by Delia Ray
A FEW DAYS LATER Mr. Oliver sent us all to the school library for the last half of American Studies class. “Think outside the box, people!” he ordered before we trooped down the hall. “Some of you’ve been complaining that you can’t find any information about your Adopt-a-Grave picks. So try another approach. Find out what important things were happening around our country when your adoptees were alive. You might get a better picture of the challenges they faced.”
In the library I wandered between the shelves, trying to hide from Mellecker and Beez while I stewed over where to go next with my research on Theresa Feldevert. Like a lot of kids in my class, I felt stuck for the time being. When I had shown Mr. Krasny the lines of Czech that I had copied from the Black Angel’s inscription, he hadn’t opened his eyes wide and cried, “Aha!” like I had hoped. Instead, he had peered at the words in bewilderment and told me it might take a day or two for him to figure out the translation.
I sighed and stood gazing blankly at a row of encyclopedias. I had just pulled the R (for “rattlesnake”) volume off the shelf when Delaney walked up beside me. She looked especially pretty that day. Instead of her usual messy ponytail, she was wearing her hair down and a soft green sweater that matched her eyes.
“Hey there,” she whispered. “Only five more days till the stakeout.”
“So you really think you can still go?” I asked eagerly. I’d been having my doubts the last few days. Like usual, we hadn’t had many chances to talk that week, since she was always running off after school to help out at home and make sure her mother was okay.
Delaney nodded. “I asked Mama about it yesterday. She told me of course I should go, and if I don’t stop fussing over her, she’s gonna send me away to boarding school.” Delaney let out a helpless little laugh. “So I guess I better do what she says.”
“That’s great,” I said, my spirits instantly lifting. “I’ve got the perfect spot for us to watch for the sunflower lady. The gazebo on the hill. The only thing is,” I warned, “we’ll have to keep our eye out for the warden too. He’s new at Oakland, and I’m on his bad list for some reason.”
I couldn’t explain more because Mellecker suddenly appeared. “Sorry to interrupt,” he said, flashing Delaney one of his charmer smiles. He nudged me with his elbow. “Hey, we haven’t seen you at lunch lately.”
I scratched at a pretend itch on my cheek. “Oh, yeah. I got behind on some labs for science,” I told him. “So I’ve been going to Ms. Sandburg’s room during lunch to catch up.” Actually, I’d been bringing peanut butter sandwiches from home and spending my lunchtimes in the chilly courtyard, where all the kids who wore black liked to hang out.
“So?” Mellecker asked, getting right down to business. “Any progress with the key?”
Make it short, I told myself. Straight to the point. I took a deep breath. “W-e-l-l, as a matter of fact—” But then Beez came sliding around the corner with Amy on his tail. Delaney scooted back a couple of steps as they crowded into the aisle beside us.
“So what’s the latest?” Beez demanded.
“I couldn’t get it,” I blurted out.
“Aww, man,” Beez moaned under his breath. “The only good thing about this whole stupid Adopt-a-Grave Project was that key.”
“Shhh.” Delaney nodded toward the end of the shelves, where Mr. Oliver was patrolling back and forth. She reached around Mellecker to give my sleeve a consoling little tug, and then she drifted away.
“Did you try?” Amy asked once she had checked to see if the coast was clear. “I mean really try?”
“Yeah, I did,” I insisted. “I went over there on Saturday and …” And in the next instant, I found myself doing it again, inventing a story as I went along. It gave me a little charge of satisfaction to make up ridiculous things about Kilgore. Plus, Mellecker would probably be done with me after this anyway, so why not go out with some flair?
“Remember that Kilgore guy I was telling you about?” I went on in a breathless, whispery voice. “Well, he’s real lazy and he’s always falling asleep at his desk in the office. So I waited until he was out cold and I had my hand on the key ring. I almost had it. And then—”
“Then what?” Amy pressed.
“His darn phone rang, and he leaped out of his chair, like this—” I flung my arms in the air and galloped in place. “And I had to drop to the floor like … like one of those commando guys.”
Amy gasped and started to giggle. Mellecker was laughing now too, shaking his head, and even Beez had stopped pouting for the moment. He gave me one of those get-outta-here punches on my shoulder.
I nodded. “No, really. You should have seen me. Kilgore was yakking on the phone, and I had to crawl behind a bunch of boxes and hide. Man, it was dirty back there. Dust and spiders and stuff. I had to stay there forever, waiting for Kilgore to get off the phone.”
Beez barely let me finish my story. “So when do you think you can try again?”
“Hey,” I said, holding up my hands in surrender. “Sorry, that’s it. I’m done with keys for a while.”
Beez sagged like somebody had just let the air out of his tires.
I thumped my knuckles softly on the cover of my encyclopedia. “Well, I better get back to work, you guys. See you later.” Then, before one of them could stop me, I took off around the corner and headed for a carrel on the other side of the bookshelf. At least that’s over, I thought, sinking down into the chair with relief. Now all I had to do was sneak the key back to the cemetery office.
But as I opened my encyclopedia, I realized I could still hear Mellecker and Beez talking. And they were talking about me. “Hey, we should ask him to hang out with us this weekend,” Mellecker was saying.
“What? Are you kidding?” I heard Beez answer. I froze in my seat. “He’s kinda weird, don’t you think? And what a load of bull about that key.”
“Yeah, but you gotta admit, he’s pretty entertaining. He always used to crack me up when we were little too.”
“Wait. When you were little? You and Crenshaw used to know each other?”
Mellecker paused. “Oh, yeah. I guess I forgot to tell you. We used to go to school together a long time ago.”
“But wasn’t Crenshaw homeschooled?”
“Yeah, sort of.”
“You mean you went to school at Crenshaw’s house? Who taught you? That freaky mom of his?”
“No, you big dope. Listen, it’s a long story. Never mind—”
Fortunately I didn’t have to listen to more, because Mr. Oliver swooped in to threaten them with detentions if they didn’t get busy.
“Never mind,” Mellecker had said, like I was some penny he had dropped, not even worth the trouble of retrieving. With my cheeks still burning, I flipped to the page on rattlesnakes in the encyclopedia. I had wanted to read the good part, all about how the rattlesnake “sends out poison through two long hollow teeth, or fangs, in its upper jaw.” But now the words and the pictures kept blurring together as I stared down at the page.
I was still struggling to focus when a folded note flew over the side of my carrel and fluttered down in front of me. I glanced over my shoulder just in time to see Amy toss her hair and disappear around the corner of the shelves. The note was folded up tight, written on a sheet of notebook paper. I smoothed it out on top of my encyclopedia.
We’re all meeting at Guido’s on Sat. nite. You should come. Amy
I gazed down at Amy’s fat, loopy letters in red ballpoint pen. I didn’t even know what Guido’s was. But I couldn’t help feeling happy and a little smug as I read the note to myself a couple more times. So Mellecker must have decided to overrule Beez and invite me along after all.
Amy appeared at my carrel again right before the bell rang. “Well?” she whispered. “Aren’t you going to write back?”
I didn’t answer at first. I pretended to be thinking as she stood there, shifting her feet. She was about to flounce off when, finally, I scribbled two letters on the bottom of the note a
nd handed it back to her:
OK.
MY TIMING WAS TERRIBLE. Lottie had made a real Sunday dinner, kind of—spaghetti with cherry tomatoes and cheddar cheese on top—and now I was planning to rush off again.
“But it’s a school night,” she said as she watched me stuff a huge forkful of noodles into my mouth.
“No, we’ve got the day off tomorrow,” I told her through my paper napkin. “It’s a conference day for the teachers.”
Lottie looked disappointed. “Oh. I was thinking we could have one of our chess matches. We haven’t played for ages.”
“Sorry,” I said, swallowing hard. “I already told Beez I could come. I guess he’s rented some horror movies to get everybody in the mood for Halloween coming up.”
“Who’s Beez?”
“Just a friend from school,” I said. “Friend” was definitely not the right word to describe Beez. But still … the two of us were warming up to each other. Last night at Guido’s I had beat him at darts. After my second bull’s-eye, he whapped me on the back so hard that an ice cube I’d been sucking on flew out of my mouth. Neither one of us could stop laughing until the pizza came.
Lottie was still watching me eat. “Was Beez one of the ones you were with last night?”
“Mm-hmmm.”
“You’re getting together two nights in a row?”
“Yep.”
“Well, what are they like? These new friends of yours.”
I took a swig of milk and ordered myself to be patient. Ever since the day of the field trip, when I had begged her to act more like a “normal” mom, Lottie had been trying. Along with asking questions about my social life, she had bought a can of Easy-Off and cleaned years of black gunk out of our oven. She took C.B. to the vet to get his shots and his toenails clipped. She went to her first PTA meeting. She had even noticed that I’d been running with the dogs lately, and offered to take me shopping for proper shoes. “As soon as I can run for a half-hour without stopping to rest,” I had told her, “we’ll go.”
But something about Lottie’s efforts still didn’t feel right. Most of the time it seemed like she was only going through the motions, checking off the boxes on some kind of a good-mother to-do list in her head.
“Linc?”
“Oh, sorry,” I said with a start. Friends. “Well, they’re pretty different from me. They’re all into sports—football and basketball and cheerleading and stuff.”
Lottie’s eyebrows lifted. “Really?”
“I know,” I said with a laugh. “Kind of surprising, huh? I guess I’m sort of like a mascot. They think I’m really funny. And they like my stories.”
“What kind of stories?”
“Oh, whatever pops into my head,” I said vaguely.
At Guido’s, Mellecker had made me reenact the entire key-stealing scene I had described in the school library. Everybody at the table had been so entertained that I got brave and told them a real story about the time Jeeter had to call the rescue squad to a graveside service. They wanted all the details, and I doled them out like candy. All about how huge the woman was and how much it had rained that week and how she had wobbled up to the edge of the freshly dug plot to throw in a rose, slipped in the mud, and landed—kaboooom!—six feet below on top of her husband’s coffin. “They needed to call a fire truck with a crane to pull her out,” I had revealed in a loud stage whisper, and the whole table had burst out laughing.
“Well, you’ve always been a wonderful storyteller,” Lottie was saying.
“Maybe so,” I said, shrugging with wonder. “Mellecker thinks I’m hilarious.”
Lottie stopped. “Mellecker? Isn’t he the one who …?” Her voice trailed off for a second. “The one who made you so angry on the field trip to Oakland?”
“Oh, yeah.” I flinched a little as Mellecker’s mean cartoon flashed back in my head. I waved my hand, wiping away the memory. “He apologized for all that stuff.”
“That’s good,” she said softly. Something in Lottie’s voice made me glance up—really look at her for the first time that night, sitting on the other side of the table nudging her spaghetti back and forth across her plate with her fork. She’s lonely, I realized with a pang in my chest. She wasn’t used to me breezing out of the house and leaving her behind. Usually it was the other way around.
I knew I should offer to stay home and play chess. But I just couldn’t. They were all expecting me. I stood up to clear my plate. “I should really get moving if I want to catch the next bus,” I said.
Lottie nodded, trying to smile. Then I turned away, busying myself with rinsing dishes at the sink, thinking about the stakeout with Delaney tomorrow, wondering if I needed to hurry upstairs to brush my teeth—anything to keep my mind off how lonely Lottie looked.
“Well, have a good time,” I heard her say as she headed back to her office like a bee returning to its hive. “Make sure to be home by ten.”
By the time I fed C.B. and locked the back door behind me, I only had a few minutes to spare before catching the crosstown bus at the end of our street. But halfway down the block, I spotted Mr. Krasny hunched in his winter coat, hobbling toward me on the sidewalk.
“Mr. Krasny?” I called out in surprise. “What are you doing out here? It’s almost dark. Is everything okay?”
His face brightened as I hurried closer and he realized it was me. “Linc,” he panted, gripping my arm. “I was on my way to your house. Special delivery. I finally finished translating that epitaph for you.”
“Wow, that’s great,” I said. “But you didn’t need to worry about that tonight, Mr. Krasny.”
“Nonsense,” he scolded. “You’re only four houses away. And I know how anxious you’ve been for me to finish. A few words were giving me trouble. But tonight I found my old Czech-English dictionary. Hiding in the back bedroom! Now I think I’ve got everything right.” As he reached into his coat pocket, it seemed to dawn on him that I might be going somewhere. “By the way, where were you headed off to?”
I told him I was hoping to catch the next bus to my friend’s house. “Better run along, then,” he said. “You can look at this later.” He pulled a folded piece of paper from his pocket. “I have to admit the message chilled my blood a bit. But didn’t you say some words might be missing?”
“Yeah, some of them were really faded and hard to see.”
“Well, perhaps that would explain it,” Mr. Krasny murmured, handing me the paper. “Maybe the message isn’t quite as bleak as it sounds.”
I gulped down a little flutter of dread and stuffed the paper into the pocket of my jacket. Then I baby-stepped Mr. Krasny back to his door. It was a good thing I had started my cross-country training. I could already hear the bus coming as we said goodbye. So I sprinted down the block, imagining I was running in an eighth-grade meet, with an opponent breathing down my neck as we raced for the finish line. I made it to the stop just before the driver could blow past.
On board I dropped into the first empty seat and pulled Mr. Krasny’s paper from my pocket. It was a mistake not to catch my breath before I read his translation of the Black Angel’s words, scrawled across the page in shaky cursive.
For me, the clouds concealed the sun.
The path was thorny.
The days of my life passed without comfort.
Suffering awaits you.
MY NERVES ALMOST GOT the best of me at Beez’s house. It was just my luck that he had rented a horror movie called The Corpse’s Revenge and that for the next two hours we would sit in his dark basement watching mangled cadavers rise from their graves and hunt down their enemies from the past, one by one. There were eight of us—five guys and three girls—sprawled on couches and the floor. Beez’s mom brought down popcorn and drinks, and while the girls ate and squealed and the guys cheered for the corpses and the gushing blood, I stared at the flickering TV screen gnawing my bottom lip.
What did the epitaph mean? It seemed so … so personal. “Suffering awaits you.” Did
that mean me? Did that mean anyone who dared to dig too deep into the mystery of Theresa Feldevert? Or did suffering await only those who hurt the monument in some way? I racked my brain trying to remember all the stories that Jeeter used to tell me about the Curse—about those three college students who had cut off the Angel’s bronze fingers and ended up maimed for life … about all the evil stuff that could happen if you kissed the Angel at midnight or touched her under a full moon.
The Curse seemed to cover a lot of territory. I took a handful of popcorn and then froze with it halfway to my mouth. What about me? I had touched the Angel’s pedestal—rubbed flour all over her inscription and sprayed it down with water.
Suddenly I realized the room had gone completely quiet. Up on Beez’s huge wide-screen TV the star of the movie had just annihilated the last corpse with a torch and a can of gasoline. He stood slumped in the graveyard, heaving with exhaustion, sweat trickling down his bulging biceps. Like everybody else, I knew it was coming—something terrible—and I tensed my whole body in preparation. That still didn’t stop me from nearly flipping over the back of the sofa when a moldy hand shot out of the ground, grabbed the hero’s ankle, and dragged him screaming into a dark hole in the earth. The girls screamed too. My popcorn flew into the air. Even Mellecker jerked back in his seat. Then—thank you, Thankfull—it was over.
Once we had all finished laughing and collecting ourselves, Amy said, “Hey, let’s tell ghost stories.” She bounced up and down in her seat. “You go first, Linc. You’re the best storyteller.” After feeling so squirmy all evening, I definitely wasn’t in the mood to be entertaining. But I didn’t have a choice. Beez had fixed me in the beam of the flashlight, and now all the others were listening.
“Hmmm, let me see,” I said in a slow, sly voice. I drummed my fingers together and leaned forward, letting the suspense build while I scoured my memory for something scary. All I could think of was Jeeter’s story about the three guys who cut off the Angel’s fingers. So I told it. But I spiced it up with lots of juicy details. In my version, Paul, Joe, and Nick were college freshmen who had just joined a fraternity and had to bring back the three bronze fingers to pass their initiation.