Kelly felt the eyes of the impatient gallery on her as she and Eli moved up to the tee.But Eli appeared totally unaffected by the near riot he had caused. He handed Kelly a putter and a golf ball.
‘Age before beauty,’ he said.
‘Are you trying to get us killed?’
‘Aim for the tip of the crocodile’s tail. If you hit it in the right spot, you can get a good deflection towards the hole.’
Kelly studied the angles. She didn’t know what kind of conspiracy Eli was involved in with the putter guy, but she wasn’t going to let that distract her from winning. Losing was not an option. She wasn’t wasting a night away from studying by going home a loser.
She gripped the putter just the way her dad had taught her, brought it back about a foot from the ball, kept her arms straight and swung through the shot. The ball went exactly where she wanted, but the pressure was a touch soft, so when it hit the tip of the crocodile’s tail and deflected towards the hole, it fell short by about ten centimetres.
‘Wow,’ Eli said. ‘Not your first rodeo.’
Kelly swung her putter up and placed it across her shoulder. ‘Let’s see what you’ve got, glove man.’
Eli putted well. Not as well as Kelly, but not bad. She finished an easy second shot and reached into the hole to take out her ball. It was sitting unusually high and she found a folded card beneath it. Puzzled, she took the card out and opened it up. It was about the size of her palm and lined on both sides – the same type they used to make flash cards in their study group. The handwriting was familiar:
Other than molecular size, which property affects filtration of substances by the glomerular basement membrane? A. Antigenicity B. Concentration C. Electrical charge D. Lipophilicity E. Solubility
Kelly’s skin tingled and she laughed. ‘You put a study question in the hole?’
Eli was smiling as though he’d just passed the exam. ‘Well, technically, Miles put the question in the hole. But I wrote it.’
‘Who’s Miles?’
Eli pointed back to the putter guy. ‘He also held the crowd back so we wouldn’t scare the other players with questions about gene mutation and Chron’s disease. That’s a real mood killer if you’re not studying to be a paediatrician.’
Kelly laughed again. ‘So that whole glove routine was a ruse to buy us time?’
‘Absolutely not. This glove will be an essential feature of my victory tonight.’ Eli putted his ball into the hole. ‘I believe that puts us at two strokes each.’ He pulled the scorecard from his back pocket, marked down their numbers and pointed to the second tee. ‘Shall we?’
Kelly walked slowly towards him on her way to the next hole. She drew so close she could smell his aftershave and whatever it was he put in that wild mop of curls he called a hairstyle. His lip quivered ever so slightly and his eyes widened.
‘E,’ she said.
‘What?’ he gasped, as though he was about to pass out.
‘The answer’s E. Solubility.’ She stood on her tiptoes, brushed her lips delicately on his cheek and sashayed to the next hole.
‘Wow,’ he whispered.
Kelly smiled. Maybe having a doofus for a date wasn’t so bad, after all.
Chapter Ten
Monday 23 January
‘So, what’s so special about you?’ the journalist asked.
Kelly was taken aback. She’d only met him moments earlier, when he’d belligerently introduced himself as Evan Banbury, collapsed into the chair opposite her at the hospital cafe and taken out a small notepad. No other preamble. Just straight into it.
Evan Banbury was old and fat and wore an ill-fitting brown suit. He scowled at her over reading glasses as though she were a walking colonoscopy.
After Kelly’s initial shock passed, her stomach muscles tightened. Nobody got away with looking at her like that. ‘Listen, mate. I don’t want to do this article any more than you do. So why don’t you drop the whole superior journalist routine so we can get the article written and get the fuck out of each other’s lives?’
Evan slowly took off his reading glasses and placed them on the table. He raised his chin, folded his arms across his chest and looked down at her like he was appraising a rare museum piece.
Kelly held his stare.
