Here Lies Linc (4 page)

I watched glumly as a cute girl named Amy, who always wore lots of eye makeup and clothes that showed off her permanent tan, reached out and gave Mellecker a playful little shove. That was another thing about Mellecker. Girls. He had them swarming around him like bees on a Coke can.

“Excuse me. Mr. Oliver?” I heard Sylvie say. My heart jumped. Sylvie was pointing to something across the graveyard. “Is that Professor Landers over there?”

Everybody turned to look.

“Uh … I’m not sure,” Mr. Oliver said as he stepped down to the pavement and squinted past a row of shrubbery at the strange figure heading toward us. The woman was hurrying from the middle of the cemetery, as if she might have floated up from one of the graves.

I swallowed. It was Lottie, all right. There was no mistaking that long purple skirt and determined stride of hers. I started to edge back in the crowd as Lottie moved closer. Maybe because I hadn’t seen her for a week or maybe just because she hadn’t remembered to brush her hair when she got off the airplane, my mother looked more eccentric than ever—sort of like a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces didn’t fit together quite right. Her face (smooth and pale without a single freckle or age spot) didn’t match her hair (wild and curly and streaked with gray). Her clothes (an extra-large pullover sweater and a droopy skirt) didn’t match her size (extra small). Then there were those clunky brown boots with muddy shoelaces that she always wore for her graveyard work.

I could see the other kids giving Lottie the once-over as
she rushed up and stood panting in front of us, trying to catch her breath. “All
righty
!” she gasped. “Which one of you is Mr. Oliver?”

I felt my face go hot. Was she trying to be funny? Who’d she think the bald guy was, the one with the mustache, standing right in front of her? I stared down at my tennis shoes. I couldn’t stand to watch.

“That’s me,” I heard Mr. Oliver say. “Hey, you caught us a little off guard there, Professor Landers.… Where exactly did you park your car?”

“Oh, I didn’t drive here,” Lottie told him. “I walked. We live—”

I felt my head pop up. For a half second Lottie’s eyes found mine. She started to smile; then her gaze skimmed away. “I mean,
I
live on Claiborne Street, right on the other side of Oakland. My yard borders the cemetery.”

Mr. Oliver’s mustache twitched with amusement. “Wow. That makes it a little difficult to leave your work at the office, doesn’t it?”

A few kids laughed. When Lottie didn’t join in, Mr. Oliver looked embarrassed and started again. “I only meant, isn’t that interesting? You study cemeteries, and you happen to live next to a graveyard.…”

“Oh, it’s not a coincidence,” Lottie said with a little flip of her hand. “I’ve always made a point of living close to graveyards. We lived next to a cemetery in Wisconsin too. It’s like having your own private park—more peaceful than a park, actually. So when we moved here a few years ago and I spotted a
FOR SALE
sign right next door to Oakland, I knew it was
the perfect house for us … I mean, for me.” Lottie spun around to survey the acres of stone crosses and urns and monuments spread out like a mixed-up chess set in front of us. “Well, Mr. Oliver, shall we get started?” she said, rubbing her hands together. “Let’s see … where to begin?”

Sylvie chimed in before Mr. Oliver could say anything. “How about the Black Angel?”

“Yeah!” a few others agreed.

Oh boy
. I held my breath, bracing for what might happen next.

Lottie turned back to the group, closing her eyes for a second as if a volt of pain were passing through her body. “W-e-l-l-l,” she said slowly, working to keep her voice patient, “we
could
start with the Black Angel … but not if we want to do justice to the rich history Oakland Cemetery has to offer. Those kinds of silly ghost stories and myths that surround the Angel are what give people the wrong idea about cemeteries—that they’re scary, sinister places.”

The excited smile on Sylvie’s face started to fade.

But Lottie was just getting warmed up. She shook her head hard, sending her hair swirling around her face like a tornado. “Visitors from all over just flock to the Black Angel, thrilled by all those legends—about why the statue turned black and what happens if you touch her under the moonlight.
Nonsense!
All that sort of ghost-story mumbo jumbo prevents us from understanding the real stories these gravestones have to tell.”

Lottie had been waving her hands, and now without any warning she turned and set off across the old section of the
graveyard, still lecturing and making a stubborn beeline away from the direction of the Black Angel. We all looked at Mr. Oliver, wondering what to do next.

“Professor?” he called after Lottie. “Weren’t we going to start with Governor Lucas’s grave?” Lottie kept walking.

Somebody piped up with that high-pitched tune from
The Twilight Zone
—“doo-doo-doo-doo, doo-doo-doo-doo”—the one people always sing whenever anything weird happens.

Mr. Oliver pretended not to hear. “C’mon, people,” he said, turning gruff. He motioned for us to hurry and catch up with the professor. “You’re supposed to be taking notes, remember?”

I hung behind as my class straggled after Lottie. But bits and pieces of her lesson kept floating back to me. I had heard most of it before, though I couldn’t remember exactly when. She was talking about the carvings on old headstones and what they meant. A carving of a broken chain represented a life cut short. A cedar tree symbolized strong faith. A willow tree—grief and mourning. An arch—victory over death.

I watched a couple of squirrels zip through the yellow maple leaves over my head and tried to let Lottie’s lecture melt into the sound of traffic out on Dodge Street. But Mr. Oliver had spotted me lagging, and even from nine or ten graves away I could see his mustache jerk down at the corners as he turned to scowl and jab his finger at my unopened notebook. I shuffled closer and found a place at the edge of the group, on the opposite side of where he was snooping around for field trip violations.

“Now let’s talk about lambs,” Lottie was saying. “A lamb is one of the three or four most common symbols found in cemeteries throughout the United States. Can anyone guess what a lamb is meant to symbolize? Anyone?”

Nobody even tried to make a guess.

“Innocence!” she flung out at our circle of blank faces. “Purity! The lamb often marks the death of an infant or a child. Over in Babyland, you’ll find dozens of small sculptures or carvings of lambs on the headstones.”

“Babyland?”
Sylvie sounded offended. “Ewww. Isn’t that kind of creepy?”

Lottie nodded, trying to look sympathetic. “I know it seems morbid. But lots of older cemeteries have sections designated for the burial of children. And it’s been traditional, not only in the Midwest but all across the country, to name those sections Babyland.”

“That’s so sad,” a girl standing near me said, almost to herself. Actually, she said “say-ad,” drawing out the word into two syllables. It was a surprise to hear her voice at all. Just like me, she was new that year and kept quiet most of the time. All I knew about her was that her name was Delaney Baldwin, and with her accent and the way she said “Yes, ma’am” and “No, ma’am” to the cafeteria ladies in the lunch line, I figured she had come from down south somewhere.

I was still sneaking looks at Delaney, who seemed hypnotized by whatever my mother was saying about Babyland, when I noticed Mellecker standing right in front of me. He was bent over his notebook and scribbling so hard, you would
have thought Lottie was feeding him plays for the football game on Thursday. I rocked up on my toes so I could get a look over his shoulder and see what he was writing.

He was drawing, actually … a picture of my mother.

A
LTHOUGH
M
ELLECKER WASN’T MUCH
of an artist, there was no mistaking his subject matter. He had drawn a stick figure, then added a triangle skirt, combat boots, and wild curlicues for hair. For my mother’s eyes Mellecker had drawn
X
marks, making her look like somebody had just punched her lights out. Then, at the top of the page, he sketched a big headstone and labeled it with the words “Professor” and “R.I.P.” in big block letters. Rest in Peace.

For a few seconds my ears filled up with a rush of white noise like TV static. I wanted to flatten him. I wanted to grab the back of his head and shove that handsome, magazine-ad face of his into the nearest grave plot. But I couldn’t seem to move. All I could do was watch while Mellecker sketched more and more details on his dead-Lottie cartoon.

Now he was adding doodles to her headstone—first a bat
with stretched-out wings and then something that looked like a big peanut.

He held out his notebook so that one of his sidekicks from the football team—Jake Beasley—could see. I didn’t like what I had seen of Beez so far. He was big and loud, always swaggering around trying to be funny. But I figured he had to be one of Mellecker’s best friends, since all the guys in that circle went by their last names. Apparently Mellecker had started a trend.

“What do you think, Beez?” I heard him whisper. “Like my symbols for the professor’s grave?”

Beez stared blankly down at Mellecker’s bat and peanut doodles. “I don’t get it.”

Mellecker rolled his eyes at him. “She’s bats!” he hissed. “Nuts!”

“Oh,
yeah
,” Beez said, not even trying to muffle his guffaw. “Now I get it.” I glared at the back of his meaty head.

Mellecker must have felt me breathing down his neck. All of a sudden he glanced at me over his shoulder and then turned with his notebook to give me a better view.

“Pretty good, huh, Linc?” he said softly.

So he knew my name after all. I felt my mouth stretch into a sickly Halloween-pumpkin smile as I searched his face for some sort of clue. Did he know it was
me
—his old Ho-Ho playmate? Or did he only remember my name from Mr. Oliver’s annoying roll call every afternoon? Whatever it was, Mellecker didn’t let on. He just stood there, grinning at me, waiting for me to laugh at his nasty cartoon.

I could feel my pumpkin smile caving in. But before I could decide whether to force out a fake laugh or walk away in a huff, we were interrupted by the sound of Lottie’s voice rising in frustration. Someone must have asked her about the Black Angel again. “Look,” she was saying. “The only reason that angel is black is because the statue is made of bronze, not marble, and when bronze is exposed to the elements, oxidation occurs and the metal turns dark.”

She paused.

“BUT!” she almost shouted, making everybody, even Mellecker, jump. “If you don’t believe me, you should come out here at midnight tonight and see for yourself. Climb up on the pedestal and give that angel a
big—fat—wet
kiss right on her lips. If you’re dead tomorrow morning, we’ll all know the legends are true.”

From the startled expressions on everyone’s faces, Lottie had to know her little speech had gone too far. But I guess something about the awkward pause that followed struck her as funny, because all at once she started to laugh. First it was only a little laugh that bubbled out. But then her giggle turned into a cackle, and I watched in growing horror as she pressed her knuckles to her mouth and spun away from us with her shoulders shaking, struggling to regain control. If we had been anywhere else, I probably would have burst out laughing too. But not here. Not on my junior high field trip, with my whole class staring at my mother like she was a lunatic.

“Okay, everybody,” Mr. Oliver broke in nervously, giving
Lottie a chance to compose herself. “I think the professor is saying that’s
enough
questions about the Black Angel. We’re not focusing on legends today. We’re focusing on historical facts and what this graveyard can tell us about our town’s early citizens. Agreed?”

Mr. Oliver shot a warning glance around our group. Then he cautiously turned back to Lottie. “Shall we continue, Professor?”

Lottie finished wiping the tears from under her eyes. “Certainly,” she said with a businesslike little sniff. “You had asked about Governor Lucas’s grave. Why don’t we head over there?”

Mellecker fell into step beside me as we all set off behind Lottie. He nudged my arm, tapping his cartoon with the point of his pencil. “See what I mean?”

“Yeah,” I muttered before I could stop myself. “Definitely. You should draw a fruitcake next to that peanut. And while you’re at it, add a rocking chair.”

“Whoa,” Mellecker exclaimed under his breath. “Nutty as a fruitcake … off her rocker. You’re good.” He hunched over his drawing again, more eager than ever.

I let myself be herded along, wishing I could sink down into the ground with the corpses for a while. How could I have said those things about Lottie? I was a traitor. A mother backstabber. And then another thought dawned on me—an idea that made me feel even worse. What if Mellecker really
did
remember me from four years ago? And what if he remembered my mother too and was just taunting me, waiting for me to spill my stupid secret? I racked my brain trying
to recall when he might have met Lottie at Dr. Lindstrom’s. Even when I was eight, I had always walked back and forth to school by myself. But we Ho-Hos used to put on all sorts of special plays and performances for our parents. Maybe Lottie had come to one of them and Mellecker had seen her then.