The Morgue and Me (2 page)

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 your 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.

“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.

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.