The Morgue and Me (14 page)

Abby stayed put in the corner as Mike tested for a pulse. He stayed there too long for good news. My throat closed up and I prayed for Mike—prayed that this wouldn’t mark him forever. Finally his shoulders relaxed and he peeled his fingers away. I could see the relief in his eyes as he trained the gun on Abby again and ran over to me.

“He’s only unconscious,” Mike said as he hurried to untie my hands. It only took a second, and then he gave me the gun. “Hold it on her while I get the rest of this undone.”

We didn’t need to bother. She was cemented in the corner, defeated.

“What were you trying to tell me before he came down here?” I called to Abby. She picked her glazed eyes up from her husband but didn’t say anything. “Look, have you been followed? Is that what this is about?”

Mike had almost finished with the knots. Finally Abby nodded. “They’ve been watching me, in a car. I think they’ve been in the house, too.”

“It isn’t us.”

She didn’t argue. “Wade thought it was. You had that silver car. He figured you came to the bar looking for me again.”

We had come in the Maskes’ Porsche. It did, in fact, look similar to the car that had followed me that night.

“Why are they after you?”

“I don’t know.” She was going at her lip again.

Mike threw the rope aside; I could stand now. “Let’s get going,” he said.

“Listen,” I said to Abby, “I think it has something to do with Mitch Blay—”

And then it struck me.
She cleaned his room. They would have seen each other every day, they would have talked. Mitch had found a girl and taken her out to the Country Club
. . .

That look on her face as she barred the door, the plea in her voice—Abby wasn’t afraid of me, she was afraid of what I might tell her husband.

“You were with him, weren’t you?”

Her eyes shot away to the corners, glassy and lost. She didn’t need to say it.

“You’ve got to tell me what’s going on, quick. Somebody killed him. I’m trying to find out who.”

Mike pulled at me. “C’mon. We don’t know how long he’ll be out.”

“If you don’t tell me what’s going on, they’re just going to keep after you,” I said as firmly as I could.

“How are you going to stop it?”

“Just tell me what they’re after, Abby.”

Her hands fluttered at her side, nervous for a distraction. “I need to get him somewhere. You can die if you’re hit in the head, even really light. I read that someplace.” But she wasn’t checking him over, comforting him, doing any of the things you’d do if you cared about the man knocked to the floor, out cold.

“Yeah, you should take him to the hospital. But tell me what happened the night he died. I know you were at the motel. Tell me quick, then go.”

“I don’t know anything.”

“Yes, you do.” I was sure of it. Mike was hopping toward the stairs, willing me to follow him, and I was almost ready to give up when Abby broke.

“I was just getting on work, night shift,” she said in a rush. “Brian wasn’t there—he’s the manager—so I just went straight to Mitch’s room because that’s when we’d see each other and . . .” Her eyes welled. “I saw he was dead right away and called the police. The sheriff came real quick.”

The sheriff.
Maybe he’d been there already,
I thought.

“Did anyone come with him? A policeman named Spencer, maybe?”

Abby shook her head, giving me a little relief. “No, nobody. The sheriff stopped an SUV on the road, probably making sure they had nothing to do with it. I saw that much from the office. Then he came in and got the master key from me.”

If the sheriff had killed Mitch, and he knew that Abby had seen all the bullet wounds, she would have been a problem for him.

“He asked you what you saw, right?”

“Yeah, a bunch of times. I told him I just saw a guy in his room with blood on him, acted like I didn’t know anything else.”

“Because you didn’t want anyone knowing about you and Mitch?”

“Yeah, that’s right,” Abby said. It made sense—she had probably played it with the sheriff just liked she’d played it with me in the Hideaway. If she had, he wouldn’t have been too worried about her knowing anything.

So who was following her—and why?

“Why are they after you? What do they want?”

She was going to crack, I could feel it. She was going to tell us everything.

But then something rustled against the floor, and we all held our breath as Wade flopped over on his back and reached to his forehead. A welt had blossomed above his temple. He was deep in his own world, unaware of us, but it shattered the confessional mood to pieces.

“Get the hell out of here,” Abby said. “I need to take care of this.”

I wondered if she meant taking him to the hospital or smothering him with a pillow, but we couldn’t stick around to see.

“Let’s go,” Mike said, and I didn’t resist.

We were halfway up the stairs when Abby called to me.

“Hey, kid. What’s your name?”

“Christopher Newell,” I said, and she disappeared right back into the basement.

I trudged out of the house with Mike, heavy-legged and spent from adrenaline. By the time we got outside, I was consumed by the pain at the back of my head and the swelling of my tongue. I couldn’t process what had happened yet. Getting abducted, seeing Mike with the gun—it was too much to absorb just then.

I could only think little thoughts, and one of them kept returning to me as we stumbled out to the car:
Why did Abby Shales ask my name?

It would only take two days for me to find out.

M
ike had parked the Porsche a few houses short of the Shaleses’ place. He drove us away through a mist that speckled the windshield. It cast paint-splatter shadows on Mike’s face as I slumped into the leather seat and watched the sad homes in the Shaleses’ neighborhood pass by. They had tool sheds overflowing with scrap metal and hollowed-out cars sitting pointlessly on front lawns. Tire swings hung from a few trees, but that was about it in the way of fun.

We came to a road with a vaguely familiar name, and Mike turned left, shrugging. It didn’t matter—the thrill of surviving the episode in the basement was too much to care about getting a little lost.

Mike reached across me and slid the gun inside the glove compartment.

“So, umm, where did you get a
gun
, anyway?”

“My dad bought it for protection. Then, of course, my mom didn’t like it in the house.” They were always fighting. He used a hand to clear fog from the windshield. “She said it was freaking her out and put it in the glove box to return, but that was, like, a month ago. I don’t even know how to use it. Guess it worked anyway.”

“Yeah, thank God for that. So what happened in the parking lot?”

Mike smirked. “I was halfway passed out, but then I saw that guy peeling away with you in his passenger seat. I followed him all the way out here. Yeah, we came this way,” he said, and took a sharp left turn onto Mercury Drive.

We weren’t that far from the North Campus, much closer to home than I’d thought.

“Well, you did a stellar job,” I said.

“I saw that guy tying you up through the basement window. Then he sat there and had a beer in the kitchen before he went back down. I had to wait for him so I could punch through the screen door and get inside.”

“You punched through their screen door?”

“Well, on the fourth try.” Mike held out his fist proudly—his knuckles had raspberry tears from the metal screen. “Not bad, eh?”

“One for the books,” I said, remembering that we had to go back to Dana’s to pick up the Escort. We crossed back over the city line (WELCOME TO PETOSKEY: WHERE NATURE SMILES FOR SEVEN MILES), but I still didn’t want the ride to end.

“So you’re done with all this now, right?” Mike said.

He said it normal, like it wasn’t the most outrageous thing I’d heard all summer. “Done with this? Mike, something big is going on. She knows something—didn’t you see? She was about to tell us.”

He burned through a yellow light. “Dude, five minutes ago you were tied up in a basement with a madman and a crowbar. What’s next?”

“Since when are you the careful one? You were telling me I was nuts to think the guy was murdered. Now I’m finally getting somewhere.”

“Yeah, well—”

“They shot him in the chest
five times
. Nobody cares but me and Tina.”

“Okay, okay. You’re a man on a mission. Chill.” In the uneasy silence, Mike made a fist and admired his wounds. “You should know, though, I’m only human. I can only save your ass so many times.”

“Got it, Rambo,” I said.

The mayor’s neighborhood was funeral quiet, the houses ghostly boxes in the moonlight. I played at my swollen tongue as we pulled up to the Escort. We’d been going hard all night, and when the car came to a stop it felt like getting off a roller coaster.

“So really, thanks for saving my life,” I said. “Seriously.”

He barely opened his eyes. “No drippy shit, dude.”

“Righto. I may send a fruit basket, though. Would you mind that?”

“Just make it tasteful,” Mike said, and a laugh that had been bottled up inside me escaped from my chest.

“You gonna get home okay?” I said.

“I sobered up the second I saw that guy hit you.”

“You didn’t even move.”

“See you tomorrow,” Mike said, like it had been a normal day.

Tina’s cell phone number was on her business card, propped up against my clock radio, which read 2:30 a.m. She picked up after five rings and murmured something unintelligible.

The report from the bathroom mirror had not been encouraging. My scrape with the Hideaway’s parking lot made the right side of my face puffy and allergic-looking. At least you couldn’t see my tongue.

“Hey, it’s Christopher.”

“Yeah. And?”

“Yeah, sorry to call late, I just needed to talk to you about what happened tonight. You awake yet?”

A complicated rustling came through the line. “Sort of. Shoot.”

I told her about getting abducted by Wade Shales and getting saved by Mike, and I threw in Abby’s description of the scene at the Lighthouse Motel. I was a little geared up about the whole thing, and I realized I’d been going on for five minutes without a word from Tina.

“You still there?”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said, alert. “My God, I’m so glad you’re okay. You really think Abby knew something else?”

“Definitely. But we had to get out of there.”

“Right, of course. But we’ll have to go back to her for more.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” I said. “Should we—?”

“You did awesome,” Tina cut in, “but . . . let’s talk about it more tomorrow.” I sensed the slightest impatience in her voice. “You sure you’re okay, Chris?”

“Yeah.” I hopped into the safety of my bed. “I’m glad Mike was there. But maybe we should think about—”

“Do
not
tell me you’re pussing out.”

“I’m not pussing out.”

“Swear.”

“I swear.” Still, Mike’s warnings echoed in my head. “But you know, maybe there’s some kind of state police or something we should get involved.”

“No way. This story is my
break
. Who knows who’ll get their hands on it if we tell the police? Now, listen, can we meet up tomorrow? This isn’t really a great time.”

“Wait a second,” I said. “Where are you?”

I heard more rustling in the background, as Tina’s voice became a whisper. “Lawrence’s bathroom,” she said. “
Score!
”

 

 

“Your girlfriend writes boring stuff.” Daniel was munching on granola, reading an article by Tina about a ninety-year-old banjo player. He might have had a point.

“She’s not his girlfriend,” my mom said with a certain vigor as she spun about the kitchen. They were leaving the next day, and she now seemed obsessed with making sure all knobs, dials, and locks in the entire house were in proper position before her departure.

My face had looked slightly better that morning, but I didn’t want to take the chance of my mom seeing the damage from the night before. I bid them adieu and headed for the morgue.

Not that I really needed to. I’d already put in enough hours that week, but somehow the morgue was feeling more like a place I
wanted
to be. That might sound gruesome, I realize, but it was the thing that connected me to Mitch.

Maybe Mike thought it was weird that I cared about finding his killer so much, and yeah, maybe hundreds of people get murdered every day and I hadn’t taken up their cause or anything. But there are hundreds of homeless dogs, too, and it’s different when you go to the shelter and a lonely beagle laps at your hand. Not that either of us was a dog—the point is, we’d picked each other somehow, and we’d done it at the morgue. I
saw
him there on that table, and I knew things about him that nobody else did, or cared about.