“Then how’d you get this?” I was holding up the card.
He didn’t answer. I was searching his eyes for some kind of hint when a terrible thought struck me:
Mitch’s partner . . . could it have been Mike?
“I can’t talk about it,” he said. “I’m sorry, man, I really am, but it’s complicated. You have to trust me.”
“You’ve been lying to me all summer,” I said. “That’s going to be hard.”
“I haven’t lied to you.”
“It’s the same thing, Mike. Not telling me what you know, it’s the same as lying. I got beat up over this. I was down in that basement—”
“
And I got you out!
” His face was red, veins showing on his neck. I shuddered, wondering if he was going to hurt me somehow. “
I lied to the cops for you! I’ve been doing everything I can!”
“Except being honest.”
“I can’t, Christopher. I can’t.”
“Were you his partner? Were you blackmailing the mayor?”
It made sense, in some bizarre sort of way. Mike had always been eager to make money—he was a little bit like Mitch that way. Both of them were characters, funny guys that talked big and made people laugh. They probably would’ve gotten along well. I could see them meeting at the pool, sharing a joke. Maybe Mike had told Mitch about his bookie operation, and maybe Mitch recognized a fellow schemer. It wouldn’t have been long before Mitch was bragging about his blackmail plan.
“I’m not telling you a thing,” Mike said. He was beyond cold now—he was angry.
“Well, I’m not letting it go. I’m going to find out what happened.”
I started for the door, and that’s when Mike threw me against the wall.
He gripped my T-shirt tight. It pulled against my neck, and the fright of it had me hyperventilating.
“Christopher, I didn’t do it.”
“Tell me what you did, then.”
“I can’t.”
“I’m going to figure it out anyway,” I said.
He shoved me harder into the wall. I didn’t resist. If it came to a fight, I’d be on the ground in seconds. My lungs throbbed beneath his fists. Everything was going cock-eyed in my vision.
I tried to slip out from his hands, thinking it was useless. But then he let me slide away. I stumbled toward the door and stuck the card in my pocket.
“Take it. I don’t care about the pictures anyway,” Mike said.
“Why do you have them, then?”
Mike just shook his head. “You should really stop this,” he said.
There was nothing left to do but walk out of the house and go find the answers. But there was something final about leaving, and for a second my feet wouldn’t move. I doubted that Mike and I could be best friends after this—whatever he’d done, this was too big not to change things in some irreversible way.
But I left.
I opened the front door, and I didn’t say good-bye.
23
“
Y
ou
what
?” Tina said.
“I got the pictures. Mitch’s blackmail pictures.”
“How?”
Wind was blowing into her cell phone, crackling against my ear.
“It’s a long story,” I said. “Can you come over?”
“Not now, I’m tied up till tonight. What do they look like?”
“I’m still not sure, exactly.”
I couldn’t make myself put the card in my computer. Seeing the pictures would mean for certain that Mike was at the center of it all. Maybe he’d been Mitch’s partner, maybe he’d killed him, maybe both. I didn’t want it to be true. It was the Tim Spencer problem times ten.
“You sound like you’re out on the lake or something,” I said.
“Nice guess. Larry took me out on his boat.” Another gust flapped across the line. “I’m calling you the second I get back. You need to give me the whole story tonight.”
“Yeah, okay,” I said, and clicked off.
I sat there for another few minutes, just me and the memory card. I forced myself to place it in the little slot on my computer, but couldn’t push it in. It sat there teasing me, filling the whole world.
“What are you doing?” Daniel said.
It scared the lights out of me. He’d come far into the room, just a few feet from my computer, and I hadn’t even noticed. If I’d stuck that card in, who knows what Daniel would have seen. Even without seeing the pictures, he sensed something—a wave of fear trembled through his voice. The fright in Daniel brought it home. My life was unraveling—all the things I trusted were spinning off in odd directions, unspooling, melting away from my grasp. I needed to get a grip. “Uh, nothing.”
“What happened at Mike’s? What did you find in that drawer?”
We’d been over this fifty times on the ride back already, but he never gave up. “Nothing, I told you,” I said.
He was way too smart to believe me. Daniel looked down, brushed his foot against the carpet. Mike was just about his favorite person in the world; he was confused, afraid, and for once he seemed like a regular ten-year-old kid. “Look, sorry for yelling at you over there. Do you want to go to the museum?”
We both needed a break, and the Coast Guard Museum was Daniel’s favorite place in the world. He was powerless to resist.
I dragged out the trip as long as I could. Daniel pressed his nose to the display windows and jabbered on about the finer points of maritime history. I was thankful for the background noise—it helped me set my mind blank. Eventually a security guy inched us toward the exit with some mumbled talk about the museum closing in fifteen minutes. We ate a long dinner in town after, but the whole trip had still passed in a blur. I didn’t want to go back to those pictures.
My stomach was soggy with dread when we pulled back up to the house, and that was even before I saw Julia Spencer. She was knocking on the front door with a Netflix movie in her hand.
“Your other girlfriend,” Daniel said in the car.
I told him to beat it inside and greeted Julia on the porch.
The sky above us was purple. The air was still and fragrant with the neighbors’ flowers. Mother Nature cued the night sounds—the crickets, the rustling branches, the insect zappers. The moon was rising. A mood for romance, if you cared to see it that way. I didn’t.
“Hey. So, what happened to you at Dana’s?” Julia said.
“Oh, yeah, sorry I didn’t get to talk to you. Mike wanted to leave.”
“I figured. He didn’t look too happy.” She looked around aimlessly, smelling the flowered night. “So anyway, here I am again. Want to watch a movie?” She held it up: an old comedy called
The BreakUp
. “I figured it was kind of appropriate.”
She forced a laugh, but I didn’t join in.
Something had changed. Maybe the night at Dana’s party had knocked some sense into me, or maybe I had too many other things on my mind, but I wasn’t tempted anymore. Enough things had exploded in my face—another go-round with Julia wasn’t high on my list.
She waved the movie at me again. “C’mon, you know. For us.”
“For us?” I said.
Julia put her weight on one leg. “Because, you know, we kind of broke up. Sort of.”
I didn’t have the patience anymore. “Broke up?” I said. “We never went out.”
Julia didn’t care that my voice has raised a hair. She stepped closer, acting coy. “Technically, yeah. But Christopher, I think you could give me a break. I’ve been trying hard all summer, you know? I’ve basically been humiliating myself just to hang out with you again.”
She reached out for my hand but I wasn’t having it.
If I could have seen it from the outside I might have stopped myself, but things were getting tangled in my mind. I should have been mad at Mike, not Julia. I
was
mad at Mike—for having the pictures, for being involved in the mess. I’d been trying to ignore it all afternoon, holding back the feelings with a finger in the dam. It couldn’t last forever, and there, on the porch, it all washed out over Julia.
“
You’ve
been humiliating yourself?
“Hold on. I mean I—”
“Think how it feels for me. Humiliation is when you get rejected. I’ve never done that to you.”
“What . . . and I have?”
“Of course you have.”
She looked a little stunned. I didn’t care. I plowed on. “Remember Homecoming?”
She stumbled back a half step. Her eyes had grown large and bewildered against the sunset. A breeze pushed across the porch, smelling of hot dogs and lighter fluid.
“You think I rejected you?” she said. “You think that’s what happened?”
“I know that’s what happened.”
I did. For over a year, I’d felt a physical pain of embarrassment every time I thought of her. I’d walked under that Homecoming banner a thousand times, confused and ashamed. A thousand times I’d wondered how I’d deluded myself into thinking she liked me.
It felt good to get it out. Or it should have felt good, anyway.
But Julia looked too wounded. She could get hurt like anybody else, but she didn’t let it show, not until she was safe somewhere like the library, talking over her wounds with a trusted friend, smothering them in jokes.
“I waited for
months
for you to ask me out,” she said. Julia looked around the empty street before she let loose. “I waited for you all summer. I called you all the time, I hung out with you all the time. If you didn’t know I wanted you to . . .” She was speaking too fast to keep up with herself. She looked around again, stuffed the movie into her pocket, cleared her eyes.
I wanted to stop her from walking down the porch stairs but I couldn’t move. Regret was weighing me down, sinking me into the porch. Suddenly, there were a thousand things I wanted to do differently.
“I didn’t know.”
Julia looked back from the bottom step. “Yes you did. You were just scared. I’m like that, too—maybe that’s why we got along so well.” She gave a sad little smile, the same one she had given me by her locker, under the Homecoming banner. I hadn’t been able to figure the look out back then, but now I knew what it meant:
Sorry, I’ve given up on you
.
“No, but . . .” I couldn’t find the words to go on. There’s something unmistakable about the truth, and it was slapping me in the face. “I’m sorry,” I said. It was the only thing I could manage, and it just seemed to make her more angry.
Julia shrugged. “It was a long time ago. But you know, if you want to ask somebody to a dance, you don’t wait until a week before. It’s actually kind of an insult.” She brushed her watery face again. I could barely stand to look at her. She opened her mouth to tack something on and thought better of it.
“Forget it,” she said, and got into her car.
Daniel handed me the phone when I got inside. “Tina,” he said, waggling his eyebrows.
“Hey,” I said into the receiver.
“You don’t sound too good. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Are you back?”
Tina responded with a sound effect.
POP! Fizz.
“You like champagne?”
“Never had it, why?”
“You’re about to. Lawrence just dumped me. Wanna get drunk?”
“Yes.”
“Be over here in fifteen minutes.”
Click.
Daniel would be okay for a few hours. I made him get into bed and swear a blood oath that he’d stay put. And then I was off.
24
S
he answered the door in a white T-shirt with red lettering that spelled JUICY. She was clutching two champagne bottles. One of them was half-empty. She held out the other, wobbling.
“Here you go,” she said. “Got a head start on you.”
“Uh, thanks.”
She stumbled to the living room and plunked down on the sofa. Her arm curled the bottle tightly to her chest, like it might go wandering.
“Cheers.”
I clinked bottles with her. “Cheers, Tina.”
She poured back a swallow like it was root beer. “Cheers.”
“You got it. So why the champagne?”
“Little tradition of mine,” she said. “Champagne always takes the edge off a breakup.”
“Guess I can use it, too, then.”
“What?”
“Nothing,” I said, and had my first sip of champagne. I’m pretty sure you’re supposed to drink the stuff from a tall, thin wineglass, but whatever. It tasted sweeter than one of Daniel’s juice boxes. The red sticker on the side said $3.99. It went down easy.
Magnifique
.
A huge mound of newspapers sat on the carpet; Tina used them as a leg rest. Some kind of postmortem talk about Larry Lovell seemed appropriate, but I didn’t know how to bring it up without sounding happy about it. I sat back and surveyed her apartment again: the tropical plant, the bass with the broken string, the worn-out carpet. A Twinkie wrapper on her coffee table reminded me, for some reason, of the body bag I’d seen in the morgue the day they brought Mitch in. Maybe the champagne was hitting me.
The smell of the lake mixed with scented candles that she’d lit all around the living room. The clutter in the room cast giant flickering shadows on the walls.
I shifted and felt the memory card dig into my leg. I’d stashed it in my pocket before leaving the house.
“You’ve got a computer, right? Let’s look at these pictures.”
“Computer? Umm, maybe you haven’t heard, but reporters don’t get paid crap. So no.” She leaned in, almost touching her forehead to mine, like we were about to make out. “C’mon, let’s go outside.”
She lived at the peak of a hill that descended to Lake Michigan on one side and Duncan Woods on the other. We sat on the curb in the cool air, with the black lake floating beneath us. It was late and nobody walked on the little slice of beach. I told Tina about finding the pictures at Mike’s place, and getting in a fight with him, and how I thought it probably meant that he’d been Mitch’s partner in the blackmail somehow.
“My God,” Tina said. “Guess you need this worse than I do.”