“I’m not helping him.”
She sighs, bites her bottom lip. “I shouldn’t have promised not to say anything.”
“Yeah, but you did promise.”
She bugs her eyes out at me. “I know, okay?”
“Look, this isn’t about you. Can’t you just pretend you didn’t find the note?” I’m pleading with her now.
“I’m not good at pretending.”
“You swore, Annie!”
“I know!” Annie growls.
I feel the stitches on the baseball in my hand, and I think back to last year when we lived in Santa Monica and my gram helped us with Natalie. Things were better back then. It’s too hard here with just my mom, my dad… and me.
“So are we going to play ball?” I whisper.
Annie rolls her eyes. “Jeepers, Moose. Something like this happens and all you can think about is baseball?”
“Yeah,” I say. “It is.”
3. WILLY ONE ARM
Same day-Monday, August 5, 1935
Alcatraz Island is shaped like a wedding cake with three tiers and lots of paths and stairs and switchbacks that lead from one level to the next. The parade grounds where we play baseball is a big, flat parking lot-size cement area in the middle tier of the island. It makes a pretty good field except for the wind. I can’t tell you how irritating it is to hit a good ball and have the wind make it a foul.
Annie and I are playing catch right now, which gets my mind off of Capone, but it doesn’t seem to distract Annie one bit. Every other throw she’s walking up to whisper another suggestion. I should wash my own laundry, so Capone won’t have a way to communicate with me. I should talk to the people at the Esther P. Marinoff School. I should come with her to church. The priest will know what to do.
“I’m not even Catholic,” I tell Annie as Piper flies down the steep switchback on her roller skates, her long hair streaming behind her, her dress flowing back so you can see the outline of her-okay, never mind what you can see. She goes so fast sparks fly from her skates. She shoots up in the air over a crack in the road and lands with a graceful clickety-clack-clack.