Here Lies Linc (16 page)

“Who’s Beez?”

“Just a friend from school,” I said. “Friend” was definitely not the right word to describe Beez. But still … the two of us were warming up to each other. Last night at Guido’s I had
beat him at darts. After my second bull’s-eye, he whapped me on the back so hard that an ice cube I’d been sucking on flew out of my mouth. Neither one of us could stop laughing until the pizza came.

Lottie was still watching me eat. “Was Beez one of the ones you were with last night?”

“Mm-hmmm.”

“You’re getting together two nights in a row?”

“Yep.”

“Well, what are they like? These new friends of yours.”

I took a swig of milk and ordered myself to be patient. Ever since the day of the field trip, when I had begged her to act more like a “normal” mom, Lottie had been trying. Along with asking questions about my social life, she had bought a can of Easy-Off and cleaned years of black gunk out of our oven. She took C.B. to the vet to get his shots and his toenails clipped. She went to her first PTA meeting. She had even noticed that I’d been running with the dogs lately, and offered to take me shopping for proper shoes. “As soon as I can run for a half-hour without stopping to rest,” I had told her, “we’ll go.”

But something about Lottie’s efforts still didn’t feel right. Most of the time it seemed like she was only going through the motions, checking off the boxes on some kind of a good-mother to-do list in her head.

“Linc?”

“Oh, sorry,” I said with a start. Friends. “Well, they’re pretty different from me. They’re all into sports—football and basketball and cheerleading and stuff.”

Lottie’s eyebrows lifted. “Really?”

“I know,” I said with a laugh. “Kind of surprising, huh? I guess I’m sort of like a mascot. They think I’m really funny. And they like my stories.”

“What kind of stories?”

“Oh, whatever pops into my head,” I said vaguely.

At Guido’s, Mellecker had made me reenact the entire key-stealing scene I had described in the school library. Everybody at the table had been so entertained that I got brave and told them a real story about the time Jeeter had to call the rescue squad to a graveside service. They wanted all the details, and I doled them out like candy. All about how huge the woman was and how much it had rained that week and how she had wobbled up to the edge of the freshly dug plot to throw in a rose, slipped in the mud, and landed—
kaboooom!
—six feet below on top of her husband’s coffin. “They needed to call a fire truck with a crane to pull her out,” I had revealed in a loud stage whisper, and the whole table had burst out laughing.

“Well, you’ve always been a wonderful storyteller,” Lottie was saying.

“Maybe so,” I said, shrugging with wonder. “Mellecker thinks I’m hilarious.”

Lottie stopped. “Mellecker? Isn’t he the one who …?” Her voice trailed off for a second. “The one who made you so angry on the field trip to Oakland?”

“Oh, yeah.” I flinched a little as Mellecker’s mean cartoon flashed back in my head. I waved my hand, wiping away the memory. “He apologized for all that stuff.”

“That’s good,” she said softly. Something in Lottie’s voice made me glance up—really look at her for the first time that night, sitting on the other side of the table nudging her spaghetti back and forth across her plate with her fork.
She’s lonely
, I realized with a pang in my chest. She wasn’t used to me breezing out of the house and leaving her behind. Usually it was the other way around.

I knew I should offer to stay home and play chess. But I just couldn’t. They were all expecting me. I stood up to clear my plate. “I should really get moving if I want to catch the next bus,” I said.

Lottie nodded, trying to smile. Then I turned away, busying myself with rinsing dishes at the sink, thinking about the stakeout with Delaney tomorrow, wondering if I needed to hurry upstairs to brush my teeth—anything to keep my mind off how lonely Lottie looked.

“Well, have a good time,” I heard her say as she headed back to her office like a bee returning to its hive. “Make sure to be home by ten.”

By the time I fed C.B. and locked the back door behind me, I only had a few minutes to spare before catching the crosstown bus at the end of our street. But halfway down the block, I spotted Mr. Krasny hunched in his winter coat, hobbling toward me on the sidewalk.

“Mr. Krasny?” I called out in surprise. “What are you doing out here? It’s almost dark. Is everything okay?”

His face brightened as I hurried closer and he realized it was me. “Linc,” he panted, gripping my arm. “I was on my
way to your house. Special delivery. I finally finished translating that epitaph for you.”

“Wow, that’s great,” I said. “But you didn’t need to worry about that tonight, Mr. Krasny.”

“Nonsense,” he scolded. “You’re only four houses away. And I know how anxious you’ve been for me to finish. A few words were giving me trouble. But tonight I found my old Czech-English dictionary. Hiding in the back bedroom! Now I think I’ve got everything right.” As he reached into his coat pocket, it seemed to dawn on him that I might be going somewhere. “By the way, where were you headed off to?”

I told him I was hoping to catch the next bus to my friend’s house. “Better run along, then,” he said. “You can look at this later.” He pulled a folded piece of paper from his pocket. “I have to admit the message chilled my blood a bit. But didn’t you say some words might be missing?”

“Yeah, some of them were really faded and hard to see.”

“Well, perhaps that would explain it,” Mr. Krasny murmured, handing me the paper. “Maybe the message isn’t quite as bleak as it sounds.”

I gulped down a little flutter of dread and stuffed the paper into the pocket of my jacket. Then I baby-stepped Mr. Krasny back to his door. It was a good thing I had started my cross-country training. I could already hear the bus coming as we said goodbye. So I sprinted down the block, imagining I was running in an eighth-grade meet, with an opponent breathing down my neck as we raced for the finish line. I made it to the stop just before the driver could blow past.

On board I dropped into the first empty seat and pulled Mr. Krasny’s paper from my pocket. It was a mistake not to catch my breath before I read his translation of the Black Angel’s words, scrawled across the page in shaky cursive.

M
Y NERVES ALMOST GOT
the best of me at Beez’s house. It was just my luck that he had rented a horror movie called
The Corpse’s Revenge
and that for the next two hours we would sit in his dark basement watching mangled cadavers rise from their graves and hunt down their enemies from the past, one by one. There were eight of us—five guys and three girls—sprawled on couches and the floor. Beez’s mom brought down popcorn and drinks, and while the girls ate and squealed and the guys cheered for the corpses and the gushing blood, I stared at the flickering TV screen gnawing my bottom lip.

What did the epitaph mean? It seemed so … so personal. “Suffering awaits
you.
” Did that mean me? Did that mean anyone who dared to dig too deep into the mystery of Theresa Feldevert? Or did suffering await only those who hurt the monument in some way? I racked my brain trying to remember all the stories that Jeeter used to tell me about the
Curse—about those three college students who had cut off the Angel’s bronze fingers and ended up maimed for life … about all the evil stuff that could happen if you kissed the Angel at midnight or touched her under a full moon.

The Curse seemed to cover a lot of territory. I took a handful of popcorn and then froze with it halfway to my mouth.
What about me?
I had touched the Angel’s pedestal—rubbed flour all over her inscription and sprayed it down with water.

Suddenly I realized the room had gone completely quiet. Up on Beez’s huge wide-screen TV the star of the movie had just annihilated the last corpse with a torch and a can of gasoline. He stood slumped in the graveyard, heaving with exhaustion, sweat trickling down his bulging biceps. Like everybody else, I knew it was coming—something terrible—and I tensed my whole body in preparation. That still didn’t stop me from nearly flipping over the back of the sofa when a moldy hand
shot out of the ground
, grabbed the hero’s ankle, and dragged him screaming into a dark hole in the earth. The girls screamed too. My popcorn flew into the air. Even Mellecker jerked back in his seat. Then—
thank you, Thankfull
—it was over.

Once we had all finished laughing and collecting ourselves, Amy said, “Hey, let’s tell ghost stories.” She bounced up and down in her seat. “You go first, Linc. You’re the best storyteller.” After feeling so squirmy all evening, I definitely wasn’t in the mood to be entertaining. But I didn’t have a choice. Beez had fixed me in the beam of the flashlight, and now all the others were listening.

“Hmmm, let me see,” I said in a slow, sly voice. I drummed my fingers together and leaned forward, letting the suspense build while I scoured my memory for something scary. All I could think of was Jeeter’s story about the three guys who cut off the Angel’s fingers. So I told it. But I spiced it up with lots of juicy details. In my version, Paul, Joe, and Nick were college freshmen who had just joined a fraternity and had to bring back the three bronze fingers to pass their initiation.

I have to admit, my version was ten times better than Jeeter’s. I even grossed myself out when I got to the parts about Paul’s accident at the sawmill and Nick’s hand rotting off with gangrene. Sophie, Mellecker’s latest girlfriend, hid her face in his shoulder, like she had been doing all night, while Amy and her friend Taylor shrank back into the sofa cushions and held on to each other. The guys helped things along by yelling “Foul!” and “Nasty!” in all the right places.

When I was done, Beez kept the flashlight beam trained on my face. “Pretty good, Crenshaw. But aren’t you the one who’s supposed to be proving the Curse of the Black Angel is a bunch of bull?”

“Yeah, supposedly,” I muttered. “But I may have to change my hypothesis.”

Sophie clapped her hands over her ears. “Don’t tell us any more! Turn on the lights!”

Of course Beez snapped the flashlight off instead, and the basement went completely black. Mellecker spoke up in the darkness, ignoring Sophie’s whimpers. “Hey, I got a great idea. Wouldn’t it be cool to go see the Black Angel on Halloween?”

“Yeah!” Beez chimed in. “Let’s cut off another one of her fingers and find out what happens.”

“Halloween’s not the best time to sneak into Oakland,” I warned. “You can’t get away with anything that night because the staff stays late to keep an eye on things. They start patrolling as soon as it gets dark, and they make rounds all night long, watching out for kids tipping tombstones and stuff like that.”

“Tipping tombstones?” I could hear the spark of excitement in Beez’s voice, so I was glad when the overhead light suddenly flipped on. Beez’s mother was standing in the doorway, shaking her head at all of us squinting into the brightness like moles.

“Okay, everybody,” she announced. “Time to break it up and head home. That’s enough horror for one night.”

I couldn’t have agreed more.

W
INSLOW & COMPANY
were up early to greet me the next morning when I looked out my bedroom window to check on the weather.

Morning, Mr. Tomato Head. We hear you got a big date over in our neighborhood today. So why are you looking like the cat who ate the canary? Can’t you see it’s pouring out here? Take it from me, kid. Ladies hate being out in the rain. Makes their hair frizzy
.

Don’t you get it, fellas? The warden’s been on his trail, and now he thinks just because it’s a little wet outside, Captain Kilgore won’t be bothering with guard duty today
.

Fat chance! The Black Angel summed it up for you, didn’t she? Suffering awaits!

And what about the key, son? You think you can keep that thing hidden in your sock drawer forever? You need to put it back where it belongs before it’s too late!