Scoop to Kill: A Mystery a La Mode - By Wendy Lyn Watson Page 0,25
and Reggie’s. If I’d put Alice up to this, I would have told her to use the key, and she wouldn’t have had to involve Tally at all.” Emily laid her hand over her heart as though swearing an oath. “I would never ask Alice to dig through Bryan’s things.”
“I wish I’d known that thing about the keys,” Alice muttered. Then she sighed. “Look, Mom, it was all my idea. Besides, I didn’t get to do much digging before Detective McCormack came in.”
She lowered her face and looked up at us through her lashes. “But I did find this . . .” She ducked down to search through her bag, and sat up with a cube of paper.
A calendar, one of those page-a-day things.
We all stared at it in amazement, as though she had produced the Holy Grail out of her knapsack. Even Bree’s anger faded in the face of this relic from Bryan’s desk.
Finally, Finn reached across and picked up the cube of paper and turned it over in his hands. He read the cover. “Three hundred sixty-five days of baseball trivia, an academic-year calendar.”
Across the room, I saw Kyle perk up. Kyle didn’t play sports, but I guess he had a more intellectual interest in baseball.
Alice took the calendar back. “This is what I thought was interesting,” she said.
She flipped through the calendar to the page for November 15 of the previous year, then turned the little cube around so we could all see it better. There was a note scrawled in all capital letters: “NO OSTERGARD!!!”
“Who or what is Ostergard?” Bree asked.
“I don’t know,” Alice conceded. “But it looks like it mattered to Bryan a lot. See?”
She flipped back to November 10: “OSTERGARD?”
Then she flipped forward to November 26: “O—DEFINITELY FAKES.”
“Weird,” I said.
We all turned to Emily. After all, Bryan moved in her world.
“What do you think?” Finn asked.
Emily looked troubled. “I’m not sure. I’ve never heard of a student named Ostergard. But the name is familiar. It looks like Bryan was quite a baseball fan . . . maybe it’s a player?”
Kyle piped up. “There was a player in the 1920s named Red Ostergard, but he only played a year. I doubt he’s talking about Red Ostergard.”
We all stared in stunned silence at Kyle. Who knew the boy had that kind of trivia at his fingertips?
Emily frowned. “I just don’t know. It might be significant. It might not.”
Alice’s face fell.
“No, no,” Emily said, reaching out to pat the girl’s hand. “I appreciate the effort. And it might actually mean something. I just don’t even know where to begin looking for significance.”
Alice shrugged and pushed the calendar away, and went to get a soda. Emily and Finn started chatting, and Bree watched their exchange with unconcealed interest.
Kyle picked up the calendar, and started paging through the days. I’d never seen the boy so interested in reading. His usually sullen expression took on an intensity that gave his face definition and provided a glimpse of the man he would become.
I was marveling at the thought that our favorite juvenile delinquent would one day—possibly soon—be a grown-up, with real responsibilities, when Kyle frowned. He flipped a page of the calendar, flipped it back, and again.
“Uh, there’s a page missing,” he said.
Alice, who had returned to the table with a can of Dr Pepper, swung her head around to look at him, her expression deeply peeved. “What?” she snapped.
He met her gaze defiantly. “I said,” he enunciated with exaggerated care, “there’s a page missing.”
“I don’t think so,” Alice snipped. “I started at the very beginning and checked every single day, right up to the murder.”
Kyle sniffed, clearly not impressed. “Well, the page that’s missing is after the murder, smarty pants.” He rolled his shoulders, as though the mantle of “man with answers” didn’t feel comfortable there. “I mean, it’s not like that guy knew he was going to die. He had plans.”
For a moment, we all just stared at Kyle, stunned at both what he’d said—the unwitting pathos of it—and by the fact that he’d strung so many words together at all. Bless his heart—Kyle was a silent boy. As Grandma Peachy would say, most of the time he wouldn’t say shit with a mouthful. Three sentences amounted to a veritable dissertation.
Finn finally reacted, fishing a stumpy yellow pencil from his shirt pocket as he crossed the floor to Kyle’s booth. He slid into the seat across from the teen. “Show me,” he said.