Page 20 of Final Inning

Her mom had done the best she could to make sure Valeria and her three brothers had what they needed. That cop bitch hadn’t had the right to say she hadn’t. She’d even gotten social services involved once, but Uncle Ted had fixed things for her mom back then, too.

Uncle Ted always fixed things when Valeria’s family needed it. He and her mom had been close for like thirty years or something. Probably been sleeping together for that long, too. He wasn’t her dad, though.

That would be too gross.

Hagan was in the grocery store where Valeria worked now. It was the only place she’d been able to get a job after high school. Valeria had had two offers to play softball, but they had been for the local junior colleges. Valeria could have played Division 1—she wasn’t going to waste her time on JUCO, when she should have played for the best of the best. Oklahoma or Texas or Tennessee. The top. She had been good enough too. Everyone knew that.

She just hadn’t gotten the grades to go D1 because she hadn’t cared about school that much—not with the teachers all hating her the way they did. It was really their fault she hadn’t made it to a major college on a scholarship or anything. They’d been against her since kindergarten.

But Valeria was doing the best she could now.

Hagan was supposed to be that good, too. Hagan had played college ball, because the high school had given Hagan fake grades and everything. Hagan had just done JUCO, though. She hadn’t been able to cut it or something. Hagan was too small to play college softball; she shouldn’t have even tried.

But she was looking at Valeria now. Like she knew Valeria knew she was watching. Valeria sent her a smile and turned away.

She was so sick of dealing with people like Hagan every day.

Valeria watched the guy bagging the groceries for a moment. He was new and a few years younger than she was. He’d probably gone to Helery Springs, though. Most people in the county did. Only people in Buckbert had been stuck going to a ridiculous school like she had. She had hated Buckbert Community Schools.

And they had never liked her.

There were a lot of people in Buckbert who didn’t like her, and never had. They’d all been jealous. Because she was so good at what she did. That’s what her mother had always told her—and it made sense. Valeria had been the star of the Buckbert High School softball team, from the time she’d first stepped onto that rinky little field behind the school. She’d played basketball and run track, too. But she’d really loved softball the most.

It hadn’t even been a real field. The school had held its games at the complex. Where there were four fields that had actual dirt and weren’t overgrown with grass like the practice field behind Buckbert Community School.

She shuddered, just remembering those days. Remembering the principal of the school and his bitch wife. That woman had always been on Valeria’s case. All the time. That woman’s older sister had been the assistant coach of the team. Hagan had even lived with that coach for a little while when Hagan’s dad had kicked her out or something.

It hadn’t been easy. But Valeria had stuck it out.

Valeria was pretty and smart and athletic, but the principal’s wife had really hated her. It hadn’t been fair at all.

If she stayed where she was, and didn’t marry someone rich or anything, she would probably own this grocery store someday. And the one in Helery Springs, too.

Why not? People would always have to eat, right? That was what Luke had said, too.

It would make enough money to take care of her for the rest of her life. She’d talked about it with Ted. He agreed it was a good plan.

She just rang up Hagan’s stupid hot meal from the deli and pretended they didn’t both know that the only reason Hagan was in there at all was to watch Valeria. To spy on her. To pretend Hagan really was a cop or something.

Hagan knew her secrets. Valeria suspected she always had.

Chapter 13

Okay. It was a brand new day now.

Goal one for the day: Not shove a lab tech into a mass spectrometer.

Goal two for the day: Get the beautiful fearless leaders everything she could find on a thirty-year-old man named Julian Adams, son of Kevin Adams. Kevin Adams—who had apparently been bludgeoned and killed on the same ball field as Harper Wycoff.

Julian, who would have been nineteen at the time of his father’s death, was the last known person to have spoken with Harper Wycoff.

Kevin Adams. Harper Wycoff’s softball coach. Interesting connection.

For a town with 396 residents—give or take one or two—to have two murders, even over ten years apart—in the same location, of people that knew each other, well wasn’t that just a little bit entirely too coincidental?

Dani was more an “everything was connected” theorist on the world, rather than a “random coincidences suck” type. Four hundred people in town and two dead in the same spot…hmmm. Something to think about.

She could understand why Deputy Lindhour thought the cases were connected.