The Homeplace: A Mystery by Kevin Wolf

at First Methodist.”
    Mercy took her coat from its hook by the back door and stepped out into the parking lot. She tossed the coat and her purse on the backseat of her mother’s old Lincoln. There was a dark smudge on the bumper. Mercy wiped away the spot with a Kleenex.
    She climbed into the car. The warmth from the afternoon sun wrapped around her, and the steering wheel was almost too hot to touch. It reminded her of the bubble bath she had planned before Chase came to pick her up.
    *   *   *
    Sunlight touched the silvery threads of a spiderweb that stretched from the dried branches of a wild rose to the letters carved in Chase’s mother’s headstone. He stopped before he brushed them away.
    His mother wouldn’t have touched them. Not from fear. The small things of nature were what she loved most. She marveled at the swallows’ nests along the eaves of the house and how the birds came back year after year. She could name each wildflower that grew in the pastures around the house and knew to the day when each would bloom in the spring.
    When a spider spun its web outside her kitchen window, she refused to let his father knock it away. She marveled at it each day that whole summer. Especially on the prairie mornings when drops of dew clung to the silky fibers.
    He stood by her grave a long time and thought of the good times and was glad that she hadn’t seen the man he’d become. But it hurt him that she’d never seen him play for the university, never seen him on TV, and never met the woman he loved.
    He left her there with the wild rose he’d planted the morning he left Brandon, and never looked at the place beside her where his father lay.
    Chase paused at one other grave before he left the hill and said a prayer for Dolly’s mother, and asked her to forgive him for the terrible things his father had done.

 
    CHAPTER SEVEN
    Chase pounded harder on the front door of the small house that Coach Porter called home. No one had come when Chase rang the doorbell or rapped on the doorframe.
    From inside the house, ESPN’s SportsCenter played on a widescreen TV, and lights were on in one bedroom and the kitchen.
    But lights seemed always to be on at Coach’s house, and his constant companion was TV sports.
    Coach had grown up in some farm town in Missouri. Got a scholarship to play basketball for a small college in Nebraska. Was set to be a starter his junior year when, coming home from Thanksgiving break, he’d been in a car wreck on an icy highway. A teammate had been killed, and Coach’s face had been cut up real bad. He lost his left eye and his chance to start. He played a minute here or there in games whose outcome had already been decided, but spent most of his time on the end of the bench.
    But Coach made the team again his senior year, took the same seat on the bench, and graduated with honors. Fresh out of college and just a few years older than the players who would be on his teams, Coach took the job with Brandon Schools. Chase and Marty were seniors that year. For the first time Chase had to work at a game that had been so easy for him. Coach wrote letters and made phone calls, and when Brandon went to the state tournament, college coaches knew all about Chase Ford. Instead of the junior college in Lamar, Chase left Brandon with a full ride to the University of Colorado.
    Seventeen years later, Coach Porter taught history, coached track and basketball, and had made a player out of Jimmy Riley. He was the only man in Brandon whom Chase had talked to in all those years.
    Chase stepped back from the door, crossed the porch, and looked down the side of the house. Coach’s pickup was in the driveway. Chase took out his cell and dialed Coach’s number.
    Straight to voice mail.
    Like Dolly’s.
    Down the street, Chase could see the school bus wasn’t back from the freshman game. Old Paco said the cell reception was bad in Limon. Chase guessed that Coach had gone along. Maybe he even drove the bus.