The Morgue and Me (21 page)

“Yeah, guess so.”

I didn’t mention Julia.

“Look,” she said. “I don’t want to think about anything tonight. Not Mitch Blaylock, not your friend Mike, not Larry. Is that cool?”

“Yeah.”

It should’ve been a miserable night for the both of us, but being there calmed me. We sat on the curb and drank from our bottles, something loosening between us. The moonlight made delicate spiderweb patterns on the lake and Tina blew smoke that evaporated into the constellations.

She tossed her bottle on the lawn when she finished. “Come on,” she said, “I’m going to teach you how to dance. And bring that bottle.”

She ran up the street to the rickety wooden staircase that descended the other side of the hill into Duncan Woods. I found myself right behind her, energized, feeling strangely good about myself. The champagne sloshed as we wended our way down. Tina almost slipped but it didn’t worry me—I could have saved her. I could have done anything just then. I was all-powerful.

At the bottom of the stairs, our feet hit the grass, and leaves of midnight blue waved in the wind above us. She ran under the sodium lights to a clearing with a lone picnic bench. The dew was coming early and Tina’s feet made dark impressions on the grass as she twirled across it.

“C’mon, I wasn’t joking,” Tina said. She gripped my hand and brought me under the lights, like we were onstage. “Lower,” she said. She pressed my arm, and my hand slid down. She had smooth muscles around her spine, little dimples low on her back. “There, presto.”

She said the waltz was an easy dance; I could do it. We started slow and then she said I should make a quarter turn on the fifth count—then we’d really be dancing. I stepped on her. She laughed and told me it was okay, I was cute. My head spun.

We got a rhythm, our bodies turning in concert. I forgot what my feet were doing and felt my heart surge, and then we collapsed in a happy mess near the picnic table.

The bottle felt light in my hand. Tina peered at the remains, swished them, and finished off the champagne. She said good job because I had put most of it down and I must be pretty wasted.

“We need music,” she said.

We raced up the stairs back to her house—I can’t remember exactly, but we must have—and Tina pulled me inside. She dug through her CDs while I watched at her side. The world was at rest and not at rest, like getting off a carousel. The music had horns, it had a beat.

Her hand was slick with sweat when she put it in mine. We were ready to dance but she wasn’t starting—she was staring at me. “Know what your problem is, Chris?”

“Uh, no.”

“You’re sort of on the sidelines. You’re the opposite of me—too much thinking, not enough action. You can’t just ponder stuff like some professor or something. You’ve got to make it happen.”

My hand was low on her back. Our stomachs were touching. Our hips were touching. We’d started dancing again. “Make what happen?”

“Whatever you want.”

I dry-swallowed and led her too close to the sofa. It wasn’t on purpose. But still, she brushed the arm and lost her balance, tumbling down onto the cushions. She gripped my hand tight and then I was falling with her, landing softly at her side. A low, awkward laugh came from my throat.

Tina turned to me, her glistening eyes taking me in and her fingers moving strands of hair out of my face, staying longer than they needed to and curling against the back of my ear, teasing me. The room still moving but not moving, the music pushing through us like circulation. “One sec,” she whispered. She slid underneath me to the armrest, arching her back, wriggling to turn off the lamp, her breasts pushing against her T-shirt until the blue light faded away and I could smell her strawberry shampoo and feel the coolness of her skin and my chest heavy against hers and we were all by ourselves and we could have kissed and no one would have known.

Somebody pounded on the door.

“Whoa,” Tina said.

She slipped from underneath me, thumping against the carpet, laughing again and saying, “What the hell is this, wait here, Chris, I’ll be right back.” I watched the candlelight on the ceiling to keep the room from spinning. When I ventured a look at the door, I saw him there before I had to close my eyes to stop the world from whirring off its axis. Tim Spencer, outlined by the porch light.

“Hello, piglet. What brings you here?”

“You’re lit.”

“And what’re you?”

“I’m the police. Try to stand up straight.”

“What? Am I going to get a ticket for bad posture?”

“Is that Christopher Newell on your couch?”

“What if it is?”

“He’s supposed to be with my sister tonight.”

“What’re you, keeping his schedule or something?”

“Keep it down. He’s passed out, isn’t he?”

“How ’bout you tell me why the hell you’re on my porch.”

“I like that kid.”

“Well, we’re even. I like him, too.”

“A little too much, I’d say.”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“It means you better be careful with him.”

“Screw you. You’re on my porch and I still don’t see a reason for it.”

“I don’t know what you and Christopher are up to—”

“If you stop falling down, I will. I’m trying to tell you something.”

“Spit it out, then.”

“Whatever the two of you are doing, you’d better stop it. That’s what I’m telling you.”

“Is that a threat? Am I going to end up like Mitch Blaylock?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Actually, you do whatever you want.”

“Thanks a lot, dick.”

“Just keep Christopher out of it. And don’t mess with that kid’s head, I mean it.”

The door slammed.

“Jesus H.”

 

 

The morning sun scalded my eyes. My head was throbbing, like an invisible vise was squeezing in on both sides of my brain. I stumbled to the kitchen and drank three glasses of water from an enormous plastic DALE EARNHARDT, R.I.P. cup lying in the sink. Tina was still on the sofa, and she wasn’t going to be moving for a long time. I thought the water might clear my head up a bit, but no. The world was foggy and dull but intrusive at the same time. It was like walking around underwater with a flashlight in your eyes.

I didn’t know what exactly had happened between Tina and me the night before—we hadn’t kissed, I didn’t think. Beyond that, it was too early to say what was real and what wasn’t, like Tim Spencer showing up on the porch. Did I dream that?

And then the horrifying part came back—the memory of Julia, up on the porch, telling me that she’d wanted me to ask her to the dance all along. Yeah, that had really happened. Maybe Tina was right. Maybe I needed to do things instead of just thinking about them. I thought she’d been telling me to make a move, but now it just seemed like a piece of advice I should have taken long ago.

Suddenly I needed to get moving—to get out of Tina’s dark and stuffy house. Daniel had been alone for ten hours by then. He might have set the town on fire, or won a Nobel Prize. Nobel Prize, probably. I wrote Tina a note to call me and reached my hand into my pocket. The memory card was still there.

Time to look at the pictures. Time to act.

D
aniel was still asleep.

My computer was on.

The memory card was in the slot.

My heart was in my throat.

I pressed Transfer on my Picture Project software and listened to the whirring of the hard drive as the pictures made their way onto my computer. I didn’t have the energy to be scared of what they would tell me about Mike anymore.

According to Abby Shales, Mike wouldn’t be in them anyway. If she was right, they were the pictures that Mitch (with Mike’s help, somehow) had used to blackmail the mayor and Kate Warne: pictures of them in some kind of compromising position. I scrolled through the images, displaying them one by one on the screen.

In the first, Kate Warne strode toward a room at the Lighthouse Motel in a blazer and one of her short-short skirts. Grime streaks darkened the door’s turquoise paint. You could see something like its original color only where the numerals 103 had fallen off it.

In the second one, Kate Warne had disappeared, presumably into the now-open doorway. A man in a three-piece suit was heading for the room now—the mayor.

In the third picture, the mayor appeared to be leaving. He was headed away from room 103. The doorway was partially open, and you could make out Kate Warne inside the room. It looked as though she might have been putting her heels back on. Yellow numbers ran at the bottom of each picture, marking the date and time.

Abby wasn’t lying. The history of Mitch Blaylock was coming into view; I was seeing how it had happened now. Mitch had gotten his room at the Lighthouse Motel, and had seen the mayor and Kate Warne using it for a tryst. He was a natural schemer and realized he could squeeze them for money if he got evidence of it. Somewhere along the line, Mike had entered the equation, but I was too charged up to worry about that now. I’d been chasing his trail all summer and now I was right there. I wanted to know every little thing about Mitch Blaylock.

But then I opened the rest of the pictures and it all fell apart. I’d misread the situation rather dramatically.

Picture Project hadn’t put the JPEG files in chronological order. When I got through the whole set of pictures, I could see the sequence. The picture of the mayor and Kate Warne entering the hotel room were the first two, but the one of the mayor leaving the hotel room was actually the second-to-last. After Kate Warne and the mayor entered, the following pictures showed a third person entering the room. Most of the photos were taken in a two-minute span in which all three of them were talking in the hotel room. The mayor pulled the curtains shut, and that was it, until the final pictures, in which the mayor, Kate Warne, and the third guy all left the hotel room five minutes apart.

The third man was short, squat, and wearing a necklace. His black hair glistened in the streetlight. I knew that hair—it was Alexander Corbett, president of the New Petoskey Resort and Spa.

That was weird enough, but when I looked closer, I noticed that the time stamp was from two years ago. Mitch hadn’t even taken them. Or if he had, it was before he went to prison.

I spent another half hour staring dumbly at the thirty-one pictures, with no idea what they meant. The screen was making my retinas burn by the time I got up out of my chair.

My hesitant legs took me to the bathroom, where I stood under the hot water, full blast, for a week and a half. The steam clouds cleared the champagne from my brain. Well, enough to perform simple arithmetic anyway. I wrapped myself in two layers of towels and ventured out of the misty bathroom. The cool air of the house refreshed me as I dressed and went downstairs to find Daniel demolishing a bowl of tofu pasta salad.

“Really? You eat that for breakfast?”

“What?” Daniel said. “It’s got protein!”

“Just . . . keep it down a little, okay?”

“Where
were
you last night? I could have
died.
”

“Yeah, I remember, you said that last time. But look, still here.” I gave him a little pinch on the arm. He didn’t like it—it took his focus off the Business section of the
Courier.

“So, did you make out with Tina last night?”

“No, Daniel.”

“You made out with her. You guys made out all night.”

“Mmm-hmm, you’re right, it was awesome.” I was making myself some cereal, staring absently at another front-page story about the judge who had taken bribes from petty criminals, clearing them of criminal charges in exchange for thousand-dollar bribes.

“So are you and Mike enemies now?”

“No. We had a fight, don’t worry about it.”

“What did you fight over? You never tell me
anything
!”

I tried to tune him out by actually reading the story about the judge. My eyes ran over the print, not really taking it in. I flipped to page fourteen to finish it anyway, just hoping Daniel would get the point and leave me in silence for a bit. . . .
grand jury expected to convene later this month to consider charges against the once-distinguished jurist . . . blah blah blah . . . vacation property in the Upper Peninsula may have been paid for in part with takings from the illegal . . . blah blah blah . . .

Daniel was putting his plate in the dishwasher. It wasn’t until I put the paper down that a line from the story came back to me. I snatched it up and rifled back to the front page.

“What’s wrong?” Daniel said.

Right there. “. . .
sources at the district attorney’s office refused to comment on previous indications that the bribery scheme was not an isolated instance, and that a pattern of bribe-taking at the Petoskey courthouse may lead to a wider investigation implicating other past and present judges. . . .

I picked up the phone. Tina answered on the fourth ring, sounding like someone had taken sandpaper to her vocal chords. “Dude, what are you doing calling—”

“Tina, get over here. I know what happened.”

I
was watching out the front window when her Trans Am rumbled up the driveway. Tina dragged herself up the porch steps in a plain white T-shirt and dark sunglasses; she stepped inside and checked me over.

“How you feeling, stud?”

“Actually, not that bad.”

“That makes one of us.” She took her sunglasses off, squinted harshly, and put them back on. “So, whaddaya got?”

“If I’m right, the biggest story of your life.”

“Spill it, genius,” she said.

“This way.” I turned to head upstairs and found Daniel watching us from the corner of the room. “Don’t even think about going up there,” I said.