached the seventh grade, our household was in so much turmoil we could have used some United Nations peacekeepers. We had a huge fight over my extracurricular activities, and a truce was out of the question. They wanted me to be in the Reading Club at the Hillsboro Library. I wanted to play field hockey at school. They refused to sign the release form for sports. I skipped so many Reading Club meetings I was kicked out.

  I stopped talking around the house or even meeting their eyes. They pinched their lips together disapprovingly and had long, low conversations with their colleagues in the psychology department.

  I heard them talking one night when they thought I was asleep.

  “What about therapy for her? Evelyn says there’s a good child psychiatrist in Darby,” Wendell said.

  “She’s just going through an adolescent phase, dear. Didn’t you see her report card? Her grades are still good,” Lynn said.

  I wasn’t bookish, but it didn’t mean I was stupid. I kept my grades high enough to hold my parents at bay.

  Funny, you never know where you’ll find the path to salvation. I discovered it the summer after seventh grade by wandering into a sporting goods store. On the wall was a poster that showed Joan Benoit Samuelson, the Olympic marathoner, running along a tree-lined rural road. She looked so peaceful I decided to try it.

  There was a park in the middle of Hillsboro that served as a sort of class divide. On one side—our side—lived the families with the respectable jobs at the college and the hospital and the local businesses, the people who thought affluence was their birthright. On the other side were the paper mill workers and the employees and serving staff for our side, the people who had been Papa de Ville’s world. The classes rarely met socially, but everybody used the park. I decided I would run there.

  The morning after I saw the poster, I put on my cross-trainers from gym class and trotted along the uneven sidewalk until I got to the dirt running trails in the the park. I followed a path to the ball fields, where I noticed a girls’ softball team at practice. The players appeared to be high school age, and all but two of them were black. I didn’t know anyone. Clearly they were not from my side of town.

  The running trail circled the ball field, and I watched the practice as I went. At first I looked at the players, but after a while I was drawn to their coach—a slender and youthful African-American woman with a presence a Marine commandant would kill for.

  She never stopped moving. She hit balls to the outfielders. She fixed someone’s batting stance. She knocked an errant ball away before it hit her third base player in the head. She seemed to be aware of everything that was going on everywhere all the time, and her steady chatter kept her players focused.

  Just being near her made me feel good. I circled the field until the practice was over, and then I beat it.

  I was back the next day. The day after that, I came by earlier and watched the coach as she hauled in the softball equipment and set up the bases for her practice.

  I simply couldn’t stay away. If I got tired running, I walked. Sometimes I quit altogether and just watched.

  A week went by. Then the unexpected happened.

  I got to the field as usual before the players arrived. I was circling behind the backstop near home plate when the coach looked right at me and said, “You.”

  I stopped dead. “Me?”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Nothing. I—running. I’m not—I’m allowed to, aren’t I?” I was scared to death.

  “Do you like softball?”

  “Uh, sure.”

  “Come on inside then.”

  I hesitated. “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “No. I don’t know.”

  I heard her chuckle for the first time in my life. It was the mirth of a fortune teller who knew more about you than you did and might tell you or might not. It was up to her, not you. “What’s the matter?” she said. “Are you afraid you’re the wrong color to come in here?”

  It was exactly what I was afraid of. Once she said it, though, I didn’t seem to mind anymore. I walked over to the gate and let myself in.

  “What’s your name?” she said.

  I glanced down and kicked at the turf. “Wendy Lynn Kotter.”

  “What do people call you?”

  How did she know to ask that? I was falling rapidly under her spell. “Kotter.”

  “Nice to meet you, Kotter. I’m Coach Wilkes. Do you want to play some catch?”

  “Sure.”

  She picked a couple of gloves from a heap of them and tossed one to me.

  “This is no good,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “I’m left-handed.” I pitched the glove back into the pile. It kicked against the other gloves as though it had been hit by gunshot and then lay still.

&n
bsp; Why there was no thunder and lightning in the next moment I’ll never know. Randie looked at me so piercingly I knew how Adam and Eve felt when they tested the apple.

  She walked toward me very slowly. I backed up until I was plastered against the fence. She didn’t stop until she stood inches away from me, like a drill sergeant at boot camp. There was no one else around. I was terrified.

  “Don’t you ever show me disrespect,” she said, her voice low and controlled. “Don’t you ever show disrespect to the equipment. There was a civil way to do that, wasn’t there?”

  I nodded.

  “I bet I can find a left-handed glove, if you’d still like to play catch.”

  “I—yes, I would, Coach.”

  I never threw another piece of sports equipment again. In the years to come, I never slammed down my batting helmet after I struck out. I never even kicked second base after I was caught stealing. When Randie Wilkes taught you a lesson, it took.

  She tossed me a left-handed glove, well-worn and grass-stained. I wriggled my hand into it reverently, as though it was a relic from the Hall of Fame. I wondered who had worn it before me and what sort of catches it had made. I smelled its leather smell and was happy. What was it about a glove that found the poetry in me?

  Randie lobbed a throw, and I caught it snug in the pocket and threw it back smoothly. The next one came in a little harder, and pretty soon we had a nice rhythm going. Pitch and catch. Pitch and catch. The only sound that mattered was the pop-pop-pop of the ball cleanly hitting the leather.

  Randie broke the silence as our game of catch went on. “What grade are you going into?”

  I hesitated. I didn’t want to talk about other troubling things. “Eighth.”

  “Do you like school?”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Do you have a favorite subject?”

  “Not really.”

  “Are you on any sports teams?”

  I put a little extra on the ball as I threw. “No.”

  Randie quit trying to draw me out. Obviously I was a more serious case than she first thought. A little while later, she glanced at her watch. “Listen, Kotter, I’ve got to set up for my practice. You want to help out?”