Free Perfect Pitch by Mindy Klasky Page A

skipping up the front steps of the house without looking over his shoulder. When he pushed on the front door, though, it didn’t budge. He tried again, with no better result.
    He turned back to the car, as Sam rolled down her window. “No one’s home,” he said. Before Sam could figure out a solution, Daniel said, “That’s okay. I can go in through the garage.”
    She couldn’t let a child enter an empty house on his own. She grabbed her handbag and called out, “Wait up, there!”
    Daniel punched four numbers into a keypad built into the frame of the garage door. One. Zero. One. Five. The garage door clanked up, and Sam followed Daniel into the house as he said, “My niñera probably realized I missed the bus. She must have gone to school to get me.” From the tone of his voice, he’d missed the bus before. Probably lots of times.
    “Can you call her?” she asked, but Daniel was already reaching for the phone.  
    He punched in a number from memory. Apparently, it was answered on the first ring. “ Si, Isabel ,” the boy said. “ Soy yo. Lo siento. Estoy en casa. ” There was more, a torrent of Spanish that Sam couldn’t follow. Daniel said, “ Lo siento, ” again, and then he hung up the phone. “She’ll be home in a minute,” he said.
    “You speak Spanish to your nanny?” Sam asked.
    Daniel nodded. “Dad says that’ll help me when I play. It won’t matter if my catcher speaks English or Spanish, I’ll be ready.”
    Sam made some sort of response, a sound that was meant to imply it was perfectly normal for a ten-year-old to practice language skills for a job that was at least a decade in his future. Even as she tried to seem nonchalant, she looked around the house.
    The kitchen blended into a great room. From her vantage point, she could just make out the corner of a home office and the edge of a formal living room. A hallway led into the distance, presumably to bedrooms.
    Everything looked tight, controlled. The floors were polished hardwood, swept perfectly clean. In each room, she could glimpse the identical rug—short pile, sturdy weave, an indeterminate color somewhere between beige and grey. In the great room, there was a couch and two armchairs, all settled around a glass-and-chrome coffee table. The furniture was upholstered in charcoal-colored leather. Each corner was perfect, as if the pieces had just arrived off a furniture showroom that morning. Three massive photographic prints were framed in brushed steel—black and white abstracts that might have been scenes from a skyscraper under construction.
    Astonished that a home could bear so little personality, especially one with a ten-year-old child in residence, Sam looked around the kitchen. The appliances were all brushed aluminum; there wasn’t a surface to hold a single magnet, much less the collage of schoolwork and photographs and general household jetsam that Sam would have expected. The cabinets were faced with glass, and Sam could make out neat stacks of plain white dishes nestled beside clear drinking glasses.
    The house was like a museum, an exhibit on twenty-first century life. Every single thing was measured. Perfect.
    What a horrible place for a boy to grow up.
    Before Sam could say anything, a door opened to her right. Those must be the steps to the basement, she told herself. They were finished with the same immaculate hardwood that stretched through the rest of the house. The paint on the walls matched the cool white—
    A tiny portion of her brain babbled on about home decorating. But that was only because the vast majority of her consciousness was filled with awareness of the man who stepped into the kitchen.
    “Dad!” Daniel yelled as he threw himself across the kitchen, slamming his arms around his father’s waist.
    * * *
    DJ automatically reached down to ruffle Trey’s hair, but he froze when he realized that the woman standing by the center island wasn’t Isabel.
    Wasn’t anything like Isabel. Wasn’t