The Morgue and Me Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  PART I - THE MORGUE AND ME or PORTRAIT OF A CORPSE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  PART II - NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY or SUNKEN BLUFFS

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  PART III - CHAMPAGNE FOR TWO or UNSUPERVISED ADULTS

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  PART IV - THE MORGUE AND ME, AGAIN or DEATH IN DUNCAN WOODS

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  PART V - SUSPENDED ANIMATION

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Acknowledgements

  VIKING

  Published by Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in the U.S.A. by Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2009

  Copyright © John C. Ford, 2009

  All rights reserved

  eISBN : 978-1-101-08194-5

  [1. Criminal investigation—Fiction. 2. Murder—Fiction. 3. Extortion—Fiction. 4. Journalists—Fiction.

  5. Photography—Fiction. 6. Family life—Michigan—Fiction. 7. Michigan—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.F75315Mor 2009

  [Fic]—dc22

  2009001956

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any

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  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  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.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  To Mom, Dad, and Joe

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Petoskey, Michigan, is an actual city in northern Michigan which bears almost no resemblance to the version portrayed in this book. Go see for yourself. You’ll like it. And give my apologies to the medical examiner.

  Prologue

  When you’re eighteen years old and you shoot somebody in a public place at two in the morning, of course you expect some attention. Especially when it’s the person I shot, and especially when you’re found right there on the scene with that person at your feet, gasping away in a pool of blood that seeps around your shoes. Still, I find it really embarrassing.

  It’s strange to be in the paper every single day. In the first story, under the giant headline, they ran a blown-up version of my high-school graduation photo. The cap looked ridiculous, not to mention my blotchy face or the magenta robe, four sizes too big. Over the next week, they used three different pictures of me in a parade of humiliating poses: fake smile, half-closed eyes, in my pajamas. I don’t know where they dug them up, but they must have run out, because yesterday they called the house and asked for more. My mom called them “vultures” and hung up.

  Reporters from the Courier have interviewed half the town about me. And it isn’t just them—television vans from Grand Rapids and Detroit are sitting on the street outside, hoping to catch a glimpse of me. It’s a waste of time for everybody; my parents have forbidden me to leave the house, and I’m in no mood to break that particular rule just now.

  If you ever get famous (maybe I should say notorious) you’ll notice something. People say things about you that are just plain lies. They pick up on something about you, and then they repeat it over and over until they think it explains all your actions. In my case, they say I’m a loner. In today’s paper, this guy I barely know said, “Chris always kept ’way off to himself. He would sit alone in the cafeteria at lunch, reading books about astrology and stuff. It was pretty weird.” First of all, it’s astronomy. Second of all, having intellectual pursuits and eating by yourself doesn’t make you some kind of terrorist, which is what the guy was saying.

  When this happens to a group of people, it’s called stereotyping. When it happens to an individual, it’s called in-depth reporting.

  My parents hired a psychiatrist for me. Our sessions take place on the back porch, over glasses of lemonade and my mom’s oatmeal cookies. He says that I’m “disassociating” from my traumatic experience, which is why I talk about the shooting so lightly. My “levity problem,” he calls it. I say my parents are paying that guy too much. Cops and soldiers use humor to get them through, and no psychiatrist beats them up about it. If I’m going to be a cop myself—actually, a spy—shouldn’t I start adapting now?

  Then again, maybe the shrink has a point. Maybe I’m a little screwed up right now.

  My name is Christopher Newell. Classes start in a few weeks at Northwestern Michigan University. I’ll be a freshman. Not to brag, but I was valedictorian of Petoskey High, and I won the Regents Scholarship—and no matter what anybody is saying, I intend to start college on time.

  Some crazy things happened in Petoskey this summer, things that some people wouldn’t believe. I guess that makes sense; I have a way of getting caught up in my own fantasies. But everything that happened to me was real—and I won’t apologize for anything I did about it.

  PART I

  THE MORGUE AND ME or PORTRAIT OF A CORPSE

  1

  It was the job at the morgue that started this whole thing.

  I
t wasn’t my top choice, mind you. I had planned to work in the NWMU astronomy department over the summer. My parents are both professors at the university, and I figured they could pull the appropriate strings. That was the idea back in May, anyway, before I got arrested during an unauthorized visit to the university’s new $75 million planetarium.

  It happened on a Saturday. Prom night, to be exact. I didn’t go. I couldn’t see myself dressing up in a tux and going to parties with people I didn’t know very well and acting like a clod on the dance floor all night, just because you’re supposed to. It’s not that I’m antisocial, exactly. I’m just more the observing type, and stars are my favorite thing to observe, so I decided to check out the planetarium.

  What else was I going to do—sit in my room thinking about Julia Spencer all night?

  They hadn’t quite finished construction on the planetarium, so they didn’t have the alarm all geared up yet. I had just seen this Bruce Willis flick where he did a trick with his credit card to pry open the lock on a bad guy’s apartment door. I couldn’t believe it when it worked on the south entrance. The whole thing was a bust, though—they had me in plastic handcuffs within about five minutes.

  The campus security officer said he didn’t care how many moons of Jupiter were visible, it was still breaking and entering. He loaded me in the back of his car and carted me off to the campus police station, where I had a very unpleasant chat with the sheriff before my parents used their pull to get the charges dropped. Still, I wasn’t going to be getting any job offers from the astronomy department.

  My mom cried a little bit over the planetarium affair. She taught in the biology department and told me she could arrange an internship there. Her tone suggested that I should be very thankful and accept immediately. My dad said they always could use researchers in classics, too.

  Around that time, though, the Courier ran a classified ad for a job at the morgue. It went like this:

  MEDICAL EXAMINER seeks janitorial help.

  Min. Qual. Flex. Sched. $8.50/hr. 15 hrs/week.

  Naturally I hopped right on it.

  “Naturally,” I say, because my life’s goal is to become a spy, or at least a spyish-type figure. Based on my preliminary research (namely, rentals from the “Cloak and Dagger” section of University Video), I’m thinking seriously about the National Security Agency. Working at the morgue might teach me something about forensic pathology that could come in handy later, I figured. It’s not like I had better alternatives; they don’t train you in fingerprinting at the knickknack shops in town.

  “Oh my Lord,” is what my mom said when I told her that I was going to call about the job. She was making vegetarian lasagna at the time.

  We were in the kitchen, where my dad was reading Chaucer. He lowered his book. “That’s positively macabre,” he said. That’s how he talks. “Sometimes I think you would have enjoyed living in the Middle Ages.”

  My mom peered at the advertisement. “It’s just fifteen hours a week.”

  “I don’t need that much money,” I said.

  It was true, too. I had already won my full-ride scholarship to NWMU. It came with a housing allowance, which was like free money since I had decided to live at home. A part-time job was perfect—it’d leave me plenty of time to practice photography.

  I put together a slapdash résumé that filled just under half a page, including a line for interests (“Astronomy, Comic Books of the 1940s, Edgar Allan Poe, Photography”) and faxed it over. To my surprise, they called me in for an interview the very next day.

  The morgue isn’t far from our house; nothing in Petoskey is. The sign on Route 14 says, WELCOME TO PETOSKEY: WHERE NATURE SMILES FOR SEVEN MILES, but every single word of that sign is a lie. For one thing, Petoskey is six miles long at best. It sits on Lake Michigan—the West Arm Bay, to be precise—an hour’s drive from the Upper Peninsula and, if you care to go farther, Canada. Tourists come up in the summer, when you could say that Nature winks at Petoskey. For the other nine months, it blows a harsh wind off the lake that freezes nose hairs and stunts tree growth. And snows in heaping portions.

  The morgue sits in the basement of Petoskey General Hospital, a beige building that looks like the world’s most unimaginative sand castle. My boss there, aka Dr. Nathan Mobley, aka the medical examiner for Emmet County, was a piece of work. He had pale, blemished skin—imagine a thin layer of cottage cheese and you won’t be far off—and bulky shoulders that did a kind of roly-poly thing when he tottered around on his black cane. Basically, he was like an old, abandoned home creaking on its hinges.

  I had my five-minute interview with Dr. Mobley in his office, where he sat behind a wooden desk about the size of the Titanic. Everything in the office seemed to be at least a hundred years old, including Dr. Mobley’s faded gray suit and the sorry-looking briefcase at the side of his desk. He wheezed into his handkerchief and perused my résumé with narrowed eyes. The whites of them were yellowish, like his hair and his skin and his fingernails. We didn’t have much of a Q-and-A session. He just asked me if I wanted the job (“yes, sir”) and then grumbled about his office being a public trust and its importance to civilized society, or something along those lines.

  After that he led me on a tour of the autopsy room. It had a tile floor with a black drain in the middle—for bodily fluids, I supposed— and was trimmed with low-tech silver gadgetry. As Mobley explained it, my job was simple. I cleaned the dull green tiles and the grout between them. I cleaned the stainless-steel table bolted to the floor, the collection of different-sized bowls, the outsides of the body coolers. I cleaned the large, square windows that looked out onto the hallway and into Dr. Mobley’s office. I cleaned the scale they used to weigh organs, and a bunch of other instruments, including the pair of pruning shears that had been made for hedges but apparently played some useful role in opening a cadaver.

  When the tour ended, Dr. Mobley took me back to his office and explained the filing system. “The chores shouldn’t take that long. Do them three times a week, I don’t care when. If I need you for something particular, I’ll call you in.”

  With that, he sat down again and fixated on a stack of documents lying on his desk. I sensed a conclusion to the interview.

  “Look forward to working with you,” I said.

  I wasn’t really looking forward to that; actually, I’d already decided to try to limit my contact with Dr. Mobley. It was quite easy to do, since he rarely came to work—at least, to his office in the basement. He also worked as a pediatrician on the second floor, but I tried not to think about Dr. Mobley tending to small children.

  Another doctor—Dr. Sutter—kept a set of keys to the morgue. He was the one who let me in when I showed up. It may have been his only actual responsibility. Dr. Sutter had to be eighty years old, and as far as I could tell he spend most of his day doodling on a yellow pad.

  “Ah, young Christopher!” he said with his customary good cheer when I showed up one Saturday in the middle of June. “Can’t let you down there today, they’re busy. Doc Mobley says come back tomorrow if you can. If not, just come around next week.”

  On the one hand, with Dr. Mobley down there, I was more than happy to leave. But the way that Dr. Sutter said he was “busy” got me thinking that there might be an autopsy going on, which I couldn’t miss.

  I nodded, told Dr. Sutter good-bye, and then headed straight down to the morgue.

  Don’t get me wrong. I’m no freak. Like I said, I had a vocational interest in seeing an autopsy. Plus, I was five weeks into the job and hadn’t seen as much as a kidney stone—it was hard not to be a little jazzed.

  The door leading to the morgue has frosted glass on top that says MEDICAL EXAMINER in black letters. Normally it’s dark, but a yellow light was glowing against the window. It was cold in the basement, and the doorknob chilled my hand. Muffled sounds came from inside. A symphony of nerves started playing along my spine.

  Act casual, I told myself. You’re just coming over to do y
our job. Whistle if you need to. I waited for my breath to slow and turned the knob.

  Dr. Mobley and a police officer stood in the autopsy room with their backs to me, looming over a body laid out on the stainless-steel table. A body bag lay on the floor, crumpled and looking like it might blow away any minute. I stood in the hallway, unnoticed, watching through the glass partition.

  I couldn’t see Mitch Blaylock very well. I didn’t know his name then, of course. He was just the unlucky guy who phoned in dead that morning and whose body had ended up in the Office of the Medical Examiner of Emmet County.

  The policeman, though—I recognized him right away. The broad back, the cropped red hair, the cocky way he had his hands on his hips. Sheriff Harmon. I hadn’t seen him since the planetarium incident.

  Dr. Mobley maneuvered a swinging lamp over the body; it threw a gruesome sheen on the man’s waxy skin. I was rooted in place, absorbed by the sight and trying to calm my stomach, when Dr. Mobley looked my way. He clutched his handkerchief to his mouth and uttered something. The sheriff took the cue. He strode out into the hallway and closed the door behind him.

  He had heavy cheeks with dark eyes pressed into them like chocolate chips lost in cookie dough. A smell of sweat, greasy food, and pure animal aggression radiated off the sheriff’s uniform. He eye-balled me and grunted.

  “Doc says you should go on home,” he said.

  Part of me wanted to run, but I was too curious to go away that easy.