“How’s our girl looking?” I said, sitting down next to them.
“Haven’t seen her yet,” Ali said without raising his head.
“Really?” I said, gazing at the track and field where athletes from three different high schools were warming up. “That’s not like her.”
“You notice she’s been dragging?” Nana said. “She’s not getting enough sleep.”
“She’s a seventeen-year-old girl. It’s impossible for her to get enough sleep.”
“Dad,” Ali said, “can I borrow your phone? Mine died.”
“To play a game?”
He looked insulted. “No, to read a book.”
I handed it to him, said, “What are you reading?”
His thumbs flew over the screen of my phone as he said, “Criminal Investigation: An Introduction to Principles and Practice, by Peter Stelfox.”
“Where’d you find that?” I asked.
“Online.”
“You should be reading books that are more age-appropriate,” Nana said.
“Age-appropriate things bore me,” Ali said as he stared at my phone’s screen.
My grandmother looked at me sharply, apparently waiting for me to say something. “I could use a little backup at times,” she said.
Before I could reply, Jannie came out and started jogging around the track; she wore sweatpants and a hoodie, which was up. Normally, my daughter ran with a noticeable springiness in her gait, a bounce every time her foot hit the ground. It was almost like she was bounding. That natural stride had attracted the serious attention of several NCAA Division I coaches, all of them waving scholarships.
But as Jannie increased the pace of her warm-up run, I could see she was not striking the ground with the balls of her feet but farther back, toward her heels. It made her look awkward, and that was one thing Jannie never was on a track.
“She injure her foot again?” Nana Mama asked, concerned.
“I sure hope not,” I said, standing and raising my binoculars to get a better look.
Jannie had gone through a difficult year after breaking one of the sesamoid bones in her foot. She’d had an operation, and it was touch and go for a time whether she’d recover fully. But she had, and she’d run some very impressive times during the indoor-track season.
Now, however, something was definitely off, though I didn’t think it was her foot. Her shoulders were level, and her face showed no evidence of pain on the footfall.
But there just wasn’t the spark you normally saw in her.
“She mention anything bothering her in school?” I asked Nana Mama after Jannie slowed to a walk, hands on her hips, head down.
“Straight As so far.”
“Boys?”
Ali sniggered. “Jannie scares them away.”
Bree arrived and sat down. “Did I miss her?”
“No,” I said, watching my daughter again through the binoculars. She seemed distracted, almost listless, as she crossed the field toward her team.
I lowered the glasses and gave Bree a hug and a kiss. “Glad you made it.”
“Me too,” she said, and she smiled. “You texted that you had something bizarre to tell me?”
Chapter 10
I did have something to tell her, something almost unbelievable that Forbes had said, something with implications and ramifications far beyond the mystery of M.
“It’s bizarre, and it’s complicated,” I said.
“What is?” Ali said.
“None of your business, young man,” my grandmother said. “Why don’t you read up on mountain bikes and how to fix them? Like Captain Abrahamsen said.”
Ali cocked his head and smiled. “That’s a good idea, Nana.”
“We’ll talk about it later?” Bree said to me.
“Yes. Most definitely.”
I pushed my conversation with Forbes to the back of my mind and refocused on Jannie, who was scheduled to run the four-hundred and then the two-hundred.
In the last of her preparations for the start, Jannie seemed to shake off whatever had been bothering her. She went to her line in lane three, stutter-stepped, and then broke into a few loping bounds.
“That looked good,” Bree said.
“Right there,” Nana Mama said.
I said nothing, just watched Jannie go back to the line and take her marks. She coiled at “Set” and sprang at the gun.
Her arms chopped. Her knees rose and stabbed down. Each foot strike was light and elastic, and her stride was near perfect as she rounded the first turn.
“She’s ahead!” Ali cried. “She’s got this!”
Jannie did have it. Coming out of the turn, with the stagger compressing, she was in front of the others by a good five body lengths.
She kept that lead down the backstretch and as she entered the far turn, but at the three-hundred-meter mark, her head rocked back out of position, and she seemed to get lazy. And her breathing cadence changed.
A senior from another school passed Jannie coming into the final stretch. You could see Jannie wanted to respond. But she had no gas.
Another girl went by her, and a third. Jannie was fourth crossing the line, the worst finish she’d had since injuring her foot.
She slowed to a walk and then to a shuffle, her head down. I expected her to be devastated, but when she finally turned around, her expression was more bewildered than anything.
Jannie groped for something that wasn’t there. Then her eyes rolled up in their sockets. She wobbled, staggered, collapsed forward onto the track.
“Jannie!” I roared. I sprinted down the stands and through the gate onto the track, where her coach and a trainer were already at her side.
They had rolled her onto her back. She had a scrape on her jaw where she’d hit the ground, but her eyes were open and searching.
“Dad?”
“Don’t move, baby,” I said. A physician, the mother of one of the other runners, came rushing up.
Dr. Ellen Roberts examined Jannie, who was becoming more alert. “Tell us what happened,” Dr. Roberts said.
Jannie said she’d felt tired all day, even worse than she’d felt the day before and the day before that. She’d fallen asleep twice in biology class and had to take a cold shower to wake up for the meet. She felt good at the start of the race and in the middle.
“But then I just lost everything,” she said. “I don’t know, I...” She closed her eyes. “Everything aches.”
“I believe she has a fever,” the doctor said. “Which doesn’t surprise me.”
“Flu?” her coach asked.
“I’m thinking Epstein-Barr, though we’ll need to test her ASAP.”
“Epstein-Barr?” I said.
“The virus that causes mononucleosis,” Dr. Roberts said. “It’s rampant at the school. If it’s mono, I’m afraid your girl won’t be running again for a good six weeks.”
Chapter 11
“Six weeks.” Jannie moaned. We were back home after a trip to an urgent-care center, where the doctor had confirmed the diagnosis of mono.
Jannie was lying on the living-room couch under a blanket and looking forlorn. “Dad, that’s almost the entire spring season. Gone. Just like last year. What am I, jinxed?”
I felt her heartache and frustration and said so, but she just started to weep.
“It’s over,” she cried. “No college coach will want me now. I’m cursed.”
“You’re sick because you’ve been burning the candle at both ends,” I told her. “And I’m sure D-One coaches have dealt with athletes with mono before.”
She stared blankly at the wall.
“I just wanted it to all be good, Dad. Like, no question I was ready.”
“I know. And I think you already are a no-question recruit to many coaches. They’ve seen your tapes and times. They know your potential.”
She looked at me hopefully. “You think?”