The Morgue and Me (23 page)

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 Escort, 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:

PART IV

F
or 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.

My parents had left me alone with a single responsibility—Daniel—and now he’d been kidnapped.

I grabbed the portable phone and stalked around the house, but it didn’t do much to fight the feeling that I was drowning in my own uselessness. I had to keep the house line clear for the call from whoever had taken Daniel. My cell was lying on the kitchen table—I used it to dial Tina.

“Yo,” she answered, and I heard my voice come out in a rush. When I got to the fact that Daniel had been taken, she told me to hang tight and clicked off. The call had lasted about seven seconds.

I called Mike next, almost without thinking about it.

“Hey.” His voice was guarded.

“Hey, do you have Daniel with you?”

“No.” Awkward pause. “What do you mean?”

“You have no idea where he is?” I insisted. “Really?”

“No, no clue. What’s going on?”

“Somebody took him, Mike. It’s because of those pictures, and you’re the only one who even knew I had them.”

Tina knew, too, of course. I’d called her out on the boat to tell her I’d found the pictures, and then I spent the night at her place right after. But she didn’t count; she wasn’t the one who’d taken my brother.

“Hold on,” Mike said. “Are you saying he’s been, like, kidnapped?”

“Yeah. You have to tell me everything you know about those pictures. It could help me get Daniel back.”

“I can’t tell you how I got them. I just can’t.”

“They’ve got my brother, Mike.”

“I’m sorry, I know, but I can’t. But look, I didn’t tell anybody you had them. Whoever is asking about those pictures, they didn’t find out you had them from me.”

“But you’re the only one who could have,” I said.

I was milling through the house as we talked, obsessively turning on all the lights, as if it would help. They hadn’t bothered to cover up the fact that they’d searched my room. The bed had been stripped. My books were splashed all over, spines broken and pages creased awkwardly against the floor. They’d taken apart my bookshelf, now just a mess of wooden planks on the floor.

“It wasn’t me, Christopher,” Mike was saying. “I swear to God it wasn’t me. I’m coming over there to help you.”

I was barely listening. The destruction in my room was making me sick. I had just noticed the empty spot on my desk—they’d taken my computer—when a knock came from the front door. The thought of Tina’s company gave me a surge of relief.

“Christopher? Christopher?” It was Mike, still talking on the line.

“Don’t come over. I’ve got to figure out what’s going on here.”

“But Chris—”

I clicked off and raced downstairs, not bothering to look before I swung open the door.

A police cruiser sat big and bulky in the driveway, closer to the house than we ever parked. It was shadowed by the porch and the top of it glowed with the reflection of a far-off streetlight. Looking sideways, I saw Tim Spencer peering through our living-room window. He had one of those cowboy/police hats on, pressing it up against the glass as he looked in. The night was turning black behind him.

“Christopher, hi.”

He pulled open the screen door—it was like a toy in his hand—and trod past me inside. In the living room, he stalked around, forehead wrinkled as he made a quick inspection.

“Why are you here?” I said.

“Some neighbors called. They saw somebody they didn’t recognize enter through the back door earlier.”

“The Gradys?”

“Yeah.”

They lived behind us. I used to cut through their lawn on the way to school until I realized Mr. Grady spent his days looking out their windows, never missing a thing. Daniel never took that route because it was trespassing.

“Mr. Grady, he said it was probably nothing, but he knows your parents are away and decided to report it. Actually, he calls every week about something or other.” Tim glanced around the room again. “So . . . everything okay? Did you have a visitor?”

I shouldn’t have trusted him. He worked with the sheriff, he’d been staking out Tina’s place, and he’d met with Dr. Mobley. And there he was now in the living room, just happening to show up when my little brother got kidnapped. No, I really shouldn’t have trusted him—but I was desperate and he’d been my hero once.

“They took Daniel,” I said.

“What?”

“Daniel’s gone, somebody took him.” I led him into kitchen and showed him the note.

Tim read it over with a blank expression. “This isn’t a joke?”

“No.”

He scrutinized Daniel’s message some more. “They want the pictures,” Tim said softly, to himself. “Christopher, are these pictures—”

The screen door banged. A second later Tina was there in the kitchen, stopping cold when she saw Tim. “What’s he doing here?”

“Take it easy,” Tim said.

“Not likely,” she said.

The whiteboard was right between them. She read the note, then pulled me over to her for a kind of sideways hug thing. I felt weak but stayed put, soaking up her warm, protective energy.

“Really, what
are
you doing here?” Tina said. “Stalking Christopher’s house now?”

“I came on a call,” Tim shot back. “But I think—”

“It says no police. You’re putting Daniel in jeopardy.”

“Shut up for a second,” Tim barked, then tried to calm himself. “Let’s just step back, okay. I think I know something about what you’re involved in here.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Tina said dryly.

He stepped forward, into her personal space. “Hey, I’m here to help. His brother’s been kidnapped, and arguing isn’t going to help us get him back.” Tim turned to me. “Now tell me, what pictures are they talking about in that note?”