“I was all right.”
“I think the Woodsmen players are all right,” I stated blandly.
“No. They’re first-class, abnormally talented, freaks of nature,” Shane corrected me. “That’s what it takes to play at their level.”
“So, you couldn’t hack it?” Oh, damn. This had turned from adulation into flagellation. “I didn’t mean ‘hack it,’” I said. “It must be close to impossible to be an abnormal freak of nature.”
“I had physical issues that took me out of football,” he stated. “Otherwise, I tell myself that I could have made it. Who knows?”
“That’s too bad.”
“It’s part of the game,” he answered.
We were just as far as ever from him introducing me to Woodsmen players. I thought about how to bring them up again as we navigated the snowy landscape. He was apparently thinking about our surroundings, because he started talking about playing in the snow in Colorado and how he’d been totally unprepared for prolonged low temperatures.
“Arkansas has winters but when we get a lot of snow, we just stay home. I expected that college life would be canceled, no class or practice, and my teammates thought that was hilarious,” he told me. “And the Junior Woodsmen play outside all winter long. It’s terrible.”
“At least they get to play a game for a living,” I pointed out. “I bet you would have liked that, if you hadn’t been injured.” Damn that flagellation! “But you must enjoy scouting,” I quickly added. “And after a while, you’ll get to know the guys on the real team, the Woodsmen. You could become friends, for example. You might have a party and invite them over, or go to some of the bars downtown with them. That would be fun.”
He was fully staring at me. “Would it?”
“Yes, for sure,” I told him. “They all seem great when they come into the restaurant over the summer but, um, I don’t ever get the chance to really meet them. It would be fun to really meet them.” I tried to imbue the words with meaning and significance, so he would understand that he was supposed to introduce me.
“For sure,” he echoed. “What’s the real story here?”
The real story of why I was trying to force a meeting with a Woodsmen player? The real story of what was happening in myfamilybusiness, like why I wasn’t getting paid?
I took a breath. “What? What do you mean?”
“You’re driving us out into the middle of nowhere to see a lighthouse. Why? What’s so important about it?”
Oh, the lighthouse! “It’s a significant feature of the shoreline,” I informed him. “Michigan has more lighthouses than any other state. Do you know how dangerous the Great Lakes are for shipping traffic?”
“Tell me about it.”
I should have schemed a little more about how to get him to introduce me to the Woodsmen players and I also should have looked up our destination. I searched my brain for more information from the fourth-grade field trip we’d taken out here. “Hundreds of hands went down every year up until the nineteen-seventies,” I said. “No one knows how many ships have wrecked in the lakes, mostly because of unpredictable weather.”
“Really?” Shane sounded interested and I stuck to delightful topics like death and destruction as we continued our drive. At least he was learning more about the area that he now called home, and maybe I would have more fun tonight when I went out with the next guy. I congratulated myself (mentally) for being a woman with two dates today.
The first one clearly sucked. The second one would be much, much better.
Chapter 3
It wasn’t like I didn’t hear them. Of course I heard them.
“Yeah, it was last weekend but I didn’t go. I saw it, though,” she whispered.
“It was at the Iota Alpha house. It was crazy!”
“Did the police…”
I closed my rickety laptop and put it into my bag. I didn’t need to listen to this bullshit. “If you stand right behind me, I can hear you even if you whisper,” I said to the two girls.
“Oh, sorry,” one said.
“You shouldn’t gossip about things about which you know absolutely nothing,” I told her. Her eyes widened, like she was scared, but her friend covered her mouth to contain a fit of giggles.
“If you’re going to do the crime, do the time!” she told me before totally dissolving into laughter.
