Wish You Were Gone(81)

“It’s no problem. Really.” Lizzie didn’t look up.

She didn’t seem entirely herself, either. She couldn’t know, could she? What Willow and James had been doing?

“So, did you ever call that PI?” Lizzie asked, eyes still on the clipboard.

“Oh, that. No,” Emma said. “Actually, I think you were right. I think I’m just going to drop it.”

“Really?” Lizzie was surprised. “You were so adamant.”

“I know, but…”

But I already know who it was. I don’t have to look anymore.

“I’ve given it a lot of thought and I don’t need to do this to myself. James made life miserable enough while he was here. Now that he’s gone, I don’t have to be miserable anymore unless I choose to be.”

Lizzie’s face brightened behind her smattering of freckles. “Emma, I’m so proud of you. That’s a really healthy choice.”

God, this was awful. “Thank you.”

To give herself an excuse to look away, Emma reached her arms to the sky and stretched. Her back cracked in three places. This project she’d taken on was far more labor intensive than she ever would have been able to predict. She’d known James had a lot of crap in this basement, but she definitely hadn’t realized the extent of it. There were dozens of drawers and every one they opened had revealed a new array of treasures, from championship pins to mini pennants to bobblehead dolls to commemorative plates. There was even a chunk of field grass from the old Yankee Stadium vacuum-sealed inside a Plexiglas cube. Yes, her husband had purchased dirt and hidden it away for safekeeping.

The good stuff—the rare gems and conversation pieces—had been displayed in glass cases with prime lighting, but the random crap was abundant, and concealed behind solid oak doors. The man had been a stealth hoarder.

“Well, I think this is a good time to take a break,” Lizzie said. “We got all the baseball, tennis, hockey, and golf items cataloged.”

She dropped her checklist and pushed herself into a fairly impressive downward-facing dog. Her back cracked, too, and she was younger than Emma, so the sound of it made Emma feel slightly better.

Emma pushed herself up off the floor and to her feet. Lizzie was right. They’d made a lot of progress. There were neat piles separated by sports. The larger piles were of things they were going to keep, and next to each was a smaller pile of things James had bequeathed to some organization or player. It really wasn’t much, but Emma still wasn’t sure which items Darnell and Charles and “the company” were going to lay claim to. She hoped it wouldn’t be anything Hunter coveted, because she didn’t want to get into a long, dragged-out fight over some random hockey stick or a signed mouth guard. (Disgusting.)

“So, what are we missing so far?” Lizzie asked Emma.

Her friend went into an upward-facing dog as Emma grabbed her list. “There are a couple of tennis balls, a golf glove, a few baseballs and pucks, but nothing James left to anyone yet. Except the Derek Jeter bat.”

Emma glanced at the case where the bat used to live. It had been James’s pride and joy—the centerpiece of his collection. A bat used in the 1998 World Series and signed by Yankees captain Derek Jeter. She could still remember the night James came home with it. His eyes had been so glazed she had assumed he was drunk, but for once he’d been quite sober—simply giddy over the fact that he’d managed to get Jeter to sign something in the midst of all the mayhem and the crush of press. The bat had to be worth thousands of dollars and James, the bastard, had left it to the Baseball Hall of Fame. That one was going to hurt for Hunter. If they could even find it.

“Where the hell could that have gone?” Emma mused.

“You should ask the kids,” Lizzie said, standing as well.

“They get pissed at me every time I so much as bring this up.” Emma sighed and looked around. “They see this as their father ripping their legacy out from under them.”

Lizzie scoffed, and it sounded oddly sarcastic to Emma.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing,” Lizzie replied, tucking a curl behind her ear.

No. Something was up, but Emma wasn’t about to ask. If she and Lizzie got into some deep conversation, who knew where it might lead? Standing there, right next to her friend, she felt separated from her by a yawning, dark chasm, and her heart broke a little. It was exactly what she’d been afraid of. She was going to lose Lizzie over this eventually. Somehow, some way. James had been dead for over a month, and he was still ruining her life.





LIZZIE


Willow wasn’t home when Lizzie got there after helping Emma pack up the last of the things in the basement. The door to her room was closed, but the light was on, and Lizzie went in, telling herself she was just going to flip the switch, conserve energy. She was surprised to find that the space was still relatively clean. Willow’s laptop was not on her desk, the cord that attached it to the monitor snaked across the desktop over a pile of playing cards, and there were a few balled-up socks on the floor, but that was about it.

It was the little plastic cases on the hockey pucks that had gotten her thinking. They seemed oddly familiar, and then she’d remembered—she’d found something similar in the kitchen garbage can about a month ago and never got around to asking Willow what it was.