Pop (13 page)

Marcus's eyes widened.

“You're the new guy,” Barker explained reasonably. “Popovich led this team to a perfect season, and he's my man until he proves he isn't. This is a town where the head cheerleader designs zone blitzes in her sleep. We take our football seriously. Trust me, your love life is not a topic that keeps me up nights—
until
it affects my team.”

Marcus left the office astounded by the twisted brilliance of Barker's logic. The guy could justify human sacrifice if it would help him win football games.

Calm down
, he reminded himself.
You were trying to cool it with Alyssa anyway. This is just an extra reason to make it stick
.

Still, it rankled him—the thought that Barker would order it.

The athletic department was headquartered between the gym and the pool. The hallways were lined with trophy cases, celebrating past DNA glories, not just in football, but also basketball, soccer, volleyball, swimming, and track.

Marcus's eyes were immediately drawn to a brass plaque that read:

CHARLES POPOVICH
CLASS OF 1973

Third-Round Pick—San Diego Chargers
1977 National Football League Draft
“Our First NFLer, but Not Our Last”

There were no similar plaques, so he had to assume that Charlie really
was
their last—or at least the only one so far. He located the 1973 team picture. There was Charlie, tall and young in the back row, grinning like a winner.

But Charlie wasn't the one Marcus was looking for. He could not shake the feeling that the mysterious Mac might have been on this team, too. A teenage friend you played football with was usually a high school buddy.

Of course, the faces meant nothing to him. But the roster was listed below the photo.

No one was named Mac. But—his eyes homed in on a thick-necked young man to Charlie's left. Name: James McTavish.

McTavish. Mac?

The hearing date was set—December 2. On that day, Marcus was to stand before a judge and explain his involvement as a conspirator in the TP'ing of K.O. Pest Control. If he chose to plead innocent, he would be expected to reveal the name of the guilty party.

“Otherwise,” his attorney explained, “I can't help you, kid. You'll be sending me in there to fight a fire with nothing but air.”

The lawyer was a Bronx native with a bad suit and a worse accent, but Marcus knew he was right. There was no reason on earth for a judge to take his word for it. On December 2, it was going to be either Charlie or him.

Who knew if the authorities would even believe the truth? A fifty-four-year-old Alzheimer's patient didn't exactly fit the profile of a juvenile delinquent. They could accuse Marcus of trying to blame his own misdeeds on a sick, helpless man. That was easier to swallow than a wild tale of an NFL veteran mistaking a strange kid for his childhood friend and carrying on a grudge against a store that had gone out of business years ago. Unless by sheer luck the judge happened to be James McTavish himself.

The thought startled him. Okay, granted, the judge wasn't likely to be James McTavish. But James McTavish had to be somewhere. If Marcus could find the real Mac, then Mac could fill in the blanks.

Of course, the guy might live in California … or Japan. He might even be dead. But it wouldn't hurt to try to track him down.

There were two McTavishes in the Kennesaw white pages, neither of them James. One was an elderly woman who was hard of hearing. It was only with great difficulty that Marcus was able to gain her assurances that she had no relatives named James. The second guy was easier to communicate with but of no more help.

“Yeah, I remember hearing about other McTavishes somewhere in the area. They weren't part of our family, though. Sorry, pal.”

Marcus did an internet search and found, to his dismay, that there were more than two thousand McTavishes in the United States. Nearly three hundred of these had the first initial J. And there was always the possibility that the J. McTavish he was actually looking for was unlisted.

The magnitude of the task at hand was beginning to sink in. Oh, sure, it could be done. But how did you go about it? What were the steps? Marcus was a high school kid, not a private detective.

He was about to shut down the browser when the message caught his eye:

WHO ARE
YOU
LOOKING FOR?

It was a banner ad for www.almamater.usa, one of those websites where people could track down former schoolmates, find old boyfriends and girlfriends, and reconnect with past acquaintances.

It brought an ironic smile to Marcus's lips. Himself and Troy, twenty years down the road, laughing over their long-forgotten animosities. Alyssa, now a farmer's wife, mother of six, former porn star, ambassador to Finland—anything was possible.

But it occurred to him that this was exactly the place he needed to be. He was looking for a high school classmate. Not his own, but Charlie's.

He entered the site and clicked on
Find an Old Friend
. He typed in the school's name and location—
David Nathan Aldrich
in
Kennesaw, New York
—and highlighted
Class of '73
.

In the space designated for his message, Marcus typed:

As the mouse hovered over
Submit,
Marcus knew a moment of unease, pondering the possibility of the real Charlie P. visiting this site and finding a message from himself. But that wasn't very likely. If Charlie could look at a sixteen-year-old and see his friend Mac, then he wasn't searching for long-lost classmates. Part of him probably thought he was still in high school.

A grimmer thought occurred to Marcus. There was a decent chance that Charlie might be so impaired, he couldn't figure out how to use a computer at all.

T
he Aldrich Raiders won again, despite an uneven performance from quarterback Troy Popovich. It was nothing that the average fan in the stands would recognize—he was just a touch quick to abandon the pocket. He got rid of the ball a little early, and he slid when he might have picked up a few extra yards by scrambling. But to Marcus, who had done all these things as a JV quarterback in Kansas to avoid getting hit, it was as obvious as blown coverage in the end zone. And there was no mistaking the worry lines on the bobblehead brow of Coach Barker—and around the luscious lips of the true football expert in Kennesaw, the head cheerleader.

It was hard to tell if Troy knew what was going on in his own head, or if the whole thing was subconscious. Marcus understood the cause of Charlie's problems, yet his association with the King of Pop had made him crave the very same kind of physical contact that Troy now seemed to be trying to avoid. Of course, Troy was Charlie's son, so the former linebacker's illness would affect him in a different and more profound way. He might even fear a genetic weakness that would make him prone to concussion.

In the end, though, Troy's mediocre game was more than made up for by the heroics of Ron Rorschach. Behind Marcus's ferocious blocking, Ron was en route to a rushing title, piling up touchdowns along the way. And he was already second only to Troy in the number of rhyming cheers designed by Alyssa and the squad.

Even Marcus was starting to get noticed, for the sheer energy of his physical play. The crunch of his hits could be felt in the back row of the bleachers. He was the secret of Ron's success, by far the best Raider rookie this year. But the nonfootball scuttlebutt was even more tantalizing: He had been arrested and given a court date to face criminal charges (true); he single-handedly fought his way out of Luke Derrigan's basement the night of the party (false); he rode a motorcycle (half true); he stole Troy Popovich's girlfriend and then dumped her (twenty-five percent true); the dumping part was just a cover, and he and Alyssa were still secretly seeing each other (totally false, but nice to think about).

Marcus tried to tell himself that he didn't care, but the fact was he did. He noticed the admiring looks in the hall and the whispered conversations in his wake.

Alyssa explained it with her usual flare. “Marcus, you are so hot right now, we could fry an egg on your pecs. And I found you first. Go, me!”

He would have taken her compliments more seriously if she didn't always make them among large groups of people, where they were pretty sure to work their way back to Troy. Yet the flirting felt great—and he couldn't escape the notion that, in spite of everything that had happened, it could get a whole lot better.

The problem was this: Alyssa the Football Expert understood blocking. He opened up holes so that Ron could gain yardage and become a star. In other words, Marcus did the donkey work in order for someone else to reap the rewards.

He had to wonder if he might be performing the same function outside football as well.

The email in the inbox of Charlie P.'s account on www.almamater.usa had the subject “Blast from the Past?” Hand trembling, Marcus clicked on the message and read:

Excitement dissolved into disappointment. Not Mac. Just some busybody from the alumni association. But really, what had he expected? To throw a posting on a message board and find the real Mac? It was too big a world for that. It was actually kind of amazing that he'd stirred up anyone at all from the class of 1973.

Not that Charlie cared. If the King of Pop gave a hoot about his old classmates, he'd have supplied an address more current than San Diego, which had to be more than twenty years old....

Marcus put the brakes on his galloping mind. The California address was outdated, but it was still an address. Alumni associations kept information on everybody! His mind made the leap. If they had one for Charlie, then they probably had one for Mac, too. It might be just as old, but at least it was a place to start.

He turned back to the keyboard and typed a careful reply to Doris Brennan Vanderboom:

Marcus had his answer within a couple of hours. Charlie was a real celebrity among his former classmates, so Dori was beside herself with joy at the possibility of hosting the King of Pop in Syracuse. He had the feeling that Dori nurtured a crush on Charlie that dated back long before he'd ever picked up an NFL football.

She provided hideously boring details about her three lovely children and her husband, a gastroenterologist and weekend fly fisherman. But Marcus only had eyes for the bottom paragraph:

Coltrane, New York. He knew from his rides with Mom that Coltrane wasn't that far—about halfway between Kennesaw and the foothills of the Gunks. It was maybe half an hour's drive, depending on how hard you pushed your Vespa.

E
ighty-five the Colonnade Way in Coltrane wasn't a house at all. It was an old brick warehouse that had been converted to trendy shops, with offices on the second floor.

Marcus parked the bike and entered the building. Could this warehouse have been built on the site of Mac's house? He doubted it. The brick was ancient. But why would the alumni association have Mac living in Candle World or Hiker Heaven?

He checked the directory on a sign outside the door. It was under the professional listings:

206—McTavish, James, CPA

This wasn't Mac's home. It was his office.

He climbed the stairs, holding his breath in anticipation. This was Mac, the person Charlie thought Marcus was. It was hard to get his head around that.