Underworld (12 page)

“If I hadn’t, sir,” John said, his voice dropping dangerously low, “your niece would be dead.”

I
insinuated myself between my boyfriend and uncle before things could get any uglier.

“Okay,” I said, in a shaky voice. It was shocking to me how quickly otherwise reasonable men could revert back to their cave-dwelling ancestors. “Uncle Chris, we didn’t come here to start a fight, we really just came to let you know I’m all right —”

He inhaled to interrupt me, but I held up a hand to signal that I wasn’t finished.

“I know Grandma may have told you some things, but let’s face it, we both know Grandma exaggerates a little … sometimes a lot.” I saw Uncle Chris’s face grow contemplative as he took that under consideration. It was true, and he knew it. “My friend’s name is John, and you shouldn’t judge him before you’ve gotten to know him. I think you of all people know how unfair that is, don’t you, Uncle Chris?”

Uncle Chris blinked a few times at that, as I’d known he would. His frown had deepened.

But not, it turned out, over my reminder that he, too, didn’t have the most sterling reputation, having spent most of his only child’s life serving a prison term for a crime he resolutely refused to discuss.

He turned his attention to John.

“Why?” Uncle Chris asked. “Why would she be dead if you hadn’t come along? Who’d want to hurt Pierce?”

Suddenly, I could see exactly why John had been so reluctant to bring me back, even to save the life of someone else….

After I’d died and been resuscitated, everyone had wanted so badly to know what it had been like on the other side.

But the few people to whom I’d told the truth turned out to not want to hear it. They only wanted to hear about the light everyone else saw.

Uncle Chris had been one of those people.

How could you explain to someone that his mother was a Fury, and for years had been trying to kill you, and had maybe killed his own father? How could you tell someone something so horrible, something that would change his life forever?

John knew all this, had known it all along. Maybe this was not only why he hadn’t wanted to bring me back, but why he wouldn’t tell me the truth about himself.

Still, when my uncle Chris asked him who would want to hurt me, John didn’t lie. He said only, “Bad people. Some very bad people.”

Uncle Chris’s mouth flattened into a small, thin line. Then he nodded crisply. He knew all about bad people. John was speaking in a language he understood.

“Is it drugs?” Uncle Chris asked, in a hushed voice.

I looked at John, in his black jeans and T-shirt, with his long dark hair, and studded leather wristbands. I could see why Uncle Chris had asked. To someone of his generation, it would have to be either drugs, or … well, a rock band.

John gave me a barely perceptible shake of his head.
No
, his eyes begged me.
Don’t.

“Yes,” I said, glancing back at Uncle Chris. “It’s drugs.”

John’s gaze instantly rolled towards the sky.

“Piercey,” Uncle Chris said, exhaling gustily and dragging a hand through his hair. “We talked about this. I thought you were the one I didn’t have to worry about.”

We had talked about something along those lines, I remembered, outside this very house, the night before Jade was killed. But it had been about Uncle Chris giving me driving lessons. I didn’t recall drugs being mentioned.

“Well,” I said. “Things are a little messed up right now. That’s why we’re here. I wanted to make sure Alex is okay.”

“Alex?” Uncle Chris threw me a look of alarm. “Don’t tell me
Alex
is doing drugs.”

I could see now why John had been against lying about the drugs thing. I’d thought it would simplify things. But it was only making them worse.

“He’s not,” I said quickly. If Alex got out of all this alive, he was going to kill me. “It’s just that some of the people he hangs out with —”

“Rector,” Uncle Chris said, in a flat voice. “It’s that Rector boy you were with the other day, the one who brought you home from school in that truck —”

“What?” I said, taken aback. Especially because John’s head jerked up when he heard the name
Rector
, the same way it had in the cemetery. What was with the people on this island and the name Rector? “No, it’s not Seth….” Except that of course, if Alex really was trapped in the senior class coffin, it probably was. “It’s … some kids from off the island —”

Uncle Chris shook his head. He didn’t believe me. “I already know who it is. Why else would your counselor have gotten killed?”

John was shaking his head, an I-told-you-so expression on his face.

“Uncle Chris,” I said, fearing I’d created a mess in which my uncle did not —
should
not — need to involve himself. “I don’t think there’s any evidence that Jade was killed for drug-related reasons —”

Uncle Chris, however, was off and running, speaking almost to himself. “Seth and his father were over here this morning.”

“They
were
?” I could not hide my surprise. “Why?”

“They took a bunch of the ‘missing’ flyers your mom made up. She said they were real eager to help go around and hang them up. But I kept thinking —” Uncle Chris looked at me, then at John, then seemed to get control of himself with an effort. “Well, there’s no need to go into what I thought. I only wish your father would hurry up and get here. He’s on his way, you know. His jet couldn’t land at the local airport because the FAA closed it due to the storm, so he’s driving down from where they let him land. Or being driven, I guess, since he’s hiring a car and driver from there. Fort Lauderdale, I think it was.”

“Oh,” I said. Unlike Uncle Chris, I wasn’t too eager to see my dad. I could only imagine what he was going to think of John. I had a feeling that, compared to meeting Uncle Chris, John’s meeting my dad was going to go a lot worse.

“Where is Alex now, Mr. Cabrero?” John asked my uncle, gently. I think John could sense that Uncle Chris wasn’t doing so great.

“Alex? He’s out with one of those New Pathways kids. That girl, Kayla.”

I looked up at this, startled. I liked Kayla. She’d been one of my only friends at Isla Huesos High School.
One
of? Make that my
only
friend….

“Alex is really worried about you, Piercey” — Uncle Chris’s glance at me was apologetic — “but he was here all day and finally asked if he could go out for a while, and I said yes. Stupid of me, I know, but this was before I knew about the drugs —”

“And Pierce’s grandmother?” John asked, before I could insist once again that Alex wasn’t on drugs.

“She went home to rest,” Uncle Chris said, looking at him curiously. “She had a long day. Why?”

“I’ll bet,” I said, unable to restrain a bitter laugh. “Her facial lacerations bothering her?”

“Hey.” Uncle Chris looked stern. Or as stern as Uncle Chris could look, which wasn’t very. He was better at watching TV. “That’s your grandmother. You show some respect. I don’t know what went on between you two back at the high school yesterday, but she was probably just trying to do the right thing. Maybe she thought your friend was the one who was on drugs.” His gaze jerked towards John. “No offense, but if you want to be with my niece, you should think about getting a haircut. My mother is very conservative.”

“No offense taken,” John said mildly. “What about the police? Are there any police officers inside the house?”

“Hey,” Uncle Chris said, narrowing his eyes. “What’s with all the questions?”

“Pierce would like to see her mother,” John explained. “And I wouldn’t want her to run into any … inconveniences.”

“Oh,” Uncle Chris said, instantly affable again. It was easy to see how he’d gotten along in prison for as many years as he had. “There’s a police car parked right outside. I don’t even know how the two of you got in here without them stopping you. And there’s this fancy machine hooked to the phone so if your kidnappers call, we can record it. Although I guess you weren’t kidnapped, were you? We should tell your dad. He’s supposed to have someone driving down from the FBI branch in Miami tomorrow —”

“The FBI?” I was surprised my dad hadn’t called his buddies at the CIA, as well. “That’s just great. But Mom’s right inside?”

“She said she was going upstairs to take a shower,” Uncle Chris said. “I swear she hasn’t done a thing since she found out you were missing except worry. I was about to order Chinese when I looked out the window and saw you. Hey, do you two want to stay? We’re getting moo shu.”

It was so like Uncle Chris to go from wanting to beat John up one minute, to inviting him for moo shu the next.

“Uh, maybe,” I said. I pointed to the French doors, looking questioningly at John. He nodded. “Let’s see how it goes, okay, Uncle Chris?”

“That’d be good,” Uncle Chris said. “We could talk all this out.”

John followed me inside, Uncle Chris trailing behind us, his expression curious rather than suspicious.

“I hate it when families fight,” Uncle Chris was saying. “It makes it so uncomfortable….”

I suppose I should have counted it lucky that it had been Uncle Chris, and not some other adult, I’d run into first at home. I wasn’t sure if it was because of all the years he’d spent out of mainstream society — he still had no idea how to text, or what Google was — or if his personality was really this childlike. I’d been a baby when he’d gone to prison.

There was no one but us on the lower floor. I could hear water running in the bathroom off the master bedroom, upstairs, however.

A lot had changed since I’d been gone. There were stacks of “missing” flyers everywhere, each featuring the same unflattering photo of me that had been in the paper Mr. Smith had shown us. The normally meticulously neat living room was in disarray. Mom’s housekeeper would have had a fit at how smushed-in all the throw pillows on the couch were, and how many mugs and teacups had been left without coasters on the coffee table.

The biggest change of all, though, was in the garage. When I opened the door, I saw that all the pieces of four-by-eight plywood that Seth Rector and his friends had left stacked so neatly there were gone. So were the paint and other coffin-building supplies.

“This is not good,” I said, looking at all the outside patio furniture that was piled up in the garage to keep it from being blown away in the coming storm, thinking maybe I’d missed something. But I hadn’t.

“What’s not good?” Uncle Chris asked. “Piercey, what have you gotten yourself involved in?”

There was no reason not to tell him. He and my mom had both gone to Isla Huesos High School. I’d seen all the sports trophies they’d won, still on display in the administrative wing. He knew all about Coffin Night because it was football-related, and he’d been on one of the winningest teams in Isla Huesos history.

But Uncle Chris had enough to worry about, being a suspect in Jade’s murder, and all.

So I said simply, “It’s nothing. Seth Rector and his friends asked if they could store some stuff in here, and now it’s gone. They must have come to pick it up. That’s all.”

It was the wrong thing to say. Uncle Chris was immediately on the defensive, looking like a mother bear whose cubs had been teased by tourists.

“Store some stuff?” he repeated, his tone incredulous. “You let Seth Rector
store some stuff
in your mother’s home? What kind of stuff?”

I swallowed. I’d never been yelled at so much by Uncle Chris in one day in my life … I’d actually never been yelled at by him before at all. It felt terrible.

“The senior coffin,” I said, in a small voice.

I wanted to assure him that I had a very sound reason for doing something so foolish … that ever since the death of my good friend Hannah, I’d appointed myself a sort of watcher of people I cared about, and that included his son, Alex.

Uncle Chris didn’t give me a chance to say a word in my own defense, however.

“Do you know what the juniors did when they found the coffin your mother’s senior year, Pierce?” he demanded, in a heated voice. “They torched it. And the house it was in caught on fire, too. It burned to the ground.”

I lowered my eyes, too ashamed to meet his gaze. Like the crime John had committed to get himself sentenced to being protector of the dead of Isla Huesos, whatever Uncle Chris had done that had gotten him a twenty-year prison sentence was never mentioned … at least, not in our family. But I knew it was something even more serious than burning down someone’s house.

“So perhaps,” John said quietly, from the doorjamb against which he leaned, his arms folded across his chest, “it’s a good thing the coffin was moved.”

I glanced up at him. One of his dark eyebrows was arched. I couldn’t tell if he was joking or serious.

“Yeah,” Uncle Chris said, not looking convinced either. He’d begun to dig around in the pockets of his jeans. “Well, I don’t know about that. Tell me something, Pierce.”
Pierce.
I was “Piercey” no longer. That hurt. “Is Alex involved in this? Coffin Night?”

“Um.” I felt like I had no choice but to tell him the truth. “Well, he knew the coffin stuff was here. Alex doesn’t really like Seth, for whatever reason.” It wasn’t hard to guess the reason; I just didn’t want to say it out loud in front of Uncle Chris. Seth Rector, good-looking president of the senior class and son of the richest man in Isla Huesos, had everything, including a shiny new F-150 truck he’d gotten for his birthday. Alex Cabrero, newly enrolled in New Pathways and son of an ex-con, had nothing. His car was a piece of junk his Fury grandmother was always threatening to take away so she didn’t have to make the payments on it anymore. “Maybe the reason it’s all gone is because Alex took it to get back at Seth. In which case, Seth and those guys are going to be really mad when they find out —”

Mad enough, maybe, to stuff Alex in the class’s new replacement coffin.

Before I’d even completed the sentence, my uncle was hitting a button on the cell phone he’d pulled from his pocket.

“I’m calling Alex,” he said. He didn’t look angry, though. He looked resigned, as if someone had told him he had only a few months to live. He was pale, and kept dragging his fingers through his hair. It stood raggedly on end, both because of its thick texture and the fact that he’d let Grandma cut it … big mistake.