Die Like an Eagle Read online

  Just then, Michael and the boys came back, and I was plunged into the noisy chaos of making sure all three small Eagles were properly belted in and that their baseball bags were in the back and appeared to contain all the hats, gloves, batting gloves, balls, sunglasses, cleats, and other equipment they’d arrived with. Michael showed up with a small armload of similar items that had been left behind in our dugout.

  “We should be able to get all this back to the owners at the picnic,” he said.

  I glanced back at the field. I didn’t see the woman who’d been eavesdropping. Biff’s players were lined up along the first baseline, and he was walking slowly along in front of them with his hands clasped behind his back and a scowl on his face.

  Michael followed my line of sight.

  “The general inspecting his troops,” he said, sotto voce.

  “More like the warden putting the fear of God into the new prisoners,” I said. “Josh and Jamie are never playing on any team he coaches.”

  “Agreed,” Michael said, as we climbed into the Twinmobile. “Party time, guys!”

  The small Eagles cheered excitedly as we lurched out of the ramshackle parking lot and headed for home.

  Chapter 3

  I wouldn’t have asked Mother to organize a party on such short notice if I hadn’t been pretty certain she could do it. But when I arrived home and saw the scale of what she’d pulled together, I was impressed. And more than a little suspicious that she’d been planning all along to surprise us with a party.

  Someone had strung up a large GO EAGLES! banner on the front porch, and an even larger EAGLES RULE! banner draped the side of the barn. Our entire herd of picnic tables had been deployed in the backyard and covered with plastic tablecloths in black and red—the Eagles’ uniform colors. The tables were already half-covered with food, and people were still arriving bearing plates or bowls of food and cans or bottles of beverages. Someone was cooking barbecue somewhere—I couldn’t see the grill, but the tangy smell of the sauce filled the yard. And everywhere cheerful people were introducing themselves, as Team Eagle met the family Hollingsworth.

  I realized that since I was, at least technically, the hostess, I should probably pitch in to help with some of the preparations. And as Team Mom I should make an effort to get to know all of the family members. And this might be one of my best chances to gather more information on the looming menace of Biff—some of the families had older children who’d played local baseball, so they probably had stories and insights to share.

  I could do all of that. But I couldn’t do it all at once. And I wasn’t going to do any of it at the moment. I was going to find a place where I could keep an eye on things while doing the yoga breathing exercises my cousin Rose Noire was always urging me to use when something stressed me. Just thinking about Biff stressed me. And in case the breathing wasn’t enough, I snagged a glass of white wine from one of the picnic tables and my jaw dropped at the selection of food. Platters of cold cuts and cheeses, several different kinds of bread, freshly grilled hot dogs, hamburgers and brats, tossed salads, pasta salads, congealed salads, potato salad, cole slaw, crudités and dip, chili, roasted ears of corn, green bean casseroles, cakes, pies, cookies, bowls of fresh cut fruit—where had all this food come from in such a hurry?

  More and more people poured into the yard—how many relatives had Mother invited? Because most of these had to be relatives; there were only twelve kids on the team.

  Chill, I reminded myself. I perched on the back steps, sipping and breathing.

  “Mrs. Waterston? Mrs. Waterston?”

  I tried to remember the name of the small, blond, freckle-faced Eagle who was dancing from foot to foot in front of me. Luckily I already knew four of the herd—Adam Burke, Mason, and my two. Also luckily, our crew was fairly ethnically diverse—I was pretty sure this kid wasn’t a Wong, a Takahashi, or a Patel. And he wasn’t Ben, the second black kid on the team, after Adam. I’d already made a note to ask Ben’s parents how to pronounce Nzeogwu, so I could prepare a cheat sheet for announcers at the games. And I could recognize Chase by the black eye he’d acquired during practice. So by process of elimination, this was either Zack Thornton, Manuel Espinoza, or Tommy Davis. He didn’t resemble Chuck Davis or Luis Espinoza—

  “What do you need—Zack, right?” I asked aloud.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “May I use your bathroom?”

  “Of course,” I said. “Whenever you need to. Go in the back door; it’s the door on the right-hand wall.”

  I jerked my thumb over my shoulder at the back door and smiled with satisfaction as he scampered past me, and I could clearly see THORNTON emblazoned across his back. Odds were within a few weeks I’d know Zack’s cute, pug-nosed face as well as any of the boys’ friends. And I’d have strong opinions about whether he was a friend I wanted to encourage, and I’d probably know enough about his parents to either rejoice that I’d made new friends or hope we didn’t run into each other after baseball season was over. But for now I focused on fixing his face in my mind. Zack.

  “Meg!” Grandfather barked, startling me out of my reverie about the joys of the rest of the baseball season. “You need to do something.”

  “About what?” I asked.

  “Your grandmother!”

  “What’s she doing?”

  “Making a spectacle of herself!” He snorted as if in disgust and clomped off.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked. “Stealing the limelight from you?”

  But he was already too far away to hear me—probably a good thing for continued family harmony. And it occurred to me that perhaps I should see what my grandmother Cordelia was up to. After all, this wasn’t just any party—at least half the people here were relatives, many of them eccentric if not downright peculiar. If Cordelia was managing to distinguish herself in this company, maybe I should be worried. Or at least forewarned.

  The party was in full swing. My brother, Rob, had hitched Groucho to the llama cart and was giving people rides around the llama pen. A croquet game was in progress in the backyard—presumably an Xtreme Croquet game, since the playing field was dotted with lawn chairs, picnic tables, and free-range Welsummer chickens, and the players were using some of my wrought-iron flamingo lawn ornaments instead of mallets. But most of the crowd was gathered along the fence that separated our yard from my parents’ cow pasture, where Dad and Michael had set up the baseball diamond—rough, but serviceable, and absolutely accurate to the Summerball league standards. At least half of them were wearing either red-and-black Caerphilly Eagles t-shirts or regular clothing in the team colors.

  I didn’t see Cordelia in the sea of faces lined up along the fence. But I heard her voice.

  “Okay, point to your target! Eagle arm! That’s it!”

  Cordelia, looking quite at home in her Eagles t-shirt, was standing in the pasture with four small Eagles lined up facing her. All four boys were pointing with their baseball-gloved left hands toward the side of the cowshed, where someone had affixed six or seven paper archery targets. The players had their right arms drawn back and crooked into a J-shape. Cordelia was walking down the line, inspecting their form, making small corrections, and then nodding approval.

  “Now let’s throw.” She took a position beside the boys, and adopted the same pose. “Pick a target on the shed wall. Ready! Aim! Throw!”

  Five baseballs took flight across the pasture toward the cowshed. Four of the balls fell short of the targets, but not by nearly as much as I’d have expected from seeing the same four boys throw at practice. And all four were on a straight line to the target.

  Cordelia’s ball hit the bull’s-eye with a loud thud.

  The dozen or so people lined up along the fence behind the throwers cheered and waved little black-and-red pennants. I wasn’t sure if they were responding to the boys’ throws or my grandmother’s. Maybe both.

  “How’d the boys’ grandmother learn to play baseball so well?” one of the fathers asked me.
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  “Great-grandmother, actually,” I said. “And I plan on asking her that myself after the picnic.”

  He laughed, obviously under the impression I was joking. I was serious—since we’d only found my long-lost grandmother a few years ago, I really didn’t know how she had acquired her baseball skills. We were all still getting to know one another. I hadn’t even figured out what to call her. Grandmother? Grandma? Granny? None of the usual names seemed to fit, so I thought of her as Cordelia and mostly didn’t call her anything. Occasionally I referred to her aloud as Cordelia, and I had the sneaking suspicion she knew this and didn’t really mind.

  In another part of the pasture, several of the fathers were hitting fly balls to half a dozen energetic little Eagles, including Josh and Jamie. And at home plate, batting practice was in session. Michael was tossing the ball—it was one of his outstanding skills as a baseball coach, the ability to toss the ball with astonishing accuracy at just the right speed for relatively inexperienced hitters. Since we were currently playing at the “coach pitch” level, in which the batters faced not balls thrown by pitchers their own age but the familiar gentle tosses made by one of their coaches, Michael’s skill augured well for the team’s success. One of the fathers was behind the plate—possibly Vince Wong, although it was hard to tell since his face was hidden behind a catcher’s mask. In between, Adam Burke was at the plate, and beside him a whippet-thin blond woman in khaki shorts and a Caerphilly College t-shirt was making corrections to his grip and his stance.

  “Tory’s amazing, isn’t she?” I turned to see that Chuck Davis had come up to lean on the pasture fence beside me and was beaming at the batting practice with visible pride.

  “Your wife?” I guessed.

  He nodded.

  “She seems to know a lot about baseball.” Not that I was an expert myself—except maybe when it came to the rule books, thanks to all my recent insomnia. But I could see that Michael and the father in catcher’s gear weren’t objecting to what she was showing the kid—if anything, they were nodding in approval.

  “Yeah, she’s definitely where Tommy gets his athletic ability,” Chuck said. “Me, I have two left feet and more than the usual number of thumbs, but Tory’s a whiz at any sport she plays. Baseball’s always been her favorite, though. I think if this country had a really competitive, organized professional women’s baseball league, she’d have tried out in a heartbeat, and I bet she’d have made it.”

  “So she went into coaching instead?” I asked. The more I watched Tory work with Adam, the better his swing got—clearly she had a gift for teaching the sport.

  “No, she went into nuclear physics instead,” he said. “Got her doctorate from Cal Tech. She teaches at Caerphilly College now. We just moved to town in the fall, when she got the post. I can’t tell you how excited she was to see Tommy starting to play ball.”

  “Feel free to tell me to mind my own business, but was there a reason she didn’t volunteer to coach Summerball? Workload at the college, for example? I mean, you’re doing a great job, but—”

  “No, I’m doing a wretched job,” Chuck said. “Anything the boys have learned at practice, it’s mostly because of Michael, and maybe just a little because Tory teaches me all kinds of drills to pass on to the boys. And the drills help, too, as long as Michael’s there to help me run them. It should have been Tory, but the guy who runs the league never even responded to her application. So when they sent out the second or third call for coaches, I applied, and got accepted within an hour. Kind of discouraging, really. And we figured, okay, I’d be the coach in name and she’d do the actual work, but we quickly figured out that was a no go. Not if we didn’t want to get kicked out of the league. It’s frustrating. I mean, coming from Northern California we knew there would be trade-offs, moving to a small southern town, although we were hoping that since it was a college town—not that Caerphilly isn’t a lovely place—”

  “And we’re not all Neanderthals,” I said. “Just a few of us—including, unfortunately, the jerk who’s running the local Summerball league at the moment.”

  “At the moment?” Chuck echoed. “Does that mean there’s some hope he won’t be running it indefinitely?”

  “I have no idea,” I said. “I only figured out today what a menace Biff Brown is, so I haven’t yet had a chance to figure out what we can do about him. But I’m putting it on my to-do list.”

  I pulled out my notebook, flipped it open to the proper section, and wrote “find way to deal with Biff Brown” as a new task. I frowned slightly, because it wasn’t really a very satisfactory task.

  “Is that the famous notebook-that-tells-you-when-to-breathe?” Chuck said. “I’ve heard about that from Michael. I feel better already, just knowing Biff’s in your sights.”

  “Coach Chuck! Coach Chuck!” Two of the Eagles were running toward us. “It’s a Biff alert!”

  I glanced out at the field. Suddenly, instead of a glove and a baseball, Cordelia was holding a bow and arrow, and the four players were gathered around her observing a demonstration of how to nock the arrow into the bowstring. Someone had led Harpo, another of the llamas, out to home plate and Michael, Tory, Adam, and Vince were stowing the last of the baseball equipment into the two hampers slung across the llama’s back. Instead of shagging fly balls, the fielders were running about the outfield playing a noisy game of tag, while the three fathers who’d been hitting the flies were standing together in a clump. From the way they were pointing one would assume they were holding an animated discussion about several of Dad’s Dutch Belted cows, who were hanging their heads over the fence from the next pasture as if they enjoyed watching our human antics while chewing their cuds. If you looked closely, you could see the small heap of baseball gloves by the fathers’ feet, but no doubt Harpo would be making a visit there in a minute.

  “Good job, boys,” Chuck said. “We shouldn’t have to do this,” he added, turning to me. “But until you succeed in ousting Biff, no sense giving him anything to use against us. We want to spend our time playing baseball, not fighting with the league.”

  Until I succeed in ousting Biff. No pressure. And how had “dealing with Biff” escalated into ousting him? Though it could come to that.

  “Well, this could be useful,” I said. “Biff stopping by, that is. As it happens, I’ve been trying to talk to him for a while.”

  “Talk to him about what?” Chuck suddenly looked very, very anxious. “You’re not going to do anything rash, are you? I mean—”

  “Nothing about baseball,” I said. “Don’t worry.”

  I headed back toward the house, scanning the crowd for Biff.

  He wasn’t among the group doing Tai Chi under my cousin Rose Noire’s direction. He hadn’t snatched a wrought-iron flamingo to join the croquet players. He wasn’t in the crowd gathered around my grandfather, who was showing off a hawk from the raptor rehabilitation program at his zoo. Or maybe the hawk came from the Willner Wildife Refuge—Caroline Willner, owner of the refuge and Grandfather’s frequent ally in animal welfare missions, was beaming proudly as people inspected the hawk, but since she was as short and round as Grandfather was tall and gangly, I hadn’t initially spotted her. And it was an unusual-looking hawk—I was tempted to go over to take a closer look, but watching the hawk wasn’t getting me any closer to locating Biff. Remembering his pudgy shape, I headed for the picnic tables.

  Sure enough, there he was, eyeing the dessert table. But not eating. He appeared to be yelling at two ladies who were standing behind the table. One was my monumentally shy cousin Priscilla, and the other was an elderly Indian lady in a pink-and-purple sari. Priscilla looked ready to faint. From the expression on the Indian lady’s face, I suspected that while she might or might not understand what Biff was saying, she definitely didn’t like his tone.

  I looked around to see if the nondescript woman I’d seen at the ball field was with him. She wasn’t, but I’d be willing to bet anything she’d told him about our party.
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  I headed his way. Mother beat me to it.

  “I beg your pardon,” she was saying as I reached her side. “Please stop bellowing at my volunteer helpers. If you have some problem with the refreshments, please bring it to my attention.”

  “Where’s the baseball?” Biff shouted. “I know you’re doing it, so where the hell is it?”

  “Language, please!” Mother snapped. “There are impressionable children around, to say nothing of adults who prefer not to hear such language.” She turned to me. “Meg, dear, this … person seems to think you’re playing baseball here. Can you enlighten him?”

  “Sorry to disappoint you, Mr. Brown,” I said. “As far as I know, no one’s playing baseball at the moment.” I was pretty sure this was the truth, thanks to the Biff alert. “There was some talk of having a pickup game later,” I went on. “But at this point I doubt if they’ll get that organized before it’s too dark to play. Why don’t you let the ladies fix you a nice plate to take with you when you leave?”

  “You can’t fool me,” Biff said. “Your team’s having a practice. Against the rules.”

  “No, we’re not having a practice,” I said. “Although even if we were, what’s your problem? We’d be improving the kids’ baseball skills and promoting greater fitness, which last time I looked were among the Summerball organization’s official goals for the league.”

  “You can’t have a practice outside your official assigned practice times,” Biff said.

  “Show me the rule,” I said. “It’s not in the official Summerball rule book, and you know it. And you have no right to come barging in here, uninvited, and try to tell any of us what we can do on our own time and our own property.”

  “You’re going to regret this,” Biff said.

  No, I thought, you’re the one who’s going to regret it. But before I could say anything, Mother spoke up.

  “Meg, dear, if Mr. Brown wasn’t invited, perhaps we should ask one of your cousins to help him find his way back to his car.”