Taylor / Shepp Sneaker Tree

1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4835-1269-3
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 170 Seiten

An idyllic suburban neighborhood is gripped by terror when they discover that there is a serial killer in their midst preying upon children. A tightly knit group of friends with a penchant for goofy nicknames try to capture a killer and win the Little League championship. Touching, funny, and edge-of-your-seat suspenseful, The Sneaker Tree is a mystery that will take you back to the days when one summer seemed to last a lifetime and it will have you turning pages well past your bedtime.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Taylor, Phil

Shepp, Cynthia

Leseproben

Chapter 1 This day was perfect. A crisp, azure sky as far as the eye could see with only a few pristine white, puffy clouds daring to interrupt its glorious expanse. The air was still and warm. It was the first day that didn’t have even a hint of dampness or chill in the air. The trees seemed to be bursting with a deep, rich green, as their splendidly attired branches appeared to reach for that incredibly perfect sky. I had never seen anyone die, and the magnificent afternoon gave no hint of what was to come. We had talked during the day at school. As we did on almost every sunny, spring afternoon, we hopped off the bus and literally sprinted to our houses to get our gear. Some days I just dropped my backpack on the porch, gave a shout to my mom, grabbed my glove and bat, and ran to meet the guys at the field behind the elementary school at the end of our street. Some days we had enough guys for a good six-on-six game and on other days, if we were short, we’d have to use ghost runners and phantom fielders. The neighborhood baseball field was our Field of Dreams. In a day and age when most of our classmates headed for the couch and their video games, our little group of friends was a throwback to an earlier time. We still enjoyed nothing more than hearing the crack of the bat, or, since we mostly had aluminum bats, the ping of the bat. We all loved baseball, and we all imagined we’d be playing in the big leagues someday. Baseball would indeed turn out to be my salvation that summer, but not in the way I imagined. As usual, I got there first. The sun washed over the field as if cleansing it just for us. I hesitated for a moment before crossing the white line, before stepping onto the field. To me, a perfectly mown field with fresh lines and a sky full of sunshine looked like a cathedral. Because of its beauty, I was hesitant to break the silence, to soil the sacred ground with my footsteps. To me, even then, baseball was one of the few things that were unspoiled by technology or changed by time. To me, baseball was something pure that filled me with a joy nothing else did. I just stood there for a moment, gazing at the mound, the base paths, and home plate. Then there was a whoosh of air as something brushed my head as it flew by. “Hey stupid, are you asleep over there?” He threw his mitt, just barely missing my head. It was Gooby. He was my best friend, but he didn’t share my passion, my worship of baseball. To him, a field was just a field. As Gooby arrived, I could see Cliff, Chuck, Bolo, and Scooter all coming down the street and across the field at various rates of enthusiasm. Before long, a couple of the guys from the street over arrived and we had enough to get a game going. We’d add people as they showed up if need be, even if we ended up with too many. We spent a few minutes screwing around, complaining about homework, talking about girls we liked, and discussing who was on our Little League teams this year. We were all around twelve and this was to be our last year of Little League. This was the year that making the league All-Star team might even mean a trip to the Little League World Series, if we could keep winning. Although we were dreaming of being on TV in the Little League World Series, we still saw baseball as nothing but pure, unadulterated fun. We played with our friends and someone’s dad was the coach. We got to wear uniforms that were t-shirts with a major-league logo on the front and a car dealer-sponsorship logo on the back. Every game, win or lose, was still followed by a snack someone’s parent had brought. This was going to be our last year to just enjoy baseball for what it was—just a game. Next year, we would be playing on the big fields for school and travel teams that took winning seriously and some of us might not make that cut. This year was going to be really fun for some of us. We were starting to hit puberty and getting a little bigger and stronger. I had never hit a home run, at least one that left the park. Last year, I came close once. I did hit two inside-the-park homers that were due as much to the other teams inept fielding as any skills I might possess. This year though, I wanted to hit one out. Just one. I had seen a couple of the other, bigger kids do it last year, and I wanted that. I wanted to be the one watching the ball land on the other side of the fence and hearing the cheers as I circled the bases to run into my teammates gathering at home plate to pat me on the back. This year is going to be my year, I told myself. Once we chose teams, Scooter took the mound and immediately started in. “Bases loaded with Red Sox. Full count. Righetti leans in to receive the sign from Cerone. He gets his signature pitch, a tailing fastball high in the strike zone. Righetti is one pitch away from sending the Yankees to the World Series to face the New York Mets. He winds up. The pitch to Boggs….” Scooter was our unofficial play-by-play guy, even when he was playing, including running the bases. Typically, his mouth ran faster than he did, and when we played, it was always Yankees versus Red Sox. Despite the fact that Scooter’s dad had nicknamed him after the famous Yankees shortstop, Phil Rizzuto, Scooter had always wanted to be a pitcher. His dad was an old time Yankees fan and liked Phil Rizzuto because he was Italian like his family was. Scooter was a Righetti fan, which was still ok with his dad, but the nickname Scooter had been attached to him from birth. Out of us all, Nathan “Scooter” Grottanelli was probably the best baseball player. He practiced year round, even, much to his parents chagrin, swinging a baseball bat in his room in front of the mirror hundreds of times a day so he could watch his form. He was so good that he never, not even once, broke anything swinging a bat in the house. He couldn’t make the same claim in regards to practicing his pitching in the house, but he was still pretty good. Scooter even practiced baseball unconsciously just about anywhere he was. If we were just walking around the block talking or just hanging out playing cards, without thinking about it, he often mimed a throwing motion repeatedly. Even when he played the field, in between the action, he would practice his swing with an imaginary bat. His room was the best too. His dad had painted the bottom half of the walls blue to match the outfield wall at Yankee Stadium, including stenciling in the distance in each corner and where centerfield would be if his room were the stadium. The top half of the walls were white with blue pinstripes, just like the Yankees home uniforms, and covered in Yankees pictures and paraphernalia. TING! I’d love to romanticize it and say “CRACK” as if it were a wooden bat, but it wasn’t. It was one of those shiny aluminum ones, where the barrel had that trampoline effect so that one-hundred-pound kids like us could feel like big shots hitting it out of a 210-foot Little League park. Chuck had gotten a serious piece of this one, and it was headed back where it came from in a hurry. Then we all did hear a loud crack. It was a sickening, horrifying crack. It was the ball hitting Scooter in the chest. It happened so fast that he didn’t have a chance to get his glove up in front of the line drive as it rocketed off the bat. Chuck didn’t even start to run to first base. He and I reached Scooter at the same time. The ball had hit him square in the chest, and Scooter had hit the ground like someone had dropped a bag of sand. I can still remember it, and in my head, it always seems to happen in slow motion. I can still picture myself running towards him, but in my recollection, I still never get there in time. From my position at first base, I watched as the ball sped in a perfectly straight-line right back, almost to the exact point where Scooter had released it. Only when it got there, Scooter was just standing up from his follow through, and it hit him directly in the center of his sternum. I was closest to him and heard the crack as the bone in his chest gave a little. His eyes got big for a fraction of a second and then went blank, as his knees suddenly seemed to forget their responsibility for holding him upright. His arms dropped to his sides as he dropped to his knees on the mound and then fell to his side. The ball had hit the ground in front of him and rolled to the front of the mound. In my nightmares, as well as in real life, it wouldn’t matter how quickly I ran. Scooter was dead before he hit the ground. Although I was only twelve, I tried to give him mouth to mouth and CPR like I had seen on television, while Gooby ran home to tell his mom to call for an ambulance. I can still remember the salty taste of his sweat on my lips as I attempted to resuscitate him. Since then, whenever I taste my own sweat on a hot, summer day, the memory of Scooter’s dead lips against mine turns my stomach and knocks the wind out of me. I knew it was bad because, unless I was blowing into his mouth, his chest wasn’t rising and falling as we waited there for the ambulance. The wait was probably only a few minutes, but it seemed like forever. The other guys were gathered in a loose circle around the mound as I knelt in the dirt, trying to breathe every bit of life I had into Scooter. The only sound other than my inhalation and exhalation was the song of the late afternoon crickets until finally, mercifully, the wail of a siren grew near. The circle parted as the EMTs dragged a gurney across the field. “It’s okay kid. I’ll take over now,” said one of the EMTs as she gently stepped next to me and placed one of those pump-bag-type gadgets...