“I’ll pass that on,” I said. “Good luck in your game. Don’t lose any teeth.”
She grinned, showing a full set, and headed out to the rink.
I suddenly had a craving for milk, like, a lot of it. Milk with cinnamon and ice. And salt. I looked more in the refrigerator and added a squirt of hot sauce to my travel mug, and it was delicious. I slurped the cold liquid as I went to my car in the driveway. Morgan still hadn’t gotten his butt out of bed, and I saw where Kaya had put his bike after it had blocked her car from parking in the garage the night before. Only the front tire and handlebars showed from where it was embedded in the snow across the street. I nodded in appreciation at the distance and depth into the snowpack she had gotten when she had flung it. Kaya was really strong.
I got into my car and took off. My first order of business was to go to Woodsmen Stadium, the home of our local pro football team. The roads that took me there were very familiar because I had been going to games since I was a baby. It had been a few years since I had spent a lot of time hanging out in the stands, but I still knew my way around the place—it had been a home away from home for a large part of my life. The guy who manned the main gate still recognized me and let me in even though I didn’t have a Woodsmen-approved sticker on my windshield. I also knew which door would be propped open a little so that Lyle, the security guard, could sneak in and out for quick smoke breaks. I would use that one now to get into the stadium to find him and ask for his help.
It was quiet in the parking lots, since the season was over. The amazing Woodsmen quarterback, Davis Blake, had been injured in the very first game of the preseason, and the team had gone into a tailspin of losses. They hadn’t made the playoffs for the first time in, well, I wasn’t sure how long it had been since they hadn’t. Because before Davis Blake, the Woodsmen QB had been Warren Wilde, and he was the best player to ever suit up in the United Football Confederation. He was the GOAT: the greatest of all time.
He was also my father, and also a goat in another sense—I considered him to be about the same as a barnyard animal. But it was too cold to stand in this parking lot and waste my time thinking about Warren Wilde. It didn’t take me long to find Lyle once I let myself into the stadium through the open door.
“Camdyn Riordan! You’re a sight for sore eyes.” The security guard hugged me. “Did you sneak in here?” he asked.
“Sure did. I’m glad to see you too, Lyle.” He asked me about Christmas and about Warren Wilde and my sister, Ellie, and I answered as vaguely as I could. “Hey, I was hoping you could help me get an address from the personnel files,” I announced in a break in his interrogation.
Lyle tilted his head and gave me a look.
“I wouldn’t ask this of you, but it’s really, really important. I have to have it.” My eyes suddenly filled up with tears and Lyle’s widened.
“All right, I can help you! I think I can pass some information along to the girl I’ve known since I changed her diaper. Come on, we’ll go up to HR. It should be empty today.”
We walked through the stadium with Lyle chatting to me about the quarterback’s recovery. “You know that most of the offensive players stayed up here for the winter so they could work with him. They’re all determined to get themselves back on track for next season.”
I already knew that, because no one in our town talked about anything other than the Woodsmen, and besides, my sister Ellie used to work for the team and she had mentioned it, too. And it had been on the radio and reported by the TV news, how the players were meeting and practicing together without coaches in the off-season. The fact that the majority of the offensive starters hadn’t gone to spend the winter elsewhere was why I was here at the stadium today.
The Human Resources department was totally deserted. “Grigor is sick and Juana took her vacation to Mexico,” Lyle mentioned. He moved a snow globe off the keyboard of a computer in the back and two-finger typed a login and password. “I’d like to be on vacation in Mexico right now. Everyone around here needs it after the way things went last season.” He looked pained at the memory. “Ok, ok, who are we looking for?”
I said a name and Lyle’s eyebrows shot up. “What do you need with him?”
“I just need his address. It’s nothing very important.”
“You already told me it was really, really important,” Lyle countered. He looked at me for a long moment. “Camdyn, are you in some kind of trouble? Should I call—”
“No, don’t call Warren Wilde,” I said. I didn’t want my father involved at all, in anything. “I don’t need any help besides this address.”
He looked like he thought that I was full of it, but he wrote out some information on a pink post-it. “I won’t tell Warren, but I’m here too, if you need me,” he said as he
