Here Lies Linc Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2011 by Delia Ray

  Map art copyright © 2011 by Fred van Deelen

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ray, Delia.

  Here lies Linc / by Delia Ray.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: While researching a rumored-to-be-haunted grave for a local history project, twelve-year-old Lincoln Crenshaw unearths some startling truths about his own family.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89844-0

  [1. Cemeteries—Fiction. 2. Families—Fiction. 3. Death—Fiction. 4. Junior high schools—Fiction. 5. Schools—Fiction. 6. Iowa—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.R2101315He 2011

  [Fic]—dc22 2010030004

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment

  and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  For Lily,

  who’s always there to fill in my blanks

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Selected Sources

  About the Author

  Prologue

  MOST PEOPLE END THEIR LIVES in a graveyard. Sometimes I think my life began there.

  MY FIRST MEMORY: Crouching behind a crooked headstone, playing hide-and-go-seek with my dad.

  MY FIRST BEST FRIEND: Jeeter, the groundskeeper at Oakland Cemetery, who used to let me ride along on his big mower for hours whenever he trimmed graves.

  MY FIRST VACATION: To Smith’s Burying Ground in Franklin County, Ohio, so my mother could study the inscriptions on the pioneers’ tombstones.

  I could go on. This is the kind of life you get when you grow up next to graveyards and your mother happens to be a history professor who studies burial customs.

  When I was little, this didn’t seem so weird. I was used to my mom slamming on the brakes on country roads all across the Midwest, swerving onto the shoulder whenever she spotted even the tiniest cemetery set back in the trees. Once in a while I would whine, “Do we have to, Lottie?” (Lottie was Dad’s nickname for my mother, and people tell me I used to copy my father whenever possible.)

  But whining never worked with Lottie. She didn’t even seem to hear it as she hid her car keys under the mat and turned to squint at the spots of stone in the distance. So I’d tag along, over guardrails and barbed wire fences, past cows and horses, through plowed farm fields and weeds and brambles. Lottie would bring her camera and notebook. I’d bring the ratty quilt from the backseat in case I got sleepy while she was wandering around taking notes.

  “Some people might think this is disrespectful, Linc,” I remember Lottie saying as she settled me in for one of those naps, spreading the quilt over a grave so that the headstone looked more like the headboard of a bed. “But not me. You know, the word ‘cemetery’ comes from a Greek term that means ‘a large dormitory where lots of people are sleeping.’ ” She laughed as she bent down to kiss me on the cheek.

  I would wake up from my naps and stare at the writing on the gravestones above me, trying to sound out the words and figure out how old the people were when they died. Lottie swears I taught myself to read deciphering headstones.

  As I got older, I entertained myself during Lottie’s cemetery trips by keeping a journal of my favorite epitaphs written on the stones. And in her office my mother had books full of interesting inscriptions—from ancient tombs in Europe or the headstones of well-known authors and actors and leaders buried around the world—so I added some of those to my journal too. It was like collecting autographs, but more interesting.

  I got one of my best ones when Lottie and I took a research trip through Missouri, from the grave of the outlaw Jesse James:

  MURDERED

  APR. 3, 1882

  BY A TRAITOR

  AND COWARD

  WHOSE NAME

  IS NOT WORTHY

  TO APPEAR HERE

  But most of the epitaphs in my journal weren’t from the graves of famous people. Most I scribbled down because they were strange or sad or just plain funny, like Number 42 in my notebook:

  I Told You I Was Sick

  Number 79 came from the grave of someone named Elizabeth Rich, buried in Eufaula, Alabama:

  36–33–01–24–17

  Honey, you don’t know what you did for me,

  Always playing the lottery.

  The numbers you picked came in to play

  Two days after you passed away.

  For this, a huge monument I do erect

  For now I get a yearly check

  How I wish you were alive,

  For now we are worth 8.5

  I liked the fact that epitaphs didn’t have any rules, that headstones could be etched with whatever crazy thing people needed to help them remember the one who died—a winning lottery number, a portrait of a favorite pet, the name of a Cub Scout troop, or lyrics to a song.

  That’s why I’ve never been happy with what Lottie decided to do for Dad. Even though I was only seven when he died, I still remember exactly how I felt when she took me out to Oakland to see his grave for the first time.

  Gipped.

  For one thing, there wasn’t even a headstone. Instead of leading me across the cemetery to one of the newer graves scattered on the fringe like I expected, Lottie stopped at a long wall made of shiny black granite. I had asked Jeeter about the wall when we rode past it on the riding mower one day. A columbarium, he called it, pronouncing the syllables as if they left a bad taste on his tongue.

  “That’s where they store ashes of cremated people,” he said. “Call me old-fashioned, but when I go, I’d rather be laid out in a nice roomy burial plot ’stead of getting sealed up in a hole no bigger than a post office box.”

  Lottie had walked about halfway down the wall and gently placed her fingertips on one of the black compartments in the third row from the top. I had to take a few steps closer t
o read the small writing. This is what it said:

  Lincoln Raintree Crenshaw

  1965–2005

  That’s it, the end.

  “That’s it?” I remember asking. “That’s Dad’s grave?”

  Lottie turned toward me. “Well, yes.… Yes, honey,” she said. “You know your father. He liked to keep things simple. This is what he would have wanted.” But her voice didn’t sound so sure.

  She reached out to touch my face then, with that same hand she had pressed on the wall. I didn’t let her. I yanked back as if her fingers were on fire, and ran crying through the graveyard, all the way home.

  Like I said, I felt gipped. Gipped by only two lines of writing on a tiny little square of stone. Gipped by the heart attack that took my father, out of the blue—my dad, of all people, who never got sick and used to swing me up on his shoulders and had climbed more than fourteen thousand feet to the top of Mount Rainier in Washington State. Dad, who the ambulance guys said was riding his bike to work at eight o’clock one morning and then lying on the sidewalk on River Street by 8:05.

  “Hearts can be tricky,” they told my mom.

  The only thing that made me feel better back then was writing in my epitaph journal, scribbling down all the epitaphs I might have put on a real headstone for Dad if Lottie had bothered to ask me. I liked my rhyming ones the best:

  Here lies Lincoln Crenshaw

  Geologist, Husband, Pa

  He liked climbing and black-bottom pie.

  We were going to build a tree house three stories high.

  LINCOLN RAINTREE CRENSHAW

  We had the same name

  Father and Son

  First there were two, now there’s one

  I wrote lots more over the next year or so, all about how he liked to make us blueberry pancakes and never skipped the funnies in the newspaper, and how he wore long johns to bed and won the gold plaque on our mantel that said GEOLOGY RESEARCH PRIZE, 1999. But I never showed Lottie. Talking about him only made her sadder. Actually, it seemed like she didn’t even want to think about him anymore. One day while I was at school, she took his clothes to Goodwill and packed everything else—his books and his favorite coffee mug and the gold plaque and their wedding picture—into boxes and hid them away in the attic. At least she saved one picture out for me. I still have it by my bed—a photo of me with Dad when I was two. We’ve got our tongues out, sharing a drippy chocolate ice cream cone.

  But the truth is the last few years haven’t been nearly as dismal as they sound. My mother and I have gotten on with things. After Dad died, we adopted one of the world’s funniest-looking dogs from the animal shelter. Lottie went straight back to her cemetery research and teaching classes at the university. I’ve kept busy going to school down the street and helping around the house—basically trying to be a normal kid.

  Once I turned twelve this past June, I decided it wasn’t normal for someone my age to be spending so much time in graveyards anymore. So lately I’ve been making up excuses to stay behind on Lottie’s research trips. All summer I pretended to be too busy to hang out with Jeeter at the cemetery. And while I can’t quite bring myself to toss out my epitaph journal yet, I haven’t added a single new listing in weeks.

  But then along comes September and my first taste of junior high, and suddenly I’ve found myself right back where I started.

  MY FIRST FIELD TRIP OF THE SEVENTH GRADE: Not to the state capital or to a show at the performing arts center or to the science museum in Cedar Rapids. My American Studies teacher just announced that our entire class is going to Oakland Cemetery to study graves.

  PLAINVIEW JUNIOR HIGH WAS supposed to be a fresh start for me. But it’s hard to start fresh when kids keep asking you questions about your past. During the first week of school at least ten kids had tried to strike up conversations.

  They always started the same way.

  “You’re new, right? Where’re you from?”

  “I’m from around here.”

  “Then how come I’ve never seen you before? Which elementary school did you go to?”

  “Uh … you’ve probably never heard of it,” I’d say. “It’s really small.”

  “Oh, you mean Washington Elementary? Or Kennedy?”

  “No.…”

  “Well, which one?”

  “Uh—”

  “Which one?”

  “Well, it’s called the Home-Away-from-Homeschool. A retired professor runs it out of her basement. It’s sort of like a homeschool … but, you know, away from home. There were only a few of us.…”

  That’s about the time their ten pairs of eyes would cloud over and their ten pairs of feet would find an excuse to shuffle away.

  And that’s about the time I started to think that maybe I had made a big mistake switching to public school. Part of me wished I was back in Dr. Lindstrom’s stuffy basement with the other oddball university professors’ kids who made up the Ho-Hos. That’s what Dr. Lindstrom had called us—the Ho-Hos, short for Home-Away-from-Homeschoolers.

  Next to the typical Ho-Ho—like Sebastian, who could list every ancient Egyptian ruler back to King Khufu and wrote his name in hieroglyphics on the top of all his papers, or Vladka, who came from Russia and hardly ever spoke above a whisper and could multiply five-digit numbers in her head—I felt downright ordinary. I had transferred to Plainview hoping to find more regular kids like me. Lottie had always said if I really wanted, I could switch schools once junior high rolled around. But after just a few days at Plainview, I began to realize that I must be a full-fledged Ho-Ho after all, with extra cream filling on the side.

  Still, I kept trying to fit in, and I was doing a pretty good job of it until the end of September, when Mr. Oliver made his surprise announcement in American Studies class.

  That afternoon’s lecture on the settlement of the Midwest territories hadn’t exactly been riveting. So to entertain myself, I had grabbed a Kleenex from the box on the window-sill beside my desk and, like a surgeon, gotten busy dissecting the tissue into two see-through layers. Once the dissection was complete, I tuned back in, just in time to hear Mr. Oliver say, “And listen up, people! I’ve got some good news. Next week you’ll actually have a chance to see where some of our city’s most famous settlers are buried, because we’re all going on a field trip to Oakland Cemetery.”

  While the rest of the kids whooped and high-fived over the prospect of missing class for a day, I froze in my seat, trying to make sense of the weird coincidence.

  But Mr. Oliver wasn’t finished.

  “And, people …,” he said, pausing for effect while We the People waited, “here’s the best part. I’ve managed to convince one of the nation’s premier cemetery experts to come over from the university and lead our tour. Her name is Professor Charlotte Landers.”

  Lottie.

  Why didn’t she tell me?

  If the sport of blushing could be an Olympic event, I’d win the gold medal. I’ve always turned beet red without a second’s notice, even over dumb stuff like having to answer “Here” during attendance or if a halfway-decent girl happens to look in my direction or if Lottie sends me to the grocery store for something embarrassing like diarrhea medicine or dandruff shampoo.

  So obviously, as soon as Mr. Oliver called out my mother’s name, I felt my cheeks start to turn the color of raw hamburger. I grabbed a dissected tissue from my desk and pretended to blow my nose, bracing myself for the next part of the announcement, the part when Mr. Oliver would tell everyone that the graveyard expert’s son was, in fact, a member of our very own fifth-period class. I waited with my face buried in the wad of Kleenex, praying for the blood to hurry up and drain back to where it belonged, into my overactive arteries and capillaries and veins.

  A few more long seconds passed, and when I didn’t hear my name called, I lifted my face out of the tissues, inch by inch, and looked around the room. But Mr. Oliver had already turned back to the blackboard, and the kids in the next row were busy copying
down details of a new assignment. I slumped back in my desk with relief.… Nobody knew. For some reason Lottie must not have told Mr. Oliver that she was my mother. And since we had different last names, no one had any idea that we were even related.

  Still, by the time school ended that day, the upcoming field trip had lodged itself like a splinter in my brain. The timing couldn’t have been worse. Right when the Ho-Ho questions were starting to die down, now this—Lottie leading my class on a tour of the graveyard. It’s not that I didn’t love my mother. I loved her more than anything. It’s just that she was kind of … kind of unusual. The way she thought and talked and dressed, everything about her was different from other moms. I knew the kids in my class weren’t prepared for the likes of Lottie Landers.

  She called home that night to check on me—from some tiny town on the coast of Rhode Island where she was spending a week of research in an old slave cemetery. This would be the longest Lottie had ever been gone, and she had insisted on hiring one of her graduate students to “take care of” me while she was away, even though I had become pretty good at running things around the house over the past few years. Luckily I had barely seen the guy since he’d shown up on our doorstep with his four bags of laundry the day before.

  I wanted to interrogate Lottie about the field trip the minute I picked up the phone, but I forced myself to hold back until she had finished telling me about how her research was going. I couldn’t remember the last time she had sounded so excited.

  “Oh, Linc,” she said. “I wish you could see this place. They call it God’s Little Acre, and the stones are amazing. So artful and poignant. A lot of them list just a slave name and then who the slave belonged to. ‘In memory of Cato. Servant to Mr. Brinley.’ ‘Peter. Servant of Captain John Browning.’ Can you imagine? Linc? Are you there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Well, you’re so quiet. Are you all right? Is Rick helping to fix dinner like he promised?”

  “Uh-huh,” I lied, looking down at the dregs of Rice Krispies floating in my bowl on the kitchen table. I couldn’t complain. I was the one who had convinced her that I’d be fine staying home while she went to Rhode Island. I clamped the phone under my chin and started flipping through the stack of mail that had been piling up next to Lottie’s spot at the table for the past month. “There’s an overdue notice here, Lottie.” I said. My mother had a habit of avoiding bill paying until the envelopes arrived with bright red alert messages and exclamation points stamped across the front. “It’s from that plumber who came to fix our toilet back in July.”