by John C. Ford
I don’t know where he started following me.
I was shooting down Sheridan Road, passing the sign for Moby the Motorboat Salesman, when I first noticed the headlights behind me. A red light stopped me at a Shell station that had been out of business for years. Cracks in the shattered cashier’s window glistened in the streetlight like a spiderweb. The traffic signal hung low on the cross wires. It stayed red while the car drew up behind me. I flipped the mirror to ease the glare.
The shoreline provided the fastest route home. I turned onto Lakeside Drive and passed the harbor where Mike and I hung out, with fishing boats covered up in tarps for the night. The lighthouse stood at the end of the jetty, far ahead of me. At the intersection with Main Street, a flashing yellow traffic light reflected off the huge anchor decorating the plaza square. Raindrops started thumping against the windshield.
The car had been following me a hundred yards back the whole way. It didn’t feel right. I turned left toward the coast guard head-quarters to test him. He followed me, and then followed me again through two more turns on a pointless, circular route back to Lakeside. I tightened my grip on the steering wheel and inched forward. The rain misted the pavement between us.
The car held back when we reached another red light at Washington, too far behind me to read the license plate. His brights were blinding me anyway; I couldn’t make out anything except the silver paint job. The signal clicked green. I jammed my foot on the gas.
The Escort accelerated toward a tricky part of road I’d ridden on my bike a thousand times before. Ahead of me, Lakeside Drive made a half circle around an outcropping of rock, veering right and then turning back left. I swung with it to the right and for a split second the Escort slipped loose of the road. My muscles tightened in fear, but then the tires caught again and hurled me forward.
I raced to get to the other side of the curve, where the silver car would lose sight of me with enough distance between us. On the far side of the rocks, I checked the mirror and didn’t see him. I braked and swept a hard left turn onto an unmarked street. The Escort barely missed the white-painted stones marking the road.
I cut my headlights. The road climbed steeply before splitting off in two directions, one of them toward Tina’s neighborhood. The Escort rambled up the hill, dropping gears for traction. I kept the accelerator to the floor, hoping the silver car hadn’t spotted me when it swung around the bend.
I chose the right fork, then made arbitrary turns until finally it felt safe to stop the car. My heart drummed as heavily as the rain against the hood, but I didn’t see any sign of the silver car. I couldn’t stand being in the Escort anymore. I got out and headed to Tina’s address—which, I admit, I had looked up in the phone book out of curiosity.
She answered the door in a long gray T-shirt that said I WISH THESE WERE BRAINS. Her voice got scared when she saw me.
“Christopher?”
“Can I come in?”
“God, yeah, what are you doing here?”
She set me down in her living room. My adrenaline escaped and I fell slack against the sofa.
“You’re shaking,” she said, rubbing my arms. Her jet-black hair, tousled with sleep, smelled of cigarettes. “What happened to you?”
“Somebody followed me. I lost him at the bottom of the hill.”
“Followed you?”
“Yeah. I went out with Mike. I was on my way home, and this car followed me.”
My Nikes had holes in them, and the wet grass had soaked through my socks. I took them off before I realized what I was doing. I shouldn’t have been that comfortable around her already.
Tina tossed aside my shoes. “Yeah, that’s good. Okay, I’m not exactly great at this hostess crap, but let me see what I can do,” she said, and went down the hall.
I lay down under a thin blanket piled on the back of the sofa. Petoskey had a thousand homes like Tina’s, matchbook-sized places with exteriors painted in bright pastels to attract summer renters. Hers was Miami Vice blue. She had a window open, and the lake air swept through like a tonic. My eyelids fell.
Tina’s voice called in from somewhere: “Tell me everything! Start at the beginning!” The strain of the night was hitting me, and I heard myself emit a feeble sound.
A towel and an AC/DC T-shirt landed on my face. “Hey!” Tina said, retreating to the kitchen. “You just woke me up at one in the morning, and I’m making you hot chocolate. Spill it.”
“Yeah, okay.” I toweled off, put the dry shirt on, and told her: about going to the Hideaway and talking to Abby, the way she bickered with her husband, and then finding the silver car on my tail. A television rigged with a homemade antenna was sitting on the counter between us, dividing the rooms. The cord hung uselessly a foot above the shag carpet.
Tina emerged with two mugs of hot chocolate and sat cross-legged on the floor. I tried not to stare at her shirt.
“Too bad you didn’t get that license plate,” she said, slurping her drink. “Are you really sure you were being followed?”
“Yeah. I did a U at the coast guard center, and he followed me the whole way.”
“All right. But I mean, why? What do you think they wanted?”
“I assume it has something to do with Mitch Blaylock.”
Tina leaned back on her elbows. “Well c’mon, genius, who do you think it is?”
I had no answer. Any number of people could have known we were looking into Mitch’s death—Kate Warne, the sheriff, Dr. Mobley, even the hotel manager—but what any of them would get out of tailing me, I had no clue. The chase was making less and less sense.
“Are you sure it wasn’t that Abby chick? Or her husband?”
“No, they’re probably still at each other’s throats.”
We turned it around in our heads for a while. I set my mug down on the coffee table, wedging it around Oreo crumbs and scattered DVDs and a bottle of Maker’s Mark. An oversized concert poster of The Clash hung raggedly on the far wall. A huge tropical plant sat in the corner of the room, between a stereo system and a bass guitar with a broken string. I felt warm under the blanket.
Tina got up and turned off the kitchen light. A lamp in the corner had a T-shirt slung over it, casting a red glow over the shadows. Tina looked down at me with dangling black hair. Her cheeks caught the scarlet light as she smiled and bent her knee into my stomach. “Slide, Clyde.”
She slunk down onto the cushions. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to try anything,” she said.
It was a deep sofa and there was room for both of us. But there she was, next to me, and I could almost feel the heat of her body.
Her breathing became regular, and I carefully propped up on an elbow, wired and taking it in. A postcard from San Francisco sat on the table, next to a ticket from a motocross event. It was frozen in a splotch of green candle wax. Beside it was a picture of Tina and a friend in front of Comerica stadium in Detroit, wearing dark sunglasses and smiles, an open blue sky behind them.
I focused on the image of Tina and held it in my eyes. I closed them and went to sleep.
I woke up at seven o’clock. It took me a second to remember where I was, and why. Tina’s face was right in front of mine, her eyes closed peacefully, her unpainted lips pink and thin. The night came back in a rush, and then the realization that I had never called home.
Tina didn’t move as I placed the blanket over her and got to my feet. It took me ten minutes and five drafts to write her the following note: Thanks for the hot chocolate. Later, Christopher.
12
“You have got to tell us if you aren’t coming home at night.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I know you aren’t in high school anymore, but that’s one thing you’ve just got to do.”
“I know.”
“That’s not a lot to ask.”
“I know, Mom.”
“That’s just courtesy. Your father and I don’t want to be up all night worrying about you. That’s a burden on us.”
“I’m sorry.”
“We treat you like an adult now. You don’t have to tell us where you are every second. But if you’re going to live here, you have to tell us if you’re going to be out all night.”
“Mom, I’m sorry, I know.” She was treating me like an adult—she hadn’t even asked me where I had been. A knife of guilt twisted in my stomach.
She sighed and laid her hands on her thighs. We hadn’t moved from the kitchen, where she’d been sitting in her robe when I got in. A quarter inch of coffee sat in the pot she had made sometime during the night. She sniffed, rubbed her eyes, and disappeared into the refrigerator.
The morning sun came hot through the kitchen window. It felt like the worst had passed, until my dad slipped into the kitchen, bleary-eyed. He trained an evil eye on me as he poured the last of the coffee. “Would you like to tell us where you spent last night?”
Ugh.
Buckle up.
“I stopped by Tina’s. She’s the person from the Courier I told you about. That’s where I was.”
My dad sniffled away his morning grogginess. “This is the young lady you just met?”
“Yes.”
His eyes darted to my mom. In a split-second look they communicated volumes of unspoken fears, disappointments, general bafflement, reconsideration of their parenting techniques, conjectures on my future (tattoo parlors? rehab? reality TV?), and musings on the extent of their son’s sexual corruption and/or perversity. “We’d like to know when you’re going to be out all night.”
“Yeah. I know.”
“This woman Tina,” he said, “how old is she?”
“I have no idea.”
“Is something . . . going on with the two of you?”
“We talk to each other. Verbal communication is going on with the two of us. The occasional car ride.”
“And sleeping over,” my dad said.
“Not on purpose. Well, I don’t know . . . touché, I guess.”
“Okay, that’s that then,” my mom said, calling off the dogs. She turned from the stove, where some French toast had just started to sizzle. My favorite. It stabbed me in the heart.
Breakfast went well until I took the plates to the sink. My mom leaned over my shoulder as I was rinsing them.
“Gail tells me you’re going to a party tonight with Julia?” she said.
I slept the morning away and headed for the morgue around two. I hadn’t been there for three days, since finding the death certificate and getting a close look at Mitch’s bullet wounds. The morgue was cold, as always. It had the same ammonia smell and the normal paperwork in Dr. Mobley’s tray. The everyday details unnerved me: a man had been killed, and life at the hospital just rolled on. Soon enough, Mitch’s murder would be lost in an unremembered past.
The morgue was a good place to think through the case—there was mindless work to do and a blank white silence in the air. I was cleaning underneath the autopsy table they had laid Mitch out on, reviewing what little we knew about him, when an electronic jangling sliced through the room and scared me half to death. My cell phone. Tina.
“Get over here,” she said. “The shyster called back.”
Lawrence Lovell was staring into Tina’s eyes. He was shaking her hand, holding on to it for a few seconds too long. The guy rubbed me wrong already.
“Like I said, I’ve only got a few minutes.” His voice was even silkier in person.
Lawrence Lovell was a pretty man, maybe forty years old, obviously doing anything he could to preserve his looks: dyed hair, manicured nails, an expensive pink shirt.
His office was the half-empty one I had noticed before on our way down the hall to Kate Warne’s. There were framed pictures on his desk, ready to be packed away. In one of them, Lovell stood at the stern of a sailboat, staring dramatically into the wind while his unbuttoned shirt flapped wildly against his body. He must have had no idea how cheesy it looked. There were other pictures—on lakes, in log cabins, and one with a jagged mountain peak in the distance. With apple cheeks and a sun-blocked nose, Lovell pointed triumphantly to the summit. All of the pictures looked recent. The sheriff wasn’t in any of them.
Lovell knelt down by a pile of legal books, athletic in his khaki shorts and leather moccasins, and folded together a moving box. He gave Tina a smile. “So what’s all this about?”
Tina gave him a vague line about doing some background on Mitch Blaylock for a piece in the paper, and how we were talking to all of Mitch’s contacts.
Lovell looked at me for the first time. “No child labor laws at the Courier?”
“I’m an intern,” I said.
“Hey, just kidding, sport.”
Tina gave me a warning look. Maybe I had said it a little harshly. Lovell didn’t care; he fixed the sides of the box into place and rose heavily to his feet.
“Mitchell Blaylock. I was his lawyer a few years ago.” He looked up at the ceiling, his face glowing with fond memories as he continued. “That guy, he was a character. I had only been practicing for two years . . . I went to law school in my thirties, you see.”
“Enterprising of you,” Tina said. She was buttering him up.
“Well, thank you. My grandfather started the firm. With Kate’s grandfather, actually.” He reached for a black-and-white picture, a yellowed shot of the original Warne & Lovell out on Main Street. Tina drew over for a look, standing quite close to Lovell. “After Kate got divorced, she decided to carry on her grandfather’s firm. Her maternal grandfather. She took on the Warne name and went to law school.”
That explained why Kate and the sheriff didn’t have the same last name, even though they were brother and sister. Tina didn’t seem to care—her eyes had gone a little hazy as she stared at Lovell. She didn’t move away when he put down the picture.
“I came a couple of years later,” Lovell continued. “I never planned to be part of the legacy myself, but plans change sometimes.”
“Hmmm,” Tina said.
“Anyway, I was just cutting my teeth then, picking up any criminal assignments I could from the court. Poor Mitch, he got picked up on some two-year-old rap for a gas-station robbery.”
“Right, I heard about that,” Tina said.
She didn’t need to prod him, though. Lovell was relishing the chance to be helpful to Tina. He set his phasers to charm and continued. “The evidence was solid. Mitch wouldn’t take the plea the state offered, even though I begged him to.” Lovell’s fingertips bounced softly on the desk. It was like a casting director had called out: All right, Lovell, now show me wistful!
“He would call me at two in the morning, saying, ‘Hey, why don’t we say this,’ or ‘Hey, let’s invent this alibi.’ It would always be some insane idea,” Lovell said. “Not to mention illegal, usually. I told him I’d do my best, but I wouldn’t cross the line. And he never pushed me on it.”
“Ethical of you,” Tina said.
He shrugged. Awww, shucks.
That’s when I started to wonder: Is she actually . . . flirting? With this guy?
“What a character Mitch was,” Lovell said. “I remember sitting there waiting for the jury to get back. I’m sweating bullets. Mitch is facing three years in prison. We’re at the counsel table, waiting there for the judge to come in, and he turns to me and says, ‘That suit looks great on you, Lawrence.’ I mean, what a thing to say. Broke my heart. I felt so bad for him when the jury came back.”
“What kind of suit?” Tina said. Her eyes were all over his body—putting him in different outfits, taking them off. I had to stop this train, and quick.
“Were you in touch with Mitch after he got out of prison?” I said.
Lovell looked at me like I had just beamed in from Pluto.
“As a matter of fact, I was,” he said. “Mitch called a few times, asked me if I knew about any jobs. I think he just wanted somebody to talk to. It was really hard not to like the guy, even though you knew he was up to no good. So yeah, we talked a few times.”
A knock sounded at the door—Kate Warne, standing at the edge of Lovell’s office, giving Tina and me a smile as tight as her skirt. “I see you’ve found him,” she said. “We’ll talk later?”
“Sure,” Lovell told her.
She disappeared, and Lovell amped things up another notch for Tina. “Mitch looked up to me, I guess. He used to say things about how smart I was, things like that. It could get kind of embarrassing.” So embarrassing that he’d repeat them to hot girls, hoping to impress them. “But, you know, Mitch just wanted a connection with somebody.”
“Everybody wants that,” Tina said, with far too much subtext.
I cleared my throat. “What did you talk about with him?”
“Not much. Jobs, but I didn’t know of any. I offered to help him find a place.”
I left him a silence to fill, but Lovell had nothing else to say. He checked his watch. “I can’t imagine any of this is important. What’s this—”
“No, you’re right,” Tina said, “it’s probably not. But . . . do you know how Mitch was planning to make money? Anything he might have been planning? Maybe something illegal?”
“Another robbery?” Lovell said with a start. “No, he was trying to find a real job this time. I mean, Mitch always had a scheme in the back of his mind, usually involving money. But I don’t know anything about that. Anyway, I may have given you too much information already, as Mitch’s former attorney. Our discussions were privileged, of course.”
“So, if Mitch was waiting on some kind of score,” I said, “you don’t know anything about it?”
Lovell laughed at me. “I know a few things about Mitch Blaylock, but that’s not one of them.”
“Well, you’ve been very helpful,” Tina said.
Maybe he had. What he’d told us felt like the truth, but it meant that we couldn’t tie Mitch to the sheriff or Kate Warne. We had just faced a major setback, but Tina was beaming. At Lovell.
