Page 75 of Love in Tandem
Joshua stopped drumming his pen against the desk and looked up from a notebook covered in scribbles.
In the intense amount of time Sophia had spent with Joshua, she’d learned most of his habits. One of them was to take a good five seconds to unlatch his thoughts from whatever consumed him prior to her interruption and another five seconds to grab hold of her words after the interruption.
“What are my thoughts on chickens?” he said after the appropriate amount of ten seconds had passed.
Sometimes he didn’t make the complete transition. She smiled and repeated herself.
“Oh. Sure.” He dropped his gaze back to the notebook. “Any sign of the cat?”
Sophia offered another patient smile as she stepped around a pile of books to get to the desk. “Patches came down from the tree hours ago. I already told you that. Remember? He’s tucked away in the bathroom.” And D’Artagnan had been standing guard outside the bathroom ever since.
“Oh. Sure.”
Sophia gently placed her palm on top of the notebook. “Joshua.” She waited until he looked up at her. “I hate to say this, but if it’s not here, then it’s not here. There’s nothing we can do.”
He removed his glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose while he sank back in the chair. Dust motes danced above the desk in the last slice of daylight sneaking through the windows. “I just feel like I’ve got to be missing something. Hopkins wasn’t a liar. Eccentric, sure. Full of riddles, always. But he wasn’t a liar. If he told that nurse I’d find everything I need at home, then everything I need—including the challenge money—should be here at the house.”
Sophia shoved some old newspapers aside so she could perch on the desk. “I don’t think I’ve asked yet. How did you even know Hopkins? I sort of assumed nobody knew him. Not really. I mean, until his obituary came out, I’m pretty sure nobody around here knew he used to be a major-league baseball pitcher at one time.”
Stretching his arms over his head, Joshua straightened and offered the first glimpse of a smile she’d seen all day. “Literally, one time. An injury ended his career his very first game. Also ended his marriage. His wife thought she was marrying the next Greg Maddux, then jumped ship as soon as she realized he was nothing but an out of work regular Joe.”
“That’d probably mean a lot more to me if I knew who Greg Maddux was.”
“Oh, Sophia.” Joshua clutched his chest. “You hurt my heart. Greg Maddux is one of the greatest baseball pitchers of all time. You should know this. Everybody should know this.”
“Did Hopkins know this?” Sophia asked, hoping to get back to the main focus here.
“No, he didn’t know this. He swore Pedro Martinez could outthrow Maddux any day. We spent a lot of late nights arguing the issue.”
Sophia bounced her heels against the bottom drawer of the desk, waiting for him to elaborate. Then stopped banging her heels against the desk when she realized it was kind of annoying. “How did you and Hopkins meet?”
“We met a few summers ago at a church camp in Wisconsin. One of my old buddies from high school directs it every summer and is always desperate for volunteers. So I offered to help out at one of the sessions. Well, Hopkins had volunteered too. Knew the groundskeeper or something. Anyway, we got to talking that first night after all the campers had gone to bed. And, I don’t know. We just connected. You know how sometimes you just feel like you get a person even though you don’t really know all their details?”
Sophia met Joshua’s gaze as her stomach did a pleasant little flip that made her want to start swinging her heels again. Yeah, she might know the feeling.
“Well, that’s how it was for Hopkins and me. We spent a lot of late nights talking those two weeks. I mean sure, we talked about our lives. I told him all about how I wanted to go to seminary and how my dad convinced me to stay back and work at his furniture store instead. Hopkins told me all about his marriage. His divorce. How he eventually struck it rich later and ended up here in Illinois. But mostly,” he said with one of his cute smiles, “we talked about baseball.”
Joshua began drumming his pen on the desk as he stared out the window. “One of his dreams was to build a baseball diamond just like in that movie Field of Dreams. I actually came across a design he sketched of it somewhere here. Not sure why he never got around to doing it. He certainly had the money.”
His attention returned to the desk. “Which is why I keep thinking the challenge money’s got to be here. I know he had the funds. I just don’t know what he did with the funds.”
He adjusted his glasses and reached for the pile of manila folders on the desk. “Maybe I should—”
“Oh no you don’t.” Sophia swooped up the stack and marched for the hallway before he could touch them. “I’m not dragging you across the floor and spoon-feeding you back to health because you’ve gone catatonic from staring at a bunch of papers again. At least eat supper first.”
She dumped the folders onto a chair in the living room, then grabbed the gramophone she’d spotted the night Joshua had been comatose. She knew it worked, because she’d listened her way through three records that night while waiting for him to revive.
“As my grandmother always used to say, sometimes when life gets tough, the best thing you can do is eat, not think, and—” she twirled into the kitchen with the gramophone in her arms—“dance.”
Joshua’s lips twitched with tired amusement as he reached for a water glass from the cupboard. “I’m with your grandmother on two of those suggestions. You gonna answer that?” He motioned to the kitchen table where her phone had started to ring.
“Probably just a spam call.” Before Sophia could set down the gramophone, Joshua picked up her phone. She snatched it from his hand, but not quick enough to keep him from seeing her screen notification.
“It’s your dad. Aren’t you going to talk to him?” Joshua said when she immediately silenced the phone and shoved it into her back pocket.
“I will. Later. After dinner. But first a little music.” Before Joshua could question her further, she started up the gramophone. Not giving him the option, Sophia grabbed his hands. “Ready to dance?”
“No. Never.”
