“Point taken,” I said. “I’ll go through these drawers and you go through those.” I began pawing through the papers in earnest, then moved to his desk drawers and began pawing through those as well.
“Hey, Hollis?” Daisy asked.
“You found it?”
“No. I was just wondering…what do you suppose a playbook looks like?”
I stared at the mishmash of folders in the drawer I’d currently been rummaging through. “I don’t really know. I guess a notebook of some kind.”
“I picture the cover red, don’t you?”
“I was thinking black.”
“But black is so serious. Red would be much more team spirit-y.” She waved around jazz hands.
I went back to digging. “But red isn’t one of the team colors, so how spirit-y would that really be? Plus, it’s flashy. Easy to steal.” I closed the drawer and moved on to the next.
“Well, it did get stolen, after all,” Daisy said.
Turned out we were both wrong. The notebook was buried under a pile of yearbooks in the bottom drawer. It had a blue cover and Parkwood High School’s hornet right on the front cover.
“Got it,” I said triumphantly, just as the door opened and a man’s shadow filled the doorway.
“What are you doing in my desk?” he asked.
Chapter 8
For the tiniest moment, I thought we had encountered the ghost of Coach Farley. I could tell Daisy was thinking the same, because her mouth was open and her shoulders scrunched up high as if she were preparing to scream.
Don’t scream, don’t scream. Okay, maybe scream a little. If you scream, I am definitely screaming. I’m screaming like nobody’s business.
Instead of screaming, Daisy slowly slid a drawer closed with her knee, catching the shadow’s attention. I used the moment of distraction to shove the email printout and the playbook into my bag.
The shadow took a step inside and it became obvious that he wasn’t a ghost or Coach Farley at all. Instead, he was the slight man with the buzz cut I had taken to be the assistant coach earlier.
“Um,” I said. Smooth, Hollis. Really eloquent. Did they teach you the Um Technique in journalism school?
“We’re from Maid 4 U,” Daisy said, sounding so much more confident than Um. “The district sent us to clean out Mr. Farley’s desk.”
“Already?” He looked skeptical. “The police haven’t even been through here.”
Really? Interesting. Maybe that meant we were onto something they hadn’t thought of yet. Or maybe we were completely off-track and this wasn’t a lead at all. Or maybe it’s because the police chief’s son is the one who wrote the email. But wouldn’t that make them want to find it before anyone else could?
“The police don’t believe foul play was involved,” Daisy said. “They told the district to go ahead and hire us.”
His eyebrows shot up. They would have disappeared into his hairline if his hair hadn’t been buzzed to his scalp. “Really? No foul play? Well, that is surprising.”
Daisy cocked her head to one side. “Why are you so surprised? Do you know something?” She was as subtle as a jackhammer.
“We should get back to work,” I said, and I began gathering up handfuls of papers into neat stacks, trying to figure out how exactly we were going to make a graceful exit before we ended up with mop buckets.
“Whoa, now, wait just a minute. That’s my desk,” he said, coming at me fast, pointing at a nameplate that had been camouflaged by a small mountain of wadded sandwich wrappers.
Kermit Hoopsick, P.E.
Kermit Hoopsick? Sounded like a basketball-playing Muppet.
I stared at the papers in my hand uncomprehendingly. This was his desk? Did that mean Kermit was the one who called Paulie Henderson last year to talk about playbook theft? Did it mean he was the one who stole the playbook to begin with? Or had he just been covering for Farley?
He snatched the papers from my hand.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Has this always been your desk?”
“If you’re judging my tidiness, I’ve been busy,” he said. “And I know where everything is. Well, knew. Who knows where you moved stuff. Did you throw away my Diet Coke? You threw away my Diet Coke. Those aren’t free, you know. If you don’t mind…” He stared at me pointedly until I got the hint and sidestepped away from the desk. Satisfied, he sat and rolled around in his chair a little bit, as if to see if I’d somehow messed it up with my meddling.
“Were you and the coach close?” I asked.
“Excuse me?” He picked up a random pencil and began fidgeting with it. His knee bounced up and down nervously. “Who did you say you were with? Why do you want to know?”
I busied myself stacking and arranging the papers on the other desk, my mind trying to absorb everything it could. A framed photo of three happy-looking, interchangeable blond women. A lot of losing lottery tickets. Some junk mail. A few Rich & Famous magazines stuffed full with inserts about diamond watches, expensive cars, and fancy vacations. I made a quick mental note of Farley’s address. When I stepped back and viewed everything on his desk together, it was kind of pathetic.
How sad to die wishing you were someone else.
I had a brief moment wondering what the still life of my desk would say about me. Would it say I was wishing I was still the person I once was? Or would it say I had happily moved on with my life?
“We’re with Maid 4 U,” I said. “I can’t imagine how I would get along if my coworker here suddenly was gone, that’s all.” This was the truth, and I knew if I glanced at Daisy, we would share a look of appreciation for each other and totally blow our covers for sure.
“We were colleagues,” he said. Twitch twitch. “He was too busy for victory beers.”
Okay, that was an odd thing to say.
“I’ll bet you two were good friends, though. Working this close together, you probably had
