Harlan Coben - Play Dead

That isn’t exactly true. I almost had the best. Twice.

But that was a long time ago. Best forgotten. Besides, she was happy enough. She was an English professor at Colgate College and while the winters got cold, she liked the small community lifestyle. She was content, satisfied…

Bored.

Maybe. But a little boredom was not always such a bad thing. Right now, she hoped for boredom, begged for it. She wanted no new surprises.

Her poor beautiful niece. Such an awful thing to have happen to Laura. But perhaps it was divine intervention, Judy thought, though it was strange for a woman who was in no way religious, for a woman who had always despised those ‘comforting’ words that glossed over tragedy as ‘God’s will,’ to have such thoughts.

But maybe that’s what it was. God’s will. Please let that be what it was. David’s death had to be God’s will. Or some bizarre, tragic coincidence. Or…

The alternative was too horrifying to even consider. She placed her heavy sweater in the Samsonite as the phone rang again. Her hand reached for the receiver.

‘Hello?’

‘Judy?’

It was her sister. ‘Hello, Mary. How are you feeling?’

Tears were her answer. ‘Awful,’ Mary said. ‘Laura still won’t talk to me. She hates me, Judy. I don’t know what to do.’

‘Give her some time.’

‘She’ll always hate me. I know it.’

‘Laura is in a lot of pain right now.’

‘I know that,’ Mary snapped. ‘Don’t you think I know that? I’m her mother, for chrissake. She needs me.’

‘Of course she does.’

‘Judy?’

‘Yes?’

There was a pause. ‘I didn’t tell you everything.’

‘What do you mean?’

More weeping came through the telephone line. ‘I should have called you earlier. I wanted to. Really. But I know you would have tried to talk me out of it.’

Judy’s heart lurched. ‘Mary, what happened? You didn’t…’

Still more tears. ‘What would you have done? Don’t you see I didn’t have any choice? She’s my daughter. I couldn’t just sit back. And now… Oh God, I never wanted this to happen.’

Judy’s fingers nervously twisted the telephone cord. Her mind jerked back. How long? How many people must pay before it all ends? And why must the innocent have to suffer too? Why must they pay for the sins of others?

Judy fought to keep her voice calm. ‘Just tell me what happened.’

Laura’s dark sunglasses helped cut down on the warm, summer glare, but that was not the reason she wore them. They served the larger purpose of hiding her puffy eyelids from both the world and cameras that surrounded her. She sat on the dais, T.C. on her right, Serita on her left. Earl was on the other side of Serita. The photographers were pushing to get closer to the pale widow, their cameras clicking at warp speeds. Laura noticed the way T.C. glared at them, his fists clenched in his lap.

They were at Faneuil Hall, one of the most popular leisure spots in Boston. It should have been called Food Hall. Sure, Faneuil Hall had a good variety of stores. There were clothing boutiques, bookstores, even a Sharper Image. But make no mistake: Faneuil Hall was about food, tremendous amounts of food, an abundance of food. The assortment was endless. There was an Indian food stand next to a Chinese, next to an Italian, next to a Greek, next to a Mexican, next to a Japanese, next to a Lebanese, next to… name a country and you probably named a restaurant. It was the United Nations of eating.

If you were for some odd reason hungry for something more, you could wash down your foreign feast at a tropical fruit bar or an ice-cream parlor or a frozen-yogurt stand or a cookie bakery or a candy shop. David had once remarked that you could put on weight just walking through it.

There was also inadequate seating in the market (next to none, actually) which helped make the experience all the more fun. Laura recalled how David used to love to watch some poor guy forced to stand, trying to balance a souvlaki in one hand, napkins in the other, a strawberry daiquiri under one elbow, a taco under the other, and lord knows what between the knees.

David used to love…

She could not believe she was talking about David when she used that phrase.

Used to…

Faneuil Hall attracted many people, but never had Laura seen it this crowded. From her seat on the podium, Laura looked down at thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of faces, a sea of people flowing into the distant horizon, a blanket of humanity thrown over the entire area.

Today the restaurants, the bars, the shops, the parlors were all closed and locked. Even the Boston Garden stood sadly in the distance, the weathered building watching over the proceedings like a grieving father over the funeral of a beloved son. Boston’s colonial brick buildings and modern glass skyscrapers grieved with heads lowered. It was as if the whole city – the people, the buildings, the streets, the monuments – had stopped momentarily to mourn the death of David Baskin.

From behind her glasses, Laura’s eyes darted left and right: David’s friends, his fans, his teammates, Faneuil Hall, the tired yellow and blue sign reading BOSTON GARDEN. It was all too much for Laura, a full-fledged assault on her senses. Her head swam. Her strength ebbed from her body. She could barely make out the eloquent words that were being spoken. Only a sprinkling of the sad passages came through the filter her mind had created. She guessed the filter was a defense mechanism saving her from a complete breakdown, but she really didn’t possess the energy to think it through.

‘David was fiercely loyal. If a friend had a problem, it was David’s problem. I remember a time when…’

She turned toward T.C. She had not seen him since he had dropped her off at Serita’s, but he looked like he had not slept or shaved since his arrival in Australia almost a week ago. He stared back at her with concern in his bloodshot eyes. She smiled at him as if to say she was all right and turned the other way.

‘He was one of the few people I ever knew who did not have to put you down in order to bring himself up. If you congratulated him on a good game, he would talk about the great play of his teammates. If you mentioned his hard work with the handicapped, he would talk about their bravery. But with David, this was no false modesty…’

The seat next to Serita was empty now as Timmy Daniels finished speaking and Earl took the podium. She tried hard to tune into Earl’s words. The ones she caught were beautiful, moving, straight from the pain in his soul. She noticed that Earl was tearing, his voice choked, his giant seven-foot frame heaving, and she remembered that David had once told her that Earl was the most emotional guy he knew.

But knowing their past, who would ever have imagined that Earl and David would end up being close friends?

Laura did not know anything about basketball back in the days when David had first encountered Earl on the basketball court, but she knew that it had been a shock to everyone when they became best friends – everyone, that is, save Clip Arnstein, who had arranged it all.

David and Earl had always been bitter rivals, starting from their high-school days in Michigan. Newspapers had fueled the rivalry by constantly analyzing the two, theorizing on who was the better college prospect. The media moved out in force for their match-ups, notably the three times they had met in the state championships. Earl had gotten the better of David in those games, his team winning two of the three contests.

Heading into college, both players were the nation’s top recruits. David ended up at the University of Michigan. Earl enrolled at Notre Dame. The rivalry became even more intense. Basketball fans debated the merits of both players, claiming their favorite of the two was the better. The media continued to compare the white player who stood six-five with the black seven-footer. All the talk in college basketball rotated around the two superstars.