Beginnings: A Kate Martinelli novella by King Laurie R

Author:King, Laurie R. [King, Laurie R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-10-24T16:00:00+00:00

IX

Mark “More Apps Than Apple” Fields only came onto the Bay Area scene during the past decade. I’d never seen him in person, his photographs were of a thinner man with a beard, and his name was generic enough that it didn’t rouse my long-buried memories. Though I did have to wonder if the software billionaire ever thought about his teen-aged humiliation at the hands of a lesser mortal: a girl, one who barely registered on his gorgeousness meter, who’d got lucky with a chunk of pipe.

In truth, we were both damned lucky. I’d been amped up enough that night to swing for the bleachers—and with that thought came the nauseating sensation of my bat hitting something that was not a softball. It was amazing I hadn’t killed him outright.

But nobody had ever come to question me. I’ve had my own personal experience with being knocked out, in a case long ago, so I knew Fields himself might never be sure what had happened to him that night. His friends must have taken him to the hospital, and they’d have told him who was responsible, but had any of them ever reported it to the police? Well, I’d never been summoned home for questioning, never been confronted by his angry father, so—no, they probably had not.

Rather than admitting a girl had bested him, he may have used the I-walked-into-a-door defense. No doubt his buddies teased him for a while, before letting him go back to his life—maybe just a little bit wary of girls who said No .

The sounds of the library trickled back to my awareness. I blinked, and turned the yearbook page. Though I did watch for that face, in the images that followed. I finished with 1981, glanced up at the clock, and turned to 1982. School dances, nerdly faculty, fundraisers, and the Homecoming court. Two pages of yearbook staff, four of after-school clubs, and half a dozen artsy photos of classrooms at work. Then sports, again mostly boys, and heavily slanted toward football. No Mark Fields, oddly enough, despite his earlier achievement of a letterman jacket—which I was pretty sure were only given to underclassmen good enough to make a varsity team.

I felt a stir of uneasiness. Had I hit him so hard I’d ruined his high school career? Oh, come on—this was Mark Fields, one of the richest and most powerful men in the state. Whatever I’d done to him didn’t slow him down much.

On to the class of 1983. More pages, more happy young faces. Artistic close-ups of keyboards and drawing pads, a teacher in a paisley tie, couples at a school dance, an assembly with a US Senator, a shot of crowded bleachers, a group of —

Wait. I turned back, to the crowd at a basketball game. Yes, those were my sister’s heavily painted eyes, distinctive even in a sea of excited faces, looking down from a seat high in the stands. But she was not with Lisa Ferraro.

The boy beside her, at the end of a group of other boys, was a head taller than Patty.

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