by Delia Ray
“I guess that was the agreement between the Crenshaws and the Raintrees,” I said. “Since Adeline Raintree never wrote back until it was too late, Dad’s parents probably didn’t know how awful she felt all those years. They probably thought she got married and had more kids of her own … and lived happily ever after.”
“Looking back now, I should have suspected something,” Lottie said, more to herself than to me. “There were little clues here and there. Maybe that’s why your father was so intrigued by finding that letter. Maybe he had a feeling.”
I nodded. Then I bit my lip. “Lottie, that’s not all.”
Lottie looked up at me. “What?” she said. “What else could there be?”
“Adeline Raintree thinks Dad’s still alive.”
Lottie closed her eyes. “You didn’t tell her?”
“I couldn’t, Lottie. I was kind of … in shock, you know? Things just got all mixed up, and she seemed so overjoyed about finally getting to meet us.”
“Oh, no,” Lottie breathed. “Are you telling me she’s over there in that big old house, all by herself, waiting for him to come?” When I nodded again, Lottie sprang up from her chair and began to pace back and forth across the kitchen floor. C.B., who had been sleeping on his dog bed for the last hour, hopped up too and zigzagged across the kitchen, hoping it was time to go outside.
Lottie stopped and frowned down at C.B. panting at her feet. “I don’t know if we can take this on right now,” she flung out. “I mean, from the sounds of it, she has no other family. And you said there might be some dementia going on?”
“I didn’t say she was demented, Lottie. I said she was kind of … different.”
“I just need to think for a while, Linc,” she said, pressing the heels of her hands against her eyelids. “Before we do anything else, I need to think.”
After Lottie had retreated back to her office, I stayed at the kitchen table, trying to figure out what to do next. Relief and then worry crept over me like the shivers. I felt ten pounds lighter without the story of Adeline Raintree balled up inside. Lottie had taken the news much better than I’d expected. But now she was starting to get that caged-bird look in her eyes. And I hadn’t even begun to tell her the rest of my troubles.
The rest of my troubles.… I grabbed C.B.’s leash, and we hurried out the door.
JEETER’S LITTLE SHOE BOX of a house was only a couple of miles from ours. I had never been there before, never known where he lived until I had spotted his name and address in Dad’s book in the attic. But I could tell I was at the right place as soon as I saw the front yard. His small patch of grass was groomed with the same golf-course precision that he used when he mowed around the tombstones at Oakland. And I had heard all about the cast-off slab of granite perched beside his front stoop. Etched with a picture of a bass and the words GONE FISHIN’, it was originally intended to be sitting on top of a grave at Oakland instead of in Jeeter’s flower bed. According to Jeeter, the man who commissioned it for his father’s plot refused to pay when he realized the fish was a bass instead of a walleye, like he’d ordered. When Jeeter saw the half-finished monument, he shook his head and called it a thing of beauty, and his stone-carver buddy decided to give him the slab right there on the spot.
C.B. pulled on the leash and sniffed at the grass around the Chicago Cubs mailbox—another surefire sign that I had come to the right place. The only hitch was that Jeeter’s battered old truck was missing from the gravel parking space. He probably wasn’t even home. I let C.B. sniff along the curb for a minute more as I tried to decide whether it was even worth it to go up and knock on the door. Soon we had edged past Jeeter’s house, and that’s when I heard the sound of hammering drifting through the alleyway.
I found Jeeter in his backyard, inside an old wooden outbuilding. The rickety double doors were propped open, and he was bent over a rough length of board stretched between two sawhorses. Maybe if he hadn’t had three nails pressed between his lips, Jeeter would have shown more of a reaction to my unexpected visit. Instead, when he glanced up to find me standing in his doorway, he had a few seconds to compose himself while he slowly reached up to retrieve the nails. “Well, what do you know?” he drawled. “If it isn’t the two famous outlaws—Lincoln Log and his canine sidekick, C.B.”
“Hey, Jeeter,” I said softly. “I didn’t think you were here at first. Your truck’s not out front.”
He reached for the tape measure hanging on his belt and bent over the board again. “I sold it.”
“You sold it?” I was shocked. Jeeter had always loved that old truck.
“I got to eat, don’t I?” he asked as he scratched a mark on his board with a carpenter’s pencil.
I blinked down at the top of his head in dismay, wringing the end of C.B.’s leash until I couldn’t hold back anymore. “I’m sorry, Jeeter,” I said in a gush of emotion. I could feel the hot sting of tears building up behind my eyes. “I know I’m the one who got you fired. You stuck up for me when Kilgore said I stole that key to the vault. So I wanted to come see you and apologize for everything.” Jeeter wasn’t looking at me. Without taking his eyes off the pencil mark on his piece of wood, he lifted a circular saw from its perch on a nearby stool. “And I wanted to tell you the truth,” I rushed on. “The truth is I didn’t deserve you taking up for me. Kilgore was right. I did steal that key.”
The saw roared to life, making me jump and C.B.’s tail disappear between his legs. The blade bit into the chunk of wood with a hungry shriek. Then, just as quickly, it was quiet again. My ears were still pulsing from the blast of noise when Jeeter said, “I knew you took the key before Kilgore did.”
“You knew? But how?”
“Didn’t exactly take a detective to figure it out, Linc.” Jeeter blew the sawdust off his fresh cut of wood and finally raised his gaze to meet mine. “You were in the office an awful long time for somebody who supposedly only needed to use the bathroom real quick. And then when you left, you forgot to switch off the light in the closet where we keep the keys.”
I squeezed my eyes shut and slid my hand down the front of my face in embarrassment. “What a heehaw,” I said under my breath. “So why didn’t you say anything, Jeeter? Why’d you tell Kilgore it wasn’t me?”
“I figure everybody’s got to make their own mistakes,” he said after he had thought for a second. “And I wanted to buy you a little time. I kept thinking the guilt would force you into doing the right thing. Any day now, I thought, Linc’s gonna stop by to see me and come clean. But nope, the days kept passing by.” He shook his head and stepped around the sawhorses. “I tried giving you a call after Kilgore kicked you out that afternoon, but your mom said you wouldn’t come to the phone.” He shrugged. “So I decided you’d have to learn your lesson the hard way—from Kilgore, not me.”
My shoulders sagged. “I learned the hard way, all right,” I said glumly.
Jeeter led me outside to his little quilt square of grass and the crisp afternoon. With C.B. flopped at our feet, we sat in a pair of low wooden chairs next to his barbecue grill, and I told him about my wild night in the tomb—everything from Kilgore planting those deer bones and lying in wait to me sniffing out his secret canteen. “It made him madder than anything when I found it,” I said. “You think he’s gonna call the police like he threatened?”
“Naw.” Jeeter swiped his hand at the air. “He won’t report you. He’d be too scared you’d tattle on him for hitting the bottle on cemetery property.” Jeeter’s jaw tightened as he fixed me with a grave look. “But that doesn’t mean you’re off the hook.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you’ve got to make amends.” He pointed his finger at me like a schoolteacher. “This is what you’re gonna do. You’re gonna let him settle down for a couple more days. Then you’re gonna march in there and apologize and offer to do your time working on the grounds. He’s shorthanded now and he won’t be able to say no … that is, till he finds some other poor heehaw to take my place.” The
beginnings of a chuckle crept into Jeeter’s voice. “Plus, he’ll love playing drill sergeant and bossing you around. Maybe he’ll even let you borrow one of his Civil War uniforms.” He leaned back in his chair, laughing.
I cut my eyes at Jeeter. Then I leaned back too, accepting my fate with a gloomy nod. He was right. I had messed up and now I had to do my time, even if it meant following orders from Captain Kilgore for a few days. Then another idea popped into my head. “If I work really hard and get him to like me, maybe I’ll be able to talk him into giving you your job back.”
Jeeter shook his head. All of a sudden I realized his goatee was gone. Without it his chin looked raw, like a Band-Aid had just been ripped away. “Look, Linc,” he said, “I been haunting that old cemetery since Old Nicknish gave me my first job straight out of high school. This needed to happen ten years ago. You just helped things along.”
“But what will you do instead?”
Jeeter drew himself up, pretending to be offended. “What do you mean, what will I do instead? Didn’t you see me working my wonders in that wood shop over there? I’m gonna make furniture.”
I glanced over at the sagging toolshed. “Furniture?” I asked, trying not to sound skeptical.
“Yeah. Furniture for the outdoors.” Jeeter sat up straight and started talking faster, as if he’d been zapped by a bolt of enthusiasm out of the blue. “I’m real good at hunting down old scrap wood. Then I use it to make stuff that’s comfortable and looks like it’s been around forever and stands up in any kind of weather. People love it. I just filled my first order.”
“Really?”
“Yep, a guy named Gene ordered two chairs for his backyard about a week ago. Now he’s telling all his friends.”
I smiled and looked down at the wide armrests of my chair, at the traces of barn-red paint buried in the grain. “Wow,” I said, letting my body go loose against the sturdy, sunbaked wood. “That Gene, whoever he is, sounds like a real good guy.”
DELANEY WASN’T AT HER LOCKER the next morning. Before the bell rang for first period, I scanned the clogged hallways, anxiously hoping to catch sight of her. Then I rushed back to my own locker, thinking she might show up there. I found Mellecker waiting for me instead. He was leaning against the door to the janitor’s closet nearby with his hands shoved in his pockets in his usual relaxed way, but I could tell he felt out of place. He wasn’t used to waiting around for people.
“Hey,” he said as he ambled over. “How’s it goin’?”
I didn’t answer. “Have you seen Delaney?”
“Not yet.” He pulled his hands from his pockets. “I haven’t seen her since Friday night, when we dropped her off.” He started to grin a little. “Man, on the way home she was telling us more about that Kilgore creep. How he was boozing it up in the vault, waiting for you. That must have been intense.”
I opened my locker and reached for my French book. “Yeah, it was. It would have been a lot less intense if there had been four of us instead of two.”
Mellecker’s gaze slid away. “I know.” He sighed. “I should have gone back to check on you two as soon as I realized you weren’t right behind us.” He shrugged with an uneasy little chuckle. “But you know how Beez is. I told him we should go back, but he kept saying you and Delaney probably just wanted to be alone.”
From the disgusted look on my face, Mellecker must have known I wasn’t buying it. But I couldn’t resist making sure. “Oh, yeah?” I said as I banged my locker shut. “Since when did you start taking orders from Beez?”
I started to walk away, but Mellecker snagged my arm. “You know, I remembered something this weekend,” he said when I turned around. “About when we were both at that Ho-Ho school.” He hesitated, a bashful look creeping over his face. “You were always in the lead back then. Even when we would tie ourselves together and climb up that stupid dirt pile, you always went first. And then there was that time we pretended I fell in a crevasse, and I started dragging you down, and I remember asking you if you would ever cut the rope. You know what you said?”
I nodded. “Yep. I remember. I said I’d never do that to anybody.”
“Yeah, that was it,” Mellecker said. “I wish I had thought of that earlier, when we were in the graveyard.”
Then he went off down the hallway before I could think of what to say. I didn’t see him again until lunchtime, when Beez nabbed me in the sloppy joe line and dragged me over to their table. Mellecker was in his usual spot. When I glanced down the table, I noticed a few other kids were looking up at me with expectant faces. Beez must have been bragging about our exploits in Oakland Cemetery, and now I was supposed to entertain everybody with more stories.
Beez slid along the bench and nodded to the space beside him. “Have a seat, Crenshaw. Everybody wants to hear what happened on Friday night.” He was already digging into his sloppy joe.
I stood there holding my tray with a snide answer lodged in my throat like gristle. Oh, which part do they want to hear? The part where you screamed like a baby when you saw a pile of old deer bones? Or the part where you ran off like a rat and deserted us?
I looked down at Mellecker. Our eyes met for a quick second, and that’s all it took to make me hold my tongue.
“Has anybody seen Delaney Baldwin today?” I asked in a loud voice. The kids at the other end of the table looked up and shrugged.
Amy was sitting a few spots away. Apparently she was still offended because she hadn’t been invited to come along Friday night. “Delaney’s not here today,” she snapped. “Taylor lives next door to her, and she said Delaney’s mom went in the hospital this weekend.”
“What?” I asked. My voice rose above the drone of the cafeteria. “What happened?”
Amy was reaching inside her purse, fishing for something. “I guess she was supposed to have a baby in a couple weeks, but something went wrong.” She turned to the girl beside her. “Ewww, I’d be totally grossed out if my mom got pregnant now, wouldn’t you?”
The noisy cafeteria tilted, then shifted out of focus for a second. I set my tray next to Beez and hurried over to Amy so I could hear. Amy had pulled a tube of lip gloss out of her purse. “What do you mean, something went wrong?” I demanded. “Are they okay? I mean, Delaney’s mom … and the baby?”
Amy stopped with the lip gloss halfway to her mouth. She stared up at me, her expression as blank as a china doll’s. “I don’t know,” she said. “Taylor didn’t say.”
I spun around and veered toward the exit door.
“Hey, Crenshaw. You’re leaving already?” Beez yelled after me. “Can I have your sloppy joe?”
LOTTIE WAS RUNNING OUT OF PATIENCE. “Linc, you’re not making sense,” she insisted. “How could it be your fault that your friend’s mother might lose her baby?”
I closed my eyes in frustration. I had finally poured out the whole story about Friday night—all of it!—and Lottie still didn’t understand. “Don’t you see?” I asked. “I let Delaney do it. I just stood there and watched while she climbed up and kissed the Black Angel’s hand. With everything I know about the statue now, and that weird epitaph—‘Suffering awaits you’—why didn’t I stop her? Why’d I ever let her come with us in the first place?”
I flopped back, miserable, in my mother’s chair. Lottie had come home from work to find me hunched over the phone at the desk in her office. I had already tried calling the maternity ward at the university hospital twice, but the crabby nurse on the other end wouldn’t tell me anything. She said if I wasn’t related to Mrs. Baldwin, she couldn’t give me any specific information.
“Well, if you see her daughter,” I had pleaded, “can you tell her to call Linc? I’m a really good friend of hers.”
The nurse had sighed into the phone. “I have no idea who you’re referring to, young man. And we’re awfully shorthanded here today. It won’t do your friend a bit of good for you to keep calling and taking up our time.”
Now Lottie was sitting in my usual spot, the old
swivel chair, and it squeaked as she rolled closer. “Linc, I understand how concerned you must be,” she said, carefully choosing each word. “But it’s you I’m worried about. You’re not sounding too rational at the moment. Actually, from everything you’ve told me, it sounds like you went off the deep end about two weeks ago. I mean, you stole a key right under Jeeter’s nose and broke into a vault? And then you get caught by the warden, who sounds like a complete maniac? Really, Linc. How did this get so out of hand?” Somehow Lottie had managed to keep her voice calm as she spoke, but her gray eyes were wide and frightened.
I slumped lower, shaking my head. “I know. I know,” I said hoarsely. “It sounds crazy. And I know you think junior high’s the reason I’ve done all of this stuff. And sure, maybe I did some of it to try to fit in. But I’m smarter now. I’ve learned a lot.… More than I ever would have learned if I had stayed with the Ho-Hos.”
“Maybe so,” Lottie murmured. But then her brow furrowed again. “But what are we going to do about this Kilgore person? He’s threatened you more than once, and he may be drinking on the job. I feel like I should call the police, or at the very least go over there and have a talk with him.”
I sat up in alarm. “No, Mom, you can’t! I’m the one who has to fix this. Jeeter told me what I have to do to make things right with Kilgore. And I’m going to do it … but first I have to find out if Delaney’s okay.”
I stared over Lottie’s shoulder at her wall full of gravestone rubbings—all those hazy rows of epitaphs—and suddenly another awful thought popped into my head. “What if … what if Mrs. Baldwin woke up that night and realized Delaney was gone and got scared?” I said out loud. “What if that’s what caused her to lose the baby?”
Lottie’s face turned stern. “Stop it, Linc.”
“I can’t help it,” I said weakly. “If something bad happens, I’ll always feel like it was my fault.” I leaned my elbows on Lottie’s cluttered desk and dropped my face into my hands. I didn’t look up, even when I heard the click-click of C.B.’s toenails on the hardwood floor.