Here Lies Linc Read online

  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.

  ALTHOUGH MELLECKER 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.

  “Hey, look at this, Linc,” Mellecker said in my ear. “I got another one. Cuckoo clock.”

  I didn’t answer. Beez had shoved his way closer to see the latest additions to Mellecker’s cartoon, and now Amy and a couple of other kids were drifting over to find out what was so interesting. I started to edge away from them. Our class had strayed off the paved walkway, and we were zigzagging around family plots and through rows of headstones. When I looked around to get my bearings, I realized with a jolt where we were headed. Lottie was taking us on a shortcut to Governor Lucas’s grave—a shortcut that happened to lead straight past our house.

  Ours was the last one in a block of old bungalows that dead-ended at a side entrance to Oakland. There weren’t any important graves close by. So even with all my worrying the past few days, I hadn’t considered the fact that my entire class might be walking right past our run-down backyard, with its ugly stretch of C.B.’s digging holes and my old Big Wheel covered in vines and the vegetable patch I had tried to start that was too shady to grow anything besides weeds. It was all too close for comfort.

  But up ahead, Lottie seemed to have completely lost track of her surroundings. She kept marching along, sweeping her hands back and forth as she explained some point to Mr. Oliver and Sylvie and Delaney, the only ones in the group who appeared halfway interested in what she had to say.

  I dropped a few steps behind Mellecker and his crew, keeping my gaze pinned on the ground. By now we were coming up on the stretch of graves that ran alongside my house. I could even smell the leaves from our maple thick on the ground and the mossy pile of tree house boards that Dad had stacked in the backyard before he died.

  I held my breath as Lottie kept lecturing and moving along. We were almost past the woodpile, past our rusted barbecue grill, past my upstairs bedroom window.

  Then I heard it. A yip rang out across the cemetery. I knew right away it was C.B. But what was he doing outside? I had left him asleep on his dog bed when I took off for school that morning. My stomach turned queasy as I realized what had happened. Sometimes during nice weather we left C.B. tied to the clothesline pole in the backyard. Lottie must have come home from the airport and put him outside before she rushed over to meet us.

  I clenched my fists and plowed forward, praying C.B. wouldn’t notice me in the crowd. But the sound of his whimper obviously caught Lottie by surprise. She stopped and whipped around, her lecture about graves cut off midstream.

  “Awww, look at the poor doggie!” Sylvie cried out. I stole a glance over my shoulder and got a quick glimpse of C.B. straining on his rope, leaping higher and higher as if his stubby legs were mounted on pogo sticks. Lottie tried to shoot me a look of apology as I stalked past her, staring straight ahead.

  “Come on, everybody!” she called, sounding just as frantic as C.B. “Mr. Oliver, we’ve got to keep the class moving if we want to stay on schedule!”

  Then I heard Beez shout. “Hey, look! Pooch on the loose!”

  I stopped and turned around just in time to see C.B. streak into the graveyard, trailing a long piece of frayed rope from his collar. He flung himself against Lottie’s legs, covering her purple skirt with muddy paw prints.

  “Hey there, boy,” she said, bending down to bury her hands in his scraggly fur. “How’d you get loose, huh? C’mon, buddy, calm down.”

  Everybody crowded around to watch the reunion. “Is that your dog?” Mr. Oliver asked.

  “Yep,” Lottie said, and sighed, taking hold of his frayed rope and scratching his favorite spot under the collar. “It sure is.”

  “Awww, he’s so cute,” Sylvie said. “What kind of dog is that?”

  “Nobody’s quite sure,” Lottie told her. “Even the people at the animal shelter didn’t know what to call him. But we call him C.B. It’s short for Cerberus.”

  “Cerb-rus?” Beez scoffed out of the side of his mouth. “What kind of a name for a dog is that?” Beez probably thought he was being quiet. He didn’t know my mother had ears like a bat.

  She stood up in surprise. “You kids haven’t heard of Cerberus?” She swiveled around to face Mr. Oliver. “Don’t you-all teach Greek mythology in that school of yours?”

  I squeezed my eyes shut. I knew what was coming.r />
  Before Mr. Oliver could reply, Lottie was already rattling off an explanation of our dog’s unusual name. “So Hades was the god of the dead,” she said briskly. “Otherwise known as king of the underworld. And Cerberus was the three-headed dog that guarded Hades’s house on the River Styx.” She reached down to give C.B. another rub. “And since this guy absolutely loves to dig and bury things underground, especially dead stuff, we decided to call him Cerberus.”

  Mellecker poked me in the ribs with his elbow. Somehow he had ended up standing next to me again. I felt a tight ball of anger growing red-hot in my chest. I wasn’t sure who made me madder—Mellecker with that smirk on his face or my mother for acting like she had just been let out of the psych ward on a day pass. All I knew was that I would explode if I had to stand in that spot, stuck between the two of them, for much longer. I decided to risk it. A tiny step backward.

  Right away, C.B. started to squirm.

  Lottie crouched down to soothe him. “Easy, boy. It’s okay!”

  But she was too late. The rope slipped out of her hands, and in two seconds C.B. was all over me. Licking and panting and smearing gummy black dirt on my jeans. My notebook flopped to the ground as I hunched over, trying to decide whether I should pet C.B. or push him away.

  “Hey, look, Linc. Devil Dog likes you,” Mellecker teased in a whispery voice. “You and the professor must have a lot in common.”

  I stood up to face him with that ball of anger turning to lava rising in my chest.

  “That’s real funny, Teddy Blair,” I burst out, sending a shock wave across the small space between us. “Why don’t you go ahead and tell everybody? Go on. I don’t care anymore.” I whirled around, shouting the news to my entire class. “She’s my mother, okay? She’s my mother!”

  AFTER THAT, THERE WAS ONLY ONE THING TO DO.

  Run.

  While everybody watched with their jaws hanging open, I shoved past Mellecker and tore across the hundred yards that separated the graveyard from my back door. I didn’t stop running until I’d made it upstairs to my room, where I dove for my bed like it was a foxhole. C.B. was right on my heels. He settled into his usual nest next to my hip while I buried my face in my pillow, waiting for the worst attacks of anger and embarrassment to pass. Finally, once I was certain no one was coming to try and coax me back down to the graveyard, I turned over and scowled up at the posters plastered across the walls and the ceiling above me.