by John C. Ford
I pounded on the wall between my room and Daniel’s.
“Get your suit on! We’re going swimming!”
PART III
CHAMPAGNE FOR TWO or UNSUPERVISED ADULTS
19
Tina came over in record time when I told her about the note. We sat on the porch so she could smoke while we waited for Daniel to peel himself away from his science books and get his swimming stuff together.
“So this is like the bachelor pad now, huh?” Tina said.
“I guess.”
“Can I see your bedroom?”
I surveyed it in my mind. I didn’t know what she would think of my War of the Worlds poster (the original) or my Green Hornet comforter from ten Christmases ago. I made a mental note to get a new one. Black, maybe. Or leopard print.
“Let’s see if we can find this partner first,” I said.
“Cool, I thought you might be thinking about puss—”
“Tina, I’m not pussing out.” I took the note back from her and folded it carefully into my wallet.
Daniel was taking forever, but it was a great moment—sitting on the porch with the insanely hot Tina McIntyre, contemplating our break in the case, talking about going up to my bedroom. This was the good part of my parents being on vacation.
But something was bothering me about Mitch’s blackmail scheme. “Do you think he really could have been doing that? He was only back in town a month.”
“Have you been listening to anyone for the last week?” Tina said back. “The guy was a scam artist. That is what he did for a living. He gets out of prison, sets himself up in that dump of a motel. One day he’s looking out the window and he sees the mayor and Kate Warne traipse into a room with a bottle of Dom and a box of Trojans. Ding! A big bright lightbulb, right over Mitch’s head.”
I wasn’t sure. Just a few minutes ago it had felt like Abby’s note had all the answers, but I was starting to realize how much remained a mystery. “Even if it’s true,” I said, “we still don’t know who killed him. It could have been the sheriff, the mayor, or Kate Warne.”
“Dude, don’t focus on the negative. We’ll find all that out when we talk to his partner.” Tina seemed to think we’d spot him right away at the pool, wearing a sandwich board that said MITCH’S PARTNER. “You know, don’t sweat these things so much. There’s this theory that some philosopher came up with that says the simplest explanation for something is usually the right one. I’m sure you’ve heard of it.”
I had no idea what she was talking about, but the answer was on its way. Daniel padded onto the porch in a pair of green flippers. He lifted his goggles off his face.
“It’s called Ockham’s razor. And he wasn’t some guy—he was William of Ockham, the fourteenth-century logician. Don’t you guys know anything?”
“The male body isn’t very attractive, if you think about it,” Tina said.
We had set up on a pair of plastic-lounger things on the deck, giving us a full view of the small cross-section of Petoskey that had shown up to the pool that day: a gaggle of middle-school girls; three older women slathered in oil, arching their necks toward the sun; parents loaded down with beach bags and sippy-cups, unleashing spastic kids into the pool. Just about everybody was two square inches of lycra away from being stark naked. Unfortunately, Tina wasn’t one of them. She also had a point—it wasn’t a good look on most of the men, especially the one grilling hamburgers on the barbecue in nothing but a star-spangled Speedo job. I guess something about paying three dollars for a day pass to the Petoskey pool made people lose all sense of dignity.
Daniel’s little flipper kicks splashed onto the deck. He had hopped in the water the moment we arrived, and now he was darting from one end of the pool to the next, industrious as ever. A lifeguard looked on from a seat raised above it all. His blond hair was tinged green from chlorine exposure. I was glad it wasn’t the guy from Dana’s party—I didn’t like the idea of Daniel’s life being in the hands of the guy who’d ruined Mike’s summer.
It only took a minute to scan the crowd of thirty or so and discount all of them as possible partners in Mitch’s blackmailing scheme.
“Do you have that picture of Mitch on you?” I asked Tina.
She went for her bag. “Yeah, why?”
“I know a girl who works here. I can ask her if she ever saw him here with anyone.”
“Is she cute?”
“What?”
Tina held the picture out of my reach. “I’m just saying, we need to find you a girlfriend. Don’t you think?”
“Not this girl—she used to go out with Mike.”
Tina grudgingly handed over the picture. “Fine, but don’t think I’m going to let this go.” She took off her shoes and basked in the sun. Even her feet were pretty.
Three girls in GUARD shirts sat around behind the concession stand, slurping neon-colored ice pops. Sophie Hamilton was one of them. She was perched on an icebox, and she looked right through me when I walked up—like she didn’t remember me from two nights ago at Dana’s house, or three years of high school before that. It was pretty annoying.
“Hey. Is Dana here?” I said.
One of the girls was making a paint-pen sign about Bingo Night at the pool. “No,” she said, taking her eyes off the sign briefly. “She just left.”
“Oh, thanks. Do you know where she went?”
The third girl gave the others a creeped-out look. “Umm, home maybe?” she said, like I was a either a potential stalker or just an idiot. The others sniggered into their ice pops.
“Are you with her?” Sophie said sharply, giving a little point-out to Tina.
“Yeah, I am,” I said proudly. “See you around, Sophie.”
I turned, trying to feel triumphant about the exchange. But the girls started whispering at each other furiously as I left them, and I couldn’t help wondering what they were saying about me. High school would never really end.
Tina refused to come with me to Dana’s. “Chicks hate me,” she said. “And a chick your age is going to hate me even more. You know what this sounds like? A solo mission.”
Somebody needed to keep an eye on Daniel anyway, and Tina said she’d take him home from the pool when he finished his Olympic workout. Which left me all alone ten minutes later, standing on the Rubys’ front porch, when Dana’s mom answered the doorbell.
“Hi, Mrs. Ruby.” A shorter, more delicate version of her daughter, Mrs. Ruby was trying to place me when Dana appeared in the foyer and squeezed past her as if she were a ghost.
“Hey, Newell,” Dana said. “What’re you doing here?”
“I just wanted to ask you about something real quick,” I said.
I had the picture of Mitch in my back pocket. The investigation was starting to feel hopeless again—all our hopes rode on the off chance that she would remember Mitch and his partner from the pool.
She waved me in and led me upstairs like I was over all the time. The mayor’s house always felt so lonely to me, except up in Dana’s room, where she had all kinds of lights on and Petoskey’s cheesy rock station playing on a pink boom box. The fifth caller was going ballistic over winning Weezer tickets. Dana didn’t turn it down.
“You don’t have to stand there at the edge of the room,” she said, lying on the bed in a seductive way. It didn’t mean anything—seductive was her default setting.
I pulled a chair out from the kid-size desk with a giant-size laptop on it. “Yeah, well, like I said, I’m doing this sort-of internship at the Courier this summer.”
“Oh geez, it’s Newell with his work again.” She laid back on her bed like she was being tortured. “No, just kidding. What’s up?”
“It’s actually about this guy who died. His name is Mitch Blaylock.” I pulled out the picture and handed it to her. “He used to hang out at the pool. Did you ever happen to see him there with anybody?”
Dana just stared at me—her eyes had gone dead at the details. The disc jockey was going on about their forty-f
ive-minute rock block, and I wanted him to get on with it already so he wouldn’t be yapping in our ears.
Dana wagged the picture. “So, you want to find this guy?”
“He’s the dead one. I’m looking for the guy he hung out with at the pool.”
Dana’s laptop burped with a flurry of incoming IMs. The place was a sensory-overload chamber. I wondered if she would go insane if she had to be in a quiet place for fifteen minutes.
“What’s the story about?”
“Oh, I don’t even know. I’m just sort of a gopher. Every once in a while they ask me to do something like this—getting a phone number or whatever.”
“Hmm. I might have seen him, but I don’t know.”
“You sure you don’t recognize him?”
“Yeah.”
She hadn’t really looked that closely. “Just see if you can think about it for a minute. Try to, like, imagine that guy in sunglasses or a bathing suit or something. I mean, they say it’s really important.”
But Dana just flung the picture back to me. “I don’t know the guy, Newell, I’m sorry.” She was studying my face. “Is this even real? Is this, like . . . did Mike tell you to come over here or something?”
“No,” I said quickly, but then I realized it wasn’t an angry question.
A bunch of loose pictures were strewn over the desk—pictures of Dana out at parties, playing soccer, dressed up for Halloween with Sophie Hamilton. (Sexy nurses, of course.) Most of the pictures had Mike in them, and it hit me: she was hoping he’d sent me over here.
“You guys aren’t talking?” I said.
“He’s not talking to me, that’s for sure.” Dana’s cell phone was lying on the desk, amidst the pictures and some beaded necklaces and a bunch of other junk. She checked the phone—making sure she hadn’t missed any calls from Mike, I guess—and tossed it on the bed. I could feel her mood ping-ponging. The air in the room was turning cold.
She swept the pictures off the edge of the desk and into the trash. One of them missed, spinning wildly in the air on its way to the carpet.
“Screw him, right?” Dana said, more to herself than me. But he was my best friend; I couldn’t let it go.
“He thinks you were cheating on him with that guy from the party.”
“Yeah, well . . .”
She didn’t finish the thought. It felt like an admission.
I picked the stray picture of her and Mike up from the carpet, not that it did much to unclutter the room. The bedroom had a walk-in closet but you wouldn’t know it—stacks of jeans and sweaters lay around, some of them spilling from plastic crates. A pile of volleyball gear sat in a corner like it was being punished.
The dresser was the only clean part of the room, and it was immaculate. The mirror above it glistened, and the wood of the dresser-top gleamed from a fresh polish. It was bare except for a single framed photograph. It made sense—the one part of the room she looked after was the image of herself. I was curious about the picture she had chosen to place there, expecting it to be of her and Mike at the senior prom, but I couldn’t see it from my angle.
“So you want to do something?” she said.
I was kind of shocked; we’d never hung out together before, just the two of us. I was thinking that I shouldn’t, out of respect to Mike if nothing else, when the mayor’s voice barked in from the hallway. “Dana! Where are you?!”
It jarred me—he was yelling at her, a hard edge of cruelty cutting through his voice. The door flew open and the doorknob hit the wall with a thud. It marked a spot indented from previous episodes. The mayor stopped short when he saw me.
“You’ve got company,” he said, ratcheting himself back just a shade. It was for my benefit I guess, but he didn’t seem nearly embarrassed enough. “You need to tell me when you have people over.”
“I didn’t ask him, he just came over,” Dana said. “Hope that’s okay.”
The mayor reached over and turned down the radio. “I want to talk to you later,” he said, and just like that he was gone.
Dana sulked. “He found out about the party,” she said when he was safely downstairs.
If my parents found out I’d had a party like Dana’s, we would have held hands in a circle or gone to therapy or spent a day in the woods playing trust games. But I never would have heard a demeaning voice like the mayor’s. Something was off about it—something that made me think killing somebody might not be beyond him.
Dana was balling up her comforter like a stress toy. “So, like, what do you think?”
“Well, I mean, I think that was kind of harsh.”
She laughed. “Not that, Newell. Do you want to hang out or what?”
“Oh. Yeah, well, I should probably get back to the paper.”
She nodded. “Okay.”
I had stepped back when the mayor came barging in, far enough to sneak a peek at the picture on her dresser before I left. When I did, it sort of killed me. There Dana was in her red prom dress—she had a spray tan and complicated braids, and she actually looked outrageously beautiful—but the guy on her arm wasn’t Mike. It was her dad.
It was just a single picture at a dresser, but it said something unmistakable. The person she kept at her honored place before the mirror was the one who treated her the worst. I realized that I had misjudged her for ten years, and so had everybody else at Petoskey High. She didn’t ask for attention because she was selfish. It had never been like that at all. The swim coach, Lawrence Lovell, the football players at the party—the whole lineup of older guys she attracted—they were substitutes. A psychologist could have had a field day.
I wanted to say something on my way out, something nice, but as soon as I crossed into the hall, the door shut behind me.
“Saved some fries for you,” Mike said.
His eyes never left the television. The sleepy voices of two former Detroit Tigers were calling their game with the Chicago White Sox. Mike was stretched out on our sofa, his feet spilling off the far end. The french fries wilted on the cocktail table next to the ledger in which Mike recorded his bets.
He told me that he’d come over a little while ago and decided to babysit Daniel until I came home.
“Where have you been?” Daniel said. “I could have died or something.”
His face glowed blue in the light of the television, which he sat about three inches away from. It was an odd picture; I had never seen Daniel actually watch a baseball game before. He prefers dissecting the box scores in the morning paper to the fun of actually watching the game.
I pushed Mike’s legs aside and decided to give the fries a try. Soggy, cold. I pointed to Daniel. “What gives?”
Mike slid the ledger toward me. “I gave him a fifty-dollar credit to screw around with. Kid loves the action. Who knew?”
“He’s betting with you?”
A run came home. Daniel raised his arms. “Yes!”
“Just fifty bucks, for fun. Just to make the night a little more exciting,” Mike said.
I saw several bets by the initials DN. “I’m up two hundy already,” Daniel said. I examined the page again in disbelief, and considered ripping it out for evidence to be used against him later. It could be the only thing standing between him and the presidency someday—it would be up to me to stop him.
“You’re gonna lose it all, buddy,” Mike said. A graphic came up on the screen, showing the score: Tigers 2, White Sox 10.
I made mac and cheese for dinner—Daniel, rubbing his temples and rocking back and forth in front of the television, told me he didn’t want any—and by the time I finished, Mike had nodded off. I hadn’t told him about my visit to Dana’s yet; it made me feel guilty toward Mike, my best friend, snoozing away on the couch beside me. I wanted to ask him if he knew how the mayor treated her, but it seemed too personal. The least I could do for Dana was to keep my mouth shut and let her decide who knew about her home life.
The Tigers were down to their last out. Mike stirred upright, clapped his ledge
r closed, and gave Daniel a kick in the ribs. “Sorry bud, you lost it all. . . .”
Just then, a Tiger connected with a fastball. The bat hung loose from his arm and the ball traced an arc high above the outfield grass. The announcer said: “One of the greatest comebacks in Detroit Tigers history. Amazing. Unbelievable.” The Tiger swept around third base, engulfed in a river of teammates.
Mike knelt down in amazement and broke up laughing. “I owe, let’s see . . . let me find the lines here. Yeah, that makes it . . .”
“Thirteen hundred and fifty-two dollars,” Daniel said.
“Whoa,” I said, “I thought you said he only had two hundred dollars.”
Daniel bounded onto the couch. “Yeah, but I had the Tigers on a parlay.”
“Parlay?”
Mike finished a calculation and stared at Daniel in wonder. “Thirteen hundred and fifty-two dollars, that’s right. Did you do that in your head?”
Daniel nodded.
“I could use somebody like you,” he said.
Mike was laughing. Daniel had come out on top, as usual. For a brief moment, the world seemed right.
But it was a fantasy. It would all change the next day.
20
Things started out innocently enough.
Mike had crashed on the couch, and in the morning I found him pulling frozen boysenberries and other bounties from the fridge. He’d already found the blender, which could mean only one thing—another smoothie experiment. It turned out grainy. Plum colored. Bitter.
Daniel drained his whole glass in about two swallows and came up smiling.
“Thanks, Mike.”
“No problem. I gotta remember this one—Purple Haze.”
I swallowed something that might have been an acorn and gave up. I kept my opinions to myself and ruminated on Abby’s note; I had read it about a hunded times before going to sleep, in hopes that it would reveal something new. At the kitchen table, I played the last part back to myself over from memory:
