Just Kill Me

by Adam Selzer

  I lean back in my seat. “Okay.”

  I want to believe her. I desperately, desperately want to believe her. And I think I do.

  “Seriously, Megan. Why would you even think I would do that?”

  “He knows all about her.”

  “What?”

  “And at least the basics about my stories. And he says you told him.”

  She breathes heavily for a second, then says, “Did Zoey know about Edward?”

  “I guess. I told her a little about the competition and stuff.”

  “She probably e-mailed him herself, then. Maybe she got so pissed off when you kissed Morticia that she sent everything over to your business rival.”

  I swear on the grave of Lillian, the second Cyn says that, the windshield wipers in the hearse turn themselves on. If we’d been on a ghost hunt, we’d say it was a ghost sighting. The wipers clear up the windshield just as everything becomes clear in my brain.

  Of course Zoey must have e-mailed Edward.

  It was probably some sort of revenge on me. She probably offered to give him dirt on us or something. Our tour route. Pictures of the Couch tomb interior. Stuff about my Lillian obsession. Maybe even my stories.

  It all makes sense.

  Edward had my phone number to text me the other day, after Aaron died. Even if Cyn was telling Edward about Zoey, surely she wouldn’t have given him my phone number, right? What would be the point? But if Zoey was sending him shit about me as revenge, my phone number might have been part of it.

  I think the wipers are beating at the same rhythm as my heart.

  “That’s gotta be it,” I say. “It has to be. She told him. And he’s been lying to me.”

  “Of course he has,” says Cyn. “It’s what he does. The way I see it, either he got the info from Zoey herself, or he’s rigged something up to bug the bus and spy on us. Maybe both.”

  “I thought about that. I checked for, like, walkie-talkies or whatever you’d use. Nanny cams. I didn’t see any.”

  “I’ll check some more. But I’ll bet the whole dog and pony show that Zoey told him herself.”

  Then I look over at Cyn. Each thunk of the windshield wipers feels like another piece of the puzzle falling into place.

  Thunk thunk.

  “He knows about the brain-punch thing, you know,” I say. “I don’t know how.”

  “He’s been in the business a while. If Marjorie found out about it, he probably could have too.”

  Thunk, thunk.

  “He could have been killing people at his tour stops this whole time. For years,” I say. “That might explain why everyone thinks his stops are haunted, even when the back story doesn’t check out.”

  “Totally. Proper murder victims would make better imprints than what we get.”

  Thunk thunk.

  “Maybe he killed Aaron Saltis,” I say.

  “Yeah. Maybe after he found out Saltis was talking to Ghostly Journeys.”

  Thunk thunk.

  “Probably did it on the tour route so I’d think it was you.”

  Thunk thunk.

  “He’s trying to throw you off,” says Cyn. “So you won’t suspect that he’s planning to kill you himself.”

  “You think? I think he’d rather have me alive and do the TV show with him. He’s trying to recruit me.”

  Thunk thunk.

  “He might let you live a while if you join him,” she says. “Might. But it’ll just be a matter of time.”

  “So . . . what do we do?”

  We stay in the cemetery, talking through every point of evidence, until they’re about to close the gates. Then we say good-bye to Lillian and head over to a little deli nearby to warm back up. We sit there for the next hour, comparing notes.

  We can’t call the cops. We’ve done too much we don’t want them looking into.

  And we can’t really tell Ricardo, partly because he doesn’t know what we’ve been doing either, and partly because we both decide we don’t want to deal with all of the jokes he’s sure to make about Edward trying to turn me to the DarkSide.

  But we make plans.

  And before I go home, I call Tweed and arrange a meeting.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “Let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it . . . To practice death is to practice freedom.”

  —MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

  The moon hangs between the antennas of the Hancock Center as I pull the hearse into the damp, gloomy bus lot. A Halloween-sized rat scurries along by the 1930s fire truck that someone keeps parked out here. The coyote is probably out there somewhere on the other side of the chain-link fence.

  Edward Tweed is waiting by his car and waves at me when I roll my window down.

  “Sweet ride,” he says.

  “Thanks.”

  “I think in a couple of cities they actually have ghost tours that drive people around in hearses, but I don’t know how they make any money. Only so many seats to sell.”

  “You want to take it out to Lincoln Park?” I ask.

  “We can just take my car,” he says. “They all know me at the museum, so they won’t run us off if I park in their lot.”

  My knees are shaking like hell, but I somehow manage to walk from my car to his. It’s a fancy sports car. Mr. Tweed is doing pretty well for himself.

  He drives out of the lot, and I notice Cyn sitting in a car with Punk Rock James at the intersection on the other side of Halsted Street. In the rearview mirror I see them hold back a second after we pass by, then they pull onto Halsted Street to follow us at a safe distance.

  My sense of lingering dread is mostly gone now, but it’s been replaced by a nervousness way beyond any I’ve ever felt before. The only thing I can compare it to is the second before Morticia kissed me. Only that was just a second. This is a continual buzz of nervousness.

  Emprise (first recorded 1500). Twitchety (1859). Spooky (1926).

  I’ll get through this.

  It’s really sort of awesome, in fact. Espionage and intrigue already, at the age of eighteen. Fuck yeah.

  I keep trying to tell myself things like that. But I’m also busy trying to gauge how scared I should be. Cyn and I agree that even if he did kill Saltis, he’s probably not going to kill me today. Maybe not even this year. He might really want me to do this TV show with him.

  But “probably” isn’t good enough. I’m in danger. But I can’t let him know that I know it.

  Also, there’s a very good chance that this old man has read some of the stories I wrote. That Zoey sent him the most embarrassing ones. The idea that he knows that part of me makes me nauseous.

  “I found some new articles about Lillian the flapper,” I say casually, as we cruise along. “Apparently Virginia Harrison, her partner, was the chief suspect when her tearoom got torched.”

  “Lovers’ quarrel,” he says. “They were a couple, you know.”

  “That’s one theory. I think maybe Virginia liked Lillian more than Lillian liked  Virginia.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Didn’t find anything about her dying in 1925, though.”

  “Oh, she did,” he says. “Tuberculosis. Got a lot of girls back then. Probably caught it out in Bughouse Square on a cold night.”

  There. A lie. Evidence.

  Part one of the plan is confirming our suspicions, and I’m off to a good start.

  “Makes sense,” I say. “So, you wanna go get some food first and talk about this TV deal before we go to the tomb? I’m starving.”

  “I could eat.”

  “I know a good place,” I say.

  “Point the way.”

  I navigate him to one of Rick’s favorite diners, which is a grimy hole-in-the-wall hidden in a hotel just off the Magnificent Mile. Cyn and I have staked out a spot where she and Punk Rock James can park the car and keep an eye on us from across the road, unseen.

  The plan is working so far.

  Ed’s cell phone is
sitting in the change tray by the gear shifter.

  Mine is rigged up so that I can call Cyn with the push of a button if I get into a jam.

  I’ve never actually been into this diner, but it seems familiar when I step inside. It takes me a moment to figure it out, but the place looks almost like the hotel bar from the dream where I was Lillian in the 1950s. Close enough to feel really fucking weird. Maybe she and Irene Castle sang along with a jukebox here twenty thousand midnights ago.

  “What’s good on the menu?” he asks.

  “They do a good Italian beef,” I say.

  Ed gets one of those, and I order a pizza puff. He pulls out his card to pay, but I’m quicker on the draw and hand over cash to the clerk.  A credit card would leave behind evidence that we were here. Cash won’t.

  I grab us a seat by the window and we sit and chat for a bit, just making small talk. Ed talks about the old days in the ghost business, and how he used to have access to places we couldn’t dream of going now. Like Bachelor’s Grove, the old abandoned cemetery in the southwest suburbs that is sort of a ghost-hunting theme park now.  You can’t legally be there at night without a filming permit anymore, but back in the day he could take tour groups out there without any trouble.

  “How did you even have time to go there on a tour?” I ask. “It’s an hour from downtown.”

  “My old tours were six hours long, every time,” he says. “People had longer attention spans back then. Only trouble we had was that sometimes we’d come out there and there’d be a bunch of kids on drugs. Once they were digging up a body.”

  “Yeah, I saw some newspaper articles about kids doing that out there back in the seventies,” I say. “I don’t know how dull life must have been in the south suburbs back then.”

  “Pretty dull,” he says. “Supposedly one of the guys was buried with a huge wad of cash. The hell of it is, they kept digging up the same guy over and over again, even though there wasn’t any cash there the last time.”

  He laughs a cheerful old-man laugh as our food comes. Tweed is a strange person to watch. Sometimes he seems like a young hipster, with his curly mustache and the twinkle in his eye. But then he’ll laugh or cough and move his face a certain way, and look a hundred years old. Like a freaking shape-shifter.

  I eat slowly. My job right now is to keep him talking, drag the meal out as long as I can. Let the food do its work. Rick mentioned this place back on the tour with those hicks from downstate—this was the place where he said the Italian beef went south fast. If all goes well, Ed will need the bathroom soon.

  And with any luck, he’ll leave his cell phone on the table.

  It’s in his pocket now.

  “Hey,” I say. “We got a great shot at Hull House the other night on the tour. Let me send it over.”

  I send a tour shot—one that I know damn well is fake—over to him via text, and he pulls his phone from his pocket to see.

  “Looks so good, I’d be afraid they used one of those apps to fake it,” he says.

  “I assume they did,” I say. “But I played along.”

  He chuckles and sets his phone down on the table, beside his plate, instead of putting it back in his pocket. Just like I hoped he would.

  “Playing along is part of the job,” he says. “You’re new at this, but how many people have told you Al Capone had a vacation home in whatever small town they live in?”

  “I lost count the first week.”

  He smiles. “And you can’t just tell them they’re wrong.  You don’t want to be a killjoy.”

  I nod, get up to order another pizza puff (which has the added benefit of needing to be fried up on demand, which will give me a few extra minutes), then sit back down to keep the small talk going.

  “So, how did you find out how to get into the Couch tomb in the first place?” I ask.

  He smiled. “Old girlfriend, years ago,” he says. “She could find her way into anything.”

  I keep a poker face.

  “Was she, like, a professional finder?”

  “Yeah. Ran a company. She was looking for a ghost on some movie guy’s nickel back when I was just starting out—he wanted to put a real one in a film. She found all kinds of stuff. Like that thing about how to kill people just right. She knew it.”

  “No kidding?”

  “She was an older woman. I liked older women back then. Of course, at my age now, liking older women is basically just being a necrophiliac. Or at least someone who likes the elderly, whatever you call that.”

  “Gerontophile.”

  This is an interesting piece of new data: Edward apparently used to date Marjorie Kay Stone.

  I keep eating and make a point of not reacting much, except to ask a few questions about this person he knew. The kind a historian would ask when she hears about a woman who was hired to find a real ghost. This line of questioning doesn’t tell me anything new, but it gets me through my second pizza puff. When that’s done, I order a milk shake and stall things even further.

  “Now, let’s talk about this TV idea,” I say. “Where we team up.”

  “Well, if you’ll pardon me for saying it, I’m a selfish old man and I want the show. And I think I would get the show, since I get more sightings, except that they have you. You’re the edge.”

  “We’ve been having more sightings lately,” I say. “We’re trying out new sites and having good luck. Death corner. Places like that. We were thinking of Bughouse Square, where Lillian hung out.”

  “That’d make good TV,” he says.

  “I’ve never even really been there,” I lie. “I really want to, but it keeps feeling dangerous. I don’t quite believe you that Cyn’s planning to kill me and make me into Lillian’s ghost, but I’m not taking any chances.”

  “Smart,” he says. “Tell you what. I’ll go out there with you right now, we can scope it out as a haunted spot and figure out how to make it spooky for TV. Even if we have to make stuff up. I know it’s not really your style, but that’s what would make us the villains on the show.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I never make up stories, really, but I always identified as a villain.”

  “Sure,” he says.

  It really is a pretty decent concept. Assuming he really plans to let me live long enough to carry it out. But now he’s offered to take me to Bughouse Square himself. I can imagine him making me decide right then whether or not to leave Mysterious Chicago and join him, and if I turn him down . . .

  For all the chatting, I don’t have enough data on him to know how scared I should be yet.

  Then it happens.

  He makes “the face.”

  “Is there a washroom here?” he asks.

  “Behind you.”

  “Be right back, and then we’ll head out.”

  He leaves the table, and, hallelujah, leaves his phone sitting on the table.

  I immediately grab it and run outside. Cyn is waiting on a bench just outside of the door.

  “You got it?” I hold up the phone.

  “Hurry,” she says. “Give it here.”

  When I hand it to her, she attaches a cable to it that runs into her laptop, then starts punching buttons. As she does, she hands me a clove cigarette and a lighter.

  “Just so you have an excuse if he comes out and finds that you aren’t at the table,” she says. “Say you needed a cigarette.”

  I try to light the thing while Cyn messes with Edward’s phone. Thank fuck Ed doesn’t have a password lock. I’m not totally sure what she’s doing as she pushes buttons, but she told me that Punk Rock James taught her some hacking tricks.

  I feel like I’m in a spy movie.

  “Edward used to date Marjorie Kay Stone,” I say. “That’s how he knows about the brain punch.”

  “That would explain it,” she says. “They must have made a hell of a pair.”

  “The TV thing sounds fairly sincere,” I say. “Like he’d want to keep me alive if I joined up with him.”

  “Unti
l he didn’t need you anymore, or decided you knew too much.”

  She taps a few keys on her phone, looks something over, then unplugs the phone and hands it back to me.

  “Okay,” she says. “I’ve got what I need. We’re moving forward. Stall him, don’t turn your back on him, and wait for texts from me.”

  I start to tell her that if he’s got my stories, I’m not sure I want to know about it, but before I can, she sprints back to her car, leaving me alone with the phone and the clove cigarette. I take a drag and cough. Inside, I see that Ed is just coming out of the bathroom. I make sure Cyn is out of sight, then wave to him through the window. He ambles out, joins me on the sidewalk, and takes a whiff of the spicy air.

  “I thought they outlawed those clove things.”

  “When did something being outlawed ever stop you from being able to get it in Chicago?”

  He laughs and his eyes twinkle again. “True.”

  Then I hold up his phone. “Sorry, I reached for my phone and accidentally brought yours out.”

  “Any calls?”

  I shake my head and hand it over to him.

  “So, Bughouse Square, then the Couch tomb?” I ask.

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  I slip back in to get my phone off the table, completing the act of having grabbed the wrong one. We get into his car and I take out my own phone, acting like I’m not paying attention to where we’re going.

  I start getting more nervous. My fingers shake.

  This is it. If he’s planning to kill me, I’ve agreed to go to two perfect spots.

  As we get to a traffic light, there’s a series of texts from Cyn:

  SWITCHBLADE CYNTHIA FARGON:

  He has e-mails from Zoey. Affirmative.

  SWITCHBLADE CYNTHIA FARGON:

  And he didn’t turn off location tracking on a few key apps.

  SWITCHBLADE CYNTHIA FARGON:

  So there’s data showing he was at the body dump the day Aaron Saltis died.

  SWITCHBLADE CYNTHIA FARGON:

  Before the tours. Before you found him. He killed him all right. Good bet you’re next.

  SWITCHBLADE CYNTHIA FARGON:

  Are you going to the tomb or bughouse?

  I text back “Plan B,” meaning Bughouse Square, and try to stay calm.