The Morgue and Me

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

VIKING
Published by Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

 

First published in the U.S.A. by Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2009

 

Copyright © John C. Ford, 2009

All rights reserved

 

eISBN : 978-1-101-08194-5

[1. Criminal investigation—Fiction. 2. Murder—Fiction. 3. Extortion—Fiction. 4. Journalists—Fiction.
5. Photography—Fiction. 6. Family life—Michigan—Fiction. 7. Michigan—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.F75315Mor 2009
[Fic]—dc22
2009001956

 

 

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PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of
the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons,
living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Petoskey, Michigan, is an actual city in northern Michigan which bears almost no resemblance to the version portrayed in this book. Go see for yourself. You’ll like it. And give my apologies to the medical examiner.

Prologue

W
hen you’re eighteen years old and you shoot somebody in a public place at two in the morning, of course you expect some attention. Especially when it’s the person I shot, and especially when you’re found right there on the scene with that person at your feet, gasping away in a pool of blood that seeps around your shoes. Still, I find it really embarrassing.

It’s strange to be in the paper every single day. In the first story, under the giant headline, they ran a blown-up version of my high-school graduation photo. The cap looked ridiculous, not to mention my blotchy face or the magenta robe, four sizes too big. Over the next week, they used three different pictures of me in a parade of humiliating poses: fake smile, half-closed eyes,
in my pajamas
. I don’t know where they dug them up, but they must have run out, because yesterday they called the house and asked for more. My mom called them “vultures” and hung up.

Reporters from the
Courier
have interviewed half the town about me. And it isn’t just them—television vans from Grand Rapids and Detroit are sitting on the street outside, hoping to catch a glimpse of me. It’s a waste of time for everybody; my parents have forbidden me to leave the house, and I’m in no mood to break that particular rule just now.

If you ever get famous (maybe I should say
notorious
) you’ll notice something. People say things about you that are just plain lies. They pick up on something about you, and then they repeat it over and over until they think it explains all your actions. In my case, they say I’m a loner. In today’s paper, this guy I barely know said, “Chris always kept ’way off to himself. He would sit alone in the cafeteria at lunch, reading books about astrology and stuff. It was pretty weird.” First of all, it’s
astronomy
. Second of all, having intellectual pursuits and eating by yourself doesn’t make you some kind of terrorist, which is what the guy was saying.

When this happens to a group of people, it’s called
stereotyping
. When it happens to an individual, it’s called
in-depth reporting
.

My parents hired a psychiatrist for me. Our sessions take place on the back porch, over glasses of lemonade and my mom’s oatmeal cookies. He says that I’m “disassociating” from my traumatic experience, which is why I talk about the shooting so lightly. My “levity problem,” he calls it. I say my parents are paying that guy too much. Cops and soldiers use humor to get them through, and no psychiatrist beats them up about it. If I’m going to be a cop myself—actually, a spy—shouldn’t I start adapting now?

Then again, maybe the shrink has a point. Maybe I’m a little screwed up right now.

My name is Christopher Newell. Classes start in a few weeks at Northwestern Michigan University. I’ll be a freshman. Not to brag, but I was valedictorian of Petoskey High, and I won the Regents Scholarship—and no matter what anybody is saying, I intend to start college on time.

Some crazy things happened in Petoskey this summer, things that some people wouldn’t believe. I guess that makes sense; I have a way of getting caught up in my own fantasies. But everything that happened to me was real—and I won’t apologize for anything I did about it.

PART I

I
t was the job at the morgue that started this whole thing.

It wasn’t my top choice, mind you. I had planned to work in the NWMU astronomy department over the summer. My parents are both professors at the university, and I figured they could pull the appropriate strings. That was the idea back in May, anyway, before I got arrested during an unauthorized visit to the university’s new $75 million planetarium.

It happened on a Saturday. Prom night, to be exact. I didn’t go. I couldn’t see myself dressing up in a tux and going to parties with people I didn’t know very well and acting like a clod on the dance floor all night, just because you’re supposed to. It’s not that I’m antisocial, exactly. I’m just more the observing type, and stars are my favorite thing to observe, so I decided to check out the planetarium.

What else was I going to do—sit in my room thinking about Julia Spencer all night?

They hadn’t quite finished construction on the planetarium, so they didn’t have the alarm all geared up yet. I had just seen this Bruce Willis flick where he did a trick with his credit card to pry open the lock on a bad guy’s apartment door. I couldn’t believe it when it worked on the south entrance. The whole thing was a bust, though—they had me in plastic handcuffs within about five minutes.

The campus security officer said he didn’t care how many moons of Jupiter were visible, it was still breaking and entering. He loaded me in the back of his car and carted me off to the campus police station, where I had a very unpleasant chat with the sheriff before my parents used their pull to get the charges dropped. Still, I wasn’t going to be getting any job offers from the astronomy department.

My mom cried a little bit over the planetarium affair. She taught in the biology department and told me she could arrange an internship there. Her tone suggested that I should be very thankful and accept immediately. My dad said they always could use researchers in classics, too.

Around that time, though, the
Courier
ran a classified ad for a job at the morgue. It went like this:

Naturally I hopped right on it.

“Naturally,” I say, because my life’s goal is to become a spy, or at least a spyish-type figure. Based on my preliminary research (namely, rentals from the “Cloak and Dagger” section of University Video), I’m thinking seriously about the National Security Agency. Working at the morgue might teach me something about forensic pathology that could come in handy later, I figured. It’s not like I had better alternatives; they don’t train you in fingerprinting at the knickknack shops in town.

“Oh my Lord,” is what my mom said when I told her that I was going to call about the job. She was making vegetarian lasagna at the time.

We were in the kitchen, where my dad was reading Chaucer. He lowered his book. “That’s positively macabre,” he said. That’s how he talks. “Sometimes I think you would have enjoyed living in the Middle Ages.”

My mom peered at the advertisement. “It’s just fifteen hours a week.”

“I don’t need that much money,” I said.

It was true, too. I had already won my full-ride scholarship to NWMU. It came with a housing allowance, which was like free money since I had decided to live at home. A part-time job was perfect—it’d leave me plenty of time to practice photography.

I put together a slapdash résumé that filled just under half a page, including a line for interests (“Astronomy, Comic Books of the 1940s, Edgar Allan Poe, Photography”) and faxed it over. To my surprise, they called me in for an interview the very next day.

 

 

The morgue isn’t far from our house; nothing in Petoskey is. The sign on Route 14 says, WELCOME TO PETOSKEY: WHERE NATURE SMILES FOR SEVEN MILES, but every single word of that sign is a lie. For one thing, Petoskey is six miles long at best. It sits on Lake Michigan—the West Arm Bay, to be precise—an hour’s drive from the Upper Peninsula and, if you care to go farther, Canada. Tourists come up in the summer, when you could say that Nature winks at Petoskey. For the other nine months, it blows a harsh wind off the lake that freezes nose hairs and stunts tree growth. And snows in heaping portions.