Free The Morgue and Me by John C. Ford

the fact that he couldn’t speak to me. I found him hard to believe. Tina spit her number out for me and I left it in a message.
    “Buzzkill,” Tina said, and I knew what she meant. We’d just started getting somewhere, and now we’d have to wait for the guy to call back. Tina sulked, revving the engine at a traffic light. I tried to think of other leads and only came up with one.
    “Got time for a trip to the country club?” I said.
    Tina nodded, smiling. “Good call. Why the hell not?”
    The light turned green. She blasted the “Angry Songs” mix and floored it.
     
     
    A huge sign saying NEW PETOSKEY RESORT AND SPA marked the entrance to the country-club complex. Tina pulled in and we followed a snaking road to an intersection with little wooden signs pointing the way to the spa complex, tennis courts, and the cardio theater. The signs were affixed to a pole at odd angles, like those ones in the middle of nowhere pointing to TIMBUKTU, 607 MILES in one direction and CAIRO, 1,290 MILES in another. I think they were supposed to be cute. Tina kept on until we reached another blizzard of signs: INDOOR/OUTDOOR POOL, WHITEFISH RESORT, LAKE VIEW CONDOMINIUMS, GOLF ACADEMY, and the OLD CLUBHOUSE.
    She stopped in the middle of the intersection, reading intently. “Christ, you need MapQuest to find your way around here. You know your way around this place?”
    “Nope.”
    I’d been here a long time ago, when it was just a regular little golf course. But I’d never actually set foot in the New Petoskey Resort and Spa, which was kind of weird. Weird because there’d been a huge scandal when it opened a few years ago, and it was all anybody in Petoskey talked about. I’d heard so much about it I felt like I knew the place, but now I was seeing it for the first time. The fairways on either side of us were carpeted with electric-green grass, bare of trees, and silent as a church. A worker in a white jumpsuit mowed a stretch of grass that already looked perfect. He glanced over at us and frowned, pegging us as riffraff. He probably wanted to come over and straighten our collars.
    “If Mitch was a caddy, maybe we should try the clubhouse first,” I said.
    Tina nodded and followed the sign until we arrived at a black asphalt parking lot the size of a football field. The clubhouse in front of us looked like a winter lodge. Golfers gathered to the side of it, taking lazy practice swings and scrubbing golf balls in a red machine. Tina shaded her eyes and looked off to our left, where we could see the resort’s signature building—a fourteen-story glass tower of luxury hotel rooms with built-in Jacuzzis.
    I knew about the Jacuzzis because of my parents. I knew a lot of details like that; the golf course was all they’d talked about for a long time. I knew the hotel had 160 rooms, I knew they’d built three new golf courses, I knew the names of the chemicals they used to make the grass green, I knew that the place we were standing used to be a cherry orchard. The country-club property stretched for about a mile ahead of us, where there used to be a forest.
    Tina sighed as she took in the glaring tower.
    “You know why I moved here?” Tina said. “I saw a picture of the bluffs. I applied to the Courier the next day.”
    We both laughed.
    Petoskey Bluffs had been the town’s claim to fame. They were pictured on the town seal, the Courier ’s masthead, and all the old travel posters ever made. They were pretty cool, those bluffs. At their highest point, they formed a 340-foot coastal wall that dropped down to the edge of the lake. People used to set up lawn chairs at sunset, just to watch them turn a bloodstained orange. It was the kind of thing that Julia and I would have done together in high school, if the bluffs hadn’t disappeared by then.
    The developers wanted to make their new golf courses look like the ones in England, which don’t have trees on them, so they clear-cut the forest. But as it turned out, the