Devil's Food Cake Murder (Hannah Swensen, #14)(43)

“What happened?” Hannah asked him.

“The first thing Coach Tellson had them do was gather firewood. They could go in groups or individually. He said later that he did it to see which boys worked best together and which boys preferred to go it alone. I asked him why, and he told me that it would help him make decisions about which boys to play in certain positions.”

“Okay,” Norman said, but he didn’t sound convinced. “What did he say about Matthew?”

“He said that Matthew went off alone, and so did Hugh. Hugh’s younger brother, Adam, stood there for a minute and then he went off alone, too. The same for Matthew’s cousin, Paul.”

“Paul was there?” Hannah was surprised. Grandma Knudson hadn’t mentioned that he’d played football.

“Paul was on the junior varsity team. I don’t think he got in more than a few minutes of playing time, but any boy who wore a uniform was there.”

“Tell them about the other boys,” Delores prompted.

“Except for Matthew, Hugh, Adam, and Paul, all the other boys paired up, or went in groups of three or four.”

“And that told the coach something about football?” Delores sounded as dubious as Hannah felt.

“That’s what Coach Telleson said. When the boys came back, he watched the amount of wood they brought, and made certain assumptions from that. He explained what these assumptions were at the time, but I don’t remember now. It probably didn’t make a lot of sense to me.”

“Did Matthew bring back much wood?” Hannah asked.

“He brought back more wood than anyone else, but he came back late.”

“There was a time limit?” Norman asked the question before Hannah could.

“Yes. They had to be back in fifteen minutes. Coach Telleson said the groups started coming in first after they’d been out for thirteen minutes. The paired boys were next, then Paul, and then Adam. Matthew arrived at the twenty-minute mark.”

“How about Hugh?” Hannah asked the obvious question.

“He didn’t come back at all. They found him a ways away, in a stand of birch with a broken leg.”

“Tell them what happened,” Delores urged.

“Hugh said he’d seen Matthew go down the same path, so he’d gone a different way to an area where he thought there’d be more firewood. When he saw that there wasn’t any, he went back to the path that Matthew had taken, hoping that Matthew had left some wood. A little ways down the path, he found the perfect log for the campfire. He headed straight for it and that’s when he fell in a deep hole that was hidden by fallen leaves and broke his leg in two places.”

Hannah was already a step ahead of Doc’s story. “And Hugh blamed Matthew?”

“That’s right. He thought Matthew had dug a deep hole, filled it with fallen leaves to camouflage it, and placed a perfect log just beyond it as bait. And that prompted a real rift in the team. Hugh’s best receiver pointed out that the hole had been there for a while since there were decaying leaves and mud at the bottom from the rain they’d had at the beginning of the week.”

“So Hugh apologized and all was well?”

“No. A couple of the boys had seen Matthew going down that path. They knew that part of Hugh’s story was true. And the hole had been filled to the top with leaves. That probably wouldn’t have happened naturally. Even if Matthew hadn’t dug the hole itself, he might have filled it with leaves and baited it with the log.”

“You said there was a rift,” Hannah pointed out. “Does that mean some of the boys believed that Matthew was innocent?”

“Yes. Coach Telleson did, for one. He told me that Matthew didn’t have it in him to be that mean. And some of the older members of the team agreed with him. The split was about fifty-fifty, but the accusation was almost forgotten when Matthew played brilliantly in the homecoming game and the Gulls beat the Browerville Tigers twenty-eight to three.”

“What do you think?” Delores asked him. “Did Matthew do it?”

“I could be wrong, but I don’t think so. I asked him point blank when he came to visit Hugh in the hospital after the game. Hugh wouldn’t see him, of course. He still believed Matthew had set him up so that he could have the quarterback spot. Matthew told me that he had nothing to do with it, that he’d seen the hole and avoided it and the log hadn’t been there. He insisted that someone must have come along after he’d left, filled the hole in with leaves, and baited it with the log.”

“Who do you think did it?” Delores asked, leaning toward Doc.

“It could have been anyone on the team. Coach Telleson said Hugh had decided he was the greatest thing since the first rhubarb pie, and he had an exaggerated notion of his importance to the team. He seemed to think that without him, they couldn’t win. There were quite a few other players who didn’t like his attitude, especially when he lorded it over them. It could have been any one of them.”

“Or several of them,” Norman suggested.

“True. Maybe one of those groups of three boys started talking about what fun it would be to see Hugh fall in a hole.”

“Perhaps it wasn’t even malicious,” Delores suggested. “They might not have thought it through at all. They just decided to set a trap for him and they never expected him to fall so hard that he would break his leg and be out for the whole season.”