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had taken an undue number of close-ups of the bullet wounds against Mitch Blaylock’s pale skin. If my parents happened to waltz in and see them, I would be wearing a straitjacket within the hour.
    “You had a phone call this morning,” my mom called through the door. “From Julia Spencer!” A dramatic silence. “I bet you could still get her at home!”
    “Mmmmm . . . okay . . . thanks.” I was madly shutting down screens.
    I could sense my mom biting her tongue, and then I heard her feet on the stairs. I checked about fifty times to make sure I hadn’t saved the picture files to my computer and stuck the card safely back in my camera.
    My mom was unloading sacks of organic produce when I got downstairs. The Courier had a huge headline about some judge who’d gotten in trouble for accepting bribes. I checked through the paper for stories by Art Bradford, but no dice. I flopped it down, helped unload some kale and bags of unidentifiable grains that didn’t look entirely edible, and considered my duty done. It was time to get going.
    “And where are you off to?” my mom said.
    I had my camera strapped around my shoulder—after looking at those pics, I would have secured it with a deadbolt if that were physically possible—so I just said the first thing that came to mind. “Thought I’d take some pictures downtown.”
    A distant cheer went up in the backyard, which no doubt signaled completion of the finest bird feeder northern Michigan would ever know.
    “See ya,” I said, and gave my mom a peck on the cheek.
    As I left, I knew it was killing her not to mention that I hadn’t called Julia back.
     
     
    Mitch Blaylock died here , I thought when I parked the Escort at the Lighthouse Motel. It was 10:53 by the dashboard clock, and the morning light didn’t flatter the place. Before me, the motel rooms framed an outdoor pool in a U shape. The doors were painted robin’s-egg blue; the sun hit them head-on, revealing grimy streaks of dirt. A rust-stained waterslide drooled into the pool, where leaves gathered in the gutters. A single jet on the waterslide sent a wayward arc of water throbbing onto the deck, a sad little fountain of hope.
    The hotel office stood at one end of the U. A man in a wife-beater and cutoff shorts held a garden hose in one hand. He had tree-trunk legs, and he was drenching flowers at the base of a sign. It flashed the word Vacancy over and over. The man didn’t seem to care about me one way or the other. He went to the side of the building, turned a squeaky knob, and left the hose lying in the grass when he returned to the office.
    I wasn’t sure what I was doing there. Mike was right, I wasn’t eager to discover that Tim Spencer had killed Mitch Blaylock. But (a) maybe Tim didn’t, and (b) I couldn’t leave it alone anyway. They tell us to follow our dreams, and my dream was to catch people doing bad things. This was a golden opportunity.
    The Lighthouse Motel has been around forever, but I’d never inspected it up close. It would have fit perfectly into a spy novel: The Lighthouse Motel sat on a lazy bend in Route 14, the main artery into Petoskey. Citizens found it an unsightly building, but mostly they had forgotten it, like a stain on a kitchen counter not quite ugly enough to bother eradicating. After a while they just stopped seeing it. A man had been murdered in that motel—
    Someone was knocking on my window. Loudly.
    It was the insanely hot woman from the Courier , which made me wonder if maybe I was still fantasizing. Or maybe, better, she was stalking me. I rolled down the window to find out.
    “You again,” she said. “You’re popping up all over.”
    “Yeah, me again. Hi.”
    “So listen . . .” She stopped to fish for something in her bag and came up with the memo I had left for Art Bradford, Senior Reporter. Apparently, she had decided to intercept it. Hmm. Her eyes found what she needed and looked back at me. “. . . Chris. We need to talk.”
    I almost