Just Kill Me (20 page)

I don't ask, but I'm pretty sure their relationship is in “on again” mode.

One night on a ten o'clock tour, when it's actually dark out, we pull into the body dump and there's a van that's a-rocking.

I can just picture the guy saying, “Come on, baby, I know the perfect little dead-end street, no one ever goes there. . . .” Then
here comes the tour bus
!

Our being there does not stop them. For a minute I think I should tap the window, just to let them know they aren't alone, but then I think of Mrs. Weyher and figure that maybe they'll help us out a little.

One
OED
synonym for having an orgasm is “die.” Like, half the time they say “die” in Shakespeare, they mean it both ways.

Maybe there's more than one way to make a ghost by dying at the body dump.

We experiment a bit with new stops, especially places where Cyn and I have taken care of someone. The first time Rick steers the bus up to Death Corner, we notice something weird: snow.

One of the four vacant lots surrounding the corner is fenced off, and behind the fence is a thin layer of snow.

Snow!

The weather is colder, but not
that
much colder.

We all step out and wander up to the fence that blocks access to the lot itself. The snow starts a few feet inside, so no one can quite reach it to see if it's cold. But it's there, and there are footprints going through it, like a ghost has walked through. Or danced through, really. The footprints don't seem
to go in any logical path, just all over. It's positively chilling.

But after the customers get off the bus at the end of the tour, Rick just laughs.

“It's probably just some weed killer,” he says. “They're about to put up townhouses there.” Then he pauses, looks up thoughtfully, and says, “I hope someone has the foresight to call their house ‘the House at Death Corner.' Get kind of a goth Winnie-the-Pooh vibe going.”

I don't tell him, of course, about the old woman, all skin and bones, who was punched in the brain right outside the fence two nights before.

One night, when we have two tours to run, I pull a trick on Rick.

The week before, I ordered a commemorative James Garfield spoon, just like the ones that had been stolen from his tomb, off eBay for the whopping price of ninety-nine cents. And on the seven o'clock tour, I hop the fence at the Couch tomb and slide it about halfway under the door, so the handle is sticking out.

On the ten o'clock tour, I direct Rick to take a route that I know will get us stuck in traffic, then have him tell the people all of his theories about the theft of the spoons from the James Garfield tomb.

“Now, here's the real kicker,” he says. “The guy who shot Garfield was a Chicago man. Charles Guiteau. A complete nut
who sort of failed his way through life. One of the things he failed at was joining a free-love cult called the Oneida Community. They kicked him out and he tried to sue them. Now, here's the thing: the Oneida Community is still around, only they stopped having free love. You know what they do now instead of having sex?”

“What?” I ask.

“They manufacture silverware,” he says. “Spoons!”

He and I think this is the funniest thing ever, even though only a couple of customers laugh.

When we get to the tomb, I tell Rick I hurt my ankle hopping the fence on the seven o'clock tour and ask him to do it for me. Anytime you ask Rick to take the spotlight, he'll do it.

So he puts the bus's flashers on and leaves it by the side of the road, follows us out to the tomb, and jumps the fence. He notices the silvery glint sticking out from under the door right away.

“Hey, this is new.”

He pulls the spoon out and stares for a second. Once he realizes what it is, he shakes his head for a second, then starts to laugh so hard he literally falls onto the ground.

He isn't fooled, of course. He knows right away that I planted it there. But once he gets ahold of himself enough that he can stand upright, he pats me on the shoulder and says, “Megan, I am so glad we hired you.”

Cyn continues to talk about hooking me up with one of her friends. Even while we're heading up to the nursing home to pick someone up.

“You liked Morticia, right? Like, you would kiss her if you had the chance?

“She vanished. Like a breath into the wind.”

Cyn adjusts her ass in the seat.

“Have you ever texted Zoey while we were doing ‘charity work'?” she asks.

“Sure. I didn't say what we were doing or anything, but I talk to her basically constantly.”

“She could still trace it to where you were, probably.”

“It'd just look like we were out for a slice of pizza or something. And they know we're signing people out at the home. Shanita does, at least.”

“True.”

We pull around, back behind the excursion bus, and I take the gorilla mask out of the Rubbermaid container. We've upgraded from the plastic Target bag we had the first time. You can tell business is picking up. We carry our gorilla mask of scary death in style now.

“If she won't even send you a picture,” says Cyn, changing the subject back, “you deserve a better girlfriend.”

“It's an anxiety thing for her.”

“And you don't worry that she knows too much about you while you know nothing about her?”

I don't answer that.

Because I do, sometimes.

I worry that if anything ever happens with us, like if I break up with her, she'll spread the worst of my stories all over and tell everyone who I am and where I live and the name of Mom's business and everything.

If I don't want that to happen, I might be stuck with her.

But I'm okay with that. Every time something funny happens on the tour, Zoey is the first person I want to tell. I never get tired of talking to her. She knows just what to say to turn me on, and might be the only person on the planet who ever will.

If I can't be with her in person, I'm happy just to love the shadow she casts over the internet, and let it love me back.

I
wake up one morning to a flurry of panicked texts.

ZOEY BABY:

ARE YOU OKAY?

Then

ZOEY BABY:

PLEASE ANSWER, MEGAN

Then

ZOEY BABY:

ARE YOU THERE? I NEED NEED NEED TO HEAR FROM YOU.

I roll over onto my back, rub the crud out of my eyes, and
type back, “I didn't get you pregnant last night, did I, baby?” with a couple of smiley faces.

This is the kind of  “cute couple game” you do when you can't have proper tickle fights—you joke about getting each other pregnant when it's well beyond the bounds of biology for many different reasons. But she isn't in the mood to joke today; she is genuinely scared about something.

She sends back a million or so emojis, and then a link to a news story. Some maniac has shot up a shopping center in Crystal Lake, a strip-mall town up in the far north suburbs. I tell her not to worry—I've never even been to Crystal Lake—then get up out of bed.

Mom and Clarice are in the living room, watching the live news. The maniac has been cornered in the back of a store someplace, and the SWAT team is surrounding it.

“Rough morning,” says Mom. “Six kids so far. More in the hospital.”

Clarice smokes and exhales deeply.

“What was this guy's issue?” I ask.

“He posted something online about demons,” says Mom. “But who the hell knows?”

For a second I feel like a slimeball.

He's blaming the supernatural. Aren't I just encouraging people to blame the supernatural when something happens that they don't understand right away? Even if I try not to? I've noticed that no matter how insistent I am that the “devil baby”
was just a rumor that went around in 1913, people get out of the bus and ask where it was buried, or if I've ever seen its ghost.

I sit and watch the news and sneakily text with Zoey a bit, telling her what a shit-pot I feel like. She texts back that I'm the good kind of ghost-tour guide. That if my customers didn't come on my tour, they'd just go on an even less responsible one.

She's right, I guess. If I wasn't in the business, if Mysterious Chicago didn't exist, it wouldn't stop people from going on ghost tours. They'd just go on a DarkSide tour, or another one that didn't care about getting the stories right. One that actively told them to think every stray light in their photos was a dead person up and floating around.

This is why Mysterious Chicago is here. To be the honest company. We are the ragtag band of rebels sweeping out the bullshit, just like Brandon said.

I still sort of feel like an asshole, though. I'm supposed to be working tonight. How can I make all those flippant jokes about death on a night like this? I wonder if Rick and Cyn will just cancel tonight's tour.

Rick calls around ten in the morning.

“You ever hear of a guy called Vaughn Meader?” he asks.

“Nope.”

“He was a JFK impersonator. Legend has it that when Kennedy was shot, Lenny Bruce had to go onstage that night. First thing he said was ‘Poor Vaughn Meader.' ”

“Have you ever had to run a tour on a night like this?”

“Are you kidding? People get shot up like this all the time in this country. It's worse when it's kids though.”

“So what do you do?”

“Well, if you're lucky, it'll all be tourists who've been hanging out at Navy Pier all day and didn't hear the news yet.”

“Right. But even so . . . the Alley of Death and Mutilation is out. I can't talk about dead kids today.”

“The St. Valentine's Day Massacre site is out, too. And Death Corner. God. I might even skip the body dump, if I were you. No places with shootings or murders. No disaster sites where kids were among the victims.”

“So, that basically just leaves Hull House and the Couch tomb,” I say. “What do I do to fill the gaps?”

The two of us brainstorm a bit, and he tells me about some places we could go—like the block of Prairie Avenue south of the Loop, where all the millionaires used to live. “The Fort Dearborn Massacre happened right there,” he says, “but even if you don't want to mention that, it's still full of mansions that look like something from
Scooby-Doo
. One of them's supposed to be haunted by the architect who designed it and died before it was built.”