Chapter Ten
Matthew
April
Matthew started scouring around. He looked in every drawer, under the desk, and all around it, but there was nothing.
How could his favorite memento and a big metal water bottle just disappear?
He began to feel frantic, rechecking the drawers he had just looked in and pushing some papers aside, although it made no sense for either to be under those papers. He would have noticed the bulging.
“This can’t be happening, where’s my baseball? My bottle?” he whispered to himself.
Dread started to wash over him. The water bottle, not a huge deal, he could ask for a replacement, but he couldn’t lose that ball, it meant so much to him. A baseball doesn’t just disappear. It had to be here somewhere …
And then a thought exploded in his head.
Faith. No way. Could it be? Could it?
Turning slowly toward her desk, he eyed it warily.
Would there be any chance Faith took his stuff?
As retribution for the lipstick, maybe, if she somehow was on to him.
No, she couldn’t possibly know about that.
It had been months since it happened and she hadn’t said anything or acted any more cold to him (she was cold enough as it was). But still …
He walked toward her desk, looking in disgust at how dirty and cluttered it was. Yet, he couldn’t really start shuffling things around or it would be super obvious that someone had. Maybe he could peek in the drawers.
Putting his fingers on the handle of one, he slowly slid it open. It was jam-packed with a huge assortment of random things: Tylenol, gum, mints, more makeup, hand sanitizer, various business cards, rubber bands, tape, a pair of scissors, and other crap. No baseball. No water bottle.
She had three other drawers, and he tried all of them, but two just had stacks of papers or old magazines and one was crammed with a similar collection of junk, this one more of the food variety, protein bars and her appetite-suppressing gum and Lipton’s Cup-a-Soup in a few flavors and some Red Bulls.
Matthew sighed. Nothing much to see here. He turned and looked at Abby’s and Chuck’s desks. No way they took his stuff. None of them were great buddies, but they wouldn’t stoop this low, would they?
Just in case, he quickly inspected all of the drawers in their desks but didn’t find anything of note. Theirs were way more clean and organized than Faith’s, though, as he could have guessed.
Clearly the baseball and bottle were not hidden in anyone’s desk drawers.
If they weren’t back the next day, though, he would have to report them to HR and to Perry.
Anything that went missing had to be looked into.
Maybe the cleaning people took his stuff when they were alone in the office at night.
But he had a hard time believing that. The same Russian family had been cleaning at Channel 9 for twenty years, and while he didn’t know all of their names, they would always say hello and be friendly.
They were kind, hardworking people who had never stolen anything to his knowledge.
Plus, there were way more valuable things to steal if you were left unsupervised at night in a TV station.
Microphones and cameras and lights and Emmy statuettes and other awards that people kept on their desks or Perry lined up on a shelf for all to see.
The Russian family might not know the value of that baseball either, he reasoned.
He had tried to discuss the Tigers a few times with the father and son during the height of a playoff run but the duo had just looked at him quizzically.
The baseball was valuable, signed by Kirk Gibson, one of the Tigers’ most well-known players.
Matthew had once looked up the price on an auction site—not that he would ever sell it, he was just curious—and it was more than $600, especially in the pristine condition it was in, kept in that glass box for all of these years.
As for the water bottle, ones with the Channel 9 logos were everywhere if someone wanted to steal one.
But now both were missing. And something was fishy.
Quickly he went to his phone and the weather-team text chat they all shared.
Has anyone by chance seen my signed Kirk Gibson baseball I keep on my desk or my water bottle with the Pistons sticker? They’re both missing.
The typing bubbles started going right away. Abby was first, as he could have predicted.
No, I haven’t. That’s terrible though. I will keep an eye out.
Chuck was next.
Dude, I have no idea but I’ll also look for them.
It took over an hour before Faith responded. Matthew was already home when his phone buzzed. He picked it up and read her words, or rather word:
Nope
That was it. And he knew that this was her doing. If it was revenge for the lipstick, he could not be sure. But she had taken his baseball, maybe his water bottle. He could feel it in every cell of his body. And if that’s how she wanted to play, then it truly was game on.