The Morgue and Me Read online

  “I left something in the office last week,” I said. “I’ll just grab it and go.”

  “Make it quick,” he said, and I felt his eyes linger on me as I walked down the hall.

  When I got to the office and looked back in through the window, the sheriff had returned to Dr. Mobley’s side, their attention fixed on the body. The doctor pointed to something on the dead man’s chest. The sheriff was blocking my view, but I had lost my enthusiasm for the project. What was I going to see, really? It wasn’t like they had his chest cracked open or anything good like that.

  Just get going before they kick you out.

  I figured I’d just bang around the desk a little, pretend to do a search, and then scamper out. I lifted a few papers off the desk and then opened the top drawer with the pens and scissors and Dr. Mobley’s nasal spray. The desk had large drawers on the sides, which I knew that Dr. Mobley never used.

  I pulled one open, all ready to shut it again, when a glinting light caught my eye. It came from the clasp on Dr. Mobley’s briefcase, which wobbled inside the drawer when I pulled it out. The briefcase shouldn’t have been there—Dr. Mobley always kept it at the side of his desk, out in the open. It had been in that spot every time I came in, a little eyesore of cracked brown leather with Mobley’s initials branded into the side: NHM.

  It was a doctor’s bag, the kind that pries open at the top. The clasp on the briefcase wasn’t sealed, and the mouth of it was open wide enough for me to see an envelope lying at the bottom.

  I checked the window. Dr. Mobley and Sheriff Harmon talked casually across the dead body. Quickly, I knelt down out of view.

  The dull sounds of their conversation drifted in as I considered the envelope. Why would he hide his briefcase in the drawer? And what was that rectangular shape inside the envelope? The air in the office turned hot and close.

  The sheriff is going to check on you in a minute. Get this over with.

  The envelope crinkled against my fingers when I pulled it out. The flap, unsealed, pulled away easily. The mass inside was a few inches thick.

  There were three stacks of bills bound in coarse brown paper bands.

  They were hundreds.

  2

  I counted the first stack as fast as I could, kneeling out of view, wetting my thumb four times before making it through the fifty bills. That was $5,000. The other stacks were the same size—another $10,000.

  Fifteen thousand dollars in cash.

  It was the kind of money you don’t see unless it’s written on an oversized check, with maybe some showgirls standing in the wings. But it was right there. In my hands. Something about this was wrong, but I had no time to wrap my mind around it because footsteps were coming down the hall.

  I stuffed the cash back in the envelope, pitched it into the bag, and shut the drawer. Sweat broke across my forehead as I dove over to the sofa, where I had just lifted a cushion and assumed a puzzled face when the sheriff strode into the office.

  “What’d you lose—loose change?”

  “Ha! No, my library card.” I threw the cushion back and lifted the next one. “Thought it might have slipped under the cushions when I was filing the other day.”

  “Come back later, when the doctor isn’t so busy.”

  My heart jackhammered against my ribs as the sheriff’s tiny dark eyes bored into me. They looked disturbed, like I was a joke he wasn’t getting. “Oh sure,” I said. “Sure. It’s probably in my bedroom or some—”

  “You’re the Newell kid,” the sheriff said suddenly. His head leaned and his eyes burned hot with memory. The memory of me, the kid with the professor parents who got off the hook that night at the planetarium.

  “Uh, yeah. I guess you remember we’ve actually met. Under slightly less pleasant circumstances. Not that an autopsy is a pleasant—”

  “Just come back later.”

  “Righto,” I said, and took off.

  I drove home in a haze. Past the cutesy stores on Taylor Road, the library, the freaky cemetery at Hart Square with weathered tomb-stones slanting from the ground like an old man’s teeth. I didn’t register any of it until I reached the end of our driveway and returned from the fog.

  I looked up and cringed.

  On our front porch, my father posed in an awkward stance: shirtless, eyes closed, thin arms spread-eagled. His bony legs quivered as he tilted himself into a human Leaning Tower of Pisa. Daniel, my precocious oddball of a ten-year-old brother, sat cross-legged on a wool blanket with his hands on his knees. Music floated from Daniel’s stereo, playing a tune that might have been called “Triumph of the Miniature Wind Instruments.”

  This disturbing activity had been going on for a month or two. My dad and Daniel called it “Yoga Night.”

  I checked up and down Admiral Street for witnesses, but thankfully it was empty.

  “Dancer’s Pose,” Daniel called with crisp, Buddha-like command.

  My dad launched into a complicated reorganization of his body parts. The pose should have been called Irregular Pretzel. “How was work?” he said with faltering breath.

  “Fine.” This wasn’t the time to bring up the money—not on the street, in the middle of Dancer’s Pose.

  My dad got himself balanced. Daniel returned his hands to his knees. Their serenity unnerved me.

  We ate on the screened back porch, where Daniel set the table every night with an absurd, military precision. He’s quite a nefarious character, but my parents have no idea because he does such a good job of playing the perfect child. He sat ramrod straight, looking at pictures on my camera with his usual frown.

  It’s a nice camera, a Nikon D50 SLR, which Daniel likes to swipe from my bedroom so he can flip through the pictures on the back screen, criticizing my technique. Lately I’ve been trying to take artistic shots of Lake Michigan at night. Sounds easy, but it’s not. Daniel shook his head, thoroughly disappointed. His antics would have bothered me more just then if I wasn’t busy trying to figure out why Dr. Mobley would have $15,000 cash lying around his office. I hadn’t come up with anything yet, except the notion that I should probably tell my parents about it.

  I’d have to minimize the snooping-into-Dr.-Mobley’s-things element, although that did play a sizable role. My mom passed around some bok choy while I considered how to finesse the issue.

  “More gloom and doom,” Daniel said, displaying the screen to my parents, who hummed their agreement.

  “They’re a work in progress,” I said.

  My mom took the camera from Daniel and stuck it on a side table, next to a brochure about Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, where she and my dad were going on vacation. They were leaving Daniel and me alone, together, for the first time.

  “Why don’t you ever take a picture during the day?” Daniel said.

  “I like night scenes.”

  Daniel took a dainty sip of milk. “Yeah, and I like to be able to tell what I’m looking at.”

  “Now, Christopher,” my mom interjected, “your father is going to talk to you this evening about what you’ll have to do while we’re gone. Right, dear?”

  “Sure, we’ll talk it over. He can handle it.” My dad shot Daniel a smile. “What I want to know is, who’s going to look after whom?”

  “I’m looking after myself,” Daniel said, happily forking a green bean into his face. “I don’t know about him.” My parents broke into distressingly hearty guffaws at that, until finally it died down and my dad asked me again about my day at the morgue.

  “Yeah, well—”

  “Do we have to talk about dead people while we’re eating?” Daniel said.

  “Actually, they did have a body in there today.”

  Daniel shivered. “Gross. Did you touch it?”

  “Oh!” my mom said before I could get back on track. “Before I forget. You’ll never guess who won the Regents Scholarship this year.”

  She was looking at me in a meaningful way, and I knew precisely the meaning behind that look.

  “Julia
Spencer,” I said.

  “How did you know? Have you two been in touch? Do you see her?”

  My blood rose with each of her breathless questions.

  “No, we don’t talk, Mom. And we won’t be in touch the next time you ask, either.”

  “That’s a depressing thing to say,” my dad said.

  “He works with corpses,” Daniel reminded the table.

  “Well,” my mom said, “I thought you might be interested or, God forbid, happy for Julia doing so well. And the two of you, winning the same scholarship . . .” She trailed off in sorrow over my obtuseness.

  The Spencers used to live next door to us. Julia is one grade below me, and we were friends until my junior year. And then, abruptly, we weren’t. My mom had no idea what had happened between us, which is why she still brought Julia up all the time.

  “What?” she said, when she caught me rolling my eyes.

  My dad reached an arm across to her. “Dear, the referenda on Miss Spencer . . .”

  “Couldn’t have said it better myself, Dad.”

  My mom placed her napkin on her lap. “It wasn’t anything like that. It’s just that, well, at the very least you’re going to have to see her at the scholarship ceremony. After that, I won’t mention her name in your presence, if that’s what you want.”

  She sighed and focused on her beets.

  I couldn’t concentrate on anything for the rest of dinner—anything, that is, besides how it had felt to walk away from Julia’s locker a year and a half ago. I’d thought about that a lot. I’d constructed a vivid memory full of colors (the green Homecoming banner), sounds (“Christopher, please . . .”), and smells (kiwi lip gloss), but it happened so long ago I couldn’t say how much of it was real anymore.

  The sting was real, I knew that much.

  I felt it all over again and never managed to bring up Dr. Mobley.

  The next day, the Courier ran the story on the bottom half of page A7, between the Word Jumble and an advertisement for Dirty Dan’s Landscaping and Snow Removal. I don’t normally read past the front page, but I wanted to see if the morgue’s latest guest had made the paper. He had, but it wasn’t much of a story:

  LOCAL MAN EXPIRES IN MOTEL

  Art Bradford, Senior Reporter

  Mitchell Blaylock, 26, was found dead yesterday morning at approximately 2:30 a.m. in the Lighthouse Motel on Route 14.

  Blaylock attended Petoskey High School, where he played safety for the 2001 Falcon football team. He later spent three years with the Oscoda Cadets of the semi-professional Erie League.

  Sheriff Dale Harmon reported that the cause of death is unknown.

  At least I knew the guy’s name, Mitchell Blaylock.

  I tore the article from the paper and called my best friend, Mike Maske.

  Mike lives in a wooded area at the edge of town, in a house that’s basically a glass rectangle and gets photographed for design magazines about every other week. His parents are rich, hot tempered, and about to get divorced. On the rare occasion they’re home, Mike’s usually eager to escape. He bounded out as soon as I pulled up behind his mom’s silver Porsche Boxster.

  He was wearing his customary summer garb: Tevas, long-sleeved T-shirt, and a pair of glimmering basketball shorts. His aviator sunglasses reflected the sun as he drank from a cup with pink sludge in it. His latest concoction.

  “Calling it Strawberry Fields,” Mike said as he folded his lanky body into the passenger seat. “Wanna taste?”

  I declined. Mike’s been on a smoothie kick lately. He wants to start a chain of smoothie stores with drinks named after popular songs. It’s about the hundredth business idea he’s had since we bonded over his plan to sell digital baseball cards on the Internet back in sixth grade. I thought for sure he’d be Forbes’s Businessman of the Year, but the only scheme he’s followed through on is becoming a small-time bookie for college students at NWMU, which, according to Mike, he does pretty well at.

  Anyway, I figured Mike had learned a thing or two about keeping cash from watchful eyes, so I was eager to get his take on Dr. Mobley’s hidden stash.

  I gave him the basics as we drove toward the harbor. They have food stands and pleasure boats down by the docks there. If you’re lucky, maybe a few girls in bikinis. It’s sort of our default destination, but I had something else in mind.

  Mike had his head back and his knees up on the dash—more interested, it seemed, in savoring the subtle flavors of Strawberry Fields than Dr. Mobley’s $15,000. I had to prod him when I finished: “So, c’mon, what do you think?”

  “I guess it’s weird,” Mike said lazily, “but I don’t know.”

  “Help me think. Why would anybody carry around so much money? Maybe you’d take a big wad of cash to an auction?”

  “An auction? For what? Farm equipment?” Mike shook his head, downed his drink, and tossed the cup into the backseat (which, to be fair, has a kitchen-sink aura of untidiness). “The guy had a bunch of cash; we’ll never know why. Mysteries of the universe, man, they’re all around us. Go with it.”

  It was time to pull out my big gun—the theory I’d hit on that morning. “All right, listen to this. He’s not just the medical examiner, he’s a pediatrician, too. I think he’s selling Ritalin or something. Maybe Xanax. Illegal prescriptions, you know. It’s big business.”

  “I could see that,” Mike said. “A fine conspiracy theory you’ve got there. Now drive on, Jeeves.” He tilted his seat back, catching rays, his hair floating in the wind.

  I should have expected as much. Mike thought I read too many spy novels. Last year, he said more girls would be into me if I “got out of my head” every once in a while. I asked him if he got his psychological insights from dating shows. No, he’d said, Julia Spencer. It’s the only time I’ve ever wanted to punch him.

  Mike had fallen half-asleep by the time I parked the car. We were across the street from the hospital parking lot. The dashboard clock said 11:55—about the time that Dr. Mobley left work on Mondays.

  Mike’s head swiveled in confusion as he put his seat upright.

  “Uhhhh, what the hell are we doing here?”

  “We’re going to tail him.”

  3

  Dr. Mobley didn’t leave until 12:20.

  It was just a theory, but I figured that if we followed him around for a bit, we might find something out about his (hypothetical) secret life that somehow involved carrying large amounts of cash. I have to give Mike credit—he was being pretty cool about going along with my plan.

  “Hallelujah,” he said when Dr. Mobley’s rusted red Buick finally turned out of the exit. I pulled onto Mercury Drive, a few hundred yards in back of Dr. Mobley’s beater.

  A mile down, Dr. Mobley turned in to a strip mall and headed for Dino’s, a pricey restaurant where parents take their NWMU-student kids when they come up to visit.

  I found a spot in the back of the lot. “Slink down,” I told Mike, but we didn’t need to bother—Dr. Mobley was oblivious. He took forever to dock his boat in a handicapped spot, and then another half hour to teeter inside. He almost lost his balance on the way; he had to steady himself on a motorcycle parked near the entrance.

  It was a red racing-style motorcycle, and for a second I thought Dr. Mobley and the bike were going to topple over together. Finally, he made it up the steps, and the restaurant door closed behind him.

  Within two minutes Mike was shifting about in his seat. He was like the rookie cop in a bad stakeout flick. That would make me the wizened professional investigator—the one who always explains to the young buck that police work isn’t as glamorous as they make out in the academy. I’d hand him a coffee, maybe some pistachios, and tell him to settle in for a long night. The steam from my cup would shroud my face as I kept watch, brooding on my marriage that’d been wrenched apart by long hours on the job. My marriage to a girl named Julia—

  “Dude, it’s going to take that guy all day to eat,” Mike said. “I mean, this is a blast and everythi
ng, but . . . oh no.”

  His eyes had snagged on something in front of a clothing store. An athletic girl held blue shopping bags in her hands like barbells, scowling into the sun. Her thick blonde hair swished as she scanned for her car . . . and found us instead.

  “Ohhh no,” I said.

  Dana Ruby. The mayor’s daughter and, more importantly, Mike’s on-and-off girlfriend. Mike takes most of life in stride, but the two of them made a volatile mix. A lot of people at Petoskey High claimed to hate her, but they would’ve died to be friends with her. It was something about her ego—magnetic, repulsive, and roughly the size of Lake Michigan.

  She was prancing toward us like a runway model: high knees and wounded lips and “dare me” eyes. She had the looks to pull it off.

  “So, uhhh, there’s something I didn’t tell you,” Mike said.

  “You’re back together?”

  By then she was almost to the Escort, spreading her bag-laden hands in a wtf? kind of way. She leaned inside the car and gave Mike a Euro-peck.

  “Hey, Newell.” She was the only one in the world who called me by my last name. “So, what might you boys be doing? There’s something kinda pervy about two guys just sitting in a car together in the middle of the day, you know. Just FYI.”

  I thought we were going to have to explain ourselves, but then her face brightened with a thought. “Hey, did you tell him about my party? Newell, you’re totally invited.”

  “Umm, no, not yet,” Mike said, and she slapped the side of his head. It was playful, but it brought back a memory. I had watched her play volleyball once, and when she spiked the ball, there was something scary about it. I remember thinking: anger issues.

  Mike glanced at me. “Yeah, he’ll come.”

  “Righto. I’m there.” I’m not the biggest fan of parties, but Mike is unusually vulnerable when it comes to all Dana-related matters, so I couldn’t let him down.