Here Lies Linc Read online

  Sylvie was still complaining. “It’s not fair,” she grumbled to no one in particular. “I bet you anything he’s gonna get his mom to help him.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” somebody across the room shot back. I stared in confusion. It was Mellecker, and it sounded like he was taking my side. “She’s an expert on graveyards,” he said to Sylvie. “Wouldn’t you ask her for help if she were your mother?”

  Sylvie slouched back in her seat with her arms crossed over her chest. I kept gawking at Mellecker, wondering whether I had heard him right. But before I could figure out for sure, Mr. Oliver raised his hand for quiet. “I’m sure Linc will rely on his mother for advice and nothing more,” he said, turning to me with a pointed glance. “We’ll look forward to hearing the truth about the Black Angel when you deliver your report in November.”

  Cliff flashed me a quick thumbs-up sign from the next row. I smiled back at him, feeling a tiny surge of triumph and relief. My turn was over, and so far American Studies class was going a lot better than I had expected.

  Then I snapped back to attention. Mr. Oliver had just called on the new girl, Delaney, and she was talking in that dreamy, sipping-lemonade-on-the-front-porch voice of hers. “I’m not too sure why I picked the one I did,” I heard her say. “I just had a feelin’.”

  “Feelin’,” she said, without the g on the end.

  “And I thought the name on the headstone had a nice ring to it,” Delaney added.

  Mr. Oliver closed his eyes and kneaded the heel of his hand into his brow bone as if he were fighting off a headache. “All right,” he said. “I wouldn’t exactly say your reason for your choice is very strong. But now you’ve got me curious. What’s the name with the nice ring to it?”

  “Raintree,” Delaney announced. “Robert Raintree.”

  Raintree? I whipped around in my desk and stared at Delaney, hard. She stared right back with her clever cat eyes. I had never heard of anybody else with that name before. Nobody except for me and my dad.

  ONCE THE BELL RANG, I waited for Delaney to collect her books and leave the classroom first. We were supposed to turn in our Adopt-a-Grave work sheets on the way out. I dropped mine in the basket on Mr. Oliver’s desk and hurried to catch up with Delaney in the hall. I had just gathered up enough courage to tap her on the shoulder when I heard Mr. Oliver call me back. “Linc, can I have a word with you?”

  Delaney turned around with her green eyes wide. I snatched looks back and forth, from her to the classroom, like I was watching a Ping-Pong match. “I’ll be right there,” I called to Mr. Oliver.

  “Did you want something?” Delaney asked.

  By now the hallway had started to fill up with kids, and a few of them bumped me with their backpacks as I stood planted in the middle of traffic.

  My face was heating up. “Yeah. Or … I mean, that’s okay, it can wait till later. Never mind.” A group of girls bulldozed between us as I tried to give her one of those don’t-worry-about-it waves. “Well, I’ll see ya,” I spluttered. Then I lurched back toward the classroom. Jeeter’s term for a big loser landed on the tip of my tongue. “Heehaw,” I muttered. That was me. A total heehaw.

  Mr. Oliver had no idea his timing had been so rotten. He led me into the empty classroom and lazily settled himself on the edge of his desk. “Listen, Linc,” he finally started, “I’m not sure exactly what happened yesterday.…” He paused, waiting for me to jump in with an explanation.

  “It’s kind of complicated,” I said.

  Mr. Oliver nodded. “Can you at least fill me in on why you didn’t tell me before the field trip that Professor Landers is your mother?”

  I winced. “Um. I guess I just thought it would make things easier. But it was dumb not to tell you. I’m really sorry.”

  Another nod. He reached over and retrieved my work sheet from the basket beside him. I followed his gaze down to my drawing at the bottom of the page. It was terrible. Last night, after Kilgore had run me out of the graveyard, I had had to resort to sketching the Black Angel from memory. Under the bright lights of the classroom, my scribbly drawing looked like a third grader’s—like a lamppost with wings instead of a statue.

  “You didn’t follow my instructions,” Mr. Oliver said. “You’ve got a sketch, but where’s the name and the dates? Isn’t there an epitaph on the Black Angel?”

  “I guess I forgot to check,” I mumbled.

  Mr. Oliver sighed and handed me a new work sheet from a stack on his desk. “Listen, Linc, I gave you permission to do this monument because from what you said in class, I thought you were serious about this project. If you are serious, you’re going to need to start over and pay a lot more attention to detail.”

  “I will, Mr. Oliver. I promise.” I grabbed the work sheet, thanked him, and bolted for the hallway. I needed to find Delaney, but there were only three minutes until the next bell. Maybe she’d still be at her locker. I always passed her there on my way to French. A few times I had caught a glimpse of a little calendar that she had hung on the inside of her locker door. She had x’d off in red Magic Marker each day since school started. I couldn’t help wondering about the countdown. What was she waiting for? Her birthday? Summer vacation?

  I took the stairs two at a time. My backpack banged against my shoulder as I cut in and out of stragglers on their way to class. But by the time I made it to the east wing, there was no sign of Delaney.

  I checked back at her locker after sixth period. Nope.

  After seventh period—the last one of the day. Still no. She’d probably left for a dentist’s appointment or something. I stayed a few more minutes, searching for her in the river of faces flooding down the hall. But soon the crowds dwindled down, and when some kids chatting by their lockers started to give me funny looks for lurking, I gave up and set off for my own locker downstairs.

  I almost ran into Mellecker coming out of the boys’ bathroom. He looked startled to see me. “Oh, hey,” he said, wobbling for a second.

  “Hi,” I mumbled, and kept heading for the stairwell.

  “Wait,” he called after me.

  I stopped. Here it comes, I thought as I slowly turned around. At least there weren’t a lot of kids nearby to witness whatever happened next.

  Mellecker sauntered toward me. He started to smile. “Remember when we used to climb up that huge dirt pile in the Ho-Hos’ backyard and you kept saying we were climbing Mount Everest?”

  I blinked up at Mellecker, speechless with surprise. “Yeah,” I finally answered softly. “And I brought that rope from home, and we tied ourselves together in case one of us fell in a crevasse.…”

  Mellecker laughed and looked at the floor, shaking his head. “Yeah. What dopes.” Then his expression suddenly shifted, and he glanced at me with a pained light in his dark eyes. “Listen,” he said, “I had no idea that lady on the field trip was your mother. If I had remembered, I never would have drawn that stupid cartoon. You know that, right?”

  I founded myself nodding. He actually looked sincere.

  Mellecker’s face cleared. “I recognized you right off, though, as soon as I saw you coming down the hall. You still do that same little move with your head.” Mellecker imitated me flipping my hair out of my eyes. “I used to think it was so cool back when I first met you. I kept trying to do it too, but my hair was never long enough.”

  I smiled in amazement. Mellecker thought my “little move” was cool? I never even knew I had a “little move.”

  “So if you recognized me,” I asked, “why didn’t you say anything?”

  Mellecker shrugged. “Why didn’t you?”

  I paused and let out a big breath of air. “I don’t know. You weren’t a Ho-Ho very long. I guess I figured you didn’t want to be reminded.”

  “Yeah,” Mellecker confessed. He shoved his hands into his pockets with an embarrassed grin. “I kinda thought my Teddy Blair days were behind me.”

  “Sorry about that,” I said sheepishly.

  Mellecker shr
ugged again. “It’s okay. Let’s call it even.” He glanced toward the clock on the wall. “Well, I better be getting to practice,” he said, starting to walk backward down the hall. “But I’ll see ya tomorrow, Crenshaw. Okay?”

  “Yep.” I lifted my hand in a wave as he turned and disappeared around the corner. Then I stood there with my heart swelling like the Grinch’s on Christmas morning when he hears all those Whos singing down in Whoville. So Mellecker wasn’t such a jerk after all. He remembered everything—the dirt pile, even the dumb way I flipped my hair out of my eyes. And he had called me Crenshaw, just like he called the rest of his buddies by their last names. Suddenly the idea that we could ever be friends again didn’t seem so far-fetched anymore.

  I headed downstairs, humming, still thinking about all the possibilities. I was so preoccupied that I didn’t even notice Delaney until I was halfway down the hall. She was leaning against one of the lockers toward the end of the corridor. Not just any locker. It was mine.

  I strolled closer, trying to act calm and collected, but Delaney didn’t even attempt to hide her happy smile when she looked up and saw me. “Golly day,” she said, sounding more southern than ever. “You don’t use your locker much, do you?”

  “I guess not,” I said. I was too self-conscious to admit I’d been circling hers like a buzzard all afternoon.

  “Didn’t you want to talk to me about something. After American Studies?”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said, pretending it had almost slipped my mind. I reached for the dial on my locker and spun it round and round. Was it 6–12–21? Or 6–21–12? “I wanted to ask you about the last name on the grave you picked. It’s kind of different, right?”

  She nodded. “That’s one of the reasons why I picked it.”

  “Well, the funny thing is that’s my middle name. Raintree.”

  She let out a soft gasp. “Really? So you’re related to him? Robert Raintree?”

  I stopped spinning the dial. “No.… I don’t think so. I mean, that’s why I was surprised. If we have any relatives in town, my parents never mentioned them.”

  Delaney tucked a stray piece of blond hair behind her ear, thinking hard. “Well, where’d the name Raintree come from? Who were you named after?”

  “My father. Raintree was his middle name too. But Dad didn’t grow up around here. He grew up in Wisconsin. We only moved here because my parents got jobs teaching at the university.”

  The little crease between Delaney’s eyebrows deepened. “Well, who was your father named after?”

  I banged my locker with my fist and tried the combination again, stalling for time. It was strange. All these years I had walked around with a funny middle name like Raintree, but I’d never thought to track down exactly where it came from.

  “I think it’s just an old family name that kept getting passed down,” I said with a little shrug.

  Delaney hesitated. “Well, would it be all right if I talked to your father?” she asked shyly. “Maybe he knows more.”

  My locker finally decided to clank open. I stuck my head inside for a second and pretended to hunt for books. “I wish you could,” I said. “But he’s not around anymore. He died when I was seven.” I pulled my head out and slammed the locker shut.

  Delaney stared at me with her mouth open, as if I had reached out and pinched her. “Oh,” she breathed. “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s okay,” I told her. “I don’t even know why I brought all this up. It’s probably just a coincidence.”

  “Maybe so,” Delaney agreed. Her shoulders sank a little.

  “But I’d still like to see it anyway,” I said, just to keep the conversation going. “That grave you picked. Where is it exactly?”

  Delaney told me she wasn’t sure how to give me directions, but then her face lit up. “I could show you, though,” she offered.

  “Great!” My answer popped out so fast, I started to blush for the fifth time that day. “I mean, that would be good. When?”

  “How about tomorrow? I’ll have to go home for a little while after school. But maybe we could meet in the graveyard after that.”

  “Sure.”

  The corners of Delaney’s mouth twitched up in a mysterious smile. “Then I can show you the real reason I picked Robert Raintree’s grave.”

  “The real reason?” I asked. “What do you mean?”

  “You’ll see,” she said. “Tomorrow.”

  WHEN I CAME HOME from jogging with the dogs that afternoon, our old Electrolux was parked in the middle of the kitchen floor with a repair tag attached to the hose. I found Lottie lodged behind the giant oak desk in her study, sorting through a pile of musty-looking books. She barely glanced up when I came into the room and moved a stack of papers off the tattered swivel chair in the corner.

  I sat down and spun in a slow circle, waiting for Lottie to say something. Her office had been a sunporch before we moved in. But with all the filing cabinets and crowded shelves of books blocking the smeared windows, you could hardly tell anymore. I had always thought about how nice the room would look if we cleared away the clutter and let the light shine through all those hidden panes of glass.

  I stopped swiveling long enough to study Lottie’s rubbing wall. The walls on either side of the door to her office were papered, floor to ceiling, with charcoal impressions from tombstones all over the world—an imprint of a famous French poet’s grave, an English knight in full armor, an epitaph for a sea captain who had been lost somewhere in the Atlantic. A few of the rubbings on the wall were mine. I still remembered the first one Lottie had let me do on my own. We were at a little graveyard somewhere out in the country in Massachusetts, and even when my hand had locked up in a cramp, I wouldn’t quit rubbing—not until the name Thankfull Parsons and the year 1758 and a shadowy skull with wings had appeared underneath the side of my black crayon.

  I spun around to face Lottie again. “Thanks, Thankfull,” I said.

  She stopped what she was doing, thumbing through a heavy leather-bound book, and her face softened as she looked up at me. I knew she’d remember. We used to say that all the time after our cemetery trip to Massachusetts together, whenever one of us passed the salt or did something nice. Thanks, Thankfull.

  “Thanks for what?” Lottie asked.

  “For getting the vacuum cleaner fixed.”

  “It only took the repairman two minutes,” she confessed. “Turns out it was only a sock stuck in the hose.”

  I gulped back an incredulous laugh and wheeled myself closer. “I’m sorry about all that stuff I said yesterday.”

  “No,” Lottie said slowly. “You were right about a lot of it. I know I get lost in my work sometimes. And I forget what it’s like to be your age.” Her brow furrowed, and then a puzzled expression wandered across her face. “Wait a minute. I guess I have no idea what it’s like to be you. I wasn’t exactly the typical teenager, you know.”

  “No kidding!” I said with a laugh bubbling out of my throat. “What were you like, anyway?”

  “A bookworm mostly. Happiest when I had the old sofa on the second floor of the public library all to myself … with a stack of fresh books waiting at my feet.”

  I winced, thinking of Lottie spending all her weekends in the tiny library in New Hope, Wisconsin, coming home to her prim and proper parents. Every other year we went to visit Grandma Dee and Grandad at their quiet retirement village in Florida. I could never wait to escape the way they watched my every move at dinnertime in the dining hall, waiting to see whether I would pick vanilla pudding or chocolate cake for dessert, or their funny rules about no baseball caps indoors or no swimming in the pool until at least two hours after eating.

  “Weren’t you ever lonely?” I asked.

  “Not really. I guess I was used to being by myself.”

  With Lottie in such a talkative mood, I decided to push my luck. “It’s kinda funny. You didn’t have any brothers and sisters, and neither did Dad, and then you guys decided to have just one kid too.�
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  Lottie smiled wistfully, and I held my breath waiting for her to answer. “We used to tease each other about that,” she said at last. “About being spoiled only children. We called ourselves the Onlies. And we always talked about wanting to have another child, but …” Her voice faded on the last word.

  I knew what she was thinking. Life didn’t go according to plan.

  “I’ve been wondering,” I said, rushing to change the subject. “Who were we named after? Dad and I?”

  Lottie gazed toward the rubbing wall. “The name Lincoln came from your dad’s uncle. And Raintree was a family name from way back on his mother’s side. When I asked Ellen about it once, she told me she had found the name Raintree recorded in her family’s old Bible, and she liked it well enough to pass it on to her son. I’ve always loved it too. Lincoln and Crenshaw are such strong, sturdy names, and Raintree seems to balance everything out. It sounds so clean and peaceful.”

  “Whatever happened to that Bible?”

  “It’s packed away up in the attic,” Lottie told me. “Your father came across it in his parents’ basement after his mother passed away.”

  “I can’t even remember her.”

  “I know. It’s a shame.” Lottie shook her head. “You were only three when Ellen was diagnosed with cancer. And your grandfather died just before you were born. He would have been smitten with you, just like she was.”

  She let her sad gaze linger on me a little longer before she reached for one of the stacks of paper on her desk, ready to get back to work. But then she stopped. “Wait a minute. Why are you asking all these questions?”

  “You know that Adopt-a-Grave Project that Mr. Oliver assigned us? There’s a girl in my class who picked a grave with the name Robert Raintree on it. Maybe he’s a long-lost relative,” I said, trying to sound mysterious.