It took me a few seconds of deep disappointment to realize he was right. Mike had been unsupportive of my project from the start, but this was asking a lot. Tina was going to hate me for this, and maybe I’d get in a ton of trouble, but I didn’t have it in me to press him anymore.
“Yeah, okay, do what you need to. But could you do me a favor? If they come to your house, could you just pretend you aren’t there or something? I could use a few more days.”
Right on cue, an electronic doorbell sounded across Mike’s line.
“It’s them,” he said. “I’m looking out my window, and they can see me.”
It was over. Maybe I’d be arrested, I didn’t know. I could hear Mike’s steps to the door as I sat there on the bed, eyes pinched shut, doom bearing down on me. My jaw ached from my grinding teeth.
“You still there, man?” Mike said. He’d stopped walking. He must have been standing right at the door, ready to let them inside.
“Yeah, I’m here.”
Mike took a deep breath. “Don’t sweat it, okay? I got your back.”
The exhaustion took over—I lay back on my bed, clothes on, and fell into a deep sleep that did wonders for my overcooked nerves. Daniel woke me up for no good reason in the middle of the afternoon, but I was too relieved at getting through the morning in one piece to really care.
I picked up my room a little and took my spy novel downstairs. Keeping myself on lockdown for the day, I figured, would put my parents’ fears to rest. I planted myself on the back porch for most of the afternoon, a fixture of conspicuous responsibility, until shadows crept over the garden and the backyard fell silent for the evening. The air had cooled a touch, and I was actually thinking of helping Daniel set the table (not that he would have let me), when I heard a familiar-sounding pair of boots clomping across our front porch.
Knuckles rapped loudly on the screen door, and I could hear my mom mutter from upstairs, “Oh good Lord, what now?”
At the door, Tina had a cigarette going. Smoke billowed into the house as she peered through the screen in a T-shirt that said PRIVATE PROPERTY. My dad got there just ahead of me, and from the Botoxed expression on his face, I could tell that he didn’t know quite what to think about the apparition before him.
“Hi there. Mr. N?” Most people called him Professor.
“Errr . . . that’s one way to say it, yes.”
“Tina McIntyre,” she said. “Heard a lot about you.”
The words went straight through my dad’s ears. “Can I help you?”
“Dad, this is Tina. From the paper. Could you let her inside?”
“Errr, of course. Of course, of course, of course. Come in.”
Tina flicked her smoke onto the porch and winked at me as she entered.
“Really good to meet you. I love this kid of yours.” Tina gave my dad a close look as she shook his hand. “
Now
I see where Chris gets his good looks.”
My dad snorted a variety of laugh that I’d never heard before, and if I wasn’t mistaken, his cheeks colored a little.
“You aren’t hiding any more Newell men around town are you?”
I really couldn’t have imagined things going any better, until I heard my mom’s rapturous voice call down, “Is that Julia I hear?”
“Errr,” my dad said nervously.
My mom’s feet pounded over the stairs.
“Errr,” he said again.
I cringed.
“Now Ju—” My mom’s lips froze as she rounded the corner. “Oh.”
“Dear, this is Tina McIntyre, Christopher’s friend.”
My mom petrified halfway to the door. Her arms hung limp while Tina hugged her. “Great to meet you,” Tina said.
My mom regarded Tina warily as they broke apart. Tina looked around at the historic map of Petoskey and the antique spinning-wheel. “Very nice. Chris says you’re both professors. I can almost feel the brain power.” She made accordion movements around my dad’s head. “It’s like, bzzzzzz.”
My dad swung a chair behind her. “Sit down. Tell us about the work you’re doing over there at the
Courier
. Christopher seems to be enjoying it.”
And then Daniel appeared. “What stinks?”
“It’s nothing,” my dad said. “Come meet Tina McIntyre. She works at the
Courier
.”
“Hello, stud man,” Tina said, and I could feel my mom bristle.
“Your crossword puzzles suck.”
My mom whispered a protest: “
Daniel.”
He never talked like that with my parents around, but I knew that somehow Tina would get blamed for his bad manners.
My dad shrugged an apology. “They’re too easy for him, you see.”
“Another cutie,
and
he’s a brain?” Tina said.
Daniel beamed, and my dad’s tongue was practically hanging out of his mouth at that point. My mom held stiff at the side of the room, deep in
concerned-parent
mode, but I figured two out of three was the best I could ever hope for and pulled Tina out on the porch to talk in private.
“My mom can be a little uptight,” I said when we got there.
Tina shrugged. “She thinks I’m going to corrupt you. Moms are supposed to be protective. I’m serious, though, your dad’s a hottie.”
I ignored that and told her about the visit from Tim and the sheriff, and how I had denied even knowing Abby Shales. “I might be screwed, ’cause somebody saw Mike’s car out there. They might have even gotten a look at us, I don’t know.”
“No,” Tina said emphatically. “You’re a rock star. You did the right thing. We’re closing in on this—we just need to find out what Abby knows.”
“Yeah, well, that’s the other bad news.”
“What?”
“She’s gone. They said she disappeared last night, after she took Wade to the hospital.”
Tina slapped a fist against her palm and swore too loudly. It must have carried into the house. On the sidewalk, a retired woman from down the street was taking her poodle for an evening walk—she looked up sharply and ambled away from us.
“Your friend Tim sounds like a dick,” Tina said, burning off some disgust at the news about Abby.
I shrugged. “He didn’t used to be. I still can’t believe he did it, in a way.”
“He’s a dick, dude.”
“Yeah, maybe.” I plopped down next to her on the steps. The bad news bonded us as we sat there, moisture creeping into the air and the sky turning purple above us. Tina was the only one who cared about this case like I did. She was the one only who would’ve understood why I’d wanted to go to the morgue that morning.
“Crappy day, but you’re a stud for hanging in there. We’ll get them, Chris.”
She pulled me up off the steps, and then something magnificent happened. I don’t know if she thought about it beforehand. I didn’t. All of a sudden my arms were going around her waist and hers were wrapping over my shoulders, and we were pulling toward each other. It wasn’t sexual or anything. It was just a hug. But a wave of content crashed over me, and my worries about lying to the police leaked away into the night, as quickly as the far-off yipping of the poodle.
“We’re gonna get them,” Tina repeated in my ear.
Her lips were close, and my ear tingled with pleasure even as we drew apart.
18
“
A
ll set,” my mom muttered to herself. “All set. All set.”
My dad popped his head into the kitchen, his shoulders weighted down with suitcases. “We should have left ten minutes ago,” he said, and rushed out to the car.
“We’ll call you when we get settled, which should be pretty late tonight. Probably around—”
“Ten thirty or so. You’ve told me, Mom. We’ll be waiting.”
She hugged me tight. “Take care of him,” she whispered. “And take care of yourself, okay?”
“I’ll miss you, Mom.” I meant it.
She enlisted me to carry a few of her bags, and eventually the whole production made it out to the driveway. “It’s all yours now, partner,” my dad said as he closed the trunk.
“Have a good time, Dad.” I meant that, too.
“Keep the fights to a bare minimum, okay?”
“You got it. Three max.”
He gave me his wry grin. “Let’s not have any house calls from Tim Spencer, either, huh?”
“Yeah, sorry about that. That was just a . . . weird thing.”
He wanted to touch me in some approving, fatherly way and settled on a sideways half hug. He said his good-byes to Daniel, took a drink of us with his eyes, and hopped into the car. My mom blew us kisses as they rolled down the street, hanging out the window like her sons were standing on a train platform and she was watching us as long as she could.
“Good-bye boys! Be safe! Good-bye! Good-bye. . . .”
Their departure was supposed to free me up to investigate Mitch’s death, but mostly it was just a huge distraction. It was like having a missing tooth. It was hard to focus on anything but the hollowness in the den, where my mom would have been working on her research grant, or the empty-looking kitchen chair, where my dad would have been reading one of his old stories.
Daniel didn’t seem to mind. He dove right into a pile of chemistry books he had checked out of the library—he was probably rein-venting the periodic table of elements or something. Since I didn’t have anything else going on, I figured I might as well check the list of household duties my parents had left for me.
Mow lawn
. That could wait.
Take Daniel to pool.
Ugh.
Collect mail.
That I could handle.
The box had just three thin envelopes: the cable bill, a credit card offer, and a handwritten envelope addressed to me. It bore a post-mark from Petoskey and no return address. I tossed the others on the kitchen table and went up to my room to open it. I didn’t recognize the tiny, super-slanted handwriting, but somehow I already knew it was going to be about Mitch.
Fingertip-sized grease marks smudged the page inside, a half sheet of paper torn carelessly from a spiral notebook. Potato chip crumbs spilled to the floor when I unfolded it.
She hadn’t signed the note or written my name at the top, but she didn’t have to. I could practically see her looking my address up in the phone book that night, after she left Wade at the hospital. She probably dropped it in the mail slot at the bus station, her last act in Petoskey before throwing her chips away and hopping on a Grey-hound.
You wanted to know, so here it is. Mitch had pictures of the mayor with a woman at the motel. (Her name was Kate Something accoreding to Mitch—some fancy bitch lawyer or something.) Anyway, if you can’t figure out what he was doing with those pictures you’re not as smart as you seem.
Mitch used to tell me he was going to take his money and go to Texas. It was just a stupid dream
like everything else he said. Well I’m going. It’s a big state and I
plan on getting lost, so don’t try to find me. You actually seem like a desent kid, so I hope your serious about trying to find whoever killed my Mitch. He might have been an idiot, but he was good for a laugh and that’s more than I can say for any other man.
Good luck kid. Do Mitch right—somebody should.
P.S. He had a partner. They used
to meet at the pool, that’s all I really know. Mitch said he loved me, but he didn’t tell me much.
I sat at my desk, rereading Abby’s note with a strange exhilaration. If you’re going to get invested in a dead criminal, it’s nice to know that he was shooting for the stars. I couldn’t help smiling at the thought of Mitch trying to blackmail the mayor. The uptight little man had been having an affair with Kate Warne, and Mitch had found out somehow.
It seemed reasonably certain to me that, admirable as his efforts at blackmailing may have been, they got Mitch killed. Abby’s note had to be right. The blackmail scheme must have been what Mitch had been talking about at the country club bar the night he died, and the affair between the mayor and Kate Warne made a certain amount of sense.
Dana had told me how close her dad was to Kate Warne. It explained why the mayor had been giving her that weird look when she flirted with the bartender at the scholarship ceremony: he was jealous. It also fit perfectly with the sheriff’s interest in the case—after all, his sister was being blackmailed by Mitch. Maybe the sheriff had decided to put a stop to it.
There was something else, too. As soon as I read about Mitch having pictures, my mind flashed to the Vista View case in Dr. Mobley’s office. It had seemed like just another of Dr. Mobley’s oddities, but now that I thought about it, the first time I’d ever seen it was the day Mitch arrived at the morgue. It could have all been a wild coincidence, but I doubted it. Somewhere out there was a Vista View memory card with Mitch’s pictures on it.
I had no way of knowing where the card had gone—maybe Mobley had destroyed it, maybe the sheriff had taken it, or maybe it was gone before either of them got their hands on Mitch—but Abby had given me something else to look for that would be just as informative. We needed to find Mitch’s partner.
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
T
ina 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—”