Here Lies Linc

by Delia Ray

  “Wait a minute!” I said. “I think I can get us a ride.” Out of the corner of my eye, I had spotted Jeeter zipping along the narrow drive in the little golf cart that he used for his rounds in the cemetery. His hedge clippers and rakes were piled in the back. I ran toward him waving my arms.

  As soon as I had made the introductions and we had squeezed in next to him, Jeeter waited until Delaney looked away and then wiggled his eyebrows at me. I could almost see the thought bubble blossoming over his head: “Ol’ Lincoln Log’s got himself a girlfriend.” I gave him one of my death glares, and he chuckled to himself as he shifted the cart into gear.

  “We’ve been working on that project I was telling you about,” I explained before Jeeter could say anything embarrassing.

  “Oh, yeah?” He nodded. “You finally figure out which grave you’re gonna pick?”

  “Yep.” I grinned. I couldn’t wait to see Jeeter’s reaction. “I’m adopting the Black Angel.”

  Jeeter’s goatee sagged as he shook his head. “You’re a braver man than me, Lincoln Crenshaw.”

  I scanned the distance and checked over my shoulder as we rounded a bend in the driveway. “Hey, the Black Angel doesn’t scare me half as much as that new boss of yours. What’s the deal with that guy?”

  “Yeah, I heard you had the pleasure of making Captain Kilgore’s acquaintance the other day,” Jeeter said with a snort. “Don’t worry. He’s just one of these fellas who need to make sure everybody knows exactly who’s in charge. You say, ‘Yes, sir … no, sir,’ do things his way, you’ll be fine.”

  Jeeter glanced over at Delaney. “So you’ve got the same assignment as my buddy Linc here?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said. Jeeter’s goatee twitched, and I rubbed my hand over my mouth to keep from laughing. I don’t think Jeeter had ever been called “sir” before. Delaney tried to describe which grave she had picked. “It’s under that giant oak tree back there,” she said, “near the place where you stopped to give us a ride.”

  “You mean the grave with the sunflowers?” Jeeter asked.

  Delaney perked up. “That’s right. Do you know anything about it?”

  Jeeter took his eyes off the driveway long enough to give her one of his wise nods. “For as long as I been here, that old lady’s been coming to visit that grave every single Monday, rain or shine, right around two o’clock. If it’s summer or early fall, she always leaves a big bunch of flowers behind. Always the same kind. Sunflowers.”

  Delaney leaned across me. “So you’ve talked with her?”

  “Oh, no,” he said. “I like to respect visitors’ privacy. And she doesn’t seem to want to talk to anybody much. Except herself, that is.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Well, she kinda whispers to herself. Old people do that sometimes.”

  Of course we had a lot more questions, but we were coming up on the cemetery office already, and there was a woman with her arms crossed standing by a blue car on the far side of the parking lot. I knew it had to be Delaney’s mother. She was pretty, with wispy blond hair just like Delaney’s.

  The only surprise was that she was pregnant. As Jeeter pulled the golf cart into its parking place, I noticed her wincing and moving her hand to the small of her back as if she had a sore spot there. I wondered why Delaney hadn’t told me, especially after we had been talking about what it was like to be only children.

  Delaney jumped out of the cart before Jeeter had even set the parking brake. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Linc,” she called over her shoulder. “Thanks for helping with my project.” She made a beeline straight for the passenger side of the blue car. “Sorry I’m late, Mama,” I heard her say breathlessly as she disappeared inside.

  Her mother hesitated, staring back at Jeeter and me with a searching gaze. Her lips moved, on the edge of a smile. But when Delaney’s car door slammed shut behind her, she turned away and carefully lowered herself into the driver’s seat.

  “Why’s your girlfriend in such a big hurry?” Jeeter asked as we watched them pull out of the cemetery.

  “Beats me,” I said. I didn’t bother trying to set him straight on the girlfriend part.

  Why not let him think what he wanted for a while?

  I BARELY HAD A CHANCE to talk to Delaney over the next few days. Except for American Studies, we didn’t have any classes together or even the same lunch period, and she seemed to disappear as soon as the bell rang each afternoon. So the week after we met in the graveyard, when a team of parents came to drive everyone in our class downtown to the historical society, I kept hoping that Delaney and I would be assigned to the same van. No such luck. I ended up in the back of a station wagon squeezed between Queen of Annoying Sylvie and a moody kid named Douglas Spratt, who decided it would be a good time to dig into his backpack and finish off the leftovers of his bologna sandwich from lunch.

  I tried to catch up to Delaney when we arrived at the historical society. But I was at the back of the pack shuffling through the entryway. The minute I stepped inside, that old familiar smell hit me like a sleeping potion. I remembered it from tagging along with Lottie through the years. It’s exactly what you would smell if you cracked open an old encyclopedia and buried your nose down in the middle of the musty pages.

  We filed past the portraits of the city’s first settlers—a bunch of dead-eyed men with high collars and bushy sideburns—and as our class gathered in a subdued semicircle in the reading room, I gave up trying to catch Delaney’s eye. Ms. Beckett, the head archivist, was one of those no-nonsense librarian types. She had a pointy face and straight black hair cut into sharp angles at her chin, and she gave a curt speech about proper etiquette in the archives. (No chatting; no backpacks allowed; pencils only; no pens.) Then she explained some of the reference materials that would help us find out more about our “deceased.”

  “Your deceased,” she kept saying. “Those of you who found an exact date of death on the headstone for your deceased are quite fortunate,” she told us. “You can go to our collection of old newspapers on microfilm and look through issues published around the same date. Chances are you’ll be able to find an obituary or death notice for your deceased.”

  I brightened up a little. I had an exact date of death for Eddie Dolezal—the one buried under the Black Angel who had died when he was only seventeen.

  “Any questions?” Ms. Beckett asked pertly. No one spoke up.

  “Off you go, then,” she said with a tight smile. She flicked her hands like she was shooing flies.

  I paused, waiting to see where Delaney was going. She hurried straight for the row of computers where Ms. Beckett had said we could search the database for any mention of the names on our graves. I was tempted to follow her, but there were only three terminals, and when I saw that Mellecker was already sitting at one of them, I spun on my heel and headed for the microfilm viewers in the far corner of the research room. Although Mellecker and I had nodded to each other and waved a few times during the past week, we hadn’t had a real conversation since our heart-to-heart outside the boys’ bathroom. So I still felt awkward around him, wondering if he really might want to be friends again or if he’d rather keep our brief acquaintance as a thing of the past.

  I quickly flipped through my notebook as I walked back to the microfilm area. I found the epitaph I had copied down from the base of the Black Angel and made a note of the exact date when Eddie died.

  January 14, 1891.

  The reels of film were stored in several extra-wide filing cabinets, in row after row of small cardboard boxes lining the shallow drawers. But since there was only one newspaper published in town at the time of Eddie’s death, it didn’t take me long to find what I needed—the Daily Republican, 1890–1892.

  No one else had ventured back to the microfilm area yet, so I had my pick of the viewers. And threading the film through the machine seemed easy after watching Lottie so many times. I clicked on the light, and soon I was scrolling through months of old-timey
news.

  I felt a little rush of curiosity as I wound my way closer and closer to the date of Eddie’s death. I scanned the pages of the January 14 issue, then the next day’s paper and the next, and the day after. Nothing. I had to close my eyes for a few seconds and blow out a big breath of air. All those waves of words were starting to make me seasick, so I forced myself to slow down and roll the film backward inch by inch. And suddenly, there it was! On page three, buried in between advertisements for Dr. Bull’s Cough Syrup and J. A. Pickering’s Traveling Musical Show. The obituary was so small, I had to squint to read the skinny column of print frozen on the screen:

  Eddie Dolezal, the only son of Madame Theresa Dolezal, died yesterday afternoon of inflammation of the brain at the age of 17 years. He had been sick only a few days, having left Boerner Bros.’ Pharmacy (where he was a faithful employee) last Friday, complaining of illness.

  The departed was a bright young man who planned to study medicine at the university. He and his mother have resided on the north side of town since making their voyage to America when Eddie was just a young boy of four. Eddie was preceded into the hereafter by his father and an infant brother, who both died earlier in the family’s native village of Strmilov, Bohemia. Madame Dolezal has the sympathy of everyone for the loss of her only remaining son.

  I sat back in my chair, staring at the screen. Poor Theresa. She had lost her whole family, one by one, like falling dominoes. How unlucky could you get?

  Then I remembered those weird foreign words that Delaney had spotted on the back of the Angel’s base, the ones that had been too faded to read. The obituary said the Dolezal family had come from a place called Bohemia. So that would explain it! Maybe the epitaph was written in Bohemian.

  “But where in the heck is Bohemia?” I muttered to myself.

  I reached for my notebook so I could double-check the names that had been engraved under Eddie’s on the front of the statue’s base.

  Nicholas Feldevert 1825–1911

  Theresa Feldevert 1836–

  So at least Theresa had managed to find a new husband after Eddie died. But what happened to her after that? Questions slithered in and out of my brain. I opened my notebook to a clean page, figuring I might as well try the Lottie approach. Whenever my mother was stumped in her research, she would hunch over one of her yellow legal pads and scribble and scratch and scribble some more until she had a list of her most burning questions. My list was about ten times shorter than most of Lottie’s.

  —Where’s Bohemia?

  —Who was Nicholas Feldevert?

  —Did Theresa’s luck turn around once she married him?

  —Is Theresa dead yet?

  I smiled down at my notebook, thinking of how Lottie would be rolling her eyes at the idea of Theresa still wandering the earth more than a hundred and seventy years after she was born. But even Professor Landers would have to admit that the missing death date was too mysterious to ignore.

  I was ready to switch off the light on the viewing machine when I heard someone behind me. It was Amy, the one who was always following Mellecker around. Her lip gloss had worn off and she had a dazed look in her eyes. She swooped into the seat next to mine, clutching a box of microfilm. “You actually know how to work that thing?” she whispered frantically. “Can you show me? Pleeeeeease? I can’t stand to ask that Ms. Beckett. She’s a witch! Know what she did? She snatched my purse right off my shoulder and stuffed it in one of those grimy lockers in the hall. Can you believe that? I’ve got a lot of important stuff in there.”

  I showed Amy how to thread the slippery film through the maze of slots and spools in the viewer, then how to enlarge the picture and fast-forward and reverse. “Oh, thank you, thank you,” she breathed. “You’re the best.” She squeezed my arm and looked so amazed, you would have thought I had just scrubbed out of open-heart surgery.

  But I wasn’t done. Rosa came along begging for help. Then Cliff corralled me into showing him where to find the right boxes of microfilm. By the time I finally managed to break away, Mr. Oliver was already starting to round people up to head back to school.

  I found Delaney out on the sidewalk, where everyone was waiting for the parents to pick us up. “Guess what,” she said excitedly, as if no time at all had passed since we’d last talked. “I know who Robert Raintree was.”

  “You’re kidding. Already?”

  Delaney proudly told me about her findings. “He used to be head of the law school at the university. I guess he was kind of famous back then. There was a whole bunch of stuff about him on the Internet.”

  “So what about that woman Jeeter told us about? The one who puts the sunflowers on his grave. Who do you think she is?”

  Delaney frowned. “I’m still not sure. It can’t be his wife. She would have died a long time ago. Maybe it’s his daughter.” Delaney stood there thinking, gnawing her bottom lip. “I’ve already looked online and checked the phone book, but there’s not a single listing for anyone named Raintree. Of course, that doesn’t mean much. His daughter could have gotten married and changed her name, or maybe the Raintrees have an unlisted phone number.” Delaney’s shoulders drooped. “I just wish there was a way I could talk to that lady from the graveyard.”

  “Well, why can’t you?” I asked. “Jeeter said she’s come every single Monday for as long as he can remember.”

  “Uh-huh, but he also said she comes around two o’clock. I’d have to skip school to talk to her. I doubt Mama’s gonna like that idea.”

  “But wait,” I said. “Don’t we have a Monday off coming up?”

  “Oh, you’re right.” Delaney gasped. “There’s one of those teacher conference days week after next. It’s on that Monday right before Halloween. We could go then!”

  My heart gave a little jolt when she said the word “we.” “Yeah, we can stake out the graveyard all afternoon and be waiting for her when she gets there.”

  But then Delaney’s face clouded over.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Oh, nothing. I was just thinking about Mama.” Delaney snatched a nervous look in my direction. “Didn’t you notice the other day? My mother’s expecting a baby.”

  I nodded. “So … I should say congratulations, right? Aren’t you happy about it?”

  “Oh, I’m happy,” Delaney said quickly. “It’s just that the baby’s due in a month. But you never know. So it’s been kind of hard to plan ahead about things.”

  Before I could ask more questions, I felt a hand clamp down on my shoulder. I turned to find Beez and Amy grinning at me. “So!” Beez began. “I hear you’re an absolute genius with microfilm.”

  Amy gave him a flirty little whack on his arm. “He is.” She giggled. “He helped me a ton.”

  “So where’d you learn all that stuff?” Beez asked. “I guess it was your mom who taught you, right? The nutty professor?”

  I didn’t answer. I knew he was just trying to stir things up, hoping I’d take the bait and say something goofy. I turned back to Delaney, muttering under my breath, “How many football players does it take to thread a microfilm machine?”

  “Whoa!” Beez took an exaggerated step backward. “Listen to you! Mr. Comedian!”

  Delaney was tugging my sleeve, ready to pull me away, when Mellecker came strolling over. “Hey, what’s up?” he asked, casting an uneasy look in my direction. He must have seen me bristling, scowling at his buddy Beez.

  “Not much,” Beez told him with a chuckle. “Just trying to get some research tips from Mr. Professor Junior here.”

  “Hey, I could use some tips myself,” Mellecker said, quickly smoothing out the prickly conversation. He turned to me. “I don’t get it, Crenshaw. With a vault like the one they’ve got in Oakland, I thought the Ransoms would have been pretty famous in town. But I couldn’t find a single word about them on the Web. So what do you think?” he asked. “Where else should I look for clues?”

  As soon as Mellecker called me Crenshaw, I could feel
Beez turn watchful. Of course he was wondering why his friend would be giving a nerd like me the time of day. So suddenly I was itching to say something impressive—something that would put Beez in his place and prove I was worthy of Mellecker’s attention.

  My answer flew out before I could think it through. “You could look inside the vault,” I said.

  Mellecker blinked. “What do you mean? How would I do that?”

  “I could get you the key.”

  “The key?” he repeated.

  “Yeah,” I told him, trying to keep my voice even. “The key to the Ransom vault. I can get it for you. Don’t you want a look inside?”

  Mellecker grinned at me in astonishment. He began to nod. “That would be awesome,” he said.

  Beez hooted. “Crenshaw, my man!” he yelled out, and raised his hand for a high five. I reached up to give his palm a hard slap as Amy bounced on her toes beside us and asked if she could come too. But then I glanced over at Delaney, who was observing with her eyes wide, and I felt my palm start to sting. And that’s when I thought, Oh, no, what did I just do?

  I ONLY MANAGED TO RUN about a mile with the dogs that afternoon. And the word “run” was an exaggeration. I plodded up and down the blocks in my neighborhood like I was slogging through sand, with C.B. and Spunky dragging me along as I stewed over what in the heck I was going to do about my promise to deliver the Ransom key.

  When I came scuffing back to Claiborne Street, Mr. Krasny was exactly where I had left him, sweeping leaves off his front porch. “Back already?” he called out.

  “Yep,” I said as I slowly climbed the steps to hand over Spunky’s leash. “Sorry Spunk didn’t get very much exercise today. But I’ve got an awful lot of homework, and, well …” I couldn’t hold back my sigh. “It’s just been one of those days.”