What Nobody Saw: Day 8

Word Count: 48,003

Summary of Events:

Walker started reading the diaries and learned Mrs. Schissler was injured in a car accident, but wasn't given a lot of details. Wanting to know more, Walker hunted for old issues of the Winnipeg Free Press and discovered an article telling that Mrs. Schissler had nearly died, and had miscarried a sixth child as a result of the accident; he was also surprisingly angered at the observation that Mrs. Schissler's first name, Jolene, was never used. He was still upset about it later when he went to batting practise for his recreational team and ended up powering a baseball into a backyard across the street before explaining to his friend at third base that he was convinced Mr. Schissler had deliberately omitted his wife's name from even his own obituary . . .

Excerpt of the Day:

“How do you know he didn’t put her name in?” Corbin asked.

“Do you really think anyone else would deliberately omit a woman’s name from her husband’s obituary?” Walker asked. “Every single other obituary in that edition of the Press had the significant other’s name in the obituary whether they were dead or alive.”

“And you’re pretty impassioned about it,” Corbin said.

“It’s abuse!” Walker cried.

“Really?” Corbin asked.

“She has a name, she is a person,” Walker replied.

“Whom you don’t know,” Corbin said. “I ask again, why does this matter?”

Walker wanted to get mad, but he caught himself. He hadn’t told anyone about the papers, about what he’d learned; Jay and Finnegan and the others on the work crew were more likely to know what he was going on about than his friends.

He sighed and shook his head. “It’s just bothering me.”

“I mean, we should act when we see someone else being abused,” Corbin said. “But if the abuser’s dead what can we do?”

Walker nodded.

“Coach!” the young catcher yelled.

Glancing toward the kid, Walker saw him pointing and turned to see Marshall jogging across the street with the ball in hand, and looking like he wanted to do a long toss.

Quickly Walker stabbed his foot onto third base and tore for home plate just as Marshall got the ball airborne.

“Do you realise how far you hit that thing?” Marshall yelled. “I didn’t find it ’til the third house!”

Walker picked up his bat and gave a look to his fellow catcher. He was just as impressed as everyone else, he’d thought his annihilation of the punching bag at the gym for forty minutes would’ve been enough, but apparently not.

The fact that his heart rate hadn’t been slow in rising when he tried to explain things without being clear to Corbin also surprised him; why was he so angry? Corbin was right, since Mr. Schissler was dead it wasn’t like he could do anything to give Jolene justice — other than maybe to use her name — so what was the point?

Still, if it would help him hit home runs so far out of the park that the fielders would have to go knocking on doors to get the ball back, he might have to keep it in the back of his mind, especially when the bases were loaded.

“I guess I’ll go get suited up,” he said quietly.

“Hopefully you won’t throw them as hard as you’re hitting them,” his fellow catcher quipped.

Walker nodded and jogged over to the dugout — which wasn’t actually really a dugout so much as it was a shed — and started strapping on his catching gear. The more he’d thought about it since his visit to the archives, the more he was convinced that it was not Jolene who’d put the unopened mail up in the corner of the attic, but Warner; the question was: why?