Here Lies Linc (19 page)

Kilgore feigned astonishment. “And here I thought you fellas were supposed to be such good friends.” He sauntered past me, leaving behind a whiff of stale ashtray. “I mean, what was it you were saying the other day, Gene? Oh,
now
I remember. One of Oakland’s best neighbors. Isn’t that what you called him?”

Kilgore waited, staring down at the top of Jeeter’s head. “Huh?” he taunted. “Isn’t that what you said?”

“That’s what I said,” Jeeter finally replied in a hollow voice.

I closed my eyes for a dizzy second.
Jeeter’s biding his time
, I told myself,
waiting for the right moment to fight back
.

Kilgore tapped the blade of the screwdriver against the edge of Jeeter’s desk. “And as I recall it, you also called him
a great kid
. Well, let me tell you something, Gene. I’m starting to question your judgment. What kind of
great kid
skips school to harass an old woman just trying to pay her respects in peace?”

“I didn’t skip!” I cried out before I could stop myself. “We didn’t have school today, and I wasn’t trying to bother that lady. We were only—”

“What more convincing do you need, Gene?” Kilgore continued. “Sure, maybe he was harmless enough when he
was little. But now he’s just plain weird.” Jeeter was still sitting there like a zombie.

A foul mixture of shame and outrage bubbled up inside me. Kilgore was calling
me
weird? I was sick of people calling me that. And what about him? He was the one who got his kicks pretending he was living back in the Civil War, patrolling the graveyard like it was Gettysburg.

I took a step toward Kilgore. “Everything was fine in Oakland till you showed up!” I lashed out. “Talk about harassing people! It was your idea to put up that sign in Babyland, wasn’t it? You’re the one who took all those toys and presents off the graves.”

Kilgore made a scoffing sound in his throat as he finally swung around to face me. “Oh, man,” he said, wagging his head back and forth. “You’re even weirder than I thought.” Then, all at once, he was pointing the blade of his screwdriver at me like an accusing finger. “That’s it. I want you off this property right now.”

“You can’t kick me out,” I said in a shaky voice. “My dad’s buried here.”

“So what?” Kilgore spat out the two syllables like wads of tobacco. “You think that gives you special privileges to break the rules? Nuh-uh. I warned you when you brought dogs in here, and then again over at the Angel. Now you got three strikes, you’re out.”

I sidestepped around Kilgore and leaned over Jeeter’s desk, slapping my palms against the wood. “Jeeter?” I pleaded. “What’s wrong with you? Why don’t you say something?”

He slowly lifted his gaze to meet mine. The sadness in Jeeter’s eyes shook me. I had never seen him look this tired, or this helpless. But his words shocked me even more. “Kilgore’s right,” he said. “Get out of here, Linc. Just go home.”

P
IPE DOWN
, M
C
N
UTT
. Can’t you see he doesn’t want to hear it right now?

Yeah, Winslow? So what? The boy’s gotta toughen up. He needs to stop all that sniveling and take it like a man
.

C’mon, Nutty. Have a heart. A weirdo! That’s what they called him. Then the guy he trusts most in the world tells him to get lost for good? You’d be crying too
.

Bah! You can’t trust anybody these days
. He
should know. Heck, I don’t trust you guys, and I’ve been lying next to you for thirty-two years. Thank God I got the spot on the end
.

Aww, go back to sleep, you big stiff! Shoot, there he goes
.…

I slammed the back door on their bickering voices and ran straight upstairs to the bathroom to douse my face with water. Just for a second I forced myself to stare back at my angry reflection in the mirror, my scalded cheeks and glassy eyes. “Stop sniveling,” I hissed at myself. “Take it like a man.”

Looking in the mirror was bad enough. But I felt even worse when I went to my bedroom and stared up at those Seven Summits towering over me. The smallest mountain on my wall was the Vinson Massif, only a couple thousand feet higher than Mount Rainier, the most challenging peak that Dad had climbed. But the Vinson was in Antarctica! What had I been thinking? I’d never get there.

I reached out and yanked my poster of the Vinson down from the wall. Once I had yanked the first one, it was easier to see the other six summits come crashing down. Soon the posters were spread out like tornado wreckage all around me, scattered across the dusty floor of my room. Still breathing hard, I gathered them into a messy pile. Then I shoved the whole stack under my bed.

Half an hour later Lottie came upstairs to tell me I had a telephone call. “Jeeter’s on the phone for you,” she said as she poked her head through my doorway. “Didn’t you hear me calling?” Her gaze flicked from one blank wall to another. “Wait a minute, what happened to your posters?” I could see her eyeing a corner of Mount Kilimanjaro, still sticking out from under my bed.

I looked back down at the French book open on my desk, pretending to be engrossed with studying verb conjugations. “I got tired of them, that’s all.” I pushed myself up from my desk. “Listen, I can’t talk to Jeeter right now.”

I couldn’t believe it. Did he actually think he could make up for how he had turned on me with a stupid little phone call?

Lottie took a step into my room. “What do you mean, you can’t talk? Why not?”

“I don’t have time,” I said brusquely. “I’ve got a big French test tomorrow, plus I’m late to pick Spunky up for his run.” Then, before she could ask more questions, I swept past her and thumped down the stairs.

But Lottie was still waiting for an explanation when I came home from running the dogs. “Is there something going on with you and Jeeter?” she asked as she stood in the kitchen with one hand on her hip.

I knelt down to unclip C.B.’s leash, avoiding her penetrating gaze. “No, why? What’d he say?”

“He wouldn’t tell me anything. He said it was between you two.”

“Oh, he must have found out some new stuff about the Black Angel for me,” I lied, just the way I had rehearsed as I jogged the dogs back to Claiborne Street. I hung C.B.’s leash on the hook by the door. “I’ll go talk to him tomorrow. He probably didn’t tell you because he knows how much I want to do this project without asking you for help.”

I turned around, pasting an empty smile on my face. Lottie didn’t look too convinced. That’s when I should have come out with it—the whole pathetic story of how I had been banished from Oakland for good. But I hurried back up to my room instead, to my four blank walls and the dim quiet, where I could keep brooding and stewing in peace.
I showed up at school the next morning feeling like a pot ready to boil over. When Mellecker called hello, I gave him a curt wave and continued to walk past his locker. But something—all that brewing anger, I suppose—made me wheel around and march back.

Mellecker searched my face in surprise. “Hey, what’s up?”

“You still want to look inside the Ransom vault?” I shot out.

“What?”
His eyes narrowed and he started to smile. “You’re kidding, right?”

“I’m not kidding. I’ve got the key.”

“Holy crap, Crenshaw!” Mellecker squawked under his breath. “You really got it? All this time I thought you were bluffing!”

“Nope.” I could feel my fists clenching and unclenching at my sides. “So you want to do this or not?”

“Of course I do.” He clapped his hand to his forehead with a delighted laugh. “Beez’s gonna flip. When can we go?”

My mind raced ahead. Once I set a date, there’d be no turning back.

“The night after Halloween,” I told Mellecker.

“Excellent!” he whispered as he banged his locker shut. I could already see him searching the tallest heads in the hallway for Beez. I let out a raggedy sigh. It was done.

I
FOUND MYSELF
climbing up to the attic after school that afternoon. Ours wasn’t one of those inviting sorts of attics, packed with family heirlooms, at the top of a sunlit staircase. It was just a shadowy space in the rafters that you could reach only by pulling a folded set of steps from a trapdoor in the ceiling. So I usually limited my annual trips to the attic to two—once to bring down the Christmas ornaments and once more to lug them back up again after New Year’s.

Each winter when I made those climbs, I would glance over at the three boxes full of Dad’s things and think about stopping to look inside. Then I would always change my mind. I couldn’t wait to scurry down the rickety steps and slam the trapdoor behind me. And especially at Christmas, I was never in the mood for being reminded of how much there was to miss about Dad.

But today opening the boxes felt like a mission. I needed
something to take my mind off Kilgore and Jeeter—and what might happen the night after Halloween. And the more I thought about the strange lady in the graveyard, the more I began to think Delaney was right—the lady had recognized me somehow. What if it had something to do with us both being Raintrees? Maybe I could find a clue in the old family Bible. Lottie had said that’s where my grandmother first came across the Raintree name, recorded in our family tree. If the Bible was really packed away in the attic like Lottie said, I knew I’d probably find it among Dad’s things.

His three boxes were lined up under the tiny window that overlooked our front porch. I sat cross-legged in a patch of sunlight on the splintery floorboards and opened the first one. It didn’t take long for me to get sidetracked from my search for the Bible. The first carton was full of photos, piles of them scrambled together in no particular order. I began sorting through the jumble, and soon I was surrounded by small stacks of Lincoln Raintree Crenshaw (the First) at different ages.

As a chubby (make that fat) toddler.

As a boy showing off the whopper (minnow) he had caught.

A geeky teenager (nice glasses!) in a graduation cap, his proud parents on either side.

A college student in a beard (yikes) and hiking boots.

People used to say we looked just alike. I squinted down at each image, trying to see past the bad hair and goofy clothes, searching for a resemblance.

As I studied the stack of photos from the husband-and-father
years, I caught myself staring at Lottie instead of Dad. There she was with flowers in her hair on the day they got married in someone’s backyard in Wisconsin. There were the three of us on a Ferris wheel. Lottie had her head tipped back laughing as she gazed up at the sky.

It made my heart sink to see how much happier she was back then. With a sigh, I gathered up the piles of photos and put them away in order, from Dad’s baby years until our backyard campout right before he died. Then I slid the carton back into its place under the window.

The contents of the second box cheered me up again. I had completely forgotten about most of the things in the weird collection of keepsakes Lottie had chosen to save—Dad’s favorite Three Stooges coffee mug, a couple of his best fossil specimens, a hunk of lava rock, and a lopsided clay dog I had made for him during my years of begging for a pet. At the bottom of the box I found a Ziploc bag with my parents’ matching wedding bands and my father’s old watch tucked inside. The battery on the watch was dead, of course, and the leather band had worn thin, but I tried it on for size anyway and spent a couple minutes checking how it looked from different angles.

I hit the jackpot in the last box. The Bible was buried underneath a mishmash of geology research papers. I grunted as I carefully lifted it onto my lap. It was heavy, with a tattered spine and an ornate cross stamped in peeling gold on the leather cover. My chest tightened as I turned to the family record in the back of the book—line after line of entries, listing the names of my ancestors, along with when and where
they were born and when they died, all the way back to the 1800s. Someone—probably my grandmother—had filled out my name and birth date in graceful cursive script at the bottom of the list. I glanced up at the entry for Dad. His death date was missing. My grandmother hadn’t been alive to fill it in, and Lottie must not have had the heart.