Just Kill Me (10 page)

The woman with the dog gets up and takes it outside to see what happens. The dog hops through the fence, trots right over to the spot where Rick said the bodies fell, and poops.

“Well, there you have it,” says Rick. “It scared the shit out of the dog.”

We all have a good laugh, the dog runs straight back to the woman, and the tour goes on.

The tips are good, and Rick and Cyn cut me in, even though I barely did anything.

“Total props for that Cruella joke,” says Rick. “That was really thinking on your feet.”

“I was screwing up the story before,” I say. “I don't even know what I would have done if she hadn't shown up.”

“No worries. You proved you can handle stuff as it comes up, and that's huge. And if we get any reviews from tonight they'll be good. So you're in the clear.”

I take a deep breath and resolve not to check Yelp or whatever. I never read reviews of the fan fic I post online. I did once, and it took me weeks to get over the bad comments. I hadn't
stopped to think that I could get reviews of tours, too. But I don't have to read them, I guess.

“Hey,” says Cyn. “Weird night to have all that psychic-imprint stuff come up, huh?”

“I know, right?” says Rick. “It's like there's something in the air. Cosmic.”

They both look right at me, grinning like they're about to let me through a door into a surprise party.

“What's up?” I ask.

“Your initiation,” says Cyn. “One. Of. Us. One. Of. Us.”

Rick switches to a more serious tone. “Megan, do you support assisted suicide for chronic patients?”

I nod. “Of course.”

“All right,” he says. “Let's head up to the north side, then. We're gonna see if we can create our own psychic imprint, and you get to help.”

Y
ou, uh, aren't going to kill me, right?” I ask.

Rick laughs. “Nah,” he says. “You're not an elderly chronic patient. People would ask questions if you died. Too much trouble, besides the ethical stuff.”

“They'd probably assume Zoey did it, though,” says Cyn, as she loops the bus around onto Dearborn Street and heads north. “Tell her about the brain punch, Ricardo.”

“Right,” Rick says. “The brain punch.”

“Brain punch?” I ask.

“Brain punch. It's a Marjorie Kay Stone thing.”

“Ah.”

“Did you ever stop to wonder why we knew so much about her and her house?” asks Cyn.

“Not really. I guess I figured, you know, small town. Everyone knows everyone?”

“Magwitch Park isn't that small,” says Cyn.

“We were kind of her slaves for a while,” says Rick. “She
had, like, six thousand handwritten memoir pages, and she hated computers too much to type them herself. After she caught me burying my hamster in her yard, she sort of blackmailed us into doing it for her.”

“Try
ten
thousand pages,” says Cyn.

“Maybe twenty,” says Rick. “Unless it was thirty. Unnumbered, and not in order. There were pages just scattered all over her house. We probably never even found half of them.”

“God, that was hell,” says Cyn. “Pages in every nook and cranny, and that house had thousands of nooks and crannies.”

“Nooks and crannies and psychotic grannies,” Rick says. “Rust and must and cobwebs. Dust and bones and skeletons.”

“She had six of those,” says Cyn. “Skeletons. First time Rick saw them he about peed himself.”

“I did not,” says Rick. “Point is, we had to type the pages into this ancient computer she had. We did find a bunch of consecutive ones about the time when she was hired to find a ghost that could be in a movie, and in the middle of them she talked about how someone taught her that most of what people call ghosts are just ‘psychic imprints' from people who died in just a certain way, and in just the right frame of mind.”

“It's all to do with dying super quick when you don't quite have time to react to it,” says Cyn. “So the reaction is sort of cut off and hangs in the air. It's all scientific, not supernatural.”

“I guess that sounds logical,” I say.

“You don't even have to kill them, necessarily,” says Rick.
“Like Highball the dog didn't die, but he still left something behind.”

“Only that apparently didn't work,” I say.

“It might have worked at the time,” says Rick. “It's just long gone now. Those imprints, or whatever you call them, don't last forever. Couple years, tops. Eventually they dissipate into the environment. That's just the basic laws of thermodynamics.”

“Listen to him, talking like he knows anything about the laws of thermodynamics,” Cyn teases.

“I do too,” he insists. “And if Highball had been shot, he might have left some stronger imprint that would have lasted longer. Same if it was a little girl—they're biologically more likely to leave an imprint behind, which is part of why every fucking haunted spot in the world is supposed to have a ghostly little girl floating around.”

“Gun shots and baseball bats to the head will usually do the trick, if the victim is in the right frame of mind,” Cyn says, “but there's this technique Marjorie called ‘a punch in the brain.' It replicates the effect without the mess. It's a really quick operation. Painless.”

“And no one's gonna suspect foul play,” says Rick. “Not that this is foul, exactly.”

I nod along, not sure if they're serious or what. Like, they're talking about how to make someone into a ghost in the same kind of tone you'd use to tell someone how to make a Denver omelette.

It's probably a hazing prank.

I try to play it cool and set my face into a smirk that I hope makes it look like I'm on to them, but playing along.

“Point is,” says Cyn, “if you kill a person just right, you can get them to leave something behind, and people might pick up on it and perceive it as a ghost. And if we're going to beat Edward Tweed out, or even stay in business, we've got to get more ghost sightings.”

“And you know I hate making stuff up or lying,” says Rick, “but these imprints are close enough that I won't feel bad if people see one in Lincoln Park and think it's a ghost from City Cemetery or something. So tonight we're going to punch someone in the brain.”

“Mrs. Gunderson, down at the nursing home,” Cyn adds. “That poor old woman. Her whole family's gone. All her friends are gone. She's got nerve problems, so she can't even wipe her own ass anymore, and she's never gotten used to needing help with it, like most of them have.”

“You know how she prayed to die at dinner? She does that at every meal,” says Rick. “Breaks your freaking heart. So we're gonna help, and she is super excited.”

I nod and freeze my lips in a sort of half-smirk, still trying to look like I'm just playing along. We're on Lake Shore Drive now, and the waves are coming in so hard and strong that Lake Michigan looks like the ocean. There was a hurricane on the east coast, and we're getting the tail winds.

Honestly, it wouldn't bother me that much if they were going to help Mrs. Gunderson slip quietly and painlessly out of the world. She's old and decrepit and sad. She has some chronic illness, though I'm not sure which one, and seems to want it all to be over with. I've heard Mom talk about people like this that she meets to plan final arrangements with, people who are just holding on because their family won't let them go, or because the doctors want to keep billing someone for taking care of them. People who are already dead, really, but still breathing.

Cyn pulls the bus off of Lake Shore Drive and into the north side of the city, past playgrounds and townhouses and trendy restaurants, while I try to figure out what to do and how I should be responding. I worry a little that if this is a prank and I say that it sounds like a good idea out loud, I'll fuck everything up. Maybe they'll think I'm a sociopath. Maybe they'll even call the cops.

I try to look busy. I take out my phone and start looking up words for “kill” and “dead” in the
OED
.

“You know,” I say while I scan through synonyms, “I'm pretty sure my dad's old next-door neighbor once left behind a psychic imprint by having really good sex. Have you ever thought of, like, rigging one up like that?”

“Yeah, Rick?” asks Cyn. “Ever thought of giving it to someone so well they left a ghost behind?”

“Well, I might ask you the same question,” says Rick. “But
I think people really have to die to leave anything behind that people might notice on a tour. Sit tight, and we'll all go kill Mrs. Gunderson.”

I am so glad to have the
OED
on my phone so I can look distracted instead of actually having to react to this. Because I'm totally unsure how. Reading off synonyms seems safe. Helpful if they really want me to be helping, but casual and funny enough to seem like I might just be playing along. And, of course, it's a good way to relieve my own stress while I figure out which one of those I'm supposed to be.

“ ‘Kill' is sort of a negative term,” I say. “Maybe we should use something else. ‘Forfere,' ‘swelt,' ‘occise,' or ‘dislive.' There's a bunch of them here.”

“Whatever makes you more comfortable,” says Cyn.

“Here's one,” I say. “ ‘Ghosted.' Synonym for ‘dead' from 1834. We could say we're going to ‘ghost' her.”

“Like, as in a verb?” asks Cyn. “You can't verb the word ‘ghost.' ”

“You can too,” says Rick. “Or you could in 1834.”

“ ‘Fine,” says Cyn. “We're ‘ghosting' her.”

“That does sound better than ‘punching her in the brain,' ” Rick admits.

“Don't the old ladies in
Arsenic and Old Lace
have a word for killing people?” asks Cyn.

“Not really a word,” I said, “but they say it's ‘one of their charities.' ”

“Yeah,” says Cyn. “That's exactly what this is. One of our charities. Ghosting elderly chronic patients.”

As we're pulling into the nursing home, Zoey sends a picture of a cartoon butt.

This could escalate quickly.

The nursing home cafeteria is empty of people now, the tables full of half-finished jigsaw puzzles and stuff. It smells like moldy oranges and Lysol, and the only person there is a forty-something woman sitting behind a reception desk.

“Hi, Cynthia!” says the woman.

“Hey, Shanita,” says Cyn. “We promised Mrs. Gunderson a moonlit stroll in the park tonight.”

“Oh, she'll love that. Just sign in, and you can go get her.”

Rick and Cyn sign in, then tell me to wait in the common room. I park at a table and distract myself by sending a couple of particularly naughty texts to Zoey in response to the butt picture. She doesn't answer right away, so I'm left to stare around at the lifeless room.

After a few minutes Rick and Cyn come back, pushing Mrs. Gunderson in a wheelchair. She looks like it hurts to smile, but she's grinning from ear to ear anyway.

“Mrs. Gunderson,” says Cyn, “This is Megan Henske. Remember her?”

“You don't know what this means to me, young lady,” Mrs. Gunderson says.

“Uh, it's a perfect night,” I say. “There's a big pink moon.”

“Oh, beautiful!”

She claps her hands together, or I imagine she tries to, but her nerve issues make it so that her arms just sort of flop around. I follow as Cyn wheels her out the door and into the night.

Rick gets behind the wheel of the senior home's excursion van, giving Cyn a break from driving. I end up on the floor in the back, next to Mrs. Gunderson's strapped-in wheelchair.

“All right, Mrs. Gunderson,” Cyn says as she buckles up in the front. “Just to be clear, one more time: You know what we're doing, right?”

“Killing me,” says the old lady, cheerful as a toddler at snack time. “I'm going to be a new ghost on your tour!”