The Morgue and Me Read online

  “No, Christopher. Just . . . no.” That’s an exact quote: the words are seared into my head.

  Turns out, she was already going with some knob from the soccer team. I’d been imagining things. I’d avoided her ever since.

  I followed her to the foyer, where the Regent with the red hair was standing by himself, looking forlorn. Apparently he had been ditched for good.

  “So look,” Julia said. “I’ve wanted to ask you . . .” She trailed off, struggling with something, and I wasn’t about to throw her a line. “How come you never called me? You know, back then.”

  It was a ridiculous question, really. Julia had left me a few messages after the Homecoming debacle, saying she hoped that we could still hang out and blah, blah, something, something. It was nice of her, I guess, like it was nice of the United States to give Japan aid after we dropped the bomb on them. But I had no desire to soak in my own humiliation—of course I didn’t call.

  “Well . . . ?” she said.

  Was she serious? Well, see, you were the only girl I’d ever liked, and then you rejected me, and my soul has been in a state of repair ever since. I probably should have said that—ask a stupid question and all—but I didn’t.

  Maybe I just wanted to avoid the conversation, but my mind went to Mitch Blaylock. Now that I’d had to face Julia, I might as well talk to Tim. He was the only policeman I could trust. The one person who might help me get to the bottom of things.

  “So, hey, is your brother here?”

  Her head reared back a little. “Christopher . . . I’m trying to talk to you.”

  “Yeah, right, but I need to ask Tim something.”

  Julia pinned a curl behind her ear, like she was frustrated but being all patient about it. I didn’t get it: I was the one who’d been frustrated.

  We didn’t get any further, because a buzzing came through the windows. The lonely man with the Brillo-pad hair looked up from his drink for the first time in minutes. A throbbing, mechanical, gargling sound grew until the panes shimmied a little. Just like that, it shut off.

  “Well,” Julia said in a deflated sort of way, “here’s your chance.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She stepped to a window and peeled back the curtain. A guy was getting off a motorcycle in the driveway. “Tim’s here.”

  He was headed for the front door, scrubbing his thick brown hair back to life after it being under his helmet. I’d never seen Tim on a motorcycle before—he must have bought it in the last year.

  “Oh my God.” My voice cracked.

  Julia didn’t hear me. She pulled the door open for her brother.

  Tim bounded inside, bigger than I remembered. “Heya, Christopher Newell! Long time.”

  Heya—his signature greeting. I’d forgotten about that. He had big arms, and when he clapped me on the back I felt it all the way through my chest.

  Then he was giving Julia a hug. I stood there awkwardly, forcing myself to smile. Forcing myself to make eye contact and act as normal as possible.

  “Hey—are you all right?” Tim said.

  He and Julia were inspecting me. I guess they saw it on my face.

  “Oh, sure.” Keep your voice level, I told myself.

  Keep your eyes on them.

  Don’t look at the motorcycle.

  Tim’s motorcycle: it was a red, racing-style job.

  The exact same one from Dr. Mobley’s lunch.

  6

  In the backyard, paper lanterns glowed against the underside of the white tent. The NWMU orchestra played (poorly), and eventually the mayor took the platform. During his speech, the last three scholarship winners—moi included—had to stand behind him looking stupid. Daniel made faces at me the whole time. Finally the mayor stopped talking and awarded Julia her framed certificate. I have the exact same one; it’s under my bed. Everybody cheered. Julia turned bright red.

  The whole evening, the glamorous blonde sat at the head table with a stony look on her face. Tim was out there, too, but I tried not to look at him. My mind was racing to conclusions. Conclusions like: Tim and Dr. Mobley were eating lunch together, so Tim knew all about Mitch Blaylock, so he probably did the guy in. I was halfway tempted to call him a murderer and perform a citizen’s arrest on the spot.

  By the time the caterers swept the dessert plates away, it was almost dark. We walked over the grass to our car, and my parents shouted good-byes to friends through the thickening twilight. My mom linked her arm in mine and asked me in her best casual voice what Julia and I had talked about. “Our favorite sexual positions,” I said.

  My mom said she got the point. She chuckled and put her arm around me. It would have been a nice kind of moment if my mind wasn’t going crazy thinking about that motorcycle, and the morgue, and the holes in Mitch Blaylock’s body.

  I needed to bounce this off someone. I needed to find out more.

  I needed to call Mike.

  I did it the instant we got home, and our conversation was pretty disappointing.

  “Even if they were at the restaurant together, which you don’t even know, it doesn’t mean anything.” Mike let out a breath on the end of the line, like he had just collapsed onto his bed, exhausted by another one of my conspiracy theories.

  I wanted to write it off, too—Tim had been my hero—but I couldn’t. I was pacing my room semifrantically just to release some energy. “Come on, Mike. It’s weird. I don’t want to think that Tim killed anybody, but this whole thing is bizarre. And the police are obviously in on it.”

  “Umm, not to boge your high, but it’s not really that obvious to me. And think of it this way: what if it is Tim? Do you really want to find that out?”

  “Somebody got murdered, Mike.”

  “Says you.”

  “If you saw these pictures I took of him, you’d be saying it, too.”

  There was a background noise on Mike’s line. He laughed awkwardly and put the phone close to his mouth, talking low. “So look, Dana’s hanging out tonight.”

  “Oh, she’s there now?”

  “Yeah, just walked in,” he said, and then Dana must have grabbed the phone from him. Her voice came loud through the line—“What up, Newell?”—and then it was Mike again, laughing in my ear.

  “Guess I’ll leave you to it,” I said.

  He was going to be no use.

  The next morning, I woke up to a thwack-thwack-thwacking sound from outside my window.

  A week ago, Daniel and my dad had started making an elaborate bird feeder. They’re always doing stuff like that, for the sheer enjoyment of educating themselves in random and vaguely useless disciplines: in this case, carpentry and bird-watching. They planned to log the birds who ate at the feeder after they installed it on the birch tree. I gave up trying to ignore Daniel’s precision hammering and rolled out of bed.

  Mitch Blaylock must have been gnawing at me in my dreams, because I was thinking of him the minute I got up. Before I even showered, I stuck my memory card in my laptop for a look at the pictures. I had just brought them up on the screen when I heard a pattering in the hall.

  “Christopher?”

  “Just a sec, Mom, getting dressed.”

  Good God. In a word, the pictures were sickening. It struck me that I had taken an undue number of close-ups of the bullet wounds against Mitch Blaylock’s pale skin. If my parents happened to waltz in and see them, I would be wearing a straitjacket within the hour.

  “You had a phone call this morning,” my mom called through the door. “From Julia Spencer!” A dramatic silence. “I bet you could still get her at home!”

  “Mmmmm . . . okay . . . thanks.” I was madly shutting down screens.

  I could sense my mom biting her tongue, and then I heard her feet on the stairs. I checked about fifty times to make sure I hadn’t saved the picture files to my computer and stuck the card safely back in my camera.

  My mom was unloading sacks of organic produce when I got downstairs. The Courier had a huge headline abo
ut some judge who’d gotten in trouble for accepting bribes. I checked through the paper for stories by Art Bradford, but no dice. I flopped it down, helped unload some kale and bags of unidentifiable grains that didn’t look entirely edible, and considered my duty done. It was time to get going.

  “And where are you off to?” my mom said.

  I had my camera strapped around my shoulder—after looking at those pics, I would have secured it with a deadbolt if that were physically possible—so I just said the first thing that came to mind. “Thought I’d take some pictures downtown.”

  A distant cheer went up in the backyard, which no doubt signaled completion of the finest bird feeder northern Michigan would ever know.

  “See ya,” I said, and gave my mom a peck on the cheek.

  As I left, I knew it was killing her not to mention that I hadn’t called Julia back.

  Mitch Blaylock died here, I thought when I parked the Escort at the Lighthouse Motel. It was 10:53 by the dashboard clock, and the morning light didn’t flatter the place. Before me, the motel rooms framed an outdoor pool in a U shape. The doors were painted robin’s-egg blue; the sun hit them head-on, revealing grimy streaks of dirt. A rust-stained waterslide drooled into the pool, where leaves gathered in the gutters. A single jet on the waterslide sent a wayward arc of water throbbing onto the deck, a sad little fountain of hope.

  The hotel office stood at one end of the U. A man in a wife-beater and cutoff shorts held a garden hose in one hand. He had tree-trunk legs, and he was drenching flowers at the base of a sign. It flashed the word Vacancy over and over. The man didn’t seem to care about me one way or the other. He went to the side of the building, turned a squeaky knob, and left the hose lying in the grass when he returned to the office.

  I wasn’t sure what I was doing there. Mike was right, I wasn’t eager to discover that Tim Spencer had killed Mitch Blaylock. But (a) maybe Tim didn’t, and (b) I couldn’t leave it alone anyway. They tell us to follow our dreams, and my dream was to catch people doing bad things. This was a golden opportunity.

  The Lighthouse Motel has been around forever, but I’d never inspected it up close. It would have fit perfectly into a spy novel: The Lighthouse Motel sat on a lazy bend in Route 14, the main artery into Petoskey. Citizens found it an unsightly building, but mostly they had forgotten it, like a stain on a kitchen counter not quite ugly enough to bother eradicating. After a while they just stopped seeing it. A man had been murdered in that motel—

  Someone was knocking on my window. Loudly.

  It was the insanely hot woman from the Courier, which made me wonder if maybe I was still fantasizing. Or maybe, better, she was stalking me. I rolled down the window to find out.

  “You again,” she said. “You’re popping up all over.”

  “Yeah, me again. Hi.”

  “So listen . . .” She stopped to fish for something in her bag and came up with the memo I had left for Art Bradford, Senior Reporter. Apparently, she had decided to intercept it. Hmm. Her eyes found what she needed and looked back at me. “. . . Chris. We need to talk.”

  I almost said something. I make everyone call me Christopher. It fits the savvy NSA operative I hope to be someday. “Chris” feels neutered, like the professors who ride bikes around campus with straps around their pant legs. But something about the woman turned me to jelly, and I made my first-ever exception to the name rule.

  “Umm, okay. About what?”

  “What do you think? C’mon, we’re going to lunch.” She walked over to her car, not bothering to check if I was following her. On the way, she pulled out a cell phone and tossed the gum she’d been smacking into some bushes.

  The car was a black Trans Am. It had a T-top roof and a gold falcon painted on the hood.

  It fit her perfectly.

  Five minutes later, I still didn’t know her name. She had simultaneously lit a cigarette and dialed on her cell before we left the Lighthouse parking lot, precluding any introductions. Without checking for traffic, she raced out of the lot and headed toward town on a stretch of Route 14 that she treated like the autobahn. The Trans Am’s hood started rumbling when the needle hit seventy. She paid no mind to that, or to the dark hair swirling across her aviator sunglasses. I had no idea where she was taking us, and I didn’t care.

  Her face was a cross between a china doll’s and a vamp’s. The china doll was in her sapphire eyes and her porcelain cheeks. The vamp was in everything else. She gripped the steering wheel with one hand set at twelve o’clock, oozing confidence. She had the fishnet hose on. I was never going to associate those things with the chunky Goth chicks from Petoskey High again.

  I pegged her at twenty-six, but I was hoping she was younger. She had to yell over the wind to be heard on the phone. From what I gathered, she was calling the Detroit News, and she kept getting transferred from one person who said they didn’t have her résumé to a second person who said the first one had it. With each new transfer, she slammed the steering wheel and cursed.

  It felt weirdly intimate to be in the car as she went about her daily business, which from my brief experience seemed to involve a fair amount of drama and shouting matches. Not that I minded. I was nervous being so close to her, though. A cold sweat was spreading from my palms to my chest to my forehead, when I noticed the laws of inertia thrusting my body forward at a distressingly powerful rate. The vamp had angled off the road and jammed on the brakes. I wasn’t wearing a seat belt, and I had to brace myself against the dashboard. The Trans Am skidded for fifteen yards across a dirt parking lot, into one of the four spaces provided for customers of Ray’s Beef Burgers.

  Dead center. Very cool.

  I was still clinging to the dash with white knuckles when she said, “Screw this,” and ended her call.

  “Sorry about that,” she said. “That’s rude as hell, I know, talking on the phone with you right there. Anyway . . . Tina McIntyre. Let’s get some grub. I know it’s early, but I’m starved.” And then she grabbed a bag from the backseat and was out of the car.

  Inside Ray’s, she plunked down in a booth with her back against the wall and her spiked-heel boots up on the plastic.

  “So, when’s your birthday, Chris?” she said.

  “Uh . . . September twenty-fourth.”

  “Libra. Hmm. Very nice.” She pointed to herself. “Taurus, like you couldn’t tell.”

  We weren’t the only ones in the place, but it was close. In a far booth, two old men drank coffee and shot bull with the cashier. When a waitress came, her eyes darted between us as if to confirm the age difference and speculate as to the nature of our liaison.

  Tina ordered two house specials (beef burgers) and an outrageous amount of other stuff. Luckily I had left the house without breakfast that morning, so I joined in. The waitress gave us a final questioning look and scurried away on toothpick legs.

  A crusted ketchup dispenser and two paper-thin napkins sat on the speckled table. Tina reached into her bag. It was black with a white skull and crossbones painted on its side. Her hand emerged holding a file folder with newspaper clippings sticking out from the edges. She blew some hair away from her face, took off her sunglasses, and gave me the once-over.

  “So tell me why you’re interested in Mitch Blaylock,” she said.

  “Oh, I was just curious.”

  “You were just curious?”

  I hadn’t decided on how much to tell her, and I may have been a little flustered by all the hotness. Taking it slow seemed like the right approach. Somewhere, raw hamburger sizzled against the grill.

  “Well, I’m a sports fan and the article said he played professional football, so, well, I don’t know . . .”

  She was twirling her sunglasses on the table, staring at me with bored eyes.

  “How about this? I’ll pay for your lunch if you stop being an asshole.”

  “An asshole?” So no, I wasn’t sweeping her off her feet.

  “Don’t take it personal or anything. I’m just saying, the
guy played semi-pro football. That’s like Little League, only you get minimum wage and a kegger after the games. It’s nothing special. You’re lying.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” I said, trying to manage the butterflies in my stomach. The whole encounter had been such a whirlwind that it didn’t fully hit me until that second that Tina might have some useful information about Mitch’s murder.

  “You know something about him,” I said.

  She shrugged, noncommittal, as the waitress labored over with our food. I felt slightly emasculated as she plunked a cherry Coke, a vanilla milk shake, and most of everything else in front of Tina. The waitress left and Tina munched her chili fries, staring out the window.

  “This was probably a mistake,” she said, and I was filled with an intense panic that I would never see her again.

  It was time to dive in. I breathed deep. “Okay, you’re right. I know something about Mitch, too, and you’re gonna want to hear it. But you’ve got to be straight with me. We need to pool our information if we’re going to get anywhere.” She was chewing her burger at the moment, so I added, as definitively as possible, “You go first.”

  I actually sounded pretty tough. It was the most assertive speech I’d ever given, and I’d delivered it to the most attractive woman on the planet. I thought I might puke.

  Tina leaned back against the booth, produced a Marlboro Red from her pocket, and struck her lighter.

  “You don’t mind, right?” Smoke came floating out with her words.

  “Uh, no.”

  “Forgot how crappy this food is.” She tapped at the foil ashtray and contemplated me for a long moment.

  “Something tells me you’re all right,” she said.

  I let the smile bubble up to my face and told her to fire away.

  “Okay, all I know is, that Mitch Blaylock story should have been mine. I answered the call about it, from the sheriff himself. That’s kind of unusual.” My heart did a little up-tick at her mention of the sheriff. I was clinging to the hope that he was more involved than Tim Spencer, and this was good news: he definitely knew about the body before it ended up in the morgue. “The sheriff asked for Art specifically. Art’s been at the paper longer than dirt, and the two of them are pretty tight.”