I shook my head. “I appreciate it, honestly. But I’m not sure exactly what you think I should know.”
Briggs leaned forward in the booth, his plain brown eyes fixed on me. “When somebody runs away, sometimes the key isn’t where they’re running to, but what they’re running from. I remember you felt bad about having an argument with Fritz the day he vanished. Maybe that upset him, but not enough for him to disappear off the face of the earth. If he took all that money out of the bank the week before, he was planning this long before your argument.” I felt hot tears at the back of my eyes, a curious mix of shame and exoneration. Briggs continued speaking quietly and intently. “Take that along with the FBI dropping the case like a hot pan, and it all points to someone with connections, power. Influence. Someone who frightened Fritz enough for him to run away from everything he had, including his best friend.”
I looked up at him and spoke in a cracked, harsh whisper. “What are you saying?”
Briggs leaned back in the booth so the vinyl squeaked. “If you want to find your friend,” he said, “I suggest you start looking at his family.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
With an echoing roar that rose like a wave and swept across the stadium, Blackburne and Manassas students greeted their football teams as they streamed onto the Manassas Prep field, arms raised and spirits high. Crimson-and-gold Blackburne banners were thrust into the sky in defiance of the home team’s blue and white. A concussive noise of air horns and kazoos blasted the air, including the awful beehive sound of vuvuzelas that some students had snuck past the faculty in defiance of a clearly stated ban. Posters belittling each team’s mascot hung on the stadium walls. One showed a Manassas knight cracking a whip at a cowering Blackburne lion, while another showed a nightmarish lion chasing a fleeing Manassas knight who had dropped his sword. “Burn Blackburne” was a popular sign among the Manassas students, as was “Tame the Lions.” For our part, I saw a number of signs that read “Beat ManAsses Prep,” which I thought rather unimaginative until I realized that the overlarge A and the misspelling were calculated, and had to grin at the silly audacity of it. Soon the crowds of students began hurling chants at the other side like catapults unloading onto besieged castles. “We’ve got spirit, yes we do, we’ve got spirit, how ’bout you?” Almost two thousand students, alumni, faculty, and parents were whipped into a frenzy of adulation and glorious hatred.
I stood in the visitors’ stands among the Blackburne students, cheering and yelling along with them, lost in the primal will of the crowd. For the past week, I had brooded over my meeting with Lester Briggs and what he had said about Fritz and the Davenports: I suggest you start looking at his family. While grading papers and eating in the dining hall, while covering Gray’s dorm duties as payback for covering mine, and even when I was trying to fall asleep, Briggs’s words nagged at me, unraveling any other thoughts in my head. I was nearly sick from lack of sleep Monday night after meeting with Briggs, and it was something of a shock on Tuesday morning to realize that the Game was only four days away. Part of me felt that it would be wrong to attend a football game just days after Terence’s death. Now, shouting a Lion cheer at the faceless mass of blue-and-white Manassas fans, I embraced the whole idea of the Game, welcomed it with all my heart, even if it granted me only a temporary respite from my thoughts.
The football captains walked to the center of the field to shake hands before the coin toss. All eyes were on them. Henry “the Duke” Duquesne was a Manassas linebacker, with an action-hero jaw and a chest and shoulders that Michelangelo would have immortalized in marble. The Duke was the most dangerous defensive football player in the Old Virginia League. I’d heard Coach Gristina describe the Duke’s ability to evade blockers and tackle runners as a kind of lethal ballet.
At midfield, the Duke lined up across from Blackburne’s hero, Jamal “Bull” Bullock, our star running back. Bull was broad as an ox and would explode out of formation, battering his way through a defensive line. No matter what happened, Bull almost always carried the ball at least three yards on every run. I’d seen him run for nearly ten yards, carrying on his back two defensive linemen, who would be hanging on to him like so many koala bears, before a third player finally tackled him and brought him down. Diamond, who was Blackburne’s football demigod when I had been in school, had danced between linemen; Bull plowed straight through them.
On the Manassas field, the Duke and Bull gazed at each other stoically, like gunfighters at high noon, while in the stands hundreds of students went berserk.
“Duuuuuuuuke,” the Manassas side called, waving blue-and-white flags.
“Bull! Bull!” retorted the Blackburne side, speeding up the chant like a locomotive. “Bull! Bull! Bull!-Bull! Bull!-Bull!-Bull!-Bull!”
Blackburne won the toss and elected to receive the kickoff. Both teams huddled on the sidelines, getting final instructions from their coaches, before lining up in formation on the field. The referee consulted his watch, blew the whistle, and the Manassas kicker began his slow-motion trot toward the football, accelerating forward. Then snap! The ball was kicked and flew into the air to deafening cheers and a chorus of vuvuzelas.
I had been so intent on watching the action on the football field that it took me a moment to realize someone in the aisle was tugging on my sleeve and shouting my name. I turned, and there stood my classmate Trip Alexander, in a Blackburne tie and tweed overcoat, grinning in my face. His hair was a bit shorter but still threatened to spill into his eyes, which now sat behind rimless glasses. “Hey, Matthias,” he said casually, as if we were passing each other on the way to class.