John Katzenbach - The Wrong Man

There was one picture of the three of them, taken when Ashley was six, perhaps a month before her mother left him. It had been on a family vacation to the shore, and he thought the smiles they all wore had a helpless undercurrent to them, for they only barely masked the tension that had dominated their lives. Ashley had built a sand castle with her mother that day. The rising tide and waves poured over their every effort, washing every structure aside despite their frantic digging of moats and pushing together of sand walls.

He searched the walls and desk and bureau top, and he could see no sign of anything even the slightest bit out of place. This worried him more.

Scott looked down at the letter. No one could ever love you like I do.

He shook his head. That was untrue, he thought. Everyone loved Ashley.

What frightened him was the notion that someone could believe the sentiment expressed in the letter. For a moment, he tried again to tell himself that he was being foolish and overprotective. Ashley was no longer a teenager, no longer even a college student. She was on the verge of joining a graduate program in art history in Boston and had her own life.

It was unsigned. That meant she knew who sent her the letter. Anonymity was as strong a signature as any written name.

By the side of Ashley’s bed was a pink telephone. He picked it up and dialed her cell phone number.

She answered on the second ring.

“Hi, Dad! What’s up?”

Her voice was filled with youth, enthusiasm, and trust. He breathed out slowly, instantly reassured.

“What’s up with you?” he asked. “I just wanted to hear your voice.”

A momentary hesitation.

He didn’t like that.

“Not too much. School is fine. Work is, well, work. But you know all that. In fact, nothing seems to have changed since I was home the other week.”

He took a deep breath. “I hardly saw you. And we didn’t get much chance to talk. I just wanted to make sure that everything is okay. No troubles with the new boss or any of your professors? Have you heard anything from that program you’ve applied to?”

Again, she paused. “No. Nothing really.”

He coughed once. “How about boys? Men, I guess. Anything I should know about?”

She did not immediately answer.

“Ashley?”

“No,” she said quickly. “Nothing, really. Nothing special. Nothing I can’t handle.”

He waited, but she didn’t say anything else.

“Is there something you want to tell me about?” he asked.

“No. Not really. So, Dad, what’s with the third degree?”

She asked this question with a lightheartedness that didn’t match his own sense of worry.

“Just trying to keep up. Your life zooms along,” he said. “And sometimes I just need to chase you down.”

She laughed, but with a slightly hollow tone. “Well, that old car of yours is fast enough.”

“Anything we need to talk about?” he repeated, then scowled, because he knew she would notice the redundancy.

She answered quickly, “No. For the second time. Why do you ask? Is everything okay with you?”

“Yes, yes, I’m fine.”

“What about Mom? And Hope? She’s okay, isn’t she?”

He caught his breath. The familiar way she used the name of her mother’s partner always took him aback, though he knew he shouldn’t be surprised after so many years.

“She’s fine. They’re both fine, I guess.”

“So what’s with the call? Something else bugging you?”

He looked at the letter in front of him.

“No, not at all. No particular reason. Just catching up. And anyway, that’s what dads do: We’re always bugged. We worry. All we can imagine are worst-case scenarios. Doom, despair, and difficulty, lurking at every turn. It’s what makes us the uniquely boring and deadly dull people we are.”

He listened to her laugh, which made him feel a little bit better.

“Look, I’m heading into the museum and we’re going to lose service. Let’s talk again soon, okay?”

“Sure. Love you.”

“I love you, Dad. Bye.”

He placed the phone back on the cradle and thought that sometimes what you don’t hear is much more important than what you do. And, on this occasion, he had heard nothing but trouble.

Hope Frazier watched the opposing team’s outside midfielder closely. The young woman tended to overplay her side of the field, leaving the defender behind her exposed. Hope’s own player, marking back closely, didn’t yet see the way she could use the risks taken by her opposite number to create a counterattack of her own. Hope paced a small ways down the sideline, thought for a moment about making a substitution, then decided against it. She removed a small pad of paper from her back pocket, seized a stub of pencil from her jacket, and made a quick notation. Something to mention in training, she thought. Behind her, she heard a murmur from the girls on the bench; they were accustomed to seeing the notebook come whipping out. Sometimes this meant praise, other times it turned into laps after the next day’s practice. Hope turned to the girls.

“Does anyone see what I see?”

There was a momentary hesitation. High school girls, she thought. One second, all bravado. The next, all timidity. One girl raised her hand.

“Okay, Molly. What?”

Molly stood up and pointed at the outside midfielder. “She’s causing us all sorts of problems on the right, but we can take advantage of her recklessness…”

Hope clapped her hands. “Absolutely!” She saw the other girls smile. No laps tomorrow. “Okay, Molly, warm up and go into the game. Go in for Sarah in the center, get the ball under control, and start something in that space.” Hope went over and sat in Molly’s spot on the bench.

“See the field, ladies,” she said quietly. “See the big picture. The game isn’t always about the ball at your feet, it’s about space, time, patience, and passion. It’s like chess. Turn a disadvantage into a strength.”

She looked up when she heard the crowd raise their voices. There had been a collision on the far sideline, and she could see a number of people gesturing for the referee to issue a yellow caution card. She could see one particularly irate father storming up and down the sideline, arms waving wildly. Hope stood up and took a few strides toward the touch line, trying to see what had taken place.

“Coach…”

She looked up and saw the nearside ref waving at her.

“I think they need you…”

She saw that the opposing team’s coach was already half-jogging across the field, and so she rapidly set forth, after grabbing a bottle of Gatorade and an emergency kit from her bag. As she made her way across, she angled herself close to Molly.

“Molls…I missed it. What happened?”

“They clashed heads, Coach. I think Vicki got the wind knocked out of her, but the other girl seems to have gotten the worst of it.”

By the time she arrived at the spot, her player was already sitting up, but the opposing team’s player lay on the ground, and Hope could hear muffled sobbing. She went to her own player first. “Vicki, you okay?”

The girl was nodding, but she had a look of fear across her face. She was still gasping for breath.

“Does anything hurt?”

Vicki shook her head. Some of the players had gathered around, and Hope dismissed them back to their positions. “Do you think you can stand up?”

Vicki nodded again, and Hope took her by the arm and steadied her as she rose. “Let’s sit on the bench for a bit,” she said calmly. Vicki started to shake her head, but Hope gripped her arm more tightly.

On the nearby sideline, the one parent had raised his voice further and was now verbally assaulting the other coach. No obscenities had spilled as yet, but Hope knew they couldn’t be far behind. She turned to the sideline.