I watched her disappear into the tunnel that led to the maintenance concourse. I turned back the other way, looking to see if Beccy was still around, although I didn’t know why.

  She wasn’t on the pool deck. But Coach Collis was. He was surrounded by people, but he wasn’t paying them any mind. His attention was on me.

  I stepped down onto the deck as a maintenance crew appeared. One guy got on his knees with a little kit of chemicals and took a sample of water from the pool.

  Coach Collis said something to the group around him and then walked straight over to me. The bright lights of the arena bounced off his shiny head. Tall and broad, he looked more like a former football player than a swimmer.

  “Did you talk to that television girl?”

  “The presenter, Beccy Williams?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “She stuck to the script with her questions. You did us a solid.”

  “No, she did you a solid. And it wasn’t the questions; it was the answers that she handed him.”

  “Either way. Look, we didn’t get off on the right foot, but I don’t like people messing with my athletes when they’re trying to prepare.”

  “I get that. Trust me, it’s not the first time I’ve been told to buzz off by a coach.”

  “Well, I’ll be honest, I don’t think he should have hired you. He should have come to me with this thing.”

  “You didn’t know about the blackmail?”

  “Not until this morning.”

  “Why is that? Why didn’t he come to you?”

  “He’s a good kid. He’s been through some tough times—things that were outside his control—and I’ve tried to manage that. But we made it back. I think when he got those messages, he was worried about stressing me out.”

  “Does it stress you out?”

  “It’s not good for anyone’s blood pressure, but my job is to take the stress away from him. If I’ve gotta bear it, so be it. But we’ve worked together a long time, so he worries about me anyway.”

  “I can understand that.”

  “Well, I just wanted to put that on the record. You did some good work there.”

  “Rod Barron has hired me to run interference.”

  “Against what? Isn’t it done?”

  “It looks that way, but that doesn’t mean the journalists won’t sniff around for the rest of the week.”

  He frowned. It was a hell of a contrast. The top of his head was perfectly smooth, but the furrows that formed in his brow knew no bounds. It was like looking in the mirror, except for the hair part.

  “I suppose that’s okay. You seem to know what you’re doing. But I really want to keep this away from Greg.”

  “That would be the whole point.”

  “So it would be better if you stayed away from him,” said Collis.

  “Why?”

  “Because your presence makes him think about it and, in turn, about Rio. You know about Rio?”

  “You mean Omaha?”

  “Yes.”

  “The basics,” I said.

  “And you know what happened at the Games.”

  “I do.”

  “So we don’t want that again.”

  “Was he really close to Forrest Simpson?”

  “No, not really. They knew each other, of course. He was clearly a troubled individual.”

  “Did you see any evidence of that?”

  “He took his own life.”

  “Before that.”

  “Not really.”

  “That’s not a no.”

  “He wasn’t my swimmer.”

  “He would have been if he made the national team.”

  “Then I would have been in a position to do something.”

  “Are you saying there were signs and Coach Almonde ignored them?”

  “I’m not saying anything. He was just an odd duck, that’s all. He was an outside lanes kind of guy.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “In races, the fastest swimmers are in the middle lanes, four and five, and then the next fastest in three and six, and so on. The outside lanes are reserved for the slowest competitors.”

  “He was slow? He went to two Games.”

  “Relatively slow. This is elite company. He’d have blown you or me out of the water. But it was more than in the pool—he was always on the outside. Never the center of attention, always standing on the edge, the kid who waits to sit in the cafeteria because if he chooses a table, he’ll end up sitting alone. The one who doesn’t quite get the joke, so he laughs after everyone else has finished and then does it a little too hard.”

  “Not evidence of depression, exactly.”

  “No, it’s not. I’m just saying he was a bit of a loner, that’s all. I never saw anything more than that. But I didn’t spend every day with him.”

  “What do you think Forrest was up to?” I asked.

  “When?”

  “With the blackmail?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He claimed to know something that Greg had done.”

  “Greg’s done nothing but train and represent his country.”

  “Forrest didn’t seem to agree.”

  “Like I said, a troubled individual. Maybe deflecting his own inadequacies.”

  “Was it what happened in Omaha?”

  “No, Greg had nothing to do with that.”

  “The police checked him out?”

  “Of course. They cleared him completely. He wasn’t there when it happened.”

  “He had an alibi?”

  “He did. Me. He came home from the after-meet party and slept on the sofa. He’d had a bit to drink, celebrating, and he crashed out. I checked on him throughout the night. He never moved. I was there when he woke the next morning. We were both there when the cops came to the house.”

  “Why did Greg think the cops had it in for him, then?”

  “Not so much the cops as the media. And they didn’t really have it in for him—they find a juicy story and beat it to death. They kept asking about her, what he knew, why he didn’t stop her. But none of us saw it. Nothing. She kept it well hidden. Greg didn’t take it well, and you know what happened. He got caught up in his own head. That’s why I’m so wary this time. I can’t have him overreacting to things. There’s too much at stake.”

  “Did you see Forrest last night after the final?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Where?”

  “In the warm-up area.”

  “Greg said Forrest didn’t cool down with the others after the race.”

  “We call it a warm-down, and no, he wasn’t with the others in the pool.”

  “So he didn’t cool down, warm down, whatever?”

  “Like I say, he was an outside lanes kind of guy. He was standing in the corner, watching. His coach wasn’t there, so I told him to go take a bath.”

  “A bath?”

  “An ice bath.”

  “I didn’t see any baths in the locker rooms.”

  “There aren’t any. We use those big recycling cans.”

  “The wheelies?”

  “Yeah. Fill them full of ice and water. They do the trick.”

  “Did you see him after that?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t see him leave?”

  “No. The one hundred free was the last event of the night, so after warm-down and showers, we all left. I walked out with Greg and some others.”

  “To the vans?”

  “Yeah. Minivans, provided by the sponsor. Why do you care?”

  “I don’t,” I said. “I’m just trying to place Forrest. He clearly didn’t leave, but no one saw him. I’m wondering why.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  There’s no better dinner in the world than Mick’s homemade fish dip on crackers followed by a grouper sandwich, all washed down with an ice-cold beer. I sat at the bar at Longboard Kelly’s with my wife beside me and Ron beside her, all of us enjoying a meal of kings as the heat abated and a breeze tickled the umbrellas over the tables in the courtyard. I wasn’t sure how life got any better.

  “I’ve never seen a jock study so hard,” said Ron, wiping his mouth with a napkin.

  Danielle smiled. “He does have it in him.”

  “It’s quite the binder of information.”

  “It is all online.”

  “Lizzy does it old-school.”

  Danielle twirled the straw in her vodka tonic. “I must thank her.”

  “When’s the test?” Ron asked.

  “It’s not really a test, per se, but it’s next week,” said Danielle. “Then Orna will do one more home visit.”

  “She spends more time there than I do,” I said.

  “She needs to make sure the house is appropriate for children.”

  I picked up my beer and put it down again. “Do you think we need to get a television?”

  Danielle’s eyes went wide. She snapped around to look at Ron, then came back to me. “What’s brought this on?”

  “There are going to be kids in the house.”

  “We didn’t have a television when we had Nora there.”

  “That was different.”

  “How?”

  “She was little, and it happened suddenly. We might foster older kids or even have them for a bit longer. I don’t know.”

  “Do you want a television?”

  “I don’t need it. Mick’s got one.” I pointed at the flatscreen on the wall in the indoor bar. It wasn’t turned on. Longboard’s was many things, but a sports bar wasn’t one of them. Mick did baseball and football and the occasional game of hoops, but he didn’t leave the screens on while the talking heads jabbered on. Lots of bars put television on mute so the patrons weren’t disturbed by the mindless drivel of pundits, but then they turned on the closed captioning so everyone could read what they were saying. I never really understood the point.

  Danielle sipped her drink. “Orna thinks the kids might actually benefit from less screen time.”

  “So now we’re the screen police? That’s gonna make us popular.”

  “We have the iPad in a pinch.”

  “Kids all look at their phones these days,” said Ron. “They have televisions in their pockets.”

  I shrugged. “If you say so.”

  “We’ll see how it goes,” said Danielle.

  I nodded and drank some beer. There was a nagging doubt at the back of my mind. I didn’t watch much television. When I did, I felt like I’d just wasted a chunk of my life. I preferred doing things, being places. Living. When I did want to watch a television—usually a game, which was the only real reality television there was—I just came to Longboard’s. But I couldn’t bring a foster child to Longboard’s. Not with any regularity, anyway. So I was starting to wonder how Longboard Kelly’s would fit into this new chapter, or whether it was about to become a cherished memory.

  I shivered on my stool, and Danielle put her hand on my arm. “Goose walk over your grave?”

  I raised my eyebrows but said nothing.

  “So, how’s this new detective?” she asked.

  “Faust? She seems smart.”

  “Pretty?”

  “Some might say that.”

  Danielle smiled out of the side of her mouth. There was no competing with that.

  “It’s a hell of a name to go through life with,” said Ron.

  “Faust?” asked Danielle.

  “Not sure cops really get the story,” I said.

  “The Faustian bargain,” said Danielle. “Isn’t it about selling your soul to the devil?”

  I swirled the beer in my glass. “Technically, Faust made the bargain with Mephistopheles, but he was effectively the devil’s bagman.”

  “How do you know that?” Danielle asked.

  “I went to college.”

  “See,” said Ron. “He can study when he wants to.”

  Danielle laughed. “It’s the subject matter that worries me. You haven’t made any such bargains, have you?”

  “If I had, I’d really want to have thrown a pitch in the majors.”

  “Would that have been worth your soul?”

  “Not sure I have one of those, but even if I did, an eternity in hell can’t be all that different from summer in Florida.”

  Muriel appeared behind the bar. “No Longboard Kelly’s in hell.” She crossed her arms. No cold beer, either.”

  “I take it all back.”

  Muriel poured two more beers and made another vodka tonic. I asked her if I could put the television on for the swimming coverage. She threw me the remote.

  “Is there a sport you won’t watch?” asked Muriel.

  “Haven’t found one yet.”

  “Synchronized swimming?” asked Danielle.

  “Not a sport.”

  “Excuse me? How is that not a sport? It’s in the Olympics.”

  “You don’t get points for style in sports. I’m not saying it’s not athletic, and I’m not saying they don’t work hard, or that what they do isn’t impressive. I couldn’t do it, although I can’t do differential calculus, either. But if you get points for style, it ain’t a sport.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So, how can you say it’s not a sport?”

  “I don’t need to define what something isn’t in order to define what it is. I don’t know the chemical composition of beer, but I sure as hell know it’s not H2O. I know water when I see it.”

  “I don’t agree with that,” said Danielle.

  “Me, either,” said Muriel.

  “Fine with me,” I said. “But I will note that neither of you watch sports, period.”

  I used the remote to flick the channel over to the swimming trials and turned the sound up, as I didn’t see anyone sitting in the indoor bar. People only took it off mute at Longboard’s during a hurricane. But if there was a sudden influx, they were going to have to live with sound.

  Two men wearing headphones sat high in the stands, craning back in their seats to look at a camera that put the pool in the distance behind them. They were talking about the upcoming races. One of the men seemed measured and precise in his comments. He seemed able to pull times and stats from the ether like a young Bob Costas or Mike Tirico, and I wondered if someone sitting in front of a computer was feeding that information into his ear.

  The second guy was everything the first guy wasn’t. His hair was wild, and although he had squeezed into a blazer and shirt, the seams were barely holding in the shoulders. He was animated and expressive and used the word rapid so often it began to lose its meaning. His delivery was unpolished and raw—clearly the color commentary guy. The on-screen graphics said his name was Max Partensi, which didn’t quite match any face in my memory bank, so I was having trouble placing him. But the graphics then added that he was a three-time Olympian, so I figured him for a swimmer.

  They ran through the night’s races—finals and semis. Greg’s would be a semifinal in the 200 freestyle. The final would be the following night. As she had that morning, Missy Callahan would swim twice, one final and one semi.

  We ordered another round and watched the races. They were all closer than the day’s heats had been, which made sense given the step up in class. Greg Baxter won his semifinal by half a body length. Missy Callahan won both of hers. The team was selecting itself.

  The camera showed Coach Almonde in the stands, still in her Stanford polo, cheering.

  “She was a great swimmer,” said Ron.

  “You remember her?” I asked.

  “Yes. London and Rio. Won some medals. Gold, If I remember right.”

  “She was at Rio?”

  “Yep.”

  The arena was packed for the evening session, and the roar when each race neared the finish was thunderous. Max Partensi was making the most of that noise, losing his voice on races where the winner was a body length in front. The close ones almost sent him to the hospital.

  Each of the winners did the obligatory post-race interview. Danielle leaned toward the television as if there was something wrong with her eyes.

  “Is that Beccy Williams?” she asked.

  “Yep.”

  “Your old flame?”

  “Yep.”

  “You didn’t mention she was there.”

  “Didn’t seem important. There were lots of people there. One of them even died.”

  “How is Beccy?”

  “Older.”

  “She still looks good.”

  I paused. That comment felt like a trap. “She’s in television. They have to work hard at that stuff.”

  “But she doesn’t look older.”

  “I don’t mean she looks older. I mean she seemed older. Maybe wiser is a better word. She seems more aware of her place in the world.”

  “She still flirty?”

  “This is Beccy we’re talking about.”

  Danielle’s lips remained tight as we watched Beccy interview Missy Callahan. She was sticking to the script, as Coach Collis had said. She was playing to the audience, who wanted to watch winners, not dwell on the losers. I wondered how long it would take for Forrest Simpson to be forgotten.

  It wouldn’t be soon. He still had a job to do, and that was to tweak the heartstrings, to make us all feel greater empathy for the athletes who remained. It seemed we, the regular people, needed reminding that these automatons who swam up and down the pool for hours on end were, in fact, humans.

  The network hit the sympathy note with a memorial piece on Forrest. I should have been happy that they were remembering him. I hoped his family felt that way about it. I found the whole episode cynical. There were lots of slow-motion shots. Forrest finishing races, Forrest in the zone before a race. Forrest in the company of his teammates. Greg Baxter, Missy Callahan. Those who remained and carried his flame. Or some such nonsense.

  The swelling violins made me sad. Sad for a man who was barely out of boyhood and was now lost to the world. Sad for whatever it was that had driven him to do what he did.

  At the end, the crowd cheered, and the broadcast cut to Beccy Williams, who was standing with Missy Callahan again. She asked Missy about Forrest. They were teammates on the national team and at Stanford. Missy spoke eloquently about his contribution to the team and how his spirit would live on. Beccy surprised me by asking about the pressure they were under, about mental health as an issue in their sport.