Here Lies Linc Read online

  “Oh, shoot,” Lottie muttered. “I meant to pay that one before I left. Can you take care of it for me, Linc? I signed a couple checks for you in case something came up. They’re on the desk in my office … I think.” She hurried to change the subject. “How’s C.B.?”

  “Fine,” I said, trying not to sound too testy as I turned in my chair to look at C.B. He was sprawled on his hairy dog bed by the back door. As usual there was mud caked on the top of his big nose and dirt clods trapped in his mustache. “He’s been busy,” I told Lottie, “working on a new hole by the front porch.”

  She groaned. “Not the front yard too? Pretty soon we’re going to look like we’re living on top of an archaeological dig.”

  I plunked my bowl of soggy cereal on the floor for C.B. Even with the cranky mood I was in, I couldn’t help smiling as I watched him roust himself from his bed and wander over to investigate. C.B. caused the same reaction in most people. I could never get very far in the park without someone stopping to ask me, “What kind of breed is that?” C.B. looked like some sort of canine mutant with his sheepdog head, basset-hound body, and long rat tail. And just to make his pedigree even more of a mystery, he was the color of a chocolate lab, all except for the blond eyebrows that sprang from his head like furry antennae.

  I slid down to the floor so I could sit next to C.B. while he licked out my cereal bowl. He smelled like a swamp, but I hugged him anyway.

  “Well, how was school today?”

  I sat up, dodging C.B.’s tongue. Finally. Time to let the logjam loose. “Pretty good until fifth period,” I said. “Why didn’t you tell me that Mr. Oliver asked you to give our class a tour of the cemetery?”

  “Mr. Oliver?” Lottie repeated in bewilderment. Then she gasped. “Oh, shoot! I almost forgot. Did I miss it? Wait a minute, that’s your class going to Oakland?”

  “Mom!” I barked into the phone. We both knew I only called her Mom when I was mad. And we both knew that she had a habit of forgetting things, but this was bordering on amnesia territory. “No, you didn’t miss it. The field trip’s not till next Tuesday … and yes, it’s my American Studies class that you’re supposed to lead on the tour.” C.B. scooted out of the way as I grabbed the bowl he had licked clean and clambered to my feet in frustration.

  “I’m sorry, Linc,” Lottie said helplessly. “Before, there was just Dr. Lindstrom to keep track of, but now you have … is it six? Seven different teachers? And you know I get called to do lots of tours and special lectures. It’s hard to keep everything straight.”

  I had started toward the sink with the bowl, but the phone cord was too short and tangled for me to get very far. I gave it a hard yank. Maybe if I broke it, Lottie would join the rest of the modern world and buy us a portable phone.

  “Well, you can’t do it anyway, can you?” I asked, standing motionless for a hopeful second at the end of my phone-cord tether. “You’re not even getting home till the day of the field trip.”

  “What time does your class go to Oakland?”

  “Around one o’clock.”

  “Piece of cake,” she said. “I think my plane gets in around noon. See there? Everything’s going to work out fine.”

  I didn’t answer. It was so quiet in the house, I could hear C.B.’s long toenails clicking on the linoleum as he headed back to his bed.

  “Linc?”

  “I’m here,” I said, taking a deep breath as I set the cereal bowl on top of the scattered mail on the table. “Listen, Lottie, do you think we could pretend … for this field trip that … you know … that we’re not related?”

  There was another pause. “Why?” she asked, the cheeriness suddenly draining out of her voice. “Why would we do that?”

  I breezed ahead, trying to sound casual. “Well, you have to admit that you’ve got a pretty weird job, you know, spending your whole life studying dead people and symbols on headstones and why graves face east to west instead of north to south … and it’s just that I’m … I’m new at Plainview and …” My words started to lose some of their steam.

  “Ohhhhh. So that’s what this is about,” she said shrewdly. “Now that you’re in junior high, you’re embarrassed. You know, you never used to think twice about my job when you were with the Ho-Hos.”

  “I know,” I said, holding back a sigh. “It’s hard to explain. But I think I’d get a lot more out of the day if I could blend in with the other kids.”

  “Don’t any of your friends already know what I do?”

  I let my pent-up sigh whoosh out as I sank down in my place at the table again. What friends? Ever since I had switched to Plainview, Lottie kept referring to this mysterious group of “your friends,” even though I had never mentioned meeting anyone new. “What are your friends up to this weekend?” she would ask. “Do any of your friends ride the bus?” As if I had a fresh crop of buddies lined up like rows of corn, just waiting for the pleasure of my company.

  “Nope,” I said quietly. “We don’t really talk about our parents that much.” I couldn’t bring myself to admit to Lottie that so far, I was running on empty in the friends department. I gave myself a little shake and tried to make a joke. “Somehow I haven’t gotten around to telling them my mom is Charlotte Landers, Dr. Death. ”

  Lottie’s soft chuckle came drifting over the phone lines. “Dr. Death, huh?”

  “Please, Lottie?”

  “Fine,” she finally said. “I’ll play along just this once, for the field trip. Even though it might be difficult, considering I won’t have seen you for a whole week.” Then she started to wobble, ready to change her mind. “But what if I go to a PTA meeting sometime, or what if I have a parent-teacher conference with Mr. What’s-His-Name? He’s bound to make the connection sooner or later.”

  I rolled my eyes around in their sockets. “His name is Mr. Oliver. And c’mon, Lottie, PTA meeting? You?”

  “Oh, all right,” she said. “You win.”

  “Thank you,” I breathed.

  Then I let my mind race ahead. “Lottie? There’s one more thing.”

  “What is it?”

  “Are we going anywhere near Dad’s wall?” I needed to prepare myself. I couldn’t even remember the last time I had felt like visiting my father’s little block of stone.

  Even from a thousand miles away, I could see Lottie sitting on the bed in her hotel room, blinking her silvery gray eyes closed, the way she always does whenever she’s forced to think about Dad.

  “No,” she said after a few seconds. “We’ll be staying in the old part of the cemetery.”

  “Okay.” I found myself nodding into the phone. So far, so good.

  WHEN THE HO-HOS FOUND OUT I was transferring to public school, they tried to stage an intervention. Sebastian and Vladka showed up at my house one afternoon at the beginning of September, right before classes started. I sat between them on my front porch steps, looking back and forth while they told me how terrible Plainview would be.

  “I came from that place, remember?” Sebastian said. His face was so sweaty, his glasses kept sliding down his nose. “I know what I’m talking about. It’s just like life in ancient Egypt. You’ll know who the pharaoh is right off the bat. Then you’ve got the high priests and nobles—all the jocks and the good-looking people. And under them there’re the slaves and peasants—everybody else.”

  “You will be a peasant,” Vladka whispered in her leftover Russian accent. She sounded just like a fortune-teller.

  Of course Vladka’s prediction turned out to be right. I was a peasant—a fact that became clearer with each passing day of junior high. So, on the day of the field trip, on a crisp afternoon in early October, I took my place in the front of the bus with the rest of the peasants while the high priests and nobles held court in the back. They yelled jokes across the aisle and laughed and shoved into one another whenever the bus took a sharp corner. Anybody listening would have thought we were headed to Disney World instead of some sleepy old cemetery barely four miles away from schoo
l.

  I didn’t feel like chatting during the bus ride. I was too nervous thinking about what was in store for me during the next hour. But a kid named Cliff from the robot fighting club had slid into the seat next to me when we got on the bus, and he kept trying to start up conversations. Cliff had the palest skin and the brightest orange hair I had ever seen—exactly the same color as sweet potatoes. I had met him on the first day of school when I couldn’t figure out where to sit at lunch and ended up at his table with the rest of the BattleBots. “So how’s cross-country going?” Cliff asked me.

  “Oh. I didn’t make it,” I told him.

  “I thought everybody made cross-country.”

  I shrugged. “Not me.” Actually, I hadn’t stayed past the first ten minutes of tryouts. Once I saw all the guys in their cool running gear and heard how far we were supposed to go that day, I chickened out and slipped around the corner of the gym when no one was looking. How was I supposed to run two miles in my blown-out sneakers and baggy shorts when I’d hardly ever jogged around my block before?

  Cliff’s pale face brightened. “So now you can come to BattleBots. Since you’re not doing cross-country, I mean.”

  “Yeah, maybe.” I hesitated. “I’ll have to see. I have a job walking my neighbor’s dog in the afternoons.…”

  “We meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays,” Cliff added quietly. I felt bad. Cliff was nice and all, but the BattleBots reminded me an awful lot of the Ho-Hos. They spent their whole lunchtime arguing about stuff like whether they should build their robot with a overhead pickax or kinetic spike weapon, or whether their bot should be called the Vladiator or Dr. DeathBlow. The thought of spending four more hours a week in the midst of all that geeky bickering just made me feel tired.

  My ears pricked up. I could hear Sylvie Rothaker in the seat ahead of me babbling on about Professor Landers. “I hope Professor Landers tells us more about the Curse of the Black Angel,” she was saying to her friend Rosa. “People say the statue used to be white, but the marble turned black because the man who’s buried there was so evil.”

  I saw Rosa’s dark eyes widen as she swiveled sideways to listen to Sylvie. “What did he do, this man?”

  “My uncle told me that he was a preacher who murdered his son,” Sylvie said. “He got away with it in court, but a lot of bad things happened to him after that. We’ll have to ask the professor.”

  I slumped down further in my seat. Everybody was fascinated with the Black Angel—a creepy monument that towered over one of the graves in the middle of Oakland Cemetery. Everybody except my mother, that is. Whenever anyone even mentioned the subject, Lottie would shake her head in disgust. She thought the kind of superstitious legends that swirled around the Angel were ridiculous, and anyone silly enough to believe them, she’d say, must not be very smart.

  “We’re here,” Cliff murmured. I sat up and took a shaky breath as we rattled between the brick pillars at the entrance gates to Oakland, past the tall trees and waves of headstones spread out on either side. My palms felt slick.

  “Vel-come, children,” someone crooned from the back of the bus. “Mua-ha-ha-HA-HA!” It was a terrible Dracula impersonation, but a bunch of kids thought it was hilarious and started chipping in with their own scary sound effects. A werewolf howl. Ghost noises. More shrieks and moans.

  “Quiet down, people!” Mr. Oliver bellowed from up front as the bus rumbled to a stop. “Has everybody got what they need for taking notes?”

  “Yep!” Sylvie called back. She waved her hot-pink binder in the air.

  I pressed my face to the window, searching the small parking area for Lottie. There was no sign of her. A last flicker of hope sprang up inside me. Maybe her flight had been delayed. Even if her plane was only an hour late, she wouldn’t make it back to town in time to give us a tour. I rubbed my damp palms on my jeans, resisting the urge to cross my fingers for good luck.

  Cliff leaned in beside me. “My grandma Hunnicutt is buried over there,” he whispered, pointing toward the newer area of the cemetery where Dad’s wall stood. “We all went to see her before she died. Her feet were swollen up like watermelons.”

  “Huh,” I said, trying not to flinch. I didn’t want to think about Cliff’s grandmother with her watermelon feet being anywhere near my father’s ashes.

  When it was my turn to file off the bus, I shuffled along behind the other kids, keeping my head down. I knew if Jeeter spotted me, he’d come rushing over with that lopsided grin and bouncy walk of his. “Hey there, Lincoln Log!” he’d say. “Where you been hidin’?” I sneaked a quick glance toward the cemetery office as I stepped into the parking lot and let out another sigh of relief. Jeeter’s old truck was missing from its usual spot outside the toolshed. Hopefully, he had decided to take an extra-long lunch break.

  Mr. Oliver stood on the bottom step of the bus, checking his watch. “Professor Landers is running a little late, kids,” he called out. “But she should be here soon, so don’t wander off anywhere.” I imagined my poor mother stuck on some runway in Rhode Island, wringing her hands over missing my field trip. That’s okay, Lottie! I wanted to yell into the airspace above me. We’ll manage somehow!

  I tried to stay hidden in the middle of the pack in the parking lot, in case Jeeter came driving up. But soon our class was dividing into its usual clusters. Cliff had drifted over to tell Mr. Oliver about his grandma Hunnicutt, so I found myself alone at the edge of the crowd, watching a guy named Mellecker joke around with his buddies from the back of the bus.

  I might as well admit it. I had been watching Mellecker a lot since school started. He was the type of kid Sebastian had warned me about—the pharaoh of seventh grade. I knew it the first time I saw him sauntering through the halls at orientation, greeting his flock of admiring friends. But I never caught his name until he turned up in my American Studies class and Mr. Oliver had to say it twice during roll call. “Blair?” he repeated as he scanned the room, waiting for someone to answer “Here.” A long second passed before Mellecker raised his hand and told Mr. Oliver that he preferred going by his last name.

  That’s when it hit me. Blair Mellecker used to be a Ho-Ho.

  I couldn’t believe I hadn’t recognized him sooner. Blair and I had spent a few months of “free-choice” periods playing together in Dr. Lindstrom’s yard. But he had looked so different back when we were eight-year-olds—kind of short and pudgy, and I remembered he couldn’t say his y sounds. “Lello,” he would say instead of “yellow.” “Can ya pass me that lello Magic Marker?” I also remembered him telling me that the kids at his old elementary school used to make fun of him whenever the teacher wasn’t looking. They kept calling him “Teddy Blair,” he said, which drove him absolutely bananas, and that’s why he had transferred to the Home-Away-from-Homeschool.

  But a few months later, just when we were starting to be good friends, he disappeared. There was no warning. I came to school one Monday and he was gone. I was kind of sad about it for a while, especially after losing my dad so unexpectedly the year before. And Dr. Lindstrom didn’t really explain much about why Blair left. All she said was his parents had found a public elementary school that they thought would suit their son better.

  I guess they were right. Mellecker had completely transformed from the roly-poly little kid he had been four years ago. He must have grown a foot, and now it seemed like he was good at everything, including his y sounds. The BattleBots informed me that the high school coaches were already dropping by football practices at Plainview, sizing him up to play varsity quarterback in a couple of years. And supposedly Mellecker was smart too. He and Cliff had both tested out of junior high math, and they got to come to school late every morning, since they were taking Algebra II over at City High.

  I kept waiting for Mellecker to recognize me during those first weeks of school. I didn’t see why he wouldn’t. Unfortunately, I hadn’t changed much at all since I was eight. I was still on the short side, still skinny, with the same little chip in my front
tooth, the same shaggy hair because Lottie didn’t believe in getting haircuts more than once a year. But so far I hadn’t seen the slightest glimmer of recognition in Mellecker’s eyes. Maybe he was just embarrassed, too mortified to let the word out that he had ever been a Ho-Ho and associated with somebody like me.

  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.