The light started bobbing up and down. He was coming toward me. I jumped down. It wasn’t far, and the grass broke my fall. I started running toward my car.
The guard didn’t gain any ground on me. He must have been an old guy. Who else would take a job as a cemetery guard? At night, no less.
I reached the car, jumped in, and started the engine. I lost some time because I had to turn around, but when I was facing the right direction, I floored it. The tires kicked up some gravel and then took hold. Fortunately, the gate was still open.
My heart was pounding as I headed down the road. I kept looking in my rear-view mirror, worrying that the guy might be following in his car. But I didn’t see anything.
“Guard in a cemetery,” I said to myself, wondering why. I thought of the old second-grade joke: “Why do they have fences around the cemetery? Because people are dying to get in.” That seemed hysterical. I knew it was just from nerves, but I began to laugh and didn’t stop till I was nearly home.
chapter fourteen
OF COURSE, HE GOT my license plate. Wouldn’t you know? The only 80-year-old cemetery guard with perfect vision. I don’t know if he was really 80.
The next day, I was sitting in Ms. Hayward’s world lit class, listening to the discussion of the relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu, when the P.A. system came on. A voice said, “Ms. Hayward, please send Paul Sullivan to Ms. Brennan’s office.” Everybody looked at me.
I really had no idea what this was about. The night before, when I made it back without being chased, I figured I was home free.
That idea went out the window as soon as I saw my father and a uniformed cop waiting in Ms. Brennan’s office. And Ms. Brennan, with as stony a look as ever. Apparently it was forbidden for an assistant principal ever to smile.
She told me to sit down. Nobody spoke for a minute. Even though I knew that was intended to make me nervous, it worked. Three against one.
Finally, the cop said, “You’re Paul Sullivan?”
I nodded.
“This is being recorded,” he said. “Please answer aloud.”
“Yes, I’m Paul Sullivan,” I said. I was trying to avoid my dad’s eyes.
“Where were you last night?”
“Mostly at home.”
“Were you at the Greenwood Cemetery around 9:30 p.m.?”
Oh, shit. I knew what this was about, so I might as well admit it. “Yes.”
“What were you doing there?”
Hard to say. Trying to find the year when a woman died almost a century ago. “I was just…looking around.”
“Paul,” Dad said.
“That’s all I was doing, honest,” I told him. I could tell he didn’t believe me. It sounded fishy to me too.
The cop broke in. “Were you there with the intention of vandalizing any of the monuments?”
“No! Why would you think that?”
“A caretaker reported seeing someone attempting to break the arm of a statue. He took down the license number of the car you were driving.”
“I wasn’t trying to break the arm,” I said. “I was just climbing up there.”
“For what reason?”
“I was trying to find out the name of the book she was holding.” So call me crazy.
The three authority figures in the room looked at each other. If they didn’t think I was crazy, they probably thought I was incredibly stupid to make up such a story.
“Had you been drinking?” the cop asked. The only other obvious conclusion.
“No, I hadn’t anything to drink,” I insisted. I met my dad’s eyes and said, “Honest, Dad. I hadn’t.”
“Had you been in the cemetery at any other time?” the cop asked.
I hesitated. This was leading in a direction I really didn’t want to go. I wondered if it was illegal in Pennsylvania to feel a girl’s boobs. Was Colleen a minor? I hadn’t thought to ask. Her boobs seemed fully grown.
“Answer him, Paul,” Dad said in a voice that meant I’d be lucky if I only went to jail.
I thought I saw a way out. “Yes, I was there before,” I said.
“When was this?”
I thought back. “Just after school began. I think it was on a Tuesday afternoon.”
“In the afternoon?” the cop asked, seeming a little surprised. High-school kids didn’t go there in the afternoon.
“Yes.”
“Were you with anyone?”
“My sister.”
“You were with your sister?” Clearly the cop was now thinking incest, considering what usually went on in the cemetery.
“Yes,” I told him. “She wanted to learn how to drive, and so we went someplace where there wasn’t any traffic.” I was avoiding Dad’s eyes again.
The cop looked at my dad. “Can you confirm that?”
“I don’t know anything about it,” he said. Thanks, Dad.
“We’re more interested in last weekend,” the cop told me. “Some vandalism took place over the weekend. It’s a serious matter. One of the crypts was tampered with.”
Oh, great. Grave-robbing. But I thought of Saturday morning, when I’d seen North’s truck inside the cemetery, back where the Crapper family had their mausoleum.
“I wasn’t there last weekend.” As long as you didn’t count Friday night as the weekend.
“Do you know anyone who might have done that?”
This was standard cop technique, as I had learned from watching Law and Order. Who says TV rots your mind? I could give up North in return for leniency for myself. And then, of course, become a pariah for the rest of my senior year in high school. Not to mention that I’d need binoculars to see Colleen’s boobs ever again.
The decision seemed obvious. “No, I have no idea.” One lie leads to another.
“It’s a serious matter,” the cop said again. Must be really serious. “The family whose crypt was vandalized has paid for a guard to be on duty.” The word Crappers went through my mind and I had to bite my tongue to keep from chuckling.
That’s why the guard wasn’t there Friday night. The vandalism didn’t happen till Saturday.
“I’m sorry,” I said. It was sincere. I deeply regretted that nobody could go parking there at night anymore.
Dad finally came to my rescue. “But there was no damage to this statue that Paul was climbing?” he asked.
“As far as we can tell,” said the cop.
“Maybe Paul could volunteer for some community service,” Dad said. “It’s an old cemetery, and the graves must need tending, grass cut, things like that.”
And that’s how I came to be at the cemetery at 9 a.m. the next Saturday, in my old clothes, ready for work. Dad drove me out there, because I was officially grounded for two weeks. The pastor of the church that owned the cemetery was waiting to show me what needed to be done. His name was Flegel. He was pretty ancient, with wisps of snow-white hair across his pink scalp. He didn’t wear a clerical outfit, just some khaki pants and a plaid flannel shirt, although he did have black wing-tips on.
He unlocked the door of the tool shed at the cemetery. Inside, it smelled like it hadn’t been opened in years. They didn’t even have a power lawn mower. However, Pastor Flegel didn’t want me to cut the grass. He took out a large black plastic bag and said he wanted me to fill it with trash that littered the grounds. This included beer bottles, condoms, and a variety of other crap that kids who’d been parking there had left behind.
The old man apparently had nothing better to do, so he walked around with me. “It’s a shame the way people have no respect for the dead,” he said. I just grunted because I was bending over to pick up a beer can.
“Think about it,” Flegel went on. “Underneath our feet are the bodies of those who lived here over the past 200 years, now at rest and waiting for the resurrection.”
&
nbsp; “Do you think it’ll come soon?” I asked, just being a smart-ass.
He ignored the smart-ass part and took me seriously. “That day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father,” he replied. I could tell he was quoting from the Bible. Sounded like Look Homeward, Angel, too.
“That reminds me,” I said, “do you know anything about the person who is buried under that angel?” I pointed to the stone statue.
“Sally’s angel?” he said. “I’m an old man, but she was before my time.”
“She was a sinner, people say,” I suggested, hoping to get him going.
“As are we all.”
“So why put an angel over her grave?”
“Have you read what it says on the pedestal?”
I thought about it. “A fallen angel may rise again,” I replied.
“It gives hope to us all.”
“But why her? Who paid for the angel?”
“It doesn’t matter, really,” he told me with a smile. “A charitable person. A person with love in their heart.”
This guy was a pain in the ass. “Or maybe somebody who felt guilty at the way she was treated,” I said.
“I guess you have heard the stories,” he said with a chuckle. “You know, there was another boy from the high school who asked me about Sally,” he said.
“When was that?” I asked. All of a sudden, the old man had become interesting.
He thought about it. “I’m not sure. Time seems to pass differently when you grow older. Not recently.”
“Last year?”
“Perhaps.” Great. Now that I wanted him to tell me something, his memory failed.
“It wasn’t the boy who killed all those people at the high school, was it?” I asked.
“Wasn’t that a terrible thing?” he said. “But I can’t recall. I didn’t connect this boy with that other one. He did seem concerned about death, though. But that was because someone he knew had died.”
“His grandmother?”
“Perhaps. Yes, I think that was it. She had been the only person who really loved him, or so he felt. I’m sure it wasn’t true. Many people love us, even those we don’t suspect.”
“Sure.” Colleen Donnelly, for example.
“As I recall, he had felt his grandmother should be buried here. In that crypt over there, as a matter of fact.”
“The Crapper crypt.” That name just wouldn’t quit sounding funny.
But the pastor never cracked a smile. “He felt his grandmother had some right to be there, but she was not a family member. And there wasn’t much space left. The bodies there are not buried, you know. They’re interred above ground in stone caskets.”
“He felt his grandmother was a member of that family.” I said.
The pastor nodded. “But she wasn’t. Indeed the space was needed not long after that when the shooting at the school took place. One of the victims was interred there.”
“Sharon Craft,” I said.
“Yes. Did you know her?”
“No, I never met her.”
“Were you the one who disturbed the crypt?” His face suddenly changed, looking sad as he realized what a sinner he’d been talking to.
“No, no. I just…happened to be here after the cemetery was supposed to be closed.”
He nodded, seemingly reassured. “I’m glad. I suppose it was somebody’s idea of a prank. But it was quite a cruel one. The dead should be allowed to rest.”
Maybe that was good advice for me. In fact, the way things turned out, it almost certainly was.
Now I could see a motive for Cale’s shooting. He thought his grandmother was the daughter of Sally Dennis. That would mean that his grandmother’s father was Martin Crapper. Only she couldn’t prove it because she was illegitimate and had been raised in an orphanage. So Cale took it out on the youngest member of the Crapper family, who were now the Craft family.
So what? The others who were killed were just in his line of fire, except for maybe the librarian. And probably he wanted to kill Donna, who had turned down Cale’s direct approach to sex. Her mistake. So that wrapped everything up.
But somehow it didn’t satisfy me. What happened to the USB drive on which Cale stored everything he wrote on his computer?
And why had somebody—probably North—messed around with Sharon Craft’s crypt?
I knew what kind of advice Terry, or anybody else who was halfway smart, would have given me. It’s in the past. You didn’t know any of those people who were killed. Relax and let North fix you up with Colleen or maybe some other girls. Stay cool and enjoy the ride. Keep your grades up and go to college next year.
Or as my dad would say, Keep your nose clean.
I guess it was because I had Cale’s locker that I felt a kind of responsibility for him. For this kid that everybody seemed to want to forget. Whose face was blacked out in the yearbook. I wanted to know who he was.
chapter fifteen
I SORT OF LET THINGS slide for a couple of weeks. I spent the next Saturday at the cemetery too, and Pastor Flegel followed me around again. He kept talking about the dead and resurrection. He asked me once if I believed in resurrection, and I said I really wasn’t sure. But privately I thought if you dug all these people up they would be in pretty bad shape for resurrecting purposes. Of course, the basic idea of religion is that God can do anything, so you can believe anything you want about what’s going to happen.
We went inside the Crapper crypt once, and he showed me the broken lid on one of the coffins. Somebody had already come and filled the crack with cement, and now they were getting a lock on the door. That struck me as funny too, although obviously it was to keep people out, not for keeping the Crappers locked in.
When I told North why I couldn’t meet him and the girls after the football game that Friday, he shrugged and said, “Bummer, but there’ll be other times.” He gave me a kind of grin and asked, “You find anything when you were cleaning out the cemetery?”
“Nothing but junk,” I said. “Beer cans, mostly.”
“Yeah, well, let me know if you run across anything interesting.”
“Like what?”
He just gave me a playful slap on the back and said, “Whatever you think I might like to see.”
I nearly said, Like Cale’s USB drive? But I didn’t. North was still the alpha male in school, and my strongest connection to Colleen. I didn’t want to give up being his friend.
He surprised me by saying, “So you’re not grounded after this Saturday? How’d you like to do some hunting?”
Automatically, I said, “Sure,” but then wondered if I should have made up an excuse.
That was all he needed, however, and he said he’d pick me up Sunday at 10 a.m. “I guess you haven’t provided yourself with any firearms yet,” he said.
I smiled. “I don’t think my dad would be so hot on the idea.”
“Maybe he’ll change his mind,” North said. “I’ll have my father speak to him.”
I held up my hands, wondering if that could cause trouble—for me. “Maybe let’s hold off on that for a while.”
“The Colonel can be very persuasive,” said North.
“The Colonel?”
“That’s what everybody calls my father. He’s a retired colonel from the Army.”
Sunday arrived, and at breakfast I just told my dad that I was going somewhere with a friend.
“Stay out of trouble,” Dad said.
“He’s a great guy,” I said, wanting to reassure him. “North Hawkins. Captain of the football team. President of the senior class.”
“Nina Reynolds says you better not get into the back seat with him,” piped up Susan, who was fixing herself some toast and jam.
“I’ll be sure to stay in the front seat,” I said
. Susan thought that was funny.
Actually, North arrived in his truck, which didn’t have a back seat, so my virginity was safe for another day. He pulled into the driveway and called me on my cell. “Ready?” he said.
“I’ll be right out,” I said.
Dad took a look out the window as I pulled on a sweatshirt. “Guy drives a truck,” he commented.
“Everybody cool drives a truck around here,” I said. “I’ll be back for supper.”
This time, North had two guns in the rack over the windshield. They were different from the one I’d fired before. “Shotguns,” he told me. “Even you can hit something with one of these.”
I hadn’t thought about it before, but going hunting meant we were hunting for something. “What are we going after?” I asked. “Deer?”
He laughed. “Isn’t deer season yet, and if you go after them, you need a rifle. We’ll look for birds. Big ones, like turkeys and pheasants.”
Birds? Well, at least they wouldn’t turn and charge if we fired on them.
“We’re going to drop in and see the Colonel,” North told me. “He likes to sort of screen the people I go hunting with.”
“I hope I won’t have to pass any shooting tests,” I said.
“Nope, it’s more like a character test,” he replied. “Just remember to stand at attention until he tells us to relax. And call him sir. He’s used to that.”
“You’re kidding, right?” I said.
“No, it’s just a military thing,” North said. “Respect, discipline, and all that army shit.”
I decided that I could either follow orders or tell North I didn’t want to go hunting. Since the alternative was sitting at home all day with my dad and Susan, I decided what the hell. At least I didn’t have to salute the guy.
North’s house was pretty nice, made of dark wood with a black slate roof and a big stone chimney. It had a long driveway that circled around to the back, where some other cars were parked, one of them a big Hummer. I looked around for a tank, but didn’t see one. Probably camouflaged.
We went inside and entered what was clearly a kitchen. Then down a hallway lined with photos of people in military uniforms. North knocked on a door. I heard somebody say, “Enter,” and North turned the knob. Inside I saw a man seated behind a large desk that held a stack of newspapers and some folders. He had gray hair cut close to his skull and was wearing a blue-and-black striped tie with a white shirt. He seemed engrossed in some papers and didn’t look up as we entered.
Come Sit By Me Page 8