The Morgue and Me (30 page)

She wasn’t responding, but once I’d started, I wanted to get it all out there.

“The sheriff stopped your car on way out of the Lighthouse—somebody saw that, but I never connected it to you before. You told him what you’d done, didn’t you?”

She folded her arms across her chest. “Just go on,” she said.

“The sheriff ’s sister was being blackmailed by Mitch, so he would have wanted Mitch’s death kept quiet just as much as your dad. So they organized the fake autopsy with Dr. Mobley. I thought they’d done it all to cover up the bribery that your dad and Kate Warne were involved in. But they did it to protect you.”

That’s what the sheriff and Mobley had been talking about when they called Lovell’s death
different
. Dana was just a girl—they were willing to protect her. But the mayor shooting Lovell was a different order of things.

I kept talking. “That’s how the pictures got to Mike’s, right? You left them there that night—you probably never wanted to see them again.”

“He was supposed to destroy them,” Dana said. Her head was down—she was talking like I wasn’t even present. When she picked her head up, I saw that she’d given up entirely. She almost looked relieved.

“Did you even know Mitch before that night, Dana?”

She closed her eyes, shutting out her pain. “Barely,” she said in a small voice. “I’d see him around, that was it.”

“He started talking big to you, right? Telling you about his scheme.” She must have realized in the bar that Mitch was blackmailing her own father. “Why’d you go back to the Lighthouse with him, Dana? To protect your dad, right? To get the pictures and get rid of the evidence.”

It was so sad, and strangely hopeful, how she and her dad had done these terrible things for each other.

“You didn’t plan to kill him, did you, Dana?”

“Of course not,” she said quickly, and looked back up at me. “I convinced him to show me the pictures, and then I tried to take them and get out of there.” She left it hanging.

“But he fought you,” I said. “And he had a gun in his room. You got to it first, I guess.”

“Stop.” Dana was staring upward, biting her thumb. “Just tell me, what are you going to do?”

“I really don’t know. I’ve been trying to figure that out,” I said.

She nodded. “Well, let me know when you do.”

When I left, her eyes were wide, fixed on the bright white paint of her ceiling.

W
e sat out on the Maskes’ porch and drank smoothies.

Strawberry Fields again—it was getting better. Mike had listened to the whole story. His face grew heavier and heavier as I told him about Dana. I asked him if he’d known all along.

“Maybe, in a way. She never said so, but she was crazy that night. She’s right, she told me to throw that card away. It was such a weird thing to ask that I had to look at them.” He shrugged. “I know, I shouldn’t have. And then when Abby told you about Mitch having the pictures of the mayor and Kate Warne, I knew. I knew what she’d done.”

I spent the rest of the afternoon there, wanting to feel the comfort of our friendship. I waited for our old patterns to peek through the awkward haze left by Dana Ruby’s crime, but it was too much to get past. It was going to take more than a few hours—it might take years.

When we finished our smoothies, Mike asked if I wanted a beer. I didn’t. He got one for himself, cracking it loud, foam dripping down over his fingers and onto the ground below us. The sound of the can opening echoed in the woods.

He was halfway through when I called my parents to tell them I was at Mike’s and would be home in an hour. I’d just hung up when my cell rang, a number I didn’t recognize.

“Hello?”

“Christopher?” It was Dana, and she’d been crying.

“Yeah, it’s me.”

“Look, could you do me a favor and come to the hospital? I’ll meet you at my dad’s room, okay?”

It was the last place I wanted to go, but Dana was barely hanging on. “Yeah, sure, I’ll leave right now.”

“It was her, wasn’t it?” Mike said.

I nodded. We never hugged good-bye, but we did it that day, strong and fierce.

 

 

She stood in the hall outside his room, and even from there you could hear the bleeping of machinery keeping him alive. He was under a blue sheet, his body lumpy and lying awkwardly on his side while a nurse tended to him. Dana’s red eyes watched sympathetically.

Seeing her cry, you’d never know how mean that man had been to her. And still the two of them had ruined themselves for each other.

“If I don’t tell what happened, people will think he killed Mitch, too, won’t they?”

“Maybe,” I said after a time. She still wanted to protect him. There was hardly anything left to protect—he already had been disgraced by taking the bribe in the golf-course case. Everyone knew that he killed Lawrence Lovell. He had no honor to speak of, but Dana wanted to save it. “To tell you the truth,” I said, “I’m not sure people will care much about who killed Mitch. Nobody seemed to, this summer.”

“You did.”

I nodded. “I did.”

The nurse exited the mayor’s room, her rubber soles squeaking down the long hall. Dana waited for her to disappear around a corner.

“I want to look in on him,” she said. “After that, if I wanted to go to the police station, would you go with me? I don’t think I can do it by myself.”

“Yeah. I’ll go with you.”

She asked for fifteen minutes, and I didn’t want to sit there hovering. Or maybe it wasn’t that—maybe I knew what I was doing. I drifted down the hall, then down the dark stairwell, and I was looking at the yellow light against the frosted glass of the morgue entrance.

A shadow bobbed down the hallway, growing larger as it approached the door. I held my breath as it creaked open, and there he was. Dr. Mobley, laboring forward, his cane in one hand and his brown briefcase in the other. He stopped at the sight of me, paused, and turned to lock the door.

He slipped the key off his chain with a slight tremble in his hands. His cane wavered uncertainly in the air while he did it.

He steadied himself and gave me a respectful nod. “You should know,” he said, “that I’ve worked my last day.” It sounded like an apology.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Don’t be sorry,” he said, and teetered past me up the stairs.

After a moment I followed, and found Dana outside her dad’s room.

“Let’s go,” she said.

I
never tried again to get the black-and-white picture I had wanted so much at the beginning of the summer. The one out by the lighthouse, with the waves swimming in the moonlight.

I go out to the bluffs, the place where I got Daniel back. There’s a rocky beach underneath, with smooth stones and good quiet for thinking. The best part of the bluffs slid into the lake, but it’s still impressive out there—on a good night the cliff wall will catch the sunset, sparkling orange and red and pink. It’s a good break from the sessions with the shrink.

Sometimes I think about Dana. She’s under eighteen and it looks like whatever happens, she’s going to have a life.

There’s lots of other stuff to think about, too, like what the dorms are going to be like. I’ve decided to live on campus after all, even though my parents may hire a SWAT team to follow me around, protecting me from the world and vice versa. Or I think about Tina and hope she doesn’t take another job. She’s been getting a lot more calls about jobs since her stories broke. I overheard Tim telling her about this position with the Detroit police force one day. Tina had her cell on speakerphone, and she shut him up real quick, trying not to look at me. I give it about a month before they end up down there together.

Sometimes I don’t think at all. I bring my camera with me and just take a lot of pictures. Daniel still hates most of them.

It’s a good place to let your mind go. I can sit on those rocks on the beach for a whole afternoon, just feeling the big presence of the cliff above me. The air is still, because the cliff shoulders the breeze. I wait there until the sun goes down, and then I pick up my camera and go back into the world. There’s stuff to do out there, like getting Julia back.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to my sage editor, Catherine Frank, whose large reserves of insight, care, and red ink improved this book beyond measure. Thanks also to Kendra Levin at Viking for astute reading and much-appreciated good cheer.

 

 

I could not dream of a better tour guide to the world of publishing than the wonderfully supportive Sara Crowe, literary agent par excellence.

 

 

I began writing
The Morgue and Me
in a workshop at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland. I am grateful for that remarkable institution, the instruction of Daniel Steven, and especially the friendship of writers-in-arms Barb Goffman, Tim Jungr, Mary Nelson, Carolyn Mulford, Laura Durham, and Elizabeth Frengel. Elsewhere, Laura Caldwell and Mindi Scott gave keen-eyed readings to early drafts that had no business being inflicted on them. Many thanks.