Here Lies Linc Read online

I was halfway kidding, but Lottie tilted her head to one side. “Huh, that’s funny. Your father used to joke about having some sort of family connection in Iowa City.”

  “Really?” I leaned forward. “Why would he have joked about something like that?”

  Lottie eyed her waiting pile of papers. “Please, Lottie,” I said quietly. “I want to hear everything.”

  She tipped her head back with a resigned sigh and stared at the ceiling. “Well,” she finally began, “I used to tease your father about his so-called signs. Sometimes he would make big decisions based on what he thought were little omens—silly things like a black cat in his path, or it could be a coincidence like a report on the radio that mentioned whatever he had been stewing over.”

  “Oh, I bet you loved that,” I interrupted, thinking back to her rants about the Black Angel yesterday.

  “Oh, it drove me crazy. Here was this very science-minded geologist crossing the street so he wouldn’t have to walk under a ladder.” Lottie shook her head as if she were feeling the exasperation all over again. “Ridiculous!”

  She pushed her curls away from her face and went on. “When we decided we wanted to find new jobs, your dad and I interviewed at four universities around the country, and we ended up with four sets of job offers.” She gave me a smug little nod. “But we had a terrible time deciding which offer to accept. Then about this same time, your father was cleaning out his parents’ house, getting it ready to sell. We had been renting it out ever since his mother died. One day he came home and announced that he knew where we should move. Without a doubt! He had seen one of his signs.” She rolled her eyes.

  “What was it?” I asked.

  “He said he had been going through a crate of old mail that had been left behind over the last few years. The renters were always terrible about telling the post office where their mail should be forwarded. Anyway, your father found a letter in the pile that was addressed to his mother. Of course Ellen had been dead for quite a while by that time, so he opened it.”

  Lottie squinted, trying to remember. “He showed the letter to me. It was very odd, just one or two lines long, and it said something like ‘I apologize for writing, but I’ve been worried about you. Please let me know if you’re well.’ That was it. But here’s the mysterious part. There was no name on the letter—just some initials.” She frowned in thought for a second. “Now I can’t even remember what they were. The only real clue was a return address from Iowa City.”

  Lottie threw up her hands. “Anyway, you see how crazy your father was? That was his sign for us to move here, that this was the offer we had to accept. I tried to argue with him about it at first, but he would just laugh and say obviously his mother had a long-lost lover in Iowa City, and that was as good a reason as any to move here. Then we came for another visit, fell in love with the town, found this house … and there was no turning back.”

  I sat there with my mouth hanging open, waiting for the punch line of the story. “So Dad never figured out who wrote the letter?”

  “Not that I know of,” Lottie said with a shrug. “I’m not even sure what happened to it. Your father talked about tracking down the address as soon as he got a chance. But we were so swamped with work and getting you settled and fixing up the house when we first moved here. And then …” Something in her face shifted, and when she spoke again, all the oomph had drained from her voice. “He ran out of time. We only had a few months here before he died.”

  I couldn’t help myself. Even though I could see Lottie wanted to be done with the subject, I had to ask. “What about Dad’s omens? Do you think he had any warning about what would happen to him?”

  “No,” Lottie said flatly. “He left for work that day humming a Beatles song.” Her mouth twisted with bitterness. “So you see why I’m not exactly a big believer in signs and superstitions.”

  I nodded. Lottie pressed her fingertips to her eyelids for a long second. She startled me when she suddenly blinked her eyes open and demanded, “So who’d you pick?”

  “What?”

  “Whose grave did you pick for your project?”

  I shifted uneasily in my seat. “Well, I—”

  “Don’t tell me you haven’t done it yet? Didn’t you see that work sheet I left for you on the table last night?”

  “Yes, I saw it.”

  “Then who … did … you … pick?” Lottie asked again, rapping out each word on her desk with her knuckles.

  My answer came out sort of whispery and scared.

  Lottie leaned forward and squinted as if she couldn’t possibly have heard me correctly. “What?” Then she flopped back in her chair with an amazed cackle. “Oh, that’s too much,” she said as she sat massaging her forehead for a few seconds. When she spoke again, she sounded like a psychiatrist, clinical and calm. “Linc, is this your way of proving something to the other kids in your class?” she asked. “That you’re nothing like your crazy mother who led them on the graveyard tour?”

  “No,” I told her. “I’m just interested in who’s actually buried there, that’s all. Nobody really knows, right?”

  “Of course people know, Linc. Didn’t I explain this well enough yesterday? Every crackpot ghost chaser within three hundred miles has ransacked the records at the historical society, trying to dig up information about the Black Angel. But once they find out the real story isn’t very exciting, they either lose interest or make things up to keep the legends alive.”

  “So what’s the real story?”

  “No murder. No mayhem. Just some poor woman who spent her life’s savings on a statue to honor her dead husband and son.”

  “So there’s no preacher buried there who murdered his kid?”

  “Nope,” she said.

  “And you’ve seen all those records yourself?”

  She waited a beat too long. “Well, no. But I’ve had colleagues who’ve looked into them.”

  “Then how do you know for sure whether all their information is right?”

  Lottie didn’t answer.

  “Huh?” I asked again. “Huh?”

  She sniffed. “I guess I don’t know, for sure.”

  “Aha!” But I wasn’t finished. “Aren’t you the one who’s always told me, ‘Secondhand information makes second-rate historians’? How are all the kids in my class supposed to believe there’s no Curse of the Black Angel unless somebody shows them some cold, hard proof? Somebody like me.”

  At last Lottie’s pursed lips slipped into a smile. “You might have a point there.”

  I flung my arms up and did two victory spins in the swivel chair. “I won’t even ask you for help,” I insisted once I had stopped spinning. Sylvie’s whiny protests were still drifting through my head. “I want to see if I can do this all on my own.”

  “Be my guest,” Lottie replied. “I wouldn’t help even if you asked. I’d like to see whether all those years of dragging you around on my research trips actually paid off.”

  “Thanks a lot, Thankfull,” I said drily, and hurried off to start my detective work.

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON I got to the Black Angel fifteen minutes before I was supposed to meet Delaney there. I had come early to find Jeeter. I wanted to tell him about my run-in with his boss. But as soon as I started for the cemetery, I heard the buzz of hedge clippers off in the distance, which meant Jeeter was trimming the row of yews way over on the north side. There wasn’t time to track him down.

  So I headed straight for the Angel, keeping my eye out for Kilgore along the way. I couldn’t figure out why I felt so jittery. I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I hadn’t even considered bringing the dogs along.

  Maybe I was just nervous about finally meeting up with Delaney. Once we’d decided on our plan at my locker that morning, the day had seemed to drag on forever. We didn’t talk again, even when we passed each other in the halls. But it was obvious we were both counting down the hours. I had caught Delaney’s eye on her way into Mr. Oliver’s class that afternoon just in time to
see her smile and bite down on her lower lip like she was holding back a secret.

  But I forgot all about Kilgore and Delaney and everything else as soon as I arrived at the foot of the Black Angel. When I gazed up at the statue, a chill immediately prickled up my spine, and I found myself pulling the zipper of my jacket up to my chin. Of all the angels in cemeteries I had seen over the years, this one was the strangest. Most others looked the way you would expect, carved from white stone with their dainty wings and their kind faces raised up to heaven. You were supposed to feel comforted in the presence of those angels, protected and hopeful. But the Black Angel was anything but comforting. First off, her color was all wrong. She was dark as tar, and she was huge, with wings that looked way too heavy to fly. One wing shielded her shadowy face from the world, while the other drooped around her like a thick cape. How were you supposed to feel anything but depressed with a gloomy statue like that towering over you?

  When I was little, I used to beg Jeeter to tell me stories about the Curse. He always told the one about the three university students who had pulled a midnight prank and chopped off some of the Angel’s bronze fingers. It didn’t take long for each of them to be struck down by some kind of horrible accident. The first lost his hand working at a sawmill that summer. The next one fell over with a stroke on his twenty-first birthday and woke up with a paralyzed arm. The last student thought he was home free until he happened to nick his hand with his pocketknife on graduation day. His tiny cut became infected and slowly got worse. There wasn’t a single doctor at the university hospital who could figure out how to stop the raging gangrene. The only solution was to amputate.

  I always pretended to be fearless when Jeeter told me those stories as he puttered around the toolshed. But later, riding my bicycle home at dusk, I could barely stand to glance up at the Black Angel as I rode past. I’d steal one peek at those dark wings or the hand with its three missing fingers, and suddenly I was clenching my handlebars like they were life ropes, with my feet pedaling fast enough to launch a rocket.

  After all the time I had spent avoiding the Angel when I was little, it felt almost forbidden to step so close—close enough to read the names chiseled into the base of the statue.

  Eddie Dolezal

  Born

  March 10 1873

  Died

  Jan 14 1891

  Nicholas Feldevert 1825–1911

  Theresa Feldevert 1836–

  According to those dates, Eddie Dolezal died when he was only seventeen. So from what Lottie had told me, I knew Eddie must have been Theresa’s son. But what had happened to Eddie’s father—Mr. Dolezal? And why wasn’t there a date of death filled in for Theresa?

  I had brought along my notebook and the new work sheet from Mr. Oliver. I quickly copied down the details of the inscription, and I was almost finished with my sketch when Delaney arrived.

  “Hey there,” she said shyly, dropping her backpack on the ground beside me. Most of her wispy blond hair had worked its way out of her ponytail, and her face looked sort of splotchy, like she might have been crying.

  “So you found your way okay?”

  “Uh-huh. Sylvie showed some of us how to get here on the field trip.” She let out a long, shaky breath of air. “I’m just a little late on account of my mother. She didn’t feel so good this afternoon, and I was worried about asking her to drive me over here.”

  “Oh.”

  “But Mama swears she’s feeling fine now,” she added quickly, glancing at her watch. “She went to run a couple errands, and I’m supposed to meet her back in the parking lot in half an hour.”

  I nodded, and Delaney’s gaze drifted up to the Black Angel. “Lordy,” she said softly. “She really is spooky, isn’t she? But she’s kind of beautiful too.”

  I raised one eyebrow. “Beautiful?”

  Delaney circled around the statue, sizing her up from different angles. “Well, her face isn’t the prettiest, but her arms are so graceful under those wings. And look at her gown. You can just tell it’s silk, can’t you? The way it flows around her feet?”

  She crouched down. “What’s this?” she asked. I hurried over to see. There was an inscription carved into the granite on the other side of the pedestal—several lines in old-fashioned, slanty type.

  “What’s it say?” Delaney asked. “It’s in another language, isn’t it?”

  I knelt down and swiped my palm back and forth across the rough stone, hoping the words might come clear. But the epitaph was so worn and fuzzy with moss that I could only make out parts of the lines.

  “Yeah, definitely not English,” I said, getting to my feet. And it didn’t look like any of the languages Dr. Lindstrom had introduced during my Ho-Ho days either—not French or German or Spanish or Latin.

  I had my work cut out for me, but I’d have to come back later to finish my sketch and copy down the weird jumble of consonants and vowels in the epitaph. Delaney was checking her watch again, so I scribbled a few final notes, and we set out for the Raintree grave.

  The marker stood off by itself, in a far corner of the cemetery where an ancient oak tree loomed. Since the oak still had most of its leaves, the space under the thick canopy of branches looked dim and shadowy—except for a bright splash of yellow on the ground that we could see from all the way at the top of the hill overlooking the tree.

  Delaney led the way, and soon we were standing side by side staring down at a huge bunch of sunflowers propped against Robert Raintree’s tombstone. The bouquet was tied with a piece of lace, and against the weathered marble the gold petals blazed like a neon sign. The flowers looked pretty fresh, other than a few petals that had started to curl and turn brown at the edges.

  “See why I picked this one?” Delaney asked in a hushed voice. “I thought it was so romantic, this big bouquet for somebody who died almost fifty years ago.”

  I nodded, following her gaze to the dates etched beneath the name: 1900–1965.

  “He died the same year my dad was born,” I murmured.

  But there was something else—the edge of a carving peeking from behind the sunflowers. I reached down and nudged the bouquet out of the way.

  It was a torch, fallen on its side, with its flames dying to a flicker.

  Delaney knelt next to the stone. “I can’t believe I didn’t notice this before,” she said. “It’s one of those symbols we learned about, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, a torch is a pretty common one. It’s just another symbol for life.”

  Delaney looked so impressed, I couldn’t help adding more. “The ones I’ve seen before are always inverted … upside down, I mean … which makes sense because the person’s dead, obviously.” I started to blush, suddenly feeling like a show-off. “But I’ve never seen a torch on its side before. I’m not exactly sure what this one means.”

  Delaney hesitated. “Maybe you could ask your mom,” she said gently.

  “I could.” I sighed. “But I’ve decided it might be best if I try to keep my mother out of this project as much as possible.”

  Delaney was dusting off her knees and heading over to sit on a gnarled tree root. “How come?” she asked. “She’s an expert.”

  So far I had been dodging the subject of my mother and the field trip like a prizefighter. But now that Delaney was asking, it was a relief to try and explain why I had acted the way I did when Lottie led our class on the tour. I went over to find a spot in the roots beside her. “It’s kind of complicated,” I started, recycling my line from the conversation with Mr. Oliver. “Ever since my dad died, it’s always been just me and my mom. I don’t have any brothers and sisters.”

  “Me neither,” Delaney said.

  “So you know what it’s like being an only child. And as you might have noticed … Lottie’s a little different from your run-of-the-mill mom.”

  Delaney tried not to smile. “You call your mother by her first name?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “Like I said, things are different at my house. For
instance, Lottie didn’t really want me to go to Plainview. She says the education there is mainstream. Says it’s for the masses.” I drew the words out, rolling my eyes. “Lottie likes to keep to herself. But the truth is I kind of want to be mainstream … part of the masses for a change. That’s why I switched schools.”

  I ended up telling Delaney all about the Ho-Hos—the good parts and the bad. Then I broke the news that Mellecker used to be one too. “You might not want to spread that around, though,” I warned after I had described how different he was a few years ago. “I don’t think Mellecker wants a lot of people knowing about his former life.”

  Delaney’s face had gone still while I had been blabbering away. “You’re so lucky,” she said once I let her get a word in edgewise. “You’ve only had to switch schools once, and you’ve lived on the same street since you were little.”

  “How many places have you lived?”

  Delaney gazed up at the patchwork of leaves and branches over our heads, softly listing the places. I could hardly hear. Montgomery, Alabama, I think she said. Knoxville, Tennessee, and a couple others. She stopped and held up one hand with her fingers outstretched.

  “Five?”

  She nodded. “My father’s a factory manager, and he keeps getting transferred or promoted. Half the time I don’t know which.”

  “Where’d you start out?”

  “South Carolina. That’s where my grandma and most of my cousins live. I miss them a lot. But we keep getting farther and farther away from everybody back home. Sometimes I think Daddy’s gonna get us all the way to California before we turn around and start back again. The last place, in Indiana? We were only there a hundred and seventy-four days.”

  A memory of her red Magic Marker X’s flashed through my head. My question rushed out before I realized how nosy it sounded. “Is that what you’re keeping track of on that calendar in your locker? How many days you stay in one place?”

  Delaney’s mouth opened a little in surprise. A few more strands of her ponytail came loose when she shook her head. “No,” she said, busying herself with gathering up her hair again. “That’s something different.…” Her hands froze at the back of her neck. “Oh, my gosh!” she gasped, and checked her watch. “I forgot all about Mama. I was supposed to be in the parking lot fifteen minutes ago.” Delaney scrambled to her feet, grabbing her backpack. I jumped up with my notebook, uncertain what to do.