by John C. Ford
I exhaled. “Okay, you know about the judge taking the bribes in those criminal cases?” Tina nodded. “Yeah, well, those stories keep saying that there could have been more than one judge doing it. There could be others taking bribes, too.”
“So?”
“So, what’s the biggest case in Petoskey in the last five years?”
“I dunno. Is there a point here, mysterioso?” But then I saw it dawn on her. Tina took off her sunglasses. “The golf course case.”
“Yeah, the one clearing the New Petoskey Resort for letting the bluffs slide into Lake Michigan. And who was the judge on that case?”
She turned to the computer screen and back. “No, you don’t think—”
“Yeah, I do. That’s exactly what I think.” I pointed to the picture of the mayor leaving the hotel room. “It was two years ago—he wasn’t the mayor then. He would have still been a judge.”
“We’re looking at a man taking a bribe,” I said, ejecting the memory card and sticking it back in my pocket—I wasn’t going to be separated from that thing until the mayor was in handcuffs. “We can confirm it at the paper.”
“Let’s do it,” Tina said.
When I told him we were leaving, Daniel was puttering around the living room, making his plans for world domination. Well, okay, he was just repeating French phrases from a Rosetta Stone video.
“Partez-vous?” he said. “I mean, you’re leaving?”
“Yeah, you can go to the library if you want, but stay out of trouble.”
“Where are you going?”
“We have to do some work at the paper.”
“Can I go with you?”
I blinked. It was kind of touching, actually. “Look, I’m sorry. I guess I haven’t been the best babysitter—”
“You aren’t babysitting. Forget it, I’m gonna call Mike.”
“No,” I said quickly. “Don’t bother him today.”
“I won’t keep him long, little man,” Tina said. “We’ll be right back.”
“Will you come back with him?”
“If I can,” Tina said. “You can teach me some French, okay?”
“Okay,” Daniel said, and plopped happily on the couch. We gave him high fives on our way out, and I thought to myself, He’s not such a bad kid after all.
Tina floored it to the Courier. We were flying past MacGruder’s Market when she shot me a look. “So . . . do we need to talk about this?”
“Uh, talk about what?” Actually, I was pretty sure I knew what she was talking about, and it wasn’t Mitch Blaylock. I didn’t know if I wanted to broach the topic just yet, if ever.
“Last night was a good time, right?” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, and well, I may have acted in the moment for . . . a moment, and . . . Look, I don’t know what the hell I’m even saying. This is a stupid conversation.”
“Ummm, we don’t necessarily have to—”
“All right, here it is. I don’t remember it too clearly, but I might have sort of led you on there, and I just don’t want you going soft on me. Are you going to go soft on me?”
“Uh, no.”
“I don’t know why I’m even needing to say this. You know your prick of a hero, Tim Spencer? He came to the house last night, after you passed out. Basically called me a pedophile.”
“I heard it.”
“So you heard him give me the big ‘hands off Christopher Newell’ speech.”
“Yeah, sorry ’bout that.”
“Not your fault.” Tina blew smoke out the window. “Jerk. What is he doing, keeping a watch on my house or something?”
“Let’s just forget the whole thing,” I said.
Tina pulled down her visor, slumping back in her seat at a red light. “Screw him. Are we cool about this?”
I had no idea what just got negotiated, except that we weren’t going to be stopping for edible undergarments on the way back to my place. “Sure, we’re cool,” I said, feeling stupid for the sunken feeling in my chest.
The “morgue,” as it turned out, was an orphaned room down the hall from a guy sitting at the biggest computer monitor I had ever seen, arranging the placement of stories in tomorrow’s edition. Tina whisked me past a set of restrooms, a fire exit, and a water fountain to an industrial gray room with a metal door.
She flipped the light switch, and the bulbs struggled to life at one-quarter strength. They provided enough light to make out a microfiche machine, a cabinet of film drawers, and leather-bound books of the Courier’s past volumes, stacked in a bookshelf made for a giant.
“Okay, what are we looking for?” Tina said.
“All we really need is the date that the mayor dismissed the case against the golf-course developers.” He wasn’t the mayor yet when it happened, but Tina knew who I meant—Dana’s dad. “Also, I want to know who the golf course’s attorneys were.”
“Hmmm. Stay here a sec, okay?”
“Where are you going?”
“It could take forever to go through all these.” Tina waved a hand at the tomes lining the walls. “We’ve got a search function on our internal network. Just give me a minute.”
“Okay,” I said. I didn’t know if I could wait even five minutes anymore—I wanted to dive into those things and start looking.
But Tina came back in record time, a huge smile on her face. She shut the door, leaving us alone in the little room with the microfiche files and the wavering buzz of the fluorescent lights. “I could kiss you right now,” she said.
“Well, uh . . .”
“Sorry, shouldn’t have said that. Here, gaze upon your genius.”
She walked around the metal table in the middle of the room, pulled one of the giant volumes off the bookshelf, and flipped it open on the table. It was one of the later volumes, a little more than two years old. She turned gray pages crisping with age until she came to a front page with a blazing headline: RESORT CLEARED IN DECISION. The article had a large picture of Corbett standing on the courthouse steps with his arms raised, fists clenched. A subheading over the first column of the article (written by Art Bradford, natch) read, RULING SETTLES LEGAL QUESTIONS AROUND BLUFF DISASTER.
Tina pointed to the date. “How about that?”
“How about that.” It was seven days after Kate Warne, the mayor, and Alexander Corbett had met in the hotel room.
“Now, check this out,” Tina said. “Third graf, right here.”
She pointed to a quote from none other than Kate Warne, identified in the article as “counsel to the New Petoskey Resort and Spa.” Her statement was a BS-sounding line about how nobody had wanted the damage to happen less than the golf-course owners had. “The state wanted a scapegoat for this natural disaster, but in his well-reasoned opinion, Judge Ruby wisely declined their invitation.”
I turned to Tina, who actually kissed my cheek. “They did it, Tina. Corbett and Kate Warne—they bribed him for that opinion. It was one of the last things he did before he became mayor.”
“I know.”
If people knew, the scandal would set Petoskey on its ear. “It’s not enough to print a story, though, is it?”
“Not yet, but now we know it. I’m out of my gourd right now.”
The pictures didn’t really prove anything, expect that Kate Warne, Corbett, and the mayor had met at a hotel one night. Even if that was prohibited by the court rules, which I suspected it was, it didn’t necessarily mean that any bribery had occurred. But Tina was right: we knew it.
I gobbled up the rest of the article while Tina flipped to others that her search pulled up. They detailed how Mayor Ruby’s ruling had prevented a trial that “would have torn the community apart, for no good reason,” according to Kate Warne, who was quoted liberally in the reports. My parents appeared a few times, too. They were featured in one sidebar story about citizens who had protested the development. Somebody had shot a photo of a meeting of the Ad Hoc Committee to Preserve Petoskey’s Beautiful Spaces, which had
moved out of our house by that time to accommodate their “increasing popularity among environmentally minded citizens from Petoskey and beyond.”
Julia Spencer showed up in the background, wearing a button that said DON’T BLIGHT THE BLUFFS. I wanted to reach in there and apologize to her.
Tina wrapped her arms around me from behind. “Do you realize how huge this is?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m okay,” I said. “But does this really get us any closer to who killed Mitch?”
It was unlikely that the mayor, Kate Warne, or Corbett had killed Mitch for the pictures. If they had, they would have destroyed them. But we knew that hadn’t happened—they’d ended up with Mike.
“Maybe not,” Tina said. “But we know a big part of the picture, Chris. We just have to give a little push, and it’s going to tumble right over into our laps.”
“Yeah,” I heard myself say.
“I’m going to ask Larry about this,” she said.
“No, Tina.”
It wasn’t that I worried about them getting back together. It wasn’t that I saw her going back to him, retreating to his bed of silk sheets with a bucket of ice and a champagne bottle at the ready. Well maybe, but there was more, too. “He could be loyal to Warne. He might . . . ummm . . . warn her.”
“Kate Warne? You said she pushed him out of the firm.”
“Yeah, but Tina, don’t bring it up without me there, at least. Please.”
“Dude, I’d do anything for you right now,” she said. “Almost anything.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“No prob. But I’ve got to do some work now. Call you later?”
“Sure.” I stood up, ten feet tall and ready to conquer nations.
27
I didn’t have my car, but I didn’t care—I had brought my camera along with me, and I had this idea that I would take some pictures on the walk home. It wasn’t like I didn’t have some things to sort through.
Daniel didn’t pick up when I called from the sidewalk on the way back to Main Street. I kept walking down to the Rialto Cinema, called home again, and left a message for him that he should be ready to go to a 7:05 show or he’d miss out on his chance to see Angelina Jolie naked. Then I called my parents’ hotel room and left a message that everything back home was going swell.
At the house, I yelled inside for Daniel. He didn’t answer, like I knew he wouldn’t, and I headed out to the Escort. I tried the library first, but his favorite chair was empty. It was in the reference section, where a small collection of wispy, fragile-boned men whiled away the summer entombed in silent, air-conditioned comfort. They gave me mistrustful looks of the kind I imagined their wives had to be familiar with.
“Is Daniel here?” I figured they were regulars and would know him.
“The whippersnapper?” one of them said.
“Yeah.”
“Nope, ain’t been round.”
I nodded in defeat and headed out to the Escort. It wasn’t a surprise, really. I’d known where to find him all along; I just didn’t want to deal with it.
I started up the engine and headed for Mike’s.
It had always seemed cold to me, Mike’s parents’ house. A box of glass on stilts that could look pretty in a magazine, if you had an extremely expensive camera and caught the light just right. But it was late afternoon by then and the sun was hiding behind the clouds, as it did most of the year. When I swooshed through the S curve on the way to Mike’s house and caught a glimpse of it through the forest, it looked like it always did to me: blank, fake, reeking of money and nothing else.
Maybe that’s why Mike’s parents had chosen it—the description of their house fit their marriage pretty well. I’d never thought it could fit Mike, too, but my world had turned upside down.
Something was amiss in the driveway. Mike’s mom’s Porsche—the car he used all the time—wasn’t there. In its spot was a red Jetta with a girl sitting on the hood. Her back was to me, shaking from tears. Dana Ruby was crying, all alone under the trees.
She’d more or less gathered herself by the time I parked and came up to her.
“Hey, Newell,” she said with a sniff, not really hiding the fact that she’d been losing it a minute ago. I felt like her friend for the first time ever.
“Hi. You okay?”
She shrugged. “Yeah, sure. Well no, I’m not. Eventually maybe. Look, do you mind . . .”
“What do you need?”
“He’s not answering the door, but I think he’s just avoiding me.”
“Do you have a key?” I figured she might—when they were together she was over all the time, sometimes spending the night.
She shook her head. “Not since we broke up. Look, do you mind, like, going up there?”
“Yeah, sure. Stay here.”
I walked the woodchip path to the front door. I heard the doorbell chime inside, but the only response was a long silence broken by one of the crows that liked the woods behind the house. “Hey, Mike, it’s me!” I called. “I’m here for Daniel!”
Nothing. I motioned Dana to wait and checked around back, but the deck was bare; Mike and Daniel weren’t playing moguls today.
“The Porsche isn’t here,” I said to Dana on my way back. “He must be out somewhere.”
“Yeah, and he’s not taking my calls,” Dana said.
“Let me try him, but he might not take mine either, to be honest.” My cell got only a couple of bars in the woods, but it was enough to place the call and hear Mike’s voice-mail message. “Nope, not answering.”
“Why wouldn’t he answer for you?” she said.
“Uh, it’s a long story. We sort of had it out yesterday.”
“Was it anything about me?” That was the Dana I remembered—a little self-important, a little pathetic—but it didn’t bother me. We weren’t so different. I’d been pretty self-important, and pathetic, about Julia.
“No, it didn’t have anything to do with you. Are you sure you’re going to be okay?”
“Yeah. Thanks, you know, for doing that.” She waved in exasperation at the house.
“No problem. I hope it works out for you, Dana. With Mike, or whatever. You should be happy.” I was thinking about her dad and the way he treated her, but I couldn’t say it. I think she knew that’s what I was talking about anyway.
She slid down from the hood, hopping to her feet athletically. “Jesus, Newell, get all serious why don’t you? Are you gonna start crying now, too, or something?”
“No, no. I just mean—”
“Whatever,” she said, and hugged me like a guy—rough enough to show it didn’t mean anything. “Thanks. I’m taking off.”
She put the Jetta in reverse and backed around the Escort. And then I was alone under the trees with the distraction of Dana gone. I was missing a brother, and I didn’t like the feel of it.
Daniel didn’t have a cell phone; my parents had been adamant on the point. I think they believed, somehow, that having a cell phone was going to corrupt him in ways that reading Nietzsche, Machiavelli, and The Art of War—all of which I’d seen on his bookstand at various points—wouldn’t. It was kind of a silly stance to take, and I cursed their decision as I sped toward home, dialing our number over and over to no effect.
Everything was heightened when I got to the house. Eager for signs of Daniel, I saw things I’d stopped seeing long ago: the parted curtains in the upstairs windows, the lock around the front tire of his bike in our driveway. I heard familiar sounds like they were fresh and new. The scuff of my shoes on the walkway. The squeak of the screen door. The texture of the lock as the key fit in the door.
I put one foot in the living room and stopped. They jumped out at me like ghosts, the askew details spread throughout the room. The sofa was pushed too close to the wall. Something was off with my dad’s rolltop desk, which sat decoratively at the side of the room. He’d brought it home from a yard sale, strapped to the top of the E
scort, and my mom had stashed it in the corner because there was nowhere else to put it.
It had sat there, undisturbed, for years. And now somebody had pulled the rolltop up and left it. Daniel wouldn’t do that. The dark, S-shaped rolls of wood had been such a fixed reference in my world that seeing its interior exposed felt like a gross violation.
“Daniel!”
I walked into the kitchen. My stomach fell when I saw the catchall drawer, the one only my mom used, sitting open.
They’d left the note on the whiteboard.
It was written with Daniel’s special red pen—he never let anyone else use it. The note was in his handwriting. I guess they made him write it so I’d know they really had him:
They want the pictures. Wait for their call. No police if you want me back.
PART IV
THE MORGUE AND ME, AGAIN or DEATH IN DUNCAN WOODS
28
For an hour I sat in the kitchen, head pulsating, phone at my side, unable to move.
I can’t remember those minutes passing, really—it’s just a dark crevice in my memory, an hour-long coma I passed through before reengaging, horrified, with the world. I’ve heard the mind does that. It knows when something is too much to handle and shuts off. It might happen once in your life, if you’re unlucky—and when it does, your brain just takes an eraser to the whole thing.
The darkness brought me out of it. The sun had dipped below the kitchen window, and I realized I was just sitting there in the murky night like some kind of deranged person. Which I was, in a way. I turned on the light, carrying the portable phone with me, triple checking the battery to make sure Daniel’s call—it would come, I told myself, it would come—got through.
I avoided looking at the whiteboard. I didn’t want to think of him picking up that pen, writing out the letters in a shaky red hand that couldn’t quite master his fear. I put my head in my hands and felt my body pound.
