Here Lies Linc (15 page)

Oh yes we are
, I started to say. But I was interrupted by a roar of noise, and we both looked up to see Jeeter ambling along the driveway, aiming his freshly repaired leaf blower at a swirl of oak leaves. I could tell he was only pretending to be surprised when he glanced over. He cut the motor on the blower. “Well, hey there!” he called out. “How goes it?”

Kilgore looked irritated as he rubbed at the back of his skinny neck. “Just fine,” he answered, shooting me a dark look. “Me and your old friend Lincoln here are getting reacquainted. Turns out he’s got a real knack for breaking cemetery rules. First it’s the dogs, and then I catch him right in the middle of defiling a monument.”

“Why, that doesn’t sound right,” Jeeter drawled as he sauntered over to join us beside the Black Angel. “Lincoln’s always been a great kid. One of Oakland’s best neighbors.” He reached out and set his free hand on my shoulder. For a second I was tempted to sink against him, hide my grateful face in his faded blue work shirt.

“Well, maybe you don’t know this kid as good as you think,” Kilgore said. He lifted the spray bottle and gave it another hard shake, so we could hear the liquid sloshing around inside.

Jeeter didn’t even glance at the bottle. He held Kilgore’s stare. I could see the muscle in his jaw tighten as he answered, “Oh, I think I know him pretty darn well. How ’bout you let me be responsible for this one?”

Kilgore’s nostrils flared as if he had smelled something rotten.

Jeeter paused, carefully calculating his next move. “Okay, boss?” he added.

“Boss” must have been the magic word. The hard light in Kilgore’s gaze flickered off, and his whole body loosened as he shoved the spray bottle into Jeeter’s hands. “Fine,” he snapped. “But you make it clear to your little buddy here, if I catch him breaking one more cemetery rule, he’s out. For good.”

“Yes, sir,” Jeeter said. We studied the ground while Kilgore marched back to the golf cart and climbed in. Once the buzz of the motor had faded into the distance, Jeeter finally looked up at me with his sad Scarecrow grin. “You see what we’re dealing with here, right?”

I nodded.

Jeeter handed me the spray bottle. “I don’t mind you coming around here anytime you want, Linc,” he said. “Heck, it’s nice having you back. But you gotta watch your step, okay? It’d be an awful shame if you couldn’t stop by whenever you felt like it.” He stared meaningfully over my shoulder, toward the direction of Dad’s wall.

“Okay, Jeeter,” I said quietly. “Thanks.” I turned to go.

“Don’t be a stranger,” Jeeter called after me.

A stab of guilt cut through me as I started across the
graveyard and felt the key, heavy in my pocket, thumping against my leg. What was it Kilgore had said to Jeeter?
Maybe you don’t know this kid as good as you think
.

Jeeter was my oldest friend. Even after all of those weeks when I hadn’t bothered to stop by the office and say hello, he had welcomed me back like I’d never left. He had fended off Kilgore. And this is the kind of thanks I gave him? All this sneaking around and stealing cemetery property right under his nose?

I reached into my pocket and squeezed my fingers tightly around the key. First chance I got, I’d put it back. Jeeter would never know it had been gone.

A
FEW DAYS LATER
Mr. Oliver sent us all to the school library for the last half of American Studies class. “Think outside the box, people!” he ordered before we trooped down the hall. “Some of you’ve been complaining that you can’t find any information about your Adopt-a-Grave picks. So try another approach. Find out what important things were happening around our country when your adoptees were alive. You might get a better picture of the challenges they faced.”

In the library I wandered between the shelves, trying to hide from Mellecker and Beez while I stewed over where to go next with my research on Theresa Feldevert. Like a lot of kids in my class, I felt stuck for the time being. When I had shown Mr. Krasny the lines of Czech that I had copied from the Black Angel’s inscription, he hadn’t opened his eyes wide and cried, “Aha!” like I had hoped. Instead,
he had peered at the words in bewilderment and told me it might take a day or two for him to figure out the translation.

I sighed and stood gazing blankly at a row of encyclopedias. I had just pulled the
R
(for “rattlesnake”) volume off the shelf when Delaney walked up beside me. She looked especially pretty that day. Instead of her usual messy ponytail, she was wearing her hair down and a soft green sweater that matched her eyes.

“Hey there,” she whispered. “Only five more days till the stakeout.”

“So you really think you can still go?” I asked eagerly. I’d been having my doubts the last few days. Like usual, we hadn’t had many chances to talk that week, since she was always running off after school to help out at home and make sure her mother was okay.

Delaney nodded. “I asked Mama about it yesterday. She told me of course I should go, and if I don’t stop fussing over her, she’s gonna send me away to boarding school.” Delaney let out a helpless little laugh. “So I guess I better do what she says.”

“That’s great,” I said, my spirits instantly lifting. “I’ve got the perfect spot for us to watch for the sunflower lady. The gazebo on the hill. The only thing is,” I warned, “we’ll have to keep our eye out for the warden too. He’s new at Oakland, and I’m on his bad list for some reason.”

I couldn’t explain more because Mellecker suddenly appeared. “Sorry to interrupt,” he said, flashing Delaney one of
his charmer smiles. He nudged me with his elbow. “Hey, we haven’t seen you at lunch lately.”

I scratched at a pretend itch on my cheek. “Oh, yeah. I got behind on some labs for science,” I told him. “So I’ve been going to Ms. Sandburg’s room during lunch to catch up.” Actually, I’d been bringing peanut butter sandwiches from home and spending my lunchtimes in the chilly courtyard, where all the kids who wore black liked to hang out.

“So?” Mellecker asked, getting right down to business. “Any progress with the key?”

Make it short
, I told myself.
Straight to the point
. I took a deep breath. “W-e-l-l, as a matter of fact—” But then Beez came sliding around the corner with Amy on his tail. Delaney scooted back a couple of steps as they crowded into the aisle beside us.

“So what’s the latest?” Beez demanded.

“I couldn’t get it,” I blurted out.

“Aww, man,” Beez moaned under his breath. “The only good thing about this whole stupid Adopt-a-Grave Project was that key.”

“Shhh.” Delaney nodded toward the end of the shelves, where Mr. Oliver was patrolling back and forth. She reached around Mellecker to give my sleeve a consoling little tug, and then she drifted away.

“Did you try?” Amy asked once she had checked to see if the coast was clear. “I mean
really
try?”

“Yeah, I did,” I insisted. “I went over there on Saturday and …” And in the next instant, I found myself
doing it again, inventing a story as I went along. It gave me a little charge of satisfaction to make up ridiculous things about Kilgore. Plus, Mellecker would probably be done with me after this anyway, so why not go out with some flair?

“Remember that Kilgore guy I was telling you about?” I went on in a breathless, whispery voice. “Well, he’s real lazy and he’s always falling asleep at his desk in the office. So I waited until he was out cold and I had my hand on the key ring. I almost had it. And then—”

“Then
what
?” Amy pressed.

“His darn phone rang, and he
leaped
out of his chair, like this—” I flung my arms in the air and galloped in place. “And I had to drop to the floor like … like one of those commando guys.”

Amy gasped and started to giggle. Mellecker was laughing now too, shaking his head, and even Beez had stopped pouting for the moment. He gave me one of those get-outta-here punches on my shoulder.

I nodded. “No, really. You should have seen me. Kilgore was yakking on the phone, and I had to crawl behind a bunch of boxes and hide. Man, it was dirty back there. Dust and spiders and stuff. I had to stay there forever, waiting for Kilgore to get off the phone.”

Beez barely let me finish my story. “So when do you think you can try again?”

“Hey,” I said, holding up my hands in surrender. “Sorry, that’s it. I’m done with keys for a while.”

Beez sagged like somebody had just let the air out of his tires.

I thumped my knuckles softly on the cover of my encyclopedia. “Well, I better get back to work, you guys. See you later.” Then, before one of them could stop me, I took off around the corner and headed for a carrel on the other side of the bookshelf.
At least that’s over
, I thought, sinking down into the chair with relief. Now all I had to do was sneak the key back to the cemetery office.

But as I opened my encyclopedia, I realized I could still hear Mellecker and Beez talking. And they were talking about
me
. “Hey, we should ask him to hang out with us this weekend,” Mellecker was saying.

“
What?
Are you kidding?” I heard Beez answer. I froze in my seat. “He’s kinda weird, don’t you think? And what a load of bull about that key.”

“Yeah, but you gotta admit, he’s pretty entertaining. He always used to crack me up when we were little too.”

“Wait. When you were little? You and Crenshaw used to know each other?”

Mellecker paused. “Oh, yeah. I guess I forgot to tell you. We used to go to school together a long time ago.”

“But wasn’t Crenshaw homeschooled?”

“Yeah, sort of.”

“You mean you went to school at Crenshaw’s
house
? Who taught you? That freaky mom of his?”

“
No
, you big dope. Listen, it’s a long story. Never mind—”

Fortunately I didn’t have to listen to more, because Mr.
Oliver swooped in to threaten them with detentions if they didn’t get busy.

“Never mind,” Mellecker had said, like I was some penny he had dropped, not even worth the trouble of retrieving. With my cheeks still burning, I flipped to the page on rattlesnakes in the encyclopedia. I had wanted to read the good part, all about how the rattlesnake “sends out poison through two long hollow teeth, or fangs, in its upper jaw.” But now the words and the pictures kept blurring together as I stared down at the page.

I was still struggling to focus when a folded note flew over the side of my carrel and fluttered down in front of me. I glanced over my shoulder just in time to see Amy toss her hair and disappear around the corner of the shelves. The note was folded up tight, written on a sheet of notebook paper. I smoothed it out on top of my encyclopedia.

I gazed down at Amy’s fat, loopy letters in red ballpoint pen. I didn’t even know what Guido’s was. But I couldn’t help feeling happy and a little smug as I read the note to myself a couple more times. So Mellecker must have decided to overrule Beez and invite me along after all.

Amy appeared at my carrel again right before the bell rang. “Well?” she whispered. “Aren’t you going to write back?”

I didn’t answer at first. I pretended to be thinking as she stood there, shifting her feet. She was about to flounce off when, finally, I scribbled two letters on the bottom of the note and handed it back to her:

M
Y TIMING WAS TERRIBLE
. Lottie had made a real Sunday dinner, kind of—spaghetti with cherry tomatoes and cheddar cheese on top—and now I was planning to rush off again.

“But it’s a school night,” she said as she watched me stuff a huge forkful of noodles into my mouth.

“No, we’ve got the day off tomorrow,” I told her through my paper napkin. “It’s a conference day for the teachers.”

Lottie looked disappointed. “Oh. I was thinking we could have one of our chess matches. We haven’t played for ages.”

“Sorry,” I said, swallowing hard. “I already told Beez I could come. I guess he’s rented some horror movies to get everybody in the mood for Halloween coming up.”