Coach had passed out from the pain. A waterfall of powdery grain was spilling onto his pants from the split flour sack. Geoff and Estrella worked together to keep him from losing more blood. Geoff was on the phone with paramedics outside, applying their guidance to the wounded feet.
Leslie leaned heavily on Ed’s muscled arm. She pored over a notebook, examining complicated equations. The exercise had a calming effect on her. Ed watched Jack sit on the overturned bucket and relax against the cinder-block wall. The detective held his gun across his knees.
Ed wondered if Jack had more than one backup gun, and how they might be wrestled away from a veteran who outweighed him by maybe thirty pounds.
Ed glanced at his watch. It was almost eight. Four and a half hours to go. Forever. Leslie clicked her mechanical pencil and scribbled her way through the pages. Periodically she stopped to flip back through the sheets. Her brow furrowed.
Heat from the brick oven on the other side of the kitchen continued to warm the cold storeroom.
Geoff hung up the phone. “You need to let this man out,” he said to Jack.
“Why? You’re doing a fine job.”
“He needs help. I’m no doctor.”
“Who needs a doctor when we have a pastor? Those aren’t grave wounds.”
Ed tried to focus on Leslie’s math. He’d scraped his way through geometry, trig, and the rest. He’d half believed, while dating Miralee, that the reason Mrs. Mansfield gave him the cold shoulder was because he appeared so unintelligent in this area. The other half, he supposed, had something to do with his faith.
He elbowed her gently, eyes on her paper. “What did you mean when you said this was your fault?”
“Mrs. Mansfield wanted me to enter a state competition up at the university.”
“College stuff?”
“Yes. High-level math. Calculus. Physics. Quantum theory. She was going to be my mentor. Thought I had what it would take to really wow people, maybe even win.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me.”
“Thanks.” Leslie blushed. Her pencil bobbed as she continued to write. “It would have given Mazy some national attention. Win some money for me and for the school, for the math department. They could use it, you know, with all the cutbacks.”
“So what’s that got to do with this mess we’re in?”
“I decided not to enter. I woke up one morning, and it was just too much pressure. I’d do it for her—but for the money? For the whole school? The whole town? I’m supposed to be thinking about prom. Cutting class. Cow-tipping.”
Ed laughed aloud. “You’d never.”
Leslie frowned at him. “Maybe I want to do that stuff. Sometimes it blows, being the responsible one all the time. People have these expectations.”
“But responsible people are influential people. The ones who make great things happen.”
“So the opposite has to be true also. Our actions can be . . . terrible. Mrs. Mansfield was counting on me, and I . . . and I . . . went cow-tipping.” She huffed. “In a sense.”
“I still don’t get it.”
Leslie’s sigh was thick. “I didn’t even have the decency to tell her to her face. I wrote her a note. The next time I saw her . . . you should have seen her face. I thought she was going to cry. Which made me want to cry.”
Ed hoped she’d connect the dots soon.
“Do you think she killed herself?” Leslie whispered.
“Over that?”
She recoiled as if he’d slapped her.
“You’re not that powerful, Leslie. Sure, she was probably disappointed. But do you think you could single-handedly drive her to jump off a cliff?”
Jack’s attention swiveled in their direction.
Estrella applied a fresh cloth to Coach’s foot and tied it firmly in place with the necktie he had taken off earlier. Geoff sat on the ground next to Coach and was talking to him in low tones. He must have come around.
Jack returned his attention to Leslie. “As much as I hate to say it, I have to agree with your friend on this one. Children don’t get to set the course of their authority figures’ lives. That’s not how God ordained it.”
“But she was so sad.”
“If she was sad, it was only because she hasn’t found the courage to accept the one true faith that can make her happy. In due time. I have faith.”
“Blind faith,” murmured Coach. “You can’t see what’s in front of your own face, Jack. We’re trying to help.”
“Fine. What did she tell you about this little girl’s power over her? Put the child out of her misery, please.”
Coach didn’t answer right away.
Jack said, “Maybe you didn’t know Julie as well as you claim.”
Coach’s voice lacked strength. “She said some days made her question whether being a good teacher made any impact on the world at all. It wasn’t about you, Leslie. We all feel that way from time to time.”
Leslie sniffed and looked slightly relieved. Her pencil was flitting across the paper again.
“Your wife’s a great teacher,” Coach murmured.
“Of course she is. If she put as much effort into her spiritual life as she puts into her vocation she’d be—”
“—all but a saint,” Coach provided. “She told me you say that a lot.”
“Thees woman has run out on you,” Estrella dared. “With some man who ees not so backhanded.”
“No, no,” Coach said. “She wasn’t seeing anyone on the side. I asked her, and she laughed at that.”
“I have another idea,” Leslie said, lifting her pencil off the paper to get Jack’s attention. “Let’s say someone stole the bike—”
“We’ve been over all that,” Jack said.
“But you haven’t solved this problem about not being able to find . . . evidence of the rider. What if there was no rider?”
Jack leaned forward over his knees.
“I’ve been working on this problem for a few days, and it’s not ironclad because the math is just way too complex, but something about the whole scenario is really bugging me.” She turned to a fresh piece of paper and made a quick sketch of an intersection, a car entering it, and a scooter crossing it. “We think the bike was crossing on Sunflower, and Mrs. Bofinger T-boned it. Then everyone starts looking for Mrs. Mansfield out here.” Leslie drew little arrows fanning out in the same direction the car was headed.
“Like an arrow shot from a bow,” Ed said.
“Sort of. She would have sort of bounced off your mom’s car, but she’s not a rubber ball. She couldn’t have been thrown far if your mom was only doing thirty.”
“She wasn’t going any faster, I swear.”
Jack said, “Look, the child does physics too. Does your math take into account how much time this yahoo had to drag her body away?” He pointed at Geoff.
Leslie’s eyes widened. “Is that possible? I heard the police didn’t find any blood anywhere other than around the car.”
“How did you hear that?”
Leslie opened her mouth, then clamped it shut again.
Jack said, “It’s true, though.”
“That eliminates a few options, then.” She continued to write.
“Now she’s an accident-reconstruction specialist. Amazing.”
“Are you interested in what she has to say or not?” Ed asked.
“Well, we lost ours in budget cuts last year.”
Leslie ignored them. “We’ve been assuming that Mrs. Bofinger and Mrs. Mansfield were both in motion.” Leslie drew a line up Main Street and another coming in from Sunflower until they met in the middle. “But what if the scooter wasn’t moving?”
“Why would she stop in the middle of the street?” Ed asked.
“I don’t know why, I’m just saying what if ?”
“You tell us.”
“Here’s what happens to the body: there’s no mechanism to impart any velocity to it, but being seated on the bike puts her center of gravity pretty high off the ground. Have you ever seen a car hit a bike?”
Leslie didn’t wait for answers.
“A ton of things can happen, depending on the velocities, the masses, angles, centers of gravity, and so on, but usually the rider and his ride will be separated. If the body has a high center of gravity but no oppositional velocity, it’s going to slide up onto the hood of the car. And if the car doesn’t slow down—”
“Mom didn’t hit the brakes until after the collision.”
“—the car will pass right under the body, which will tumble over the car and land in almost the same place from which it was launched.”
“Behind the car,” Ed said.
“Yes.”
Jack said, “Well, that didn’t happen.”
“Exactly,” Leslie said. “So that’s problem number one.”
Ed could think of a million more.
“Hear me out. The other problem is what happened to the bike. If Mrs. Mansfield is driving in from Sunflower—”
“Just tell me where else my wife could have landed,” Jack said.
Leslie held up her pencil. Wait. “If she’s driving perpendicular to the car and the side of the bike is facing the car when it hits, the energy is distributed across the scooter, making it more likely to bounce off the car, or come apart.”
She looked at everyone as if this should make sense to them. Ed raised his eyebrows and shook his head.
Jack said, “The bike collapsed under the front fender. Completely crushed—who is leaking this stuff to you?”
“I told her that part,” Ed said.
Estrella stepped in. “You think ees a head-on collision,” she said.
Leslie nodded.
Jack snatched the notebook out of Leslie’s fingers, looked at it, then handed it back to her. He jiggled the gun at his side, frowning.
“Why would she be riding on the wrong side of the street?”
“She’s trying to say that no one was riding it,” Ed said.
Leslie brightened. “Yes. It was just parked there.”
“This makes less and less sense,” Geoff said.
Estrella offered to Jack, “Ees best explanation yet for why you cannot find Julie.”
“Why?” Jack said, his volume rising a notch. “Why would she park it in the middle of the street?”
No one had any theories.
“There ees nothing in physics to explain human nature,” Estrella said.
“But her blood was everywhere!” Jack barked.
“Which takes me back to my original point,” Leslie said. “Let’s say someone stole the bike. Anyone could have parked it there. Maybe someone killed her and then—”
“Why go to the trouble?” Ed said loudly to prevent her from saying anything more. His mental alarms were going off. “What’s the point of hurting her and then setting up a complicated scene like that?”
A light had gone on in Jack’s eyes that looked like the yellow of a predator about to pounce. “I like this girl’s thinking.” He glanced at Leslie. “I have lots of reasons now to hope Audrey gets back here before you’re in line to die. Save you as a witness for the prosecution. How many people would it take to set this up, if my wife was murdered before the accident?” His gaze traveled between Ed and Geoff. “How many to subdue her, kill her, steal the scooter, drain her blood—”
“You’re nuts!” The pitch of Ed’s voice became a screech. “Listen to you! Do you seriously think we’d do that? Oh my gosh. If we really did have it out for her, I promise you we wouldn’t be dumb enough to run her over with our own car!”
Ed was vaguely aware that he sounded like a lunatic and looked like one too as he lunged at Jack.
“Ed! Ed!” The weight of his father’s body held him back.
“He’s going to level us with lies.” Ed’s breaths came hard.
Geoff’s hands were firm on Ed’s shoulders, forcing his son to focus. “No one’s going to believe anything this man says after today.”
“Evidence talks louder than the person who delivers it,” Jack said.
“I’m more interested in the truth,” Geoff responded.
“You don’t think they’re same? That’s interesting.”
Ed threw his hands in the air and broke away from his dad, invading Jack’s personal space. “Aren’t you the least bit worried about Julie?” he yelled.
“Of course I am. Why on earth do you think I’m here?”