Here Lies Linc (21 page)

Delaney grew still beside me, thinking. The rumble of the bus almost drowned out her quiet answer, but I saw her start to smile, and it was easy to read her lips. “Okay, I’ll come,” she said. That’s when Old Faithful went into action. But so what? Delaney was blushing too.

I led the way off the bus when it stopped on Grand Avenue. As we stood on the sidewalk getting our bearings, Delaney looked up and down the street in surprise. “A.R. lives
here
?” she asked, surveying the rows of huge old houses on either side. “Our real-estate agent drove us down this street when we first came to town. I remember wondering what kind of folks got to live inside places like this.”

The houses weren’t mansions, but almost—with white columns and stone walkways and wraparound front porches decorated with pots of fall flowers and pumpkins for Halloween. And even though there were plenty of giant trees in the yards, the front lawns looked like flat green carpets that had been vacuumed clean of all their dead leaves.

“This isn’t the street,” I told her. “But it’s as close as we could get on the bus.” I squinted over her shoulder, trying to see how far it was to the south end of Grand. “We need to walk a few blocks this way, I think. Then we take a left.”

At first it wasn’t so obvious, but after a few minutes of walking, I began to notice the houses starting to change,
shrinking in size with each block we passed. And by the time we took a left on Fulton Lane, the neighborhood had turned even scruffier than my side of town. Shoved between the fading two-story houses were dingy apartment buildings and squat little cottages with peeling paint and rusted cars and basketball hoops in the driveways.

“What number did you say it was?” Delaney asked.

“Number two-sixty-six,” I told her. “We must be getting close. That was two-fifty-four back there.”

She hurried ahead, scanning the next two houses. “I can’t find any house numbers,” she called. I caught up with her in front of a ramshackle cottage. The porch was strewn with tacky Halloween decorations—fake cobwebs, orange mini-lights, hanging plastic witches and spiders—and as we stood searching for a house number among all the clutter, a little kid appeared in the narrow alleyway beside the house, dragging an overflowing trash can toward the curb.

“Hey, can you help us?” I called. “We’re trying to find number two-sixty-six.” The boy stopped, eyeing us from beneath his floppy bangs. “Is this it?” I prodded.

“Naw. We’re two-sixty.”

He must have seen us glance at the next house in the row. “My friend Brian lives there.” He took a few steps toward us and pointed down the street. “Are you looking for that one?”

Delaney and I followed the line of his pointing finger. But all I could see was a tall hedge of scraggly junipers.

“Do you know who lives there?” Delaney asked.

“Uh-uh.” The boy shook his head, and his hair flopped further over his eyes. “I deliver papers to lots of houses on our
street, but never that one.” Then he grinned. “Brian and me dared each other to go trick-or-treating there last year. We rang the doorbell, but nobody answered. We’re gonna try again tomorrow night.”

“Okay. Well, thanks a lot,” I said, trading puzzled looks with Delaney. I gave him a wave, and we started down the sidewalk again. When I checked over my shoulder, the boy was still watching us. We passed the line of junipers dividing the properties and walked along an old-fashioned wrought-iron fence. As the house came into view through the trees, I suddenly understood why it would take a dare for a kid to go trick-or-treating there.

“Golly day,” Delaney whispered. “Look at
that
.” The tall brick house stood far back from the street—three imposing stories of arched windows and fancy stone trim. With its deep yard and towering evergreen trees, the property seemed like it belonged with all those other estates over on Grand Avenue. Until you looked a little closer and began to notice all the frayed edges—the brown lawn, the missing slate shingles, the clumps of weeds poking through the long, crumbling walkway.

“Think we have time to catch the next bus out of here?” I joked.

Delaney called me a chicken, but she looked nervous too as she lifted the latch on the creaky gate. We took the walkway side by side and approached the tall front doors with our shoulders touching. Then I pushed a black button mounted in the brick and we waited, barely breathing, straining to hear
the echo of a doorbell or footsteps behind the thick walls. But there was nothing—only the sound of dry leaves rattling across the stone porch.

“Should we knock?” Delaney asked in a hushed voice after I had tried pushing the button again.

I rapped my knuckles against the dark wood. It was like tapping the side of a ship. “Let’s try around back,” I suggested.

We cut across the weedy lawn to a rutted driveway that hugged the far side of the property. Delaney noticed the car before I did. “Look!” she cried under her breath. She pointed to the white station wagon parked under a sagging shed at the end of the drive. “That’s the lady’s car, from the graveyard!”

I hung back for a second, feeling confused. Of course a part of me had suspected that she might be the one who lived here. But now, as I tried to connect the dots, nothing made sense. “But what about that letter to my grandmother?” I wondered out loud. “I thought we decided it was a man who must have written it.”

Delaney turned to face me with one eyebrow arched. “Maybe the lady from the graveyard isn’t the only one who lives here.”

I told her she was starting to sound a lot like Miss Marple. But Delaney didn’t hear me. She was already making her way alongside the house again. I ran to catch up, and we peered around the corner, searching for a back entrance. Mossy paving stones led from the driveway to a set of steps and a covered stoop. I had just started to follow Delaney up the path
when a flash of movement next to the shed caught my eye. I turned in time to see the same lady we had met in Oakland emerge from a raggedy patch of dried stalks—sunflower stalks. Withered flowers still drooped from a few of the tops, and the woman was cradling one of the old flower heads like an injured bird in her palms.

“Linc?” I heard Delaney call from the back steps. Then she stopped short. She must have spotted the woman too.

The lady tucked the flower head into the front pocket of a faded apron that she had tied around her waist, over her old raincoat. As she slowly came toward us across the overgrown lawn, she didn’t seem to notice Delaney scurrying to my side. She was staring at
me
. I tried to ignore the shiver creeping across my scalp. She looked even crazier today than when we had seen her in the cemetery. There was dirt smudged on her cheek, and her silver hair hung lank, as if it hadn’t been washed for a while. But what was I worried about? Even if she
was
a little demented, she seemed completely harmless.
She’s gotta be at least sixty
, I reasoned in my head.
And raving maniacs don’t usually wear aprons, do they?

The woman paused on the grass a few feet in front of me. She was wringing her hands. “I’m so glad you’ve come,” she began in that proper-sounding voice of hers. “I apologize for running away the other day.” She shook her head in wonder. “I thought I had seen a ghost. And then later, when I began to think more clearly, I was so upset with myself. I should have asked you for your full name.”

This was getting stranger by the second. “It’s Linc Crenshaw,”
I told her. “But my middle name’s Raintree,” I added quickly. “That’s why I’m here.”

The woman took another astonished step toward me, her eyes examining every inch of my face. I had to stop myself from edging away. “You’re the spitting image of your father,” she breathed. “That’s why I thought I was seeing things in the graveyard.”

“Ma’am,” I began cautiously. “Are you saying we might be … related or something?”

Her face went still. “You mean you don’t know who I am?”

I shook my head apologetically.

“Then how did you find me?”

I wasn’t sure where to begin. And it was hard to think with her practically swallowing me up with her eyes. “Well, it’s a long story.… Remember my friend who you met in Oakland?” Delaney smiled and moved closer, ready to help. But the woman gave her only the slightest nod before she turned back to me.

I thought for a second and tried again. “You see, this all started when Delaney picked your father’s grave for our school project. Remember how we were telling you about that the other day? Well, then
I
got interested because I had never heard of anyone else with the name Raintree before.”

I knew I wasn’t making much sense, and the whole story seemed too complicated to explain standing in someone’s backyard, so I skipped ahead a few steps. “Anyway, I found this address in some of my dad’s things, and that’s how we ended up coming here today.”

“So he’s had my address?” The woman pressed her hand
to her chest in disbelief. “And … and you and your family live … where?”

“Right over on Claiborne Street.” I jabbed the air with my thumb as if our house were just through the trees.

Her eyes clouded with bewilderment. “How long? How long have you lived here in town?”

“About five years,” I told her. “We moved here from Wisconsin.” I crossed my arms and swayed back and forth a little. This Twenty Questions game was making me restless. Wasn’t it her turn to start giving some answers?

“All this time,”
she said. She brought her fist to her mouth, still struggling to understand. “Did you tell your father you were coming here today?”

“My father?” I flinched in surprise. Didn’t she know? “I’m really sorry, ma’am, but my father, he—” I stole a glance at Delaney’s stricken expression and caught myself before I said the word “died.” It sounded so blunt. If this woman was truly related to my grandparents somehow, she might be crushed to find out the young man she once knew had passed away.

But she didn’t give me a chance to finish explaining. All at once she was reaching out to grab my hand. “Oh, you mustn’t apologize,” she said. “I understand. There have been too many secrets kept for too long, and now I can see … you have no idea who I am. So we’ll start from the beginning, all right?” She was squeezing my hand tighter between her dry palms. “My name is Adeline Raintree.”

I blinked back at her as the name settled itself in my brain.
Adeline Raintree …

A.R.!

I wanted to interrupt, to ask a dozen questions. But the woman’s voice was so desperate and she wouldn’t let go of my hand, and now she was herding Delaney and me toward her back entrance.

“Won’t you and your friend come inside for a few minutes?” she pleaded. “Please?”

“W
HAT’S SHE DOING
?” I mouthed. Delaney held her finger to her lips, and I clenched my teeth and went back to gawking at the high ceilings, the peeling strips of wallpaper, and the dusty crystals of the chandelier. Adeline Raintree had seated us in carved chairs at one end of her long, dark dining room table. “I would take you to the front parlor,” she said as she pushed back the heavy drapes at the windows, “but one of the pipes in that ceiling seems to have sprung a leak, and it’s a bit damp in there.”

Now she sat at the head of the table between us, bent over her old sunflower. She pushed her thumbs back and forth across the dry husk until the seeds rattled down into a tarnished silver bowl. I squirmed on my chair, and a cloud of must drifted up from the embroidered cushion. Obviously, no one but us had sat in these chairs for a very long time.

Miss Raintree scooped up a handful of the seeds and slowly let them sift between her fingers. “The birds didn’t leave very many this year,” she said thoughtfully, “but it should be enough to make a few good bouquets for Papa next summer.” My pulse raced with impatience. Why was she jabbering on about seeds instead of explaining what she had meant when we were outside? What was all that stuff about “too many secrets”? I glanced over at Delaney, who hadn’t fidgeted once. Were all southern people like that—with their good manners etched into them like that
R
engraved on Miss Raintree’s silver bowl?

I cleared my throat, and Miss Raintree finally got the hint. “Forgive me, Lincoln,” she said with a start. She wiped her hands on her apron. “Some people have prayer beads. I use seeds. They help me to collect my thoughts … and this is a story I’ve never told before.…”

I held my breath as she stared down the table at a skinny beam of light that had pushed through the drapes, and finally she began. “A long time ago, when I was barely twenty years old, I fell in love with one of Papa’s students,” she said softly. “Our romance was a secret, because my father was the head of the law school and this young man didn’t want to risk his position there.”

Delaney and I exchanged wide-eyed looks across the table. Miss Raintree didn’t seem to notice. She was still staring at that sliver of light. “I dreamed he would ask me to marry him, but the proposal never came.” She lifted her chin, and something in her face hardened. “Obviously this fellow
wasn’t the upstanding gentleman I thought him to be. He graduated from the law school and moved on. Shortly after he left, I found out I was expecting his child.”