Leaving Yesterday by Kathryn Cushman

back into the small box, planning to set them up in Kurt’s room as soon as I finished unloading the final box, the largest of the three, which I suspected would provide more laundry for my piles. I peeled back the tape and, as expected, found another wad of clothes. I sorted them into the piles, then looked at the remaining items in the box. Toward the bottom there were a few odds and ends. A flyer from a rock concert, some plastic cups and forks, and a tattered gray blanket. I picked it up, planning to add it to the laundry pile. As I lifted it, I heard the thump of something falling from the folds. I put the blanket on the floor and looked into the box. My heart stopped beating when I saw it.
    Lying there, perfectly symmetrical across the remaining items in the box, was a Louisville Slugger baseball bat. I squatted down, trying to catch my breath, waiting for reason to overtake the sudden panic that had seized me. And after a few deep breaths, it did.
    Louisville Sluggers had to be the most common bats around. Kurt was a very athletic boy; he’d probably joined a softball league or something. Of course that must be it.
    When I reached down to pick it up, I wrapped my hand around a shirt first—it wasn’t that I was concerned about fingerprints, because I knew there was a reasonable explanation for what I was seeing. I think I’d just watched one too many police shows.
    I held the bat up, closer to the overhead light of the room. The grain of the wood was worn, chipped on the end, in fact. Years of playing baseball would likely do that to a bat. I rolled it over, noting that it looked perfectly normal. Until the very last of the rotation. A couple of darker areas of the wood caught my attention. I grabbed another towel from the laundry pile and rubbed it across the grain, praying that it wouldn’t pull away blood red. It didn’t. In fact, nothing came off at all. Of course it wasn’t blood, just an old stain, for crying out loud. What had even possessed me to think along those lines? It was a little stain—likely mud. If it were blood, then it would be red, instead of this pale dirty brown. No, this was just dirt.
    I knew I was blowing this out of proportion, so I looked into the box to see what remained. I pulled up a towel—completely stiff with dirt—and beneath it found a pair of cleats and a deflated basketball. Sports equipment. Of course. Just like the bat was.
    But now what? I hesitated and weighed my options. Put it in Kurt’s room, leaning in a corner, like it was a treasured memento? Hide it away until I knew for sure? Or should I call Detective Thompson and tell him to come take a look?
    After several years of teaching at grief seminars, I knew the official answer I would give to a woman in my position. You call the detective. Now. If there is nothing to this, then you sleep easier that night knowing that you’ve done the right thing. If this is indeed the murder weapon the police have spent the last couple of months searching for, then your son has some serious explaining to do, and likely some consequences that he rightly needs to pay.
    Only the truth would set you free.
    But there was no “you” here.
    Only me. Only my son.

Fourteen
    The first thing the next morning, I found myself standing on Lacey’s front step. I couldn’t help but look over my shoulder as I pressed the doorbell. Illogical as I knew it was, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the entire neighborhood knew I was here right now, and they all knew why. I saw no evidence to back this up. Not a single person was outside. But I saw a flash of movement at an upstairs window inside the Coles’ house. Someone behind the curtains, perhaps?
    “Well, this is a pleasant surprise for a Friday. Come on in.”
    I startled at the sound of Lacey’s voice and spun around. She didn’t seem to notice, and I was glad about that. Until I looked at her, anyway.
    The circles under her eyes were darker than usual, or was her face simply pale?