The Missing Baseball

  ALSO BY #1 BESTSELLER MIKE LUPICA

  Travel Team

  Heat

  Miracle on 49th Street

  Summer Ball

  The Big Field

  Million-Dollar Throw

  The Batboy

  Hero

  The Underdogs

  True Legend

  QB 1

  Fantasy League

  Fast Break

  Last Man Out

  Lone Stars

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, NY 10014

  Published simultaneously in the United States of America by Philomel Books and Puffin Books, imprints of Penguin Random House LLC, 2018

  Text copyright © 2018 by Mike Lupica

  Illustrations copyright © 2018 by Chris Danger

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA IS AVAILABLE.

  Puffin Books Ebook ISBN: 9780425289389

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  This book is for the real Zach, who always played big, in everything.

  CONTENTS

  Also by #1 Bestseller Mike Lupica

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  ONE

  “It’s just a baseball,” Zoe Walker said to her brother, Zach. “You have lots of signed baseballs.”

  Zach and Zoe Walker were eight, and they were twins. They didn’t look exactly alike, but they did think a lot alike. They just didn’t always think exactly alike.

  Like right now, for instance. They were eating breakfast at the kitchen table before school.

  Zach knew his sister was both right and wrong. He did have a lot of signed baseballs, that much was true. Some were gifts from his parents. Some he had gotten signed by professional baseball players. Zach and Zoe’s father, Danny, worked as a sports reporter on TV. Often, he would take Zach and Zoe to special events where they got to meet the players face-to-face.

  But the ball they were talking about now was different from the others. Zach loved that ball more than the rest, and he was sure Zoe knew it.

  The twins loved competing against each other in almost everything. In fact, Zoe even made talking a competition. She seemed to be doing it now.

  “It’s not just another ball,” Zach said. “You know it’s the ball Will Hanley hit for a home run—the ball I caught!”

  It had happened a couple of weeks before. Their parents took Zach and Zoe to a game at Fenway Park. Zach’s favorite player, Will Hanley, was playing. His team only visited Boston once each season. The family all sat in the Monster Seats at Fenway. The Monster Seats are on top of the famous wall in left field called the Green Monster. Looking down at the field from their seats, Zach couldn’t believe how small everything looked. It was almost as if they were watching a game in their backyard.

  “I know Will Hanley is your favorite baseball player,” Zoe said. “And I know why. He’s smaller than just about everybody in Major League Baseball. But he plays big, same as you.”

  “And he’s a second baseman, same as me,” Zach added, as he spooned cereal into his mouth.

  “But even though he’s your favorite player, and even though you caught that home run ball,” Zoe said, “it’s still just a ball.”

  She smiled to herself, like she’d just won the argument. Zach glanced over at their mom, who was grinning from across the kitchen. She pointed to her watch, which meant it was almost time to walk to the corner to catch their school bus.

  “You know what I always tell you,” their mom said. “It’s not the souvenirs that matter. It’s the memories that go with them.”

  “But that’s the thing,” Zach said. “This ball is part of my memory.”

  * * *

  The twins’ dad, Danny Walker, had been a star basketball player. He started playing when he was Zach and Zoe’s age. Then he went on to play in high school and college. He even played a few years in the NBA. But he hurt his knee and had to retire early. He was the smallest player in every game he ever played in his life. Zach and Zoe were also small for their age, and Danny always made sure to tell them size is important. Just not in the way they thought. It’s how big you play that really matters.

  Now he worked as a sports reporter on TV. Their mom said he was just as good at doing that as he’d been at everything else in his life.

  When he bought the family tickets in the Monster Seats, he’d had no idea it would turn into a monster day for Zach. In the first inning, Will Hanley hit the ball so far and so high, it cleared the top of the wall and ended up in Zach’s glove. Everyone in their section cheered.

  After the game, Zach and his dad waited in the parking lot with a crowd of other fans. That’s where Will Hanley and the players on the visiting team would board their bus. Zach knew his dad had special connections as a TV reporter. He could get them into the clubhouse if he wanted. But Zach also knew his dad didn’t think it was right for reporters to ask for autographs, even if the autograph was for one of their kids.

  “If you want Will Hanley’s autograph, you’ll have to wait like everyone else,” Danny said to Zach after the game.

  For as long as Zach and Zoe could remember, their dad had taught them to always do the right thing, whether it had to do with sports or anything else in their lives. Even if all they wanted was to get a baseball signed by their favorite player, they had to do it the fair way.

  So Zach waited with the other kids on the street that ran along the first-base side of Fenway Park. Slowly, he and his dad worked their way to the front of the crowd, happy that the much bigger crowd was waiting up the block where the Red Sox players parked their cars.

  Finally, Will Hanley walked out of the park wearing his normal clothes. Somehow he looked even smaller than he did in his baseball uniform.

  “Mr. Hanley!” Zach shouted. “Over here! Please.”

  (His mom would say later that everything worked out because Zach had been nice. She always said you can never go wrong being nice.)

  Will Hanley stopped to see where the voice had come from. When he looked over, he saw Zach holding out his home run ball.

  “Mr. Hanley,” Zach said, “this is the ball you hit over the Green Monster in the first inning.”

  Will smiled at him.

  “If I asked for it back, would you give it to me?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Zach said, without hesitation.

  “Well, how about I just sign it for you,” h
e said. “I never hit a ball over that old green wall before. So I already know I’ll never forget today. Now neither of us will.”

  Zach handed him the ball and the Sharpie his dad had given him. Will Hanley signed the ball, handed it back, shook Zach’s hand, and then walked up the steps and onto the bus.

  That ball now sat in Zach’s backpack. He was bringing it to their third-grade classroom for a very special show-and-tell. Half the kids in the class would be presenting today, and the other half on Thursday. All the kids in the class had been asked to bring something important to them. They were even encouraged to wear a T-shirt of their favorite player or team if they had one. This was just one part of the school’s annual Spirit Week. If you weren’t a sports fan, you could wear a T-shirt of your favorite TV show or book or band or movie.

  Zach wore his No. 19 Hanley shirt. Zoe, who loved books as much as she did sports (maybe even more), wore the Harry Potter T-shirt their parents bought her when they’d visited the Wizarding World of Harry PotterTM in Florida over spring break. Zoe had already finished the first three Harry Potter books and was on to the fourth, even though she was only eight. She was even bringing her favorite Harry Potter book, the first one, with her to school today.

  “That’s your thing of value?” Zach said to her as they grabbed their backpacks. “Seriously?”

  Zoe smiled. “A really good story is as valuable as anything. Right, Mom?”

  “A hundred percent,” Tess Walker said. “Now both of you get going or the story this morning will be that you missed the bus.”

  None of them knew at the time that the biggest story of Spirit Week was just beginning for Zach and Zoe Walker, and that it was going to be the best kind:

  A mystery.

  About an autographed baseball that turned out to be anything but just another ball.

  TWO

  The kids looked forward to Spirit Week every year. Five straight days of fun activities, friendly competition, and wearing silly outfits to school.

  The teachers divided each grade into two teams, the Blue team and the White team. Then they added up the points for each competition to decide the champion at the end of the week. There were two third-grade classes at Middletown Elementary, but instead of just having the classes play against each other, they mixed up the kids to make it more fun.

  The winning team didn’t just win bragging rights, they also won a pizza party at Joe’s Pizzeria, the best pizza shop in town.

  Already, they’d had an epic tug-of-war, a capture the flag game, and a talent competition modeled after the TV show America’s Got Talent. There was still a soccer match to be played, relay races to run, and an all-school scavenger hunt.

  Last year, the championship came down to the big baseball game played on the last day of Spirit Week. Zach’s team won the game and the pizza party. This year, for fun, the other kids had voted to make Zach the captain of the Blue team and Zoe the captain of the White.

  “Your team’s not beating mine two years in a row,” Zoe said as they got off the bus at school Wednesday morning.

  “We’re already ahead now that we won the tug-of-war,” Zach said.

  “Barely,” Zoe said.

  “You know what Dad says, little sister,” Zach said. “This isn’t like horseshoes. They don’t give you points for coming close.”

  He sometimes called her “little sister” because he was born exactly one minute before she was. Lately, when he did that, Zoe would point out that she was a half-inch taller, and say, “You might be older, but I’m bigger.”

  But today she just ignored it and said, “You know it’s going to come down to the baseball game again.”

  “Can’t wait,” Zach said.

  Zach loved any kind of big championship game, whether it was baseball or soccer or basketball. But he loved baseball the most. It was another reason he couldn’t wait for the game on Friday. Their dad, who had played in many big games, always told Zach and Zoe the same thing, no matter what sport they happened to be playing at the time: you had to value every one of these games, because you never knew how many of them you’d get to play in your life.

  For now, Zach was most interested in showing off his Will Hanley ball to his classmates. There were twenty kids in their classroom, with desks in the middle and cubbies on the side. There were posters on the walls and a view from the windows of the fields below them. Behind their teacher Ms. Moriarty’s desk was a whiteboard with some markers at the bottom. Zach and Zoe agreed there was just something about this room that made them feel happy, like something good and exciting was going to happen there every single day. Their mom always told them it was part of the adventure of learning, the greatest adventure of all.

  Today, though, Zach felt like he was a teacher, too. Standing at the front of the classroom, he explained to his classmates why his ball was important to him. “Catching it the way I did made me feel, just for one moment, like I was in the game myself.”

  He wished Zoe could have done the talking for him. She loved speaking in front of their class. She always had her hand up when Ms. Moriarty asked a question. It didn’t matter which subject. If Zoe had to discuss a reading assignment, she always seemed to pick up on things that Zach had missed, almost as if she’d gone through the whole book looking for clues.

  “Zoe sees things other people don’t,” their mom liked to say.

  “Wait, does that mean I don’t?” Zach had asked her one time.

  His mom had smiled at him. “You see things like your dad. For instance, you can spot somebody open in a basketball or soccer game before anyone else. You can see something on the baseball field before it happens. Zoe looks at the world like it’s a puzzle she’s trying to solve.”

  When they’d gotten to school, Zach had been surprised to see he wasn’t the only one in class wearing a Will Hanley shirt. So was Mateo Salazar, who’d only moved to Middletown and joined their class a month ago. When Zach got up for show-and-tell, holding his baseball in his hand, he noticed Mateo staring at the ball as if it were made of solid gold.

  Zach finished his presentation with something he’d heard his dad say a lot. “Mr. Hanley shows that size really does matter in sports,” Zach said. “The size of your talent and the size of your heart.”

  Then he went over and placed the ball on the windowsill next to two other signed baseballs kids had brought to class that day. Ms. Moriarty wanted them away from their desks, so no one would stare at them all morning instead of paying attention to the other speakers.

  But it wasn’t just sports items on display. One girl brought the best coin from her coin collection. One boy, Malik Jones, brought a chair he and his dad built together. Ms. Moriarty brought her cat, Sundance, who spent most of the morning pushing a ball of yarn around on her desk. Ms. Moriarty promised to bring Sundance to class on both days of show-and-tell, to be fair to all the students.

  Zoe had her Harry Potter book. When she finished her presentation to the class, it was time to go to lunch. Everybody was headed out of the room and down the hall toward the cafeteria when Mateo said he’d forgotten his lunch in his cubby.

  Zach watched as Mateo ran back toward the classroom. Zach didn’t know Mateo very well yet, mostly because Mateo was a shy boy who had kept to himself since coming to Middletown Elementary. But Zach liked the fact that they were both huge fans of Will Hanley.

  When Mateo returned, out of breath, Zach asked, “You get what you needed?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Mateo said.

  They all went to lunch. When they got back to the room, Zach noticed that all the baseballs were where they’d been left.

  All except one.

  Zach’s ball was gone.

  THREE

  “Well, it has to be in here somewhere,” Ms. Moriarty said when Zach told her his ball was missing.

  Only it wasn’t.

  Every boy and girl search
ed the room, and even the bathroom. They looked in the closet and in every single cubby. They looked under Ms. Moriarty’s desk and under their own desks. No one could find the Will Hanley ball. It was like they were having their own private scavenger hunt, searching for one item in particular: Zach’s ball.

  But it was gone.

  Zach didn’t want the other kids in the class to see how upset he was. But he just couldn’t help himself. His mom would remind him that the memory is more important than the ball itself. But this was different. Will Hanley was his favorite player. Zach didn’t know when he’d get the chance to see him play again. And he sure didn’t think he was ever going to catch another home run ball that Will hit, at Fenway Park or anywhere else.

  This really, really wasn’t just another baseball. Not to him.

  “What if somebody picked it up by mistake?” Malik wondered aloud.

  “You mean somebody came into our classroom, picked the ball up off the windowsill, and forgot to put it back?” Zoe said.

  “But no one else besides Ms. Moriarty was in our classroom while we were at lunch,” said Zach.

  One of the other girls, Lily Holmes, who Zach and Zoe thought talked a little too much about other kids, pointed out that Mateo had briefly come back to the classroom alone while everybody else was on their way to lunch.

  “And he does seem to be a big fan of Will Hanley,” Lily said, pointing at Mateo’s shirt, which looked exactly the same as the one Zach was wearing.

  “I would never do something like that,” Mateo said. “I heard Zach say how much that ball means to him. I would never steal it! I’ve never stolen anything in my life!”

  “Nobody’s accusing you of stealing,” Ms. Moriarty said.

  “All I did was come back for my lunch,” Mateo said. “I didn’t even go near the windows.”

  He was looking straight at Zach, almost like he was begging Zach to believe him.