Chapter 1

I’m Randy Sinclair. The Orioles drafted me this year in the third round, and after agreeing to wait until I graduated from Vanderbilt in June, they sent me to the Frederick (Maryland) Keys, their high-A farm in the Carolina League. I’m going to be twenty-three years old in September.

I was a late arrival, but the Keys weren’t too happy with their shortstop so he got sent to Delmarva and I took his place. Sal Bishop, the Frederick manager, told me to relax, learn my way around the club as quick as I could, and try to fit in.

I hit a triple my first time at bat as a pro in Frederick and then went oh-for-eleven the next three home games. Hard to relax, but I tried.

Bishop moved me from sixth to ninth in the batting order, but he just smiled and told me, again, to relax.

After asking around for a few days about a good place to rent, I rejected the available-but-substandard digs vacated by the kid they sent down to Delmarva and started looking for myself. That’s when I heard about Emily’s Boarding House.

The Boarding House was only a block away from the local college, and all the boarders, I found out, were students there. That wasn’t a requirement — it’s just the way it was. The team trainer — the guy who told me about the place — said the food was exceptionally good and the rent was reasonable.

I figured if I was going to be in Frederick for the next four months or more, a boarding house room would make sense. When I got to the boarding house, I found a very large, very old, well-maintained three-story white house with a big inviting wrap-around porch and a well-tended lawn.

I talked to Emily Chambers herself, the handsome, forty-something proprietor. “What do you want with a boarding house?” she asked me skeptically after we’d talked for a bit. “You’re a ballplayer, and you’re going to be out-of-town half the time.”

“I hear the food here is really good,” I told her. “It’s bad enough, living on cheeseburgers on road trips. If I lived here I could at least have home-cooked meals when the club is home.”

“I don’t have any rooms available anyway,” Emily told me. “I’ve got an empty apartment on the third floor. Just the one bedroom in it, but with a lot more room to spread out. It’s, like, one big long room, but there’s a little kitchen at the back, and a big space in the middle for, like a living room. There’s a desk in there, too. Then there’s a full-sized bed at the front end.”

“Sounds pretty good,” I said.

“Well, it costs a lot more than just a room, and it doesn’t even have its own bathroom. There’s a bathroom right outside the door — in the little hallway at the top of the stairs — but technically, it’s also available for any of the people on the second floor. They have two bathrooms of their own, but there are five boarders up there, and sometimes in a pinch one of them will go up to the top floor and use that one.”