Just Kill Me (5 page)

People chuckle, and as she waits for an opening in the traffic, Rick does his impression of a movie trailer. “In a world . . . where there are no rules . . . one woman . . . will challenge the laws . . . of traffic. Because when you can't believe in anything . . . you can still believe . . . in Cyn.”

Cyn pulls off a perfect U-turn, to rapturous applause.

“That was totally legal right there,” she says. “As long as I don't get caught.”

She pulls the bus over on the street behind the Chicago History Museum, which sits at the south end of the park, and Rick starts telling ghost stories about the grounds. According to him, the early cops who patrolled Lincoln Park had all kinds of ghost stories about it—not just because it used to be a graveyard, either. In the 1890s the
Tribune
said that there had been enough murders and suicides in the park to furnish a ghost for every dark nook and cranny.

“Now, there is at least one reminder of what this place used to be,” he says. He points to a little stone structure out in the middle of the grass between the museum and the road. “That little building is the tomb of Ira Couch and his family, which they never moved. You guys want to check it out?”

Naturally, everyone does, so Rick calls out, “Cemetery safari!” And we follow him across the grass.

“I've driven by this a thousand times,” says one guy as we trudge through the park. “Never realized it was a tomb.”

“Yeah,” says Rick. “We get that a lot. If people notice it, they just think it's a tool shed or something. But it's a tomb.”

Mom has pointed out the tomb in the park to me when we drove by a couple of times, but I've never gone to check it out up close. It's about the size of a one-car garage, with the family name
COUCH
in raised sans-serif letters in the stone above a black metal door. A little spiked fence, about waist high, surrounds it.

“It says ‘Couch' because it's a resting place,” says Rick. “Ho ho ho.”

“Is he still in there?” I ask.

“Tough call,” Rick says. “It was built to hold thirteen people, and the general consensus is that it's about half full. Or, you know, half empty. But there are a lot of different stories.”

“Can't they open it up and see?” someone asks.

“Observe,” says Rick.

And he hops over the fence and yanks on the door. It doesn't budge.

“See? It's welded shut or something. And there's no keyhole, no hinges, no latch. Just a metal slab that isn't going anywhere. The handle is just a decoration.”

“You think he might have any James Garfield commemorative spoons in there?” I ask.

“One can only hope. You can't expect zombie Ira Couch to eat brains with his fingers. Dude ran a very classy hotel. Abe Lincoln stayed there. So did John Wilkes Booth, for that matter. Right on the grounds where the Alley of Death and Mutilation is now.”

I look down and notice a bug crawling under a crack between the metal door and the stone floor beneath it. When we're walking back to the bus, I ask Rick if he knows about the crack.

“Don't tell me my ass is showing again.”

“No, under the door. There's a crack.”

He stops in his tracks, then runs back to the fence around the tomb and looks down. When he sees that there's a small gap between the door and the stone, his face lights up like a kid who found his Easter basket, and he runs all the way back to the bus, where he breaks the news to Cyn. Her face lights up too.

“Well,” he says to me, “you wanna come back here and go tomb snooping after the tour?”

“What kind of girl do you think I am?” I ask. “Of course I wanna go tomb snooping.”

Cyn gives me a thumbs-up.

I'm pretty sure this job is mine if I want it.

A
fter Rick and Cyn get the passengers back to the Rock and Roll McDonald's and wrap up the tour, they split the tips, and we start making our tomb-snooping plans.

“Okay,” says Cyn, putting her archaeology degree to use for once, “the first thing to know about tomb snooping is that it might feel kind of awkward at first, like you're invading Mr. Couch's privacy. Peeking in a tomb is like peeking in a bathroom.”

“Decomposing: the final bodily function,” I say.

“What's the second thing to know about tomb snooping?” asks Rick.

“That it's awesome as fuck.”

We all high-five.

I don't feel awkward at all about peeking into a tomb. You lose a lot of fear about invading the privacy of the dead when you've seen what goes on in embalming rooms. Mom kept
me out of the actual embalmings when I was really little, but I started helping with makeup and dressing when I was ten, and I've seen a full-on embalming or two by now. Not enough to be used to what goes on in them, exactly, but enough that what little I might see in a one-hundred-fifty-year-old burial vault is small potatoes. In other words, “goose-wing” (first recorded 1377), “snotter” (1689), or “flap-dragon” (1700).

Rick runs across the street to the Walgreens to spend his tips on tomb-snooping supplies, which I never would have guessed you could buy there, and I run into the McDonald's to pee and finally check my phone, which has continued to buzz in my purse throughout the tour.

Mostly it's hearts from Zoey.

But there are about ten from Mom:

MOTHER DEAREST:

Where are you?

Mom and I are close enough that she isn't used to me not answering her texts right away. Even now, I'm not wild about lying to her. But I'm sure as hell not going to tell her I'm out ghostbusting and tomb snooping with plans to make a career out of it. This is going to take some lying.

I tell her I was watching a movie with Kacey, a girl I work with at the grocery store where I'm a part-time bagger. Then I send Zoey some goofy-face bathroom-mirror selfies and look
up words for “tomb” on the online
OED
on my phone before I go back outside.

Some good synonyms for tomb include “croft” (Old English), “lair-stow” (first recorded in AD 1000), and “the worm's kitchen” (1500).

Back onboard, Cyn is alone, waiting on Rick to come back.

“What did you think of the tour?” she asks.

“It was a blast,” I say. “Rick's a hell of a tour guide.”

“Rick is going to be a
star
,” says Cyn. “It's adorable how excited he gets about this stuff.”

“I get the impression that right now is one of the times when you're together?”

“Right now it's kind of ambiguous, relationship-wise.”

“Got it.”

“We drive each other nuts, but we're way too mixed up in each other's lives at this point not to be together. We have a history. That kind of shit. But there're some possible business developments and stuff coming up, and we're not sure if presenting ourselves as a couple would make things better or worse.”

Rick bounds back onto the bus from the Walgreens with a couple of cheap Chicago souvenir T-shirts and a roll of clear packing tape.

“What're the shirts for?” I ask.

“Nothing. I just wanted the wire hangers they came on.”

“That's some smart shopping, Rick,” says Cyn. “There's about ten places we could go and just buy hangers.”

“But I want to do it now.”

He removes the shirts from the hangers and tosses them into a Rubbermaid bin at the front of the bus where they keep tools and cleaning supplies. Then he bends the wires into an L shape and tapes his phone to one end, so he can slide it under the door, prop it upright, and take pictures.

“Behold,” he says, holding it up like a proud kindergartner who just made a bird feeder out of a pinecone. “The Tomb Snooper 500.”

Awesome.

Then he pulls up a picture on his phone of a graveyard at night, with little white balls of light all over, and shows it to me.

“Pop quiz, padawan,” he says. “This is the official start of your training. You know what they call these things?”

“Orbs, right?” I say. “People show us pictures of them at the funeral home sometimes and say it's someone's soul.”

Rick rolls his eyes. “Right. And I don't ever want you to bring them up on tours. They're a cheap parlor trick. And as far as we can tell, Edward Tweed from DarkSide invented the idea that they're ghosts.”

“They're usually dust,” says Cyn. “Or a problem with a cheap lens.”

“If people show up and they've already heard of them and make a big deal out of getting them in pictures, I just sort of
let them go ahead and have fun with it,” says Rick. “But if anyone asks you if they're for real, just say they're ghost farts, not ghosts.”

“Got it.”

I like that he's talking as though I already have the job. Finding the crack under the door of the tomb must have really ingratiated me to him.

“You know,” says Cyn, “in a roundabout way, they
are
ghosts.”

“What kind of roundabout way?” Ricardo asks.

“Well, there's nothing new under the sun. The atoms that make up those dust particles were probably bonded to molecules that were part of a human being once. So they're sort of ghosts. In a way.”

“Yeah, but in that same way, they're also beetle shit,” says Ricardo. “Fuck orbs. Let's go get some food.”

Cyn drives us back up north, toward Lincoln Park and the Couch family mausoleum. It won't be dark for a while yet, so we head into a nearby diner Rick recommends, where Cyn spots me ten bucks from the tips to get a dipped Italian beef sandwich and a Sprite. I'm a bit hard up for cash right now—I dented up the hearse a couple of months ago, and what little I make working at the grocery store is eaten up paying Mom back for the damages. It'd be nice to make enough to have some spending money for once.

“God, I can't wait to snoop that tomb,” Rick says. “Even Marjorie Stone probably didn't know what was in there.”

“She probably never even tried to find out,” says Cyn. “She would've found a way in. You know it.”

“But she didn't,” says Rick. “And now we will, motherfucker!”

He holds up a hand for a high five, and I don't leave him hanging, even though I have no idea what he's talking about.

“Who's Marjorie Stone?” I ask.

They look at each other, then back at me.

“Kind of a long story,” says Rick. “I assumed Cyn told you all about her when you were a babysitting charge.”

“Not that I recall.”

“I'd just moved to Forest Park back then,” says Cyn. “I was sort of trying to forget her.”

“Fair enough,” says Rick. “So, Marjorie Kay Stone was this old woman in Magwitch Park. You ever go out there?”

“Nope.”

“No reason why you should. It's a dump.”

“It's one of those old Route 66 towns off I-55 past the edge of suburbia,” says Cyn. “We were kids together there. And we met Marjorie after Ricardo tried to bury his dead hamster in her backyard. What was the hamster called?”

“Sonja,” Rick says, putting his fist to his chest in salute. “I wanted her to be someplace classy where no dogs would dig her up. That backyard had all these statues, bushes shaped like dolphins. Even a little pond. Classy as fuck.”

“Got it.”

“She was a retired professional thing-finder,” Rick says. “Ran an outfit called Finders of Magwitch Park. If some collector wanted a rare old ring, or a painting that went missing in World War II, or if a movie director wanted some hard-to-find prop, she'd find it.”

“And this was before the internet,” says Cyn. “It took some real talent to find rare things back then.”

“The internet kind of put her out of business,” says Rick. “And made her into a bitter old psycho. Working with the old people at the home is a breeze compared to her.”

The two of them swap anecdotes about Marjorie Kay Stone for a bit while I eat my sandwich. She sounds like quite a piece of work.

“There were wine stains all over that house from Marjorie getting pissed off and throwing glasses at the wall,” says Rick. “Including the bathroom. Which means that now and then she'd be drinking wine on the toilet, and get so mad she threw the glass at the wall.”

“Thank you for that image,” says Cyn. “Now I'm gonna have to hope there's a rotting body in the Couch tomb so I have something more pleasant to picture than Marjorie drinking while she pees.”

“New topic,” says Rick. “What are we gonna find in the Couch Tomb.”

“There's probably nothing to see by now, even if it was
totally full and they never moved anyone,” I say. “Even the coffins have got to be dust by now.”

“Not necessarily,” says Cyn. “That was a seven-thousand-dollar tomb in 1850s money. There's a pretty good chance they would have sprung to put him in a Fisk Metallic Burial Case.”

“Let us hope and pray,” says Rick.