Chapter 1: The Horizontal Man Before I saw the dead body, I used to like raisins.
In fact, I used to love raisins: raisin toast, raisin muffins, raisin pudding, raisin cereal. Now I look at one of those dried-up grapes, and all I see is a dried-out corpse. This morning at the breakfast table Uncle Stoppard set a plate in front of me with two giant raisin muffins, steaming with melted butter. I must have had a funny look on my face, because right away Uncle Stoppard asked what was wrong.
"You promise you won't laugh?" I asked.
"Promise," he said.
So I told him. His cucumber-green eyes got squinty: it was his serious look. "But, Finnegan," he said. "And I don't mean to say it sounds weird," he said.
"But, why on earth should raisins remind you of that dead body we found in the -- " Uncle Stoppard stopped. He stared down at the muffin on his own plate. Then he stared at me. Then he stared at the muffin again.
"Because of the...rodents?" he said quietly.
"Yeah," I said. "The...rodents."
Uncle Stoppard's complexion began to match the color of his eyes. He pushed himself away from the table, scooped up our plates, and scraped all four muffins into the waste can.
"How do you feel about waffles?" he said.
I don't know why I felt that sick. I mean, yes, it was the first dead body I ever saw. But I should have been more comfortable. After all, my whole family loves dead things.
One of my grandmothers, for instance, was a paleontologist and collected fossils for museums. My grandfather worked in the Dead Letter department of the Tombstone, Arizona, post office. Aunt Verona became a taxidermist after she got out of the Army, and used to display all her preserved pets in mock battle scenes on her front lawn. Uncle Stoppard says her neighbors called the place "The WAC's Museum." Dad's favorite band is the Grateful Dead. Mom's favorite writer is Robert Graves. Both my parents were archeologists. I mean, are archeologists. I mean, both. Both are both. As of this moment they're alive, but considered legally dead, since they disappeared over seven years ago while searching for Tquuli the Haunted City somewhere among the frozen volcano-cones of Iceland. (It was written up in Peephole magazine.) How do I know they're alive? I just know.
I'm staying with Uncle Stoppard until my parents come back. To look at us, you'd never guess we were related. Uncle Stoppard is tall and muscular with wavy red hair, crinkly green eyes, and a big nose (he calls it aquiline). I am not tall or muscular, have light-brown hair, pale skin, and freckles. Uncle Stoppard says I have a moccachino crop, java eyes, and a triple-latte complexion with nutmeg sprinkles. Uncle Stoppard likes drinking coffee. He also likes using unusual words.
The only thing we share is our glasses. I mean, we both wear glasses. And, of course, we share the family fondness for dead things: I like ghost stories and Uncle Stop spends most of his time plotting to kill people. We've been living together a little more than seven years now, and I guess I've gotten used to living in his apartment in Minneapolis. I don't think about my parents as much as I used to. Now I only think about them a couple times a day.
Poor Uncle Stoppard. Maybe I shouldn't have mentioned the raisins at breakfast.
Last year, Uncle Stoppard had a hard time eating because of fingerprints. He was reading all about fingerprints in these crime books of his and he learned What they're made of. Sweat. I mean, fingerprints are made of sweat, not the crime books. And sweat is full of stuff like ammonia, phosphate, uric acid, and cholesterol. Yummy, huh? Did you know that one of the fatty acids that oozes out of your pores is the same stuff that crayons are made from? Each time Uncle Stoppard picked up a pear or a sandwich, he thought about how those sweat chemicals got all over the food he was planning to eat. He thought about that a lot. Last year, he lost twelve pounds.
"That's all right," he used to say. "It's good for my diet."
Uncle Stoppard doesn't need to diet. He rides his bike and blades and lifts weights. He looks like one of those guys in the jeans commercials on TV. When he's not exercising, Uncle Stop writes murder mysteries. That's what I meant when I said he's always plotting to kill people.
His last mystery, Cold Feet, has been on the New York Times bestseller list for eight weeks. That's as good as Stephen King. Cold Feet is about this killer who always leaves a pair of blue shoes next to the dead bodies of his victims. Lots of readers think it's funny to send Uncle Stop a pair of blue shoes through the mail. We have bags and bags of fan letters and packages stacked in our living room. In three weeks we've given away 200 pairs of blue shoes to the Salvation Army. Uncle Stop says it's a good arrangement since the Salvation Army likes saving soles.
Anyway, we found the dead body a week ago. I was still eating raisins at the time. It was the middle of June, on a gray and gloomy Sunday. I was helping Uncle Stoppard go through the mail. We have a system. First we put all the packages in one pile and all the envelopes in another. Then we divide the packages into two categories: Probably Shoes and Probably Not. The Probably Not packages are weird shapes that a shoe wouldn't be able to fit into. Some fans send presents like food, or homemade socks, or pencil holders, or pictures of themselves and their families. Some send typed pages of mystery stories they've written, hoping that Uncle Stoppard will get them published. Uncle Stoppard says he still has trouble publishing his own books.
I was about to rip open a large, flat package that looked like it contained another manuscript when I glanced at the address again. The name on the address was not Uncle Stoppard's. It said: Pablo DeSoto. We live in south Minneapolis near Lake Calhoun. Our building is made out of dusty yellow bricks (Uncle Stoppard calls them "marigold"), with green shutters ("emerald"), and a steep, slanty roof ("alpine"). It has two apartments on the very top, two in the middle, and one sort of half underground. The laundry room and storage rooms fill in the rest of the basement. Uncle Stop's and my apartment (no. 2) is in the middle level. Pablo (no. 3) is our neighbor across the hall landing. I figured that somehow Pablo's package got mixed up with ours in the hall. This happens about two or three times a week. Since we get so much mail, the caretaker puts our packages on our landing, next to our door, which is next to Pablo's door. And sometimes packages for Pablo get stuck with ours.
I ran down the hall stairs to the mail slots in the front entryway. The slots were too narrow for Pablo's package. Not wanting to leave it sitting on the floor, I ran back up the stairs to our landing and knocked on number 3. No answer. I went back inside our apartment and decided I'd try again later. I set the package just inside our door.
It was cold and windy outside, so I stayed in the rest of the day. By lunchtime, we still hadn't opened up all the mail. I counted twenty-two more pairs of shoes, including a pair of turquoise high heels and some indigo sneakers. Uncle Stoppard went back to his office and typed on his computer. I went to my bedroom and read comic books. This was supposed to be summer vacation. Where's the sun? The only bright spot in the whole apartment was the picture I kept on my dresser.
The picture is a color photograph of me and my parents. It was taken a month before they left for Iceland. My parents, Anna and Leo Zwake, were in Agualar, near Mexico, on an archeological expedition for the world-famous Ackerberg Institute. They were searching for an ancient Mayan city in the jungle. I was only a five-year-old kid, but they took me along with them. The photo was ta