by John C. Ford
He shied from her intense look. The world adored Lawrence Lovell, and he could hardly stand it. I could hardly stand it.
Tina handed him a card. “Here’s my number.”
“A pleasure.”
“Was that an act?” I said by the elevators. “Please tell me that was an act.”
Tina shushed me. The doors opened and she pressed the button. On the way down, a shiver ran through her body.
“What a fox,” she said.
13
I avoided the topic of Lawrence Lovell on the way back.
When I got home, my mom was cooking about fifteen different items on the stove. They were meals for Daniel and me to eat while they were gone. Every once in a while my dad would come downstairs and hold up an item of clothing. My mom would either look at him like he was an alien or say, “Yes, pack that.”
The hubbub over their trip preparations was getting a little much, so I took my camera out to the lake and snapped some pictures of the lighthouse. I needed a filter I’d left in my room, and the pictures looked washed out and uninspiring. Daniel would be merciless.
My heart wasn’t in it, anyway. I was thinking about Mitch Blaylock. I set up under a tree in Duncan Woods and glanced through the gruesome pictures of his body on my camera, just to remind myself that he’d really been murdered. It hardly seemed possible out in the sunlight with little kids playing in the grass and dashing under picnic tables, making their parents laugh.
The tree had warmed in the sun—it felt soft and improbably comfortable, and my mind was slipping away to a dreamy place, when crunching sounds came from the gravel lot at the entrance to Duncan Woods. A police car. Driven by Sheriff Harmon. He parked, lurched out into the sunlight, and masked his black-pebble eyes behind a pair of cop sunglasses.
He sized up the crowd, thumbs hooked in his belt. I half expected the little kids to start crying and run to their parents. At the picnic benches, the sheriff folded his arms and scouted the grassy area like he was protecting us all from snipers. He probably acted like that all the time—he probably made doughnut runs feel like a matter of national security. I can’t say I was surprised when his sunglasses stopped on me and stuck. He gave me the death-stare for a full minute before he took his first lazy step in my direction.
The tree started scratching at my back. I was trying to remember what I could about search-and-seizure law from all the cop movies I’d watched—I had those pictures of Mitch right on my camera, and if the sheriff saw them, I’d be toast.
He didn’t stop until he was just a foot away, standing tall above me. I could barely see his face past the bulge of stomach hanging over his cinched waist. He waited to speak. I pulled the camera to my side.
“Havin’ a good summer?”
A fake smile flashed on his face and disappeared just as quick.
“Lovely, thank you.” The guy brought something out in me. He didn’t seem to like it.
“How’s your work?”
Is he trying to say something?
Is he trying to send a message?
“Tremendously instructive, I’d say.”
He nodded very slowly. He continued nodding. He kept it up until I thought his neck might give and his head would roll off toward the monkey bars. My hand was getting sweaty against the camera strap.
Finally, he said, “Well, be careful.” And then he walked away.
I guess he thought he’d proved something. But something in me hardened as he sauntered back to his car. I wasn’t going to listen to Mike, or my parents, or anyone else who told me to give it up—I wanted to know everything that had happened to Mitch.
I’d cut my work short when Tina beckoned me to Lovell’s office, and now the whole afternoon had slipped away. I drove to the morgue, wishing I could be like those B-list stars on bad TV crime shows who commune with the dead through their psychic powers and/or female intuition. They had one about a girl who worked in a morgue, and the dead people told her all their special secrets. Maybe Mitch would talk to me like that through the pictures on my camera. Maybe he’d tell me what the sheriff had done to him.
It was getting late by the time I got to the paperwork and checked Dr. Mobley’s things for clues. There was nothing of note in the desk. The plastic casing for the Vista View memory card sat in the same place, starting to collect dust. Maybe I could do a good deed and point Dr. Mobley toward a better brand, I thought, as I organized the last of the papers and shut the filing cabinet.
On my way out, a shadow was outlined on the frosted glass of the entrance. A thin, feminine figure. Knocking lightly on the door.
I was hoping it was Tina and not a hospital nurse with some question I wouldn’t be able to answer, when I opened the door and found Julia.
“Surprise,” she said.
Big surprise.
“Uhhh, yeah. Hi?”
She peered down the hallway behind me. “You alone?”
“Uhhh, yeah.”
“Oh, good. I stopped by your house. Your mom said you might be over here, so . . . well, I took a chance. You mind?” I was too flustered to stop her. She edged past me into the hallway, staring wide-eyed into the autopsy room. “So creepy. Can I go in there?”
She didn’t wait for an answer. She opened the door and walked inside, which probably violated some kind of code. I locked the front door, prayed no one would stop by, and followed her.
She had bright barrettes in her hair and a plastic bag from Mac-Gruder’s Market in her hand. Setting it reverently on the table for autopsies, she took a 360 look around the room. Her dress twirled as she took it in.
“Julia. I, uhhh, what are you doing here?”
The cold metal instruments held her interest for another few seconds before she turned to me. “Don’t be mad, okay? We didn’t get to talk at the mayor’s, and Dana’s party might be crazy. I just wanted to see you and talk like normal for once in, like, ten years.” She shrugged her shoulders and raised the bag jauntily, suddenly teasing. “So I figured . . . why not a picnic dinner in the morgue?”
“Oh, perfect. ’Cause you can really work up a hunger here, you know.”
It just slipped out of me. She laughed, relieved that we were joking.
That wasn’t supposed to happen.
I wasn’t supposed to be playing along with her. I still didn’t know where Julia’s sudden friendliness came from, and there were serious questions to be answered before we reestablished diplomatic relations: Don’t you realize that you put my heart through a paper shredder? Do you expect me to just swallow my pride and be pals with you again? And do you know that I suspect your brother of murder?
“I knew you’d like the idea,” Julia said, oblivious as she took a salad and a pasty out of the bag.
Pasties are a kind of food they have up here. They’re sandwich-like thingies that copper miners used to eat, made of dough wrapped around warm meat or chicken or whatever. They’re like the original Hot Pocket. It’s a point of pride in these parts.
The salad was for her, the pasty for me. The salad would have lots of black olives; the pasty would be chicken. We used to get lunch at MacGruder’s all the time.
The familiar smells sent a jolt of good sensations through me, but I still didn’t understand it. Julia was living in some alternate universe in which she’d never rejected me. Junior year had never happened, and we were just friends—great friends who liked hanging out in the library and gossiping about people at school, with chemistry so thick you could swim in it. Chemistry like a lake you could dive into at night, holding hands, and it would catch you.
I liked it in that universe. It didn’t really exist, but it tugged at me. And I guess I couldn’t resist it, because I swallowed my questions as Julia laid out the food, picnic-style, on the table. She was still into the joke.
“I forgot the blanket,” she said. “Do you mind?”
“That’s okay. Hope you brought your sunscreen, though—it’s pretty bright.”
“Oh yeah, you’re right.” Juli
a shielded her eyes and looked up at a bar of fluorescent lights, squinting like it was the sun. Her acting was much better when she was joking around.
She smiled at me and I let it feel good. We were back there—some place where Homecoming had never happened.
I hopped up on the table and took the pasty when she offered it. She broke out her salad, and we lost ourselves in the mindless comfort of eating together. It was nice, like we’d just survived a tough day of work together and didn’t need to talk. The hospital had gone to sleep and the morgue became a cocoon, still and soothing.
Julia was hunting through croutons with her fork when her chest started to shake. She was doing a bad job of holding back a laugh.
“What?”
“I’m sorry. It’s just so bizarre, Christopher. I mean, you work in a morgue.”
I couldn’t really argue the point. An explanation would involve getting into my master plan to become a spy (which she already knew about), and how the morgue had seemed to fit into that. It would sound stupid if I said it out loud.
She touched me on the arm. “But no, I mean it’s good. You shouldn’t be selling T-shirts or whatever. You’re more interesting than that.”
She got up and did a slow waltz around the room—inspecting the scales, the temperature controls on the body coolers, all the stuff that had fascinated me at the beginning of the summer. She lingered at the window into Dr. Mobley’s office for a long time, then propped herself next to me on the table. It was as close as we’d been to each other in a very long time. I slipped a last bite of pasty into my mouth casually, as if there weren’t huge magnetic waves bouncing between our bodies.
“Good as you remember?” she said.
I nodded. “The very same.”
She held my eyes a little too long, and then lay down on the autopsy table with a sigh. She pulled the swinging lamp over herself. “I’m just going to sun myself here for a while, if you don’t mind.”
She was stealing looks at me, expecting me to laugh, but it reminded me too much of Mitch Blaylock. The image of him hit me like a truck. We were eating a pleasant meal with happy memories on the cold, steel table where his dead body had lain. Where his murder had been covered up. If I’d still been eating, I might have gagged.
I said I wanted to do something about his murder; I had told myself I’d find out who did it. But was there really any chance of that? Tina and I didn’t know what we were doing, and Mitch wasn’t going to magically reach me from the beyond.
“Can a girl get a lemonade?” Julia said. She was still lying there, insulting Mitch without knowing it.
“We shouldn’t be here,” I said. “Let’s go.”
She felt the change and roused herself as I collected the wrappers and napkins. I did it in a rush, quick-stepping to the trash and waiting for her by the door. Julia stayed put on the table, making a point of it. She hugged her knees to her chest and looked at me strangely. At the moment, I didn’t really care.
“Just . . . wait a sec,” she said firmly. She held my eyes until I took my hand off the door.
“Christopher, I’m here because I miss you.” She talked slowly, even-toned. I could see it meant a lot to her, but she was staying in control, looking me in the eye. It was like she’d watched an instruction video from Dr. Phil. “I know things got screwed up with us, and I don’t know what you think of me or why you’re freaking out now. But look: I still like you a lot, and I just really want to be your friend again.”
I waited a second, to let her know I’d listened.
“Thanks,” I said. “But it’s really not about that.”
14
She didn’t buy it. She didn’t move from the table. “What’s it about, then?”
“I can’t really say.”
Her eyes got darker as she stared me down, trying to figure me out.
It was nice that she wanted to hang out, it really was. And maybe she was right—maybe the memory of Mitch’s body wasn’t the only reason I wanted to get out of the morgue as soon as possible.
I knew how things went when Julia and I became friends. They went magnificently. And then I got hungry for more, and her friendship turned into a tease, and it ended in heartbreak by a locker door or some other horrible place, smelling of kiwi lip gloss.
“Thanks for coming,” I said. “It was cool of you. But I’m going to drive separately to Dana’s tomorrow night.”
That did the trick.
“Okay,” she murmured, as she lifted herself to the ground. Her feet landed lightly on the tile and we left the hospital in silence, not really together at all.
It rained hard the next day, like the clouds had something to prove. I was eager to do something about Mitch, but our leads had dried up and Tina was busy. Art had her on a deadline, she said when I called.
Without her company, I did the next best thing and checked for any stories she had written in the paper. It was kind of pathetic.
The lead story was a glorified press release telling of a golf tournament at the New Petoskey Resort, written by none other than Art Bradford. They had secured some “celebrities” from downstate to participate—a fifteen-year-old Grand Rapids girl with a hit tune from a Disney movie was singing the national anthem. She’d been caught with a bag of cocaine on her last trip to L.A., but Art had only praise. Typical.
The picture showed the girl smiling beside Alexander Corbett, the club president, in front of the glass tower of hotel rooms. It was terrible composition, really—I could have done better in my sleep, and that’s not bragging—but I recognized Corbett immediately from the oil painting at the country club. He really chewed up the camera with his toothy smile. The article was full of his quotes about how having the stars there would “spotlight the world-class status of our great resort.”
At the bottom of the front page was a follow-up article about the judge suspected of taking bribes. They had a picture of him, too. It was the guy with the Brillo-pad hair from the scholarship ceremony. No wonder no one wanted to talk to him—the guy was a known criminal. The article said the full extent of the bribery problem in the Petoskey court system had yet to be discovered, and that’s when I stopped reading. The Courier could really get you depressed if you let it.
I camped out in the living room and watched a Bond marathon, with the rain spattering the windows. Daniel and my dad had taken to the study for chess. In the kitchen, my mom was making massive lists for their trip: “Trails to Hike,” “Organic Restaurants: Idaho,” stuff like that. Every fifteen minutes my dad would emerge from the study with a bewildered look, rub his face, and call back in, “One more game.”
The rain was tapering and Casino Royale had just come on, when my cell phone rang. From the porch, silverware clanked as Daniel set the dinner table.
“Don’t even think about bailing,” Mike said on the phone. Dana’s party—I’d almost forgotten.
“Too late.”
“Dude . . .”
He didn’t need to say any more. I’d promised.
A bright yellow glow poured from the windows of the Rubys’ house, showering down over the lawn still sparkling from the rain. Here and there, shadows skirted against the first-floor curtains. I’d waited as long as I dared and now it was ten thirty. I hated these things.
Walking into a party can be the loneliest feeling in the world. I edged through cars bunched tight in the driveway and dragged myself up to the imposing front doors. Maybe you were supposed to walk right in. Mike would know. I knocked, doubting they could hear me over the music throbbing from inside. It felt like a heartbeat when I put my hand to the door.
Some guy I didn’t know opened it. Sweat-marks pocked his T-shirt and his beer swished around in his plastic cup like he’d been hurrying. He must have been expecting somebody, because his smile fell when he saw me. He gave me an awkward “hey” and retreated quickly, like I might be contagious.
“Hey,” I said back to nobody. A girl-band tune screamed from the speakers into the empty living room.
I walked through, feeling like an invader.
In the kitchen, I could hear the voices coming up from the basement. Everyone was gathered there, being loud and happy. It sounded like a lion’s den. I should have headed down, but I got a shot of nerves and saw an intriguing piece of opened mail on the Rubys’ granite counter. They were oversized photographs from the ceremony, clipped to an envelope sent by the guy from the Courier with the nice camera. It felt like eons ago. The mayor handing Julia her certificate. The crowd milling under the white tent. A violinist straining with concentration against a background of white lights and shiny faces. The guy was good.
My solitude was broken when a girl bounded up the stairs, her cheeks flushed with alcohol and her ponytail flopping about. She saw me and stiffened. Her name was Sophie Hamilton—she was a year ahead of me and we’d taken physics together. She wrote left-handed in huge, bubbly letters and missed the soccer playoffs with a sprained ankle. All the girls on the team painted her number (26) on their cheeks for the game.
She had no idea who I was, of course. It happened to me all the time—the fate of the observer, I guess. She gave me an obligatory quarter smile and poured a glass of water at the fridge. I played out the awkwardness, acting all consumed by the pictures, wanting to go back home.
The mayor shaking hands with a Regent. Kate Warne having a cocktail with some professors. They looked extra-frumpy by comparison. I wondered if there would be a picture of the corrupt Brillo-pad-haired judge, the one who had traipsed around the house all alone, just like me.
Feet sounded against the steps. I hoped it was Sophie going back downstairs but then I heard Dana’s voice: “Hey, Newell, just root through my crap, why don’t you?”
She glowered at me from five feet away.
“Oh, sorry.” I blush easily, and I could feel my cheeks going neon. Sophie was standing behind Dana, interested now, giggling that I’d been caught.
Dana broke into a laugh and put her arm around me. “Just messing, Newell, relax. I don’t care.”
