“Yeah.” He smiled. “Strongest guy I ever knew. I shoulda got to know him better. I don’t know if he’ll ever hear the album, but he always wanted me to put more good into the world. I wasn’t very skillful at doing that; all I knew how to do was bowl. So this seemed like an important thing. Helping a few other guys with their dreams. Make some halfway decent music.”
“I’ll get it to him. The recording from last night. If you want.”
He closed his eyes for a moment and then smiled. “Thank you, Fovea.”
“I’ll grab a pen, write his info down.” I ducked out of the lab and ran to my mom’s office, figuring it was closer than the lobby, but in the seconds I was gone, I’d missed him.
McMullen’s game was over.
At some point, I called Howe. He got to the lab pretty fast, and since no one else was around to tell him, I did. And then we took the box of tissues and lay down on the floor of the lobby because it was the only thing we could think to do.
“I hope you don’t take this the wrong way,” he said, “but that ceiling is kind of gross.”
“No, you’re right,” I said. “Actually, you know, the floor of a cadaver lab lobby is probably super gross.”
“I don’t care,” he said.
“Yeah. Me neither.”
It came to me while I was lying there, thinking about bowling. Well, thinking about the idea of bowling, not about going bowling.
And specifically how hard it must be to be the first pin.
Getting smashed over and over again.
Everybody’s always talking about the bowling ball, but what about the pin, you know?
The thing about the pin is, it always gets back up.
A pin would not lie down on the gross floor of a cadaver lab and get all swampy feeling sad. It would stand up again.
This situation was, as a great man might say, baloney. I was going to save my parents after all. The only problem was that I had no idea how to do it. Then all of a sudden I did.
“I’ve got it,” I said, jumping to my feet so fast the lobby swam for a moment.
“Got what?” Howe said from the ground.
“The simplest solution. Whitney said she would talk to Inko. She can tell him it’s not personal, that it’s a conflict of interest. They each want different things from their dead bodies. Inko wants to burn them up, Whitney is in the use-them-whole-ish business. Then it’s technical, purely technical. It’s not emotional, and he won’t freak out.”
“If you say so,” said Howe. “I don’t know much about that stuff.”
“I’ll run it by Whitney,” I said.
While Howe stayed on the floor, I poked around on the computer, eventually finding an old staff directory with Whitney’s phone number on it.
When I got her, she immediately started apologizing.
“It doesn’t matter anymore. Nothing matters except saving my parents.” I told her I wasn’t mad anymore, that we had one last chance. I tried to keep my voice steady as I told her that my parents were already MIA, probably being questioned by the police, that Inko’s plan was probably in motion. And then I told her my counterplan.
“Will that work?” she asked.
“I honestly don’t know, but we have nothing left to lose at this point. And we’re out of time, so we should do it now. At the lab,” I added. “To reinforce the professionalism angle.”
“I’ll do my best,” she said. “He’s hard to predict, you know?”
“Do you think it’s a good plan?” I asked.
“I honestly don’t know. But it’s better than no plan at all,” she said, not doing a very good job of sounding hopeful. On that note, we hung up.
“Howe!”
He was still lying on the floor.
“You have to get up.”
“I don’t want to.”
I kicked one of his feet and he straggled to standing. I took him back to the conference room, and showed him the big closet with the other side of the fish tank. “You can watch from here if you want,” I said. “I’m going to hide under the desk so I can hear better. It might get crowded if we were both down there.”
He nodded, then noticed something through the tank. “Somebody’s here.”
A wave of nervousness hit me, and shoulder to shoulder we peered out from behind the castle. Somebody was definitely at the front door. Only there was so much of that dumb fake seaweed in that corner it was impossible to tell who it was.
I tried to talk myself down as I walked back to the lobby. Maybe Whitney was already here, I told myself, and that meant the plan was happening. It was happening and it was going to work exactly the way I wanted it to. I pushed open the blue door and jumped about eight feet in the air.
“What? Who is it?” Howe’s voice sounded thick and far away. I could see him clearly over the top of the castle, gesturing emphatically toward the door.
Impossible. I held up a finger for him to wait and went to answer the door. She was wearing giant tortoiseshell sunglasses and a head scarf. She’d mashed her face up against the glass, and when she leaned back as I unlocked the door, there was lipstick smeared where she’d been. Julia Klinger. I made sure not to open the door too wide. “Can I help you? Did you leave something behind last night?”
The old lady pushed her way right past me, just as Grandma Van raced down the sidewalk in her scooter. She tried to take the door too fast and rammed into it once before zooming inside after Julia. I shut and locked the door quickly, turning around to face them both.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“It’s unthinkable,” Grandma Van declared.
“Butt out, Vanessa,” said Julia Klinger. “This is my business.”
“Fovea Hippocrates Munson, you tell her no,” said Grandma Van.
But I didn’t tell her anything, because at that moment, Whitney arrived, stopping to stare through the door at Grandma Van and Julia.
“See there!” said Julia Klinger, reapplying lipstick more or less onto her lips. “All kinds of people dropping in! It’s a free-for-all around here.”
Whitney let herself in and hovered by the door, keeping an eye on the street. I could tell by the look on her face that we had to hurry. “Grandma Van, this is not a great time.”
“She said she was going to get her hair done, but I didn’t believe her. Not as far as I could throw her.” Grandma Van’s voice dropped. “She wears a wig. Like it’s not obvious.”
“Ha!” said Julia Klinger. “Shows what you know. Sometimes you have to get the wig done.”
“Well, that’s not what happened today, is it? She drove over and thankfully she’s very easy to follow, especially now that my chair’s battery is fully recharged. So I followed her, and sure enough, she led me right here. She wants to steal my thunder.”
Oh, my brain. “Your—”
“Thunder. From last night. That party is going down in the history of the Swan Song as the greatest activity ever.”
“On that note,” said Julia Klinger, turning to me and pulling out a checkbook. “I’d like to book the space again. And the band.”
It was like getting punched in the heart.
“The band has retired,” I said.
“Why does everybody I know keep retiring?” she groused. “Wussies.”
Grandma Van was gloating.
“Fovea!” Whitney gasped. “He’s jogging down the steps from the train!”
We were out of time. I needed to get rid of Grandma Van and Julia, and pronto.
At that moment, Julia shrieked. “There’s a boy in your fish tank!”
By the time Inko Fredrickson snaked through the door two minutes later, Grandma Van and Julia were crammed in the closet behind the fish tank. They’d agreed to a temporary truce, but only because they both wanted a view of the action, and there was no other place to see into the lobby. According to the two of them, there wasn’t room for three people back there (“Barely enough for one,” Grandma Van had said meaningfully), so Howe and I go
t ready to wedge ourselves in together under the desk. It was going to be an extremely tight fit. As we ducked under, Whitney stood by the door, ready to be apologetic but professional.
As we squeezed in together, I glanced at Howe, his face about nine inches from mine and mashed up against one of his bony knees. We shared a slightly panicked almost-smile and then heard the door swing open.
“I’m here,” we heard Inko say, catching his breath. “I’m here!”
The door swung shut and then it went quiet, except for the sound of him panting. This was torture. I needed to see. And I didn’t have many options—just the two narrow strips where the front of the desk didn’t quite meet the sides. I gestured to Howe with my eyes and then, without making any noise, we Rubik’s-Cubed ourselves around until my head was pressed against the corner. I could see out into the rest of the lobby, but so far, they were both still too close to the door for me to see anything.
“Thanks for coming,” Whitney said.
“Where is he? We’ll have the duel right here, right now. I’m ready. Soon as I catch my breath. I’ve been ready for this my whole life!”
“There’s not going to be a duel,” said Whitney, and she took a few steps away from him, crossing through my line of vision. She looked calm. In control. Good.
“No duel?” Inko was starting to sound less winded. “You’ve changed your mind? You’re coming back to me?”
“It’s not like that.”
“What’s it like, then?” As he spoke, he stepped forward, so that I could see about half of him. “Can you possibly deny the raw appeal of all this?” He licked a finger and carefully smoothed down one eyebrow and then the other, and suddenly I regretted being able to see even half of him. I closed my eyes, trying to block out the revolting mental image of Inko trying to be steamy. Dear Lake, I thought. If you are a ghost now, please interfere in this. Please poltergeist the heck out of this lobby, stat. When I opened my eyes again, Inko had stepped out of range.
“Inko,” Whitney said firmly. “We can’t date.”
“What?”
“It’s a conflict of interest.”
“Who is conflicted?”
“Me, working in a cadaver lab. You, a cremator. It’s not meant to be.”
“I can’t think of any two people more meant to be! And who will help you study?”
“I’m sorry, Inko. But it’s a problem, professionally speaking.”
“Oh,” he said, and was quiet for a moment.
“You get how it is.”
“I do,” he said.
“It’s just not possible.”
“Not while you work here,” he said.
“Right.”
“But if you didn’t work here?”
“But I do.”
“I thought you quit.”
“That was a temporary thing.”
“But if it was permanent?”
I didn’t like where this was going. Whitney didn’t seem to either, because she said, “We can talk about being friends, maybe. So if you could retract your complaint, that would be best for us all.”
“Mm,” he said, sounding distracted. “Do you mind if I make a quick call? Privately?”
“I guess not,” said Whitney. “Come with me.”
I was using all of my mental powers to try to communicate to her that this was a bad idea, but she led him through the blue door and they were gone. After a second, I untwisted and whispered to Howe, “Stay here.”
He nodded and I crawled out from under the desk, stiff from being so crunched up. As I stood, I saw Grandma Van and Julia Klinger frozen, mouths open in surprise, on the other side of the tank. He was in there with them. Whitney had taken him into the conference room. I hoped that Grandma Van and Julia could stay quiet, but I wasn’t sure it was humanly possible. Right then, Whitney ran back into the lobby.
“Why did you take him into the conference room?” I whispered. “What if he sees them? He’ll know it’s a setup!”
She looked worried. “I know. But I thought it might help if we knew what he was doing. I mean, making a call in the middle of this? Everything he does is fishy, but this more than usual.”
The two of us stared at the two old ladies behind the curtain of seaweed. We watched as they had a quick, furious hand-signal conversation with each other and then Grandma Van held up nine fingers. Julia held up one finger on her left hand. Then one finger on her right.
911.
“He’s reporting us to the police. He’s really doing it,” I whispered.
“He’s still going to get the lab shut down,” came Howe’s voice from under the desk. “If you don’t have a job, there won’t be any conflict.”
Whitney clapped her hands to her head.
There had to be something. I closed my eyes. An image of Inko filled my head. Funeral face. Soot-colored clothes. Love-letter bag.
“I’ll be right back,” I whispered. Whitney nodded as I ran toward the blue door. Inko was still on the phone, but I had how long? A minute? The door to the conference room was shut, and I made a wild dash past it, down the Hall of Innards, into the lab. I threw open the cabinet of gauze and grabbed enough to throw over McMullen and then safely pick him up. I ran back down the hall, holding on to him like a football, past the closed door, and into the lobby. Howe had crawled out from under the desk, too, and shook his head slowly.
Whitney’s eyes went big. “Is that—?”
“Yeah,” I whispered.
Through the fish tank, I saw Julia turn pale and start to slip sideways. Grandma Van slapped her, and then Julia slapped her back, and come on, I did not have time for that, this was a situation. “Hold his bag open,” I whispered.
“What bag?” Whitney asked.
“What bag?” Howe echoed.
“What do you mean, what bag?” I looked around for it. “THE bag. Inko’s bag. The bag with the love letters. I’m planting McMullen on him. The police will arrive and he’ll be his own suspect in the head disappearance.”
“Um, Fovea…” said Howe, glancing around.
“He didn’t bring a bag with him,” said Whitney.
We all stared at each other in horror and then heard a dull knocking. Grandma Van and Julia. They were gesturing frantically through the seaweed, hanging up a mime phone. Inko was walking back down the hall.
Seconds. I had seconds. And nowhere to put McMullen.
It wasn’t just that either. Howe and I were trapped out in the open, there was no way we could make it back under the desk in time, and we definitely wouldn’t fit with a whole extra head, so I grabbed him with my free hand, spun around, and pulled us both through the door to the sun and the heat outside. We lunged past the window, stopping as soon as we couldn’t be seen from inside the lobby and slamming our backs against the brick wall.
My heart was racing.
And McMullen was starting to ooze through the gauze.
“What’s the plan now?” Howe asked under his breath.
“I don’t know,” I said, frantically running through scenarios where everything worked out, except I kept smashing right into reality. There was no way around it. “The police are going to get here and they’re going to see me with McMullen and I’m going to get arrested.”
Howe said, “We’ll see about that.”
Before I could ask him what he meant, Inko Fredrickson burst out of the front entrance, followed immediately by Whitney. I dropped to the ground and scooted behind the nearest car to keep McMullen hidden. Howe stayed and leaned, casually.
“Of course I won’t call them off,” Inko was saying. “Trust me, sweetie, this is good for our future.”
We all heard the first sound of the police siren, telling cars to get out of its way. They couldn’t be more than a couple of blocks away.
“That’s my cue,” Inko said.
“Where are you going?” Whitney said.
“No need for me to be here when they arrive. As far as they know, I’m just an anonymous do-gooder reporting a c
rime in progress!”
I peeked over the hood of the car. Whitney and Inko were so focused on each other that they didn’t seem to notice Howe as he slipped back inside the lab. What was he doing? No way should he be in there when the police came—he’d get caught up in the whole thing, and I couldn’t be responsible for getting him in trouble now, too. I didn’t have time to get him out and figure out what to do with McMullen and Inko. I needed two plans now, and I still had exactly none.
Inko took Whitney’s hand and kissed it. She rolled her eyes. “Inko. You stay here and tell the cops you were pranking them.”
“No can do,” he said, and started to cross the street toward the stairway to the train platform. “But you’ll thank me later!”
“I’m serious!” Whitney said, sounding a little desperate. Inko didn’t even slow down.
The police horns were getting closer.
With a loud whoop, Grandma Van burst out of the office door, driving her chair full speed, Julia hanging on to the back. Looked like the truce was back on.
They flew off the sidewalk, past a stunned Whitney, and across the street, closing in on Inko, at which point Grandma Van shouted, “Ready! Aim! Fire!”
Julia, still clinging to the back of the scooter with one hand, reached out toward him with the other. There was a small sizzle and Inko shrieked.
The Taser.
He wobbled and went down. Grandma Van swung her chair around as I stood. When she caught sight of me, she yelled, “Now what?”
“I don’t know!” I said, adjusting my grip on McMullen. We all watched as Inko groaned and rolled against a parking meter.
“He should be unconscious longer. Victoria must not have fully charged the dang thing.” Grandma Van frowned and took the Taser from Julia.
“That’s Victoria’s?” asked Julia. “That woman drives me up a wall.”
“Um, guys,” I said as Inko started to pull himself up the parking meter.
“Victoria means well, but I swear,” said Grandma Van. “Always talking about that trip to Argentina with her tango instructor—”
“If I have to hear one more thing about the paso doble—”
“It’s like, we see what you’re doing, Victoria—”
The Mortification of Fovea Munson Page 18