Dave and I find a man matching Coach Miller’s description in a dim hallway at the back of Hancock High’s gym, lugging a metal basket of baseballs into the hall. Above his head, a lone tube light buzzes and hums.
“Are you Coach Miller?” I ask, moving close enough to get a good whiff of his cologne. The man is bathed in it, an overwhelming stench that burns the back of my throat, especially when combined with the other odors hanging in the air, Bengay and sweaty socks.
He looks up, his eyes half hidden under the bill of a Hancock High baseball cap. “Yup.”
India wasn’t kidding when she said he was built like a linebacker. Coach Miller is massive, six feet and then some of bulky bones and fat-padded muscle under baggy street clothes, jeans and a long-sleeved polo. He ducks back into the room, reappearing two seconds later with another basket, this time filled with mitts.
“The librarian told us you graduated from Hancock in 1999.”
“Yeah, that’s right.” He locks the door with a key he drops into his back jeans pocket. “Who’s asking?”
“My name is Iris, and this is my brother, Dave. We were hoping you could tell us what you remember about a former classmate of yours. Will Griffith.”
“Nope. Don’t know him.” He leans down, reaching for one of the baskets.
I slide my phone from my pocket and wake it up, revealing a picture of me and Will. “This is him. William Matthew Griffith. Do you recognize him?”
With a loud sigh, he glances at my screen, then drops the basket and looks again. “Him? That’s Billy Griffith.”
My heart flips over. “Do you remember him?”
“Everybody who went to Hancock back then remembers Billy Griffith.” He cocks his head, and his eyes narrow in suspicion. “Who did you say you were again?”
“Iris Griffith. His wife.”
The coach gives a surprised puff, quick and sharp enough to stir up the hair on the left side of my face. “No way.”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s just...” He gives me a slow head-to-toe, lingering on my curviest spots in a way that makes it hard to stand still, then follows it up with a grin, and I’m confused by the incongruity. His gaze was appreciative, but his smile isn’t the least bit friendly. “You don’t really seem like his type.”
Maybe not, but I know this guy’s type. The type who, once upon a time, was the one every boy wanted to be and every girl wanted to date. The type who swaggered through the hallways with a ball and an empty backpack, never once thinking beyond next week’s game. The type I warn my students at Lake Forrest Academy not to become.
I park my tone in neutral. “How so?”
“Do you have a weapon in your purse or your back pocket? Do you hear voices in your head telling you to, I don’t know, light fires and slash tires?”
Indignation burns, hot and sudden, at his question, but I keep my expression in check. “Of course not.”
“See? Not his type.” He leans down, swipes the basket of balls from the floor. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to get ready for practice.” Without waiting for a reply, he turns and takes off down the hall.
I shoot Dave a confused look, and he shrugs. Together, we set off after the coach.
“Coach Miller, wait.” He doesn’t wait, doesn’t even slow. His long legs take two steps to my one, and I have to jog to catch up. “Please. I only need ten minutes of your time. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but my husband was a passenger on that plane that just crashed, and I—”
“Look, lady,” he says, whirling around so fast I almost slam into him, “I am the last person you ought to be asking about Billy Griffith. I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, which means I’m not going to say anything. You do the math.”
“I’m not asking you to sugarcoat your memories. I’m only looking for the truth.”
He shakes his head, slow and stubborn. “He and I were not friends. We didn’t run in the same circles, and we didn’t get along. I don’t know what else to tell you.”
“Tell me what he was like. Tell me how long you’ve known him and who his friends were and where he lived. Tell me everything you can think of, because...” Still shaking his head, Coach Miller takes a step back and then another, his big body gearing up for a retreat, and I can tell I’m about to lose him. I take a deep breath and will myself to keep going, to tell this stranger what I’m really asking. “Because my husband lied, okay? He lied to me about a lot of things. He told me that he was en route to Orlando, not Seattle, when that plane crashed. I had no idea he’d ever even been in this city. All along, I thought he was from Memphis.”
What does a Memphis accent sound like? The question slices through my mind, sudden and unexpected. Will didn’t have much of a Southern accent, especially not compared to mine, and he never really used any of the slang Southerners are so fond of. Maybe that’s just not how they talk in Memphis? I have no idea.
Coach Miller stops moving, and his brows disappear under the bill of his ball cap. “Billy told you he grew up in Memphis?”
“Yes.”
The coach leans back, squinting at me down his nose. “Now, that sounds like something he would do.” He puffs a sigh of defeat, shoves the basket of balls at Dave’s chest, doubles back for the mitts and motions for us to follow him. “Practice starts in half an hour, so you’ll have to walk with me.”
He leads us deeper into the maze of hallways behind the gym, talking over his shoulder. “Like I said before, I remember Billy Griffith, but not because he was such a great guy. He was the type of guy that when he came walking down the hall, everybody all of a sudden had something very important to dig out of their lockers. You understand what I’m telling you? Anybody who looked him in the eye got singled out, and nobody wanted to get singled out by Billy Griffith. Not even the teachers.”
“Why?” Dave says. “What happened if he singled you out?”
“Sometimes a shove or a busted lip, sometimes nothing until days later. That was the scariest thing about Billy, his unpredictability. The only thing you could count on was that he’d turn on you eventually. He was mean and he was angry, and his parents were too busy beating the crap out of each other to care.”
His parents. His father, he said, died when he was two. His mother, he claimed, raised him on her own.
“What ages are we talking about here?” I say as we turn the corner onto a row of windowed offices. “How long ago did you know Will—Billy?”
Coach Miller thinks for a moment. “Well, I moved to Rainier Vista the summer before second grade, so what’s that? Seven or so?”